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The Republic in the Metropolis

2011; Wiley; Volume: 44; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1540-5931.2011.00844.x

1540-5931

Thomas Halper, Douglas Muzzio,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

“Amap of the world that does not include utopia,”declared Oscar Wilde, “is not even worth glancing at.” Even the most casual glance would alight on Plato's Republic, which glows no less fiercely today than in the Athens of some twenty-three centuries ago. How ought a society to be organized, it asks. We would surely want the society to be guided by virtue, Plato observes, but few have the innate natural aptitude plus the education and experience that are necessary to acquire knowledge of virtue. These few guardians, possessing wisdom, are fit to rule “for the good of their country” (Plato 341). The great mass of the people—the auxiliaries who implement the guardians' policies and fight their wars and the more numerous producers who provide ordinary goods and services—must be subservient. They perform the vital tasks for which they are suited, and, like the guardians, are essential for the proper functioning of society, but for Plato they have no political role, except to obey. If all the people were granted power, he feared, decisions would be based not on knowledge but on mere opinion. What would result would be democracy, where roles and functions would be confused and misassigned, leading to incompetence, corruption, disrespect for authority, and self-serving factionalism. Justice, then, in a sense is a matter of organization: everyone needs everyone else, and society must be arranged on the basis of division of labor and specialization of function, as determined by individual capacities and overseen by a virtuous elite. The modern reader is apt to find this appalling. Where are the rights we venerate? Or the privacy? Where is the political accountability? Or concern with the fairness of burdens? The democracy Plato loathed we celebrate. Yet if we can lay aside our convictions and imagine that events have validated Plato's ancient misgivings about democracy, we might reach different conclusions and find The Republic's prescriptions compelling. It is this that is considered in Metropolis (1926). One of the great films of the silent era, it took two years to complete, employed some 36,000 people, and bankrupted its studio, the largest in Germany. Metropolis was produced in a relatively calm interlude between regime change, assassination, and apocalyptic inflation (1918–24) and massive unemployment, political thuggery, and the rise of the Nazis (1929–33). The movie took much of its character from Berlin, which had become what the film critic, Willy Haas, called “the Babel of the world” (123), a place where the novelist, Stefan Zweig, could point to “a kind of insanity [that] took hold of precisely those middle-class circles which had hitherto been unshakable in their order” (287). Liberals prayed for the Weimar democracy's success and radicals noisily rejected the entire bourgeois ethos, both groups finding the striking changes liberating and long overdue. Meanwhile, many other Germans dismissed Weimar as incompatible with national renewal, seeing around them what Plato would have recognized as symptoms of democratic degradation. “Berlin,” declared the writer, Carl Zuckerman, “tasted of the future” (314). Sensing how terrible that future might taste, Fritz Lang, the Austrian-born director of Metropolis, tries to warn his German countrymen against the perils of imposing an authoritarian order on society. Lang was inspired to make the film when, entering New York harbor in 1923, he was awed by the vast and endless peaks and canyons formed by Manhattan's skyscrapers. Seeing the city from the ship's deck, he witnessed a street lit as if in full daylight by neon … lights and topping them oversized luminous advertisements . … The buildings seemed to be a vertical veil, shimmering, almost weightless, a luxurious cloth hung from the sky to dazzle, distract and hypnotize . … At night the city lived as illusions lived. [New York] was the crossroads of multiple and confused human forces irresistibly driven to exploit each other, living in perpetual anxiety. Yet Metropolis opens not with a glittering cityscape, but rather with close-ups of gears and machinery, and then focuses on columns of men shuffling through a tunnel, like monks going to prayer. Masses of humanity form intricate geometric patterns; art deco factory walls feature humans as machine parts. Lang's futuristic city is ruled by a super-industrialist. The “masters of Metropolis” live in towers and frolic in “pleasure gardens,” amidst peacocks and fountains, while workers toil far underground in backbreaking and dehumanizing machine rooms that provide power for the vast enterprise. The city is divided into three levels: the workers' city, farthest underground; the machinery controlling the city; and the above ground city of the masters. The machines, therefore, link the two levels of society—serving one and enslaving the other—and in this recall a prominent theme in traditional European and American views of the city. The machines enhance productivity, but, what is more serious, their consequences are profoundly anti-human: when a mad inventor tells the super-industrialist of a robot he has created that never tires or makes mistakes, the industrialist exclaims, “Now we have no use for living workers.” (A few years earlier, the Czech, Karel Capek, created a sensation with R.U.R., a play about a corporation that mass produces robots to perform work that humans consider drudgery; also wanting to escape the toil, the robots soon revolt.) Eventually, though, the workers destroy the machines and kill the inventor in a euphoric frenzy. At the end, the workers' leader (pathetically aware of his subordinate status) and the super-industrialist shake hands. The workers and the rulers will remain separate classes, but harmony—somehow—is achieved. Presumably, prosperity and cooperation lie ahead, but the fate of the machinery (and its products) is not clear. Does the answer to problems of the future lie with benevolent, technocratic despots? A mystical transformation of the human heart? Or, as Samuel Butler proposed in Erewhon, must all inventions be banned, lest machines evolve to a higher order and seize control of humanity? Plato saw clearly the consequences of the concentration of wealth in a small class. Both the presence and absence of wealth, he argued, are great forces of corruption, the former “the parent of luxury and indolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of discontent” (442). The elite, once committed to reason and knowledge, would turn to the selfish pursuit of riches, but if power is simply a function of money, the elite may be incompetent to address the problems stemming from increasing inequality, where rich and poor are “always conspiring against each other” (551). As the numbers of poor grow, Plato predicted, they will eventually become desperate, rising up against “their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing others.” The rich, having become soft from years of luxury, will be unable to resist them. The democracy of the poor, he believed, will be a creature of its appetites, bringing with it an insatiable thirst for freedom, which will end in anarchy, which will end in tyranny. Lang does not take the story this far, but he does make plain that in his Metropolis, as in Plato's Republic, the great threat to the system comes from the inability of the different classes to work together for the common good. By the 1920s, industrialization was altering the general understanding of work. Heretofore work had generally been understood in terms of personal virtues (reliability, conscientiousness, etc.) and vices (sloth, intemperance, etc.); certainly, this was how Plato viewed it. With industrialization, however, workers began to be thought of as human machines. Earlier, a German physicist, Hermann von Helmholtz had coined the term “labor power,” which entered popular usage as referring to the conversion of energy into use, whether through a motor or human action; later, the Taylorites advanced a “scientific” approach to maximizing worker efficiency (Taylor), and physiologists studied worker fatigue as if it were analogous to metal fatigue. Metropolis workers plainly are viewed by their masters as so many human machines. All this was to be expected, for Metropolis appeared during what was called the Machine Age, when commentators like Lewis Mumford announced that machines were no longer simply extensions of the individual—like a pair of scissors improving on a hand—but seemed to have taken on an independent existence—like a conveyor belt. These new machines (which Chaplin satirized in Modern Times [1936]) seemed indispensable to progress, which transformed them into icons in the eyes of self-styled practical men and women. Brazenly rational, they spoke of efficiency and profits, and yet it was the romantic possibilities of machines and their promise to revolutionize life that held these prophets in thrall. They were, in short, romantics who disdained romanticism, which they connected with the veneration of sentimental tradition that they took to be a major obstacle in their path. It was entrenched interests, they believed, who were truly romantic, for these interests rightly feared the consequences of change as challenges to their current positions: men and women of leisure belittled trade and technology, and workers viewed machines as low-priced competitors. These entrenched interests were people of faith, faith in the status quo. Yet the self-styled practical people, though they did not know it (and would have denied it), were also people of faith, and their faith was in the machine. Inventors, like Edison and Bell, were lionized; the mechanization of society, like a force of nature, took on an aura of inevitability; critics, smeared as hapless Luddites, were dismissed as naïve or stupid. This romantic attachment to machines was embodied in the triumph of the machine aesthetic. Where earlier generations had endowed nature with beauty—as in the landscapes of Constable, Church, or Corot—the Machine Age was enchanted by the forms, surfaces, and power of machines. Wheels, gears, pulleys, edifices with their rigidity and symmetry—all were now admired not only for what they could accomplish but also for their unadorned utility that seemed to proclaim the victory of the mind over obdurant forces that had until recently confined humanity for millennia. No less than beauty itself was redefined. Metropolis is awash with the machine aesthetic—its images are easily the most striking in the film—and yet Lang's point is not to worship machines but rather to permit us to understand how bewitching they can be. Metropolis' stark bifurcation between haves and have-nots is a venerable literary device for generations found in fiction (e.g., Halper) and nonfiction (e.g., Riis) alike. Often, as in Metropolis, the divide is literally vertical, as class reinforces place and metaphor is made tangible; years later in Blade Runner (1982) and Batman Returns (1992), vertical space also is made to reproduce class distinctions. The bifurcation is jarring not only for ethical reasons, but also because it conflicts with our experience of cities as what Walter Benjamin termed “porous” places (169, 171). Urban events and locales, we take for granted, are not walled off, but jostle and penetrate other events and locales, often in odd, striking, or ironic ways. Different races, classes, and ethnicities are thrown together and thrown apart. Improvisation and the unexpected appear everywhere and anywhere (and are widely credited with making city life stimulating), leaving change so pervasive that we brag that we cannot step on the same street twice. Movie cities, on the other hand, are rarely porous, usually creating self-contained little worlds: the little gangster world of Scarface (1932), the little high society world of Dinner at Eight (1933), or the little Broadway world of 42nd Street (1933). All of these city films were made at about the same time, and yet each focused so exclusively on its own locale that no viewer of one could infer the existence of the others. Metropolis, however, is, above all, extraordinarily comprehensive. Instead of creating an individual building or a complex of buildings or even a neighborhood, Lang advanced the idea of an enormous, integrated city—made possible and desirable by wondrous technologies. His city, though, is no monolith: the film depicts the interaction of the various parts and the destruction of the barriers between them, as what had been impermeable became in a spasm of violence confusingly porous. In its focus on creation and destruction, Metropolis is also an immensely elaborate commentary on the Futurist movement, which had preoccupied many European intellectuals for over a decade. Defiantly confrontational, Futurists rejected the traditional city, viewing its defenders as timid, sentimental, and hopelessly behind the times. “Take up your pickaxes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities pitiously!” urged the first Futurist manifesto (Filippo Tommaso Marinetti qtd. in Appollonio 24). Revolutionary and not evolutionary, Futurists sought not the improvement of works of the past but their obliteration. Disdainful of reform, they also showed only intermittent interest in the low-density city, spacious, tranquil, and full of parkland; not for them the Victorian English garden city ideal of small towns surrounded by greenbelts (e.g., Howard). Signs of the triumph of technology were everywhere, they proclaimed, and cities should not hide from it, but instead, display it and appreciate its beauty and power. Futurism was a European movement, for Europe seemed beset by the illusion of permanence, or at least, stability. Public buildings, homes, even pubs often were so old that their creation belonged to another epoch, one before electricity or indoor plumbing. (America, and especially New York, however, celebrated the new, knocking down the old in what Henry James called a “perpetual repudiation of the past.”) Destruction of the old thus must precede construction of the new, harming as well as helping, and often leading to a nostalgic reconstruction of what had been demolished a couple of generations earlier. In the process, what becomes evident is the disguised fact that buildings occupy contested space. They are not, like the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls, placed by God nor is their continued existence always an accepted fact. The 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center is only the saddest and most spectacular reminder of this, but in Metropolis, too, the workers (like the Futurists) would have demolished the glories that had oppressed them. Metropolis appeared at a time of fascination with La Ville Radieuse of Le Corbusier in Paris and with the architecture of Walter Gropius and other members of the Bauhaus at Weimar, though treatises on the ideal city were hardly new. In the Renaissance, for example, Italian intellectuals (e.g., Leon Battista Alberti, Antonio Averlino, Pietro Catano) had devised numerous plans, perhaps influenced by Plato's detailed depiction of the ideal city of Atlantis (Friedlander ch. 17). (Very rarely were these schemes implemented, although they famously influenced Pierre L'Enfant's plan for Washington.) But the acceptance of Le Corbusier and Bauhaus in Lang's Germany, according to Pevsner, was “universal” (409), and after World War II, this architecture, named the International Style, was to conquer the downtowns of nearly every city in America and become the standard for buildings in Western Europe, as well. Modern buildings were to be “logically transparent and virginal of lies or trivialities, as befits a direct affirmation of our contemporary world of mechanization and rapid transit” (Gropius 82). Style? This suggested the fussy ornamentation of the Beaux Arts or the art deco. Far better a style of no style (what Mies van de Rohe later termed beinahe nichts or “almost nothing”) that followed the functions to which the building was dedicated. (Le Corbusier's famous maxim was that “a house is a machine to live in,” though so besotted was he with often unworkable aesthetics that his renowned Villa Savoye in Poissy quickly became uninhabitable.) Hence, Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin of 1925, which would have plopped 18 60-story residential skyscrapers in the heart of Paris' Right Bank, or the Bauhaus' Ludwig Hilberseimer's proposal to replace large existing sections of Berlin with orthogonal grids of residential towers. (Per contra, after World War II the distinguished British architects, Alison and Peter Smithson, proposed leaving downtown Berlin in ruins and constructing a new city of interconnected towers elevated above the debris.) The Platonic urge to impose order on disorderly cities was not merely a dream of urban planners. Years earlier, Haussman had swept aside the nooks and crannies of old Paris and replaced them with grand boulevards, and Trezzini, earlier still, had done the same for St. Petersburg. Geometry and symmetry were taken as emblems of modernity and rationality, which would enable the authorities to exercise control over what had been only vast, discordant mess. As the narrator in Dickens'Our Mutual Friend described the scene: They were in a neighborhood which looked like a toy neighborhood taken in blocks out of a box by a child of particularly incoherent mind, and set up anyhow; here, one side of a new street; there a large solitary public-house facing nowhere; here, another unfinished street already in ruins; there, a church; here an immense new warehouse; there, a dilapidated old country villa; then, a medley of black ditch, sparkling cucumber-frame, rank field, richly cultivated garden, brick viaduct, arch-spanned coral, and disorder of frowsiness and fog. As if the child had given the table a kick and gone to sleep. (218) Industrialization, by attracting multitudes of workers and generating a profusion of products and waste, had given rise to filth, ugliness, confusion. Urban planners, like parents tidying a child's room, would set it right. Except, of course, that after the parents depart, the mess returns. Thus were the wondrous prospekty of Trezzini soon engulfed in Raskolnikov's slums (Dostoyevsky). (The preoccupation with symmetry and order is also found in such modern ideal cities as Brasília [Brazil], Chandigarh [India], and Putrajaya [Malaysia], all widely criticized as cold, unfriendly places.) We want buildings not only to shelter us, observed Ruskin, but also to speak to us, and the modernists plainly intended that their buildings speak of hope. Equally, though, they spoke of contempt. Which is to say, the modernists not only saw tomorrow as better—more efficient, more beautiful, more productive, more safe and clean and healthful—but viewed ordinary people as the chief obstruction—which had to be removed completely and for all time. Personal idiosyncrasies, traditions, habits, customs, behaviors that had accreted over the years were simply so many irrational hindrances in the way of rational progress. There is thus no reluctance or apology that accompanies trampling on the wishes of the multitudes. These would-be guardians did not notice (or if they noticed, did not care) how uncomfortable these housing arrangements would make their residents, how vulnerable to breakdowns and crime the buildings were, and how the residents, feeling abused, would respond with abuse. (In 1923 Le Corbusier designed austerely modernistic homes for factory workers in Lège and Pessac, studiously omitting all local and rural touches; the tenants soon added vernacular touches of their own, trumping his asceticism.) Thus, Lang's super-industrialist, like Le Corbusier, imagined himself a platonic philosopher king, paternalistically pursuing the interest of all by ensuring that “Each man will live in an ordered relation to the whole” (Rowe 152). No wonder a renegade designer worried, “My biggest fear is that architecture is necessarily a kind of totalitarian activity, a kind of prison, in that when you design a space you're probably designing people's behavior in that space” (Vito Acconci qtd. in Chen 122). And no wonder Gropius and Le Corbusier competed to design Stalin's Brobdingnagian Palace of the Soviets (Sudjic). The marvelous parade of the evidence of progress and prosperity was made visual in Metropolis' breathtaking cityscape, especially its innumerable skyscrapers. Of course, steeples, camponiles, bell towers, and so forth had been ubiquitous in Europe for centuries, and antiquity knew the pyramids of Egypt and the ziggurats of Mesopotamia. But though skyscrapers may be potent aesthetic and psychological statements, they also are a function of a myriad of mundane factors, all invisible to the casual observer: local zoning and tax laws, interest rates and real estate markets, and, not least, technological innovations. And so skyscrapers had to await the characteristically modern inventions of the elevator and iron frame construction, appearing first in New York's Equitable Building in 1870 and by Lang's time dominating commercial Manhattan and becoming monuments to great corporations. (Fearing that skyscrapers would destroy their cities, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia legislated height limits, inadvertently directing nearly all tall buildings to Manhattan, where they transformed the city and gave it a unique international identity [Rasenberger].) As early as 1907, the New York World headlined, “How Far Can New York Climb into the Sky?” (Baker and Brentano). These buildings, emblematic of progress and awesome in their enormous height and size, had captivated movie makers almost from the beginning. Early actuality films (e.g., Sky Scrapers of New York City, from the North River [1905], Panorama from Times Building, New York [1905]) often featured the New York skyline, and were particularly popular with audiences outside New York City. At about the same time Metropolis was released, The Stock Punch (1925) thrilled viewers with a tale of a young Ivy Leaguer testing his mettle by working hundreds of feet above ground on a skyscraper under construction. But none of these films was as aggressive as Metropolis in showing off the wonders of skyscrapers, airplane taxis, and all the rest, and some scenes have a pinch-me-I'm-dreaming quality that audiences found stunning. Banished were the buildings moviegoers encountered everyday, with their ornamental riffs of ages gone by. Energy and movement, heretofore confined to the street level, now extended upwards, almost touching heaven itself. Le Corbusier, appalled by disorder, congestion, in a word, humanity, proclaimed, “We must kill the street.” And around the same time, Harvey Wiley Corbett and a committee of New York's prestigious Regional Plan Association proposed that certain traffic-congested sections of Manhattan be equipped with elevated pedestrian walkways twenty feet above street level, complete with footbridges at intersections. (The great Asian megacities of the twenty-first century—Shanghai, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kuala Lampur—also feature highways, walkways, escalators, and shops elevated above the earth.) But Lang is not taken in by these facile reveries or by their manifestation in Metropolis as gee-whiz glitz. He compels us to look deeper, for he is unsparing in depicting the harshness, the brutality, and the sheer human suffering that paid for these wonders—and the cold sterility that mars their beauty. In this, he presaged the arguments of Jane Jacobs and her intellectual progeny, who conceived the modernist impulse as antithetical to the jumble of personal forces that had made the traditional city vibrant, fascinating, viable, and alive.2 Lang's critique points to the political dimension of architecture. Of course, skyscrapers, like the Gothic cathedrals of an earlier epoch, are expressions of power, knowledge, and wealth designed to overawe the multitudes. They are also among the most ostentatious profit engines—“A skyscraper,” declared Cass Gilbert, the architect of New York's “Cathedral of Commerce,” the Woolworth Building, “is a machine that makes the land pay.” But beyond a certain point, Lang knows, skyscrapers cease to be about rational goals, like money-making or efficiency, and are about psychology—specifically, the ego and authority embodied in hugely tall edifices and their accouterments. Thus, today's projected Moscow City Center, nearly two thousand feet tall and bristling with such environmental features as rain and snow harvesting and natural ventilation; or a projected Dubai condominium and hotel topping out at 2,300 feet. But the political dimension exists not only at this symbolic level: the daily operations of the Metropolis, Lang repeatedly reminds us, rest on the exploitation of the weak by the strong and the many by the few. Yet the revolt of the exploited, driven by a rage that leaves no room for thought, is equally terrible. From its confusing mix of modernism, Marxism, and Christianity, the movie pleads for reasonable, humane compromise; indeed, one character predicts the arrival of the Mediator who will set things aright. The moderation of Lang's message clashes with—but is a response to—the extremism so vividly portrayed. Metropolis is rooted in science fiction—indeed it has been hailed as the “first great achievement of the science fiction cinema” (Manville and Reginald 32), one of the oldest movie genres. It was not long after Jules Verne and H. G. Wells mesmerized the reading public that A Trip to the Moon (1902), The Comet (1913), and Message to Mars (1913) drew crowds to movie theaters. But though ordinarily set in the distant future, science fiction is “always about the year it was written,” observed William Gibson, one of the genre's most celebrated authors. Or as a shrewd film critic put it, “the essence of the SF film's technological imagination is nothing technological [but rather] the phenomenologically felt meaning of technology” (Sobchack 145). And so it is unexceptional that Metropolis reflected the aspirations, concerns, and feelings of ambivalence of German intellectuals in the up-and-down 1920s: there was a dream of socialism and a fear that it might bring on an economic debacle, a passion for modernism and a distaste for its amorality, a yearning for progress and a trepidation toward change, a commitment to democracy and a scorn for Weimar as a vulgar barrier to greatness. Yet Lang's technological dystopia is not a real city but a mythic city, and while some mythic cities may be creations of philosophy—the Athens, say, of Plato—or literature—the London of Dickens—modern mythic cities tend to be products of movies. This is true not only for literal cities, particularly New York and Los Angeles, whose mythic persona is no less a work of the movies than Wyatt Earp's Tombstone or Andy Hardy's Carvel. It is also true for urban archetypes, like the technological dystopia, Metropolis. Pride, manifested in an exaggerated faith in those celebrated children of reason, science, and technology, is our undoing. Our humanity, sometimes our physical survival are imperiled. And it is our own fault. The mind that is our glory is also our ruination. Our most rational and ardent pursuers of progress are more dangerous to us than are our sworn enemies. On one level, Lang's urban dystopia reflects if not a rejection of technology and reason, then at least a marked ambivalence about their brood. Once upon a time, perhaps, technology and reason seemed proof of inexorable social advancement, for they built on what had come before, improving it in the interest of a better life for all. “What is called Western or modern civilization,” a famous historian observed, “is in reality a technological civilization” (Beard). Except that even in the high spirited days of his remark, the wholly benign consequences of technology and reason appeared less a conclusion from evidence than a hope with feathers. This was most clearly evident in the countryside, where the pastoral and the technological often collided (Marx). Even in the cities, though, the self-styled Platonic guardian, Le Corbusier, could rarely persuade with his sunburst panacea of technology. For technology and reason could certainly perfect means, but the ends we seek are beyond their reach. More recently, the enemies of reason seem everywhere. On the left, New Agers consult astrologers, dialogue with the dead, and embrace a psychotherapy aimed at subjective revelation. Meanwhile, the evangelical right has given rise to a pop spirituality that privileges optimism and moral platitudes at the expense of critical thought; antiscientific beliefs, like creationism and faith healing, generate mass followings. Thus, though today's America itself might appear a powerful advertisement for reason and technology, its people who bask in its benefits do not always agree. To the extent that we are flawed (or sinful), they remind us, technology and reason merely make us more formidable fools (or knaves). In that sense, technology and reason are not always a blessing. The hope of the Enlightenment, they often seem to us a curse. In this light, consider cities, where technology and reason have made a revolution. Could present-day Houston exist, for instance, without cars, air conditioners, elevators, and a thousand other mechanical inventions? Machines, however, are not people, though they sometimes are valued more highly. And they always bring with them a train of unanticipated consequences. Did anyone deliberately intend to create the phenomenon of Houston in August? In other words, technology, for all the rationality involved in its creation and development, is said to have acquired an irrational character: “Cars are designed to go faster than it is safe to drive; food is processed to take out nourishment; housing is expertly designed to destroy neighborhoods; weapons