Ten Years Left

Watched “Metropolis” last night. My older one is in a film class at school and the teacher had suggested that it was something they should all take in.  I’d never seen it but had always considered pictures of the iconic black and white city skyline with connecting ramps between buildings and the Fredersen massive tower of babel at the center of it all. It had always seemed essential. 

And as with all good futuristic efforts there is a date associated with this film, which is, appropriately enough, one hundred years out from when it was made.  We are thrust into a black and white vision of wealth and drudgery, above and below, plebeians and patricians.  Workers in drab uniforms with clodhopper shoes march in rows down into the bowels of the city while others are off their shift and rise in the adjacent elevator.  While the wealthy in the city above live a ‘roaring’, sex-charged party.  This is how 2026 was imagined by someone living in the Weimar Republic, someone who had just visited New York City. 

2016 is only a mere decade away from us today. The eyes are trained invariably to what Fritz Lang got wrong. People still drive Model T-like cars and people still consult ticker tape-like machines and assert intelligence and authority with shelves and shelves of hard cover books.  Workers lives are a particular brand of misery, large dangerous machines that haven’t been impacted by chips and miniaturization, workers safety has made no progress whatsoever as everyone is stretched to the extreme, living every minute at work seconds from peril. As one would expect, it says much more about 1926 then it does about 2016 . . . to a point. 

What struck me over and over was how human and innocent the German people felt to me.  Weimar Germans as a mix of good and evil; hopeful, sympathetic, sensitive people like Fredersen the overlord and his overall-ed foreman Grot.  Most people are followers, most people are lemmings, but the key characters are ripe with human sympathies.  In ten years, everyone in the film would necessarily be involved in the Nazi Wehrmacht, fleeing it, enduring it, supporting it.  A lot can change in ten years. German people were no different before or after the war, but the perception the world had of them would change forever. 

What did the Weimar Germans think when they saw this film?  Did they consider this as anticipatory?  Was it seen as a foreign future, some vile vision that the American’s across the sea were driving toward?  Or was the creepy henchman and the evil scientist and the callous death and exploitation something they saw as indelibly German?  Ten years out they would be all be cast into something notably worse than this nightmare world of the film. We’ve ten years left, ourselves, until the centenary date arrives.