THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 5

 

As I wend my way toward the final chapters of METROPOLIS, it seems like Von Harbou may be losing control of some aspects of her dramaturgy.  

Chapter 10 is long and talky, as the ailing Freder is visited by his servant Josaphat (who has a separate minor plotline of no great importance). This gives the author a chance to recapitulate many things the reader already knows, with the protagonist conflating the imagery of the Seven Deadly Sins (from the cathedral) and the Whore of Babylon (from his own reading, apparently). He doesn't seem overly convinced that he merely hallucinated seeing his fathe and Maria together, but he talks about it in highly religious terms: "I saw Maria's brow, that white temple of goodness and virginity, besmirched with the name of the great harlot of Babylon." He also compares her to various archaic goddesses, two ancient cities (Gomorrha and Babylon) before labeling her "Metropolis," which brings one back to the origins of the name, "mother-city." This continues into Chapter 11, and Josaphat, not to be outdone, goes into huge detail about a seductive dancer who's performing at Yoshiwara, and who has sowed enmity between families and young males. This is presumably Fake Maria, but Von Harbou apparently forgot her timeline, for Josaphat imagines that this seductress was dancing in Yoshiwara during the same time that Freder saw Maria at Rotwang's house. Perhaps the 1925 proofreaders were as bored with this section as I was, that they didn't catch the error. The reference to Futura dancing for wealthy patrons has no plot-purpose but to set up, both in book and film, a later sequence where Futura seeks out Yoshiwara to make merry while the city falls apart.      

Von Harbou follows this up with an unusual tangent for Joh Fredersen. Though no version of the movie alludes to any Fredersen relatives except his son, Chapter 12 has the Master of Metropolis leave his domain and go to some nearby rustic locale, to visit the house of his unnamed mother. Described as "paralyzed," she appears to live alone in a farmhouse, supported by Fredersen's money though the two of them maintain a hostility between them due to the son's "sin" in seducing Hel away from Rotwang. Apparently, though Fredersen has always seemed stiff and unbending in his every encounter with his son, he's now disturbed at how easily virtuous Maria won him away from his father, and he's come to ask his mother's advice. (As I predicted, no one ever brings up Fredersen's reverse-Oedipal flirtation with a robot made in the image of his son's lover.) The mother doesn't give her son much advice beyond the platitude of "you reap what you sow." It's not clear how if at all this visit causes the Brain of Metropolis to alter his later course.      

The film has a scene in which Rotwang is seen talking for a bit to his prisoner Maria, but in the novel he Freder goes on and on with ornate phraes just like those of Freder: "Women know nothing of love either. What does light know of light?" He wants some sort of forgiveness from Maria, even though he boasts about having stolen her "soul" and given it to her impostor, who will soon bestir the workers into rebellion. The chapter suddenly ends with Fredersen showing up and strangling Rotwang unconscious.   

Meanwhile, we're finally getting close to the big finish. Freder still doesn't know that there are two Marias, but he's heard that the Real One is going to speak to the rebels that evening. Futura addresses the crowd, encouraging them to riot and destroy the machines that make life in the city possible. To his credit Freder finally realizes that this is an impostor. He tries to denounce her, but he's recognized as the offspring of Fredersen and he's forced to flee. 

Slightly later Maria finds herself alone in the room with the unconscious body of Rotwang. The cut 1927 film doesn't even include the scene of Rotwang's strangulation, but in the book, it seems that Fredersen, despite being in the same room with the captive, doesn't interact with Maria in any way. Did Von Harbou want readers to believe she was just sitting in shadows (the room isn't well lit) and so Fredersen just didn't see her, and that she didn't call attention to herself? In any case, after Fredersen leaves, Maria escapes as well. She immediately heads to the city of the workers, evidently arriving some time after Freder runs away. She doesn't see him but she sees Fake Maria leading the rebels in an assault on the city's maintenance machines. I realize that this is supposed to be the book's great cataclysmic climax, but despite all Von Harbou's fervid descriptions I found it rather boiler-plate. Maria eventually finds a bunch of kids to whom she gives succor, which is clearly meant to bookend her Christ-like association with kids in her first appearance. The film improves on this by having her try to correct the malfunctioning machines.    

Freder seeks out and finds his father at the New Tower of Babel, but nothing much comes of it. Fredersen, who originally seemed obsessed with crushing the rebellious workers to protect the status quo, has suddenly "got religion" of a sort, telling Freder hat he unleashed the violence "for your sake, Freder; so that you could redeem them." In one of Von Harbou's best images, Fredersen happens to be standing on a platform supporting a power-tower, whose struts remind Freder of "the crosses of Golgotha," emitting "long, white crackling springs of sparks." Freder eventually concludes that his father won't help stop the cataclysm, so he returns to the underground, where he helps Maria save the imperiled children.

Elsewhere the revolting workers become incensed at Fake Maria for unleashing the chaos that endangered so many of them, so they go looking for her in Yoshiwara, where Futura is captivating the rich boys. Instead of the two groups fighting, the leader of the cathedral-monks also shows up, condemns Futura as a witch, and persuades both groups to burn her at a stake. Freder, having somehow become separated from Maria, happens across the scene and initially thinks Real Maria has been immolated. For some reason Von Harbou doesn't produce anything like the memorable reveal of the film, where Futura's robotic nature is revealed.

Almost lastly, Maria runs around looking for Freder, and Rotwang attacks her, suddenly imagining that she's Hel reborn. There's no precedence for this in the novel, though one line in the film has the inventor fantasizing about bringing back Hel in the form of a robot. So it seems as if the two father-figures in the story both conceive an unnatural passion for the young heroine, even though one knows that he's messing around with a fake woman. Freder catches sight of Maria being menaced again and overtakes Rotwang, eventually tossing him off a roof. This is the last of the big spectacle-moments, as Fredersen the Father turns over the administration of Metropolis to Freder the Son and his bride, who is also-- sort of a "holy mother?"

I'm glad I reread METROPOLIS, for all of its uneveness and its purple prose. I'm not sure how deeply invested Von Harbou was in her vision of a perfect, sexless madonna-woman as the counter to the Whore of Babylon, but the sheer excess of all of her fulminations about sin and virtue is entertaining in a way that, say, John Bunyan could not be. I've said almost nothing about the author's Big Moral that appears throughout the book and movie, because like most platitudes it doesn't really amount to much. METROPOLIS the novel is much more interesting when judged as a form of "religious fiction," rather than as "science fiction," even allowing for the story's indubitable impact upon the SF genre.      

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 4

 The scene in which Freder thinks that Maria has given herself to Fredersen is in my mind the almost definitive proof that Von Harbou was aware of some basic aspects of Sigmund Freud's Oedipal theory. Here's an apposite example of that theory from a 1910 essay:

When after this he can no longer maintain the doubt which makes his parents an exception to the universal and odious norms of sexual activity, he tells himself with cynical logic that the difference between his mother and a whore is not after all so very great, since basically they do the same thing. The enlightening information he has received has in fact awakened the memory-traces of the impressions and wishes of his early infancy, and these have led to a reactivation in him of certain mental impulses. He begins to desire his mother herself in the sense with which he has recently become acquainted, and to hate his father anew as a rival who stands in the way of this wish; he comes, as we say, under the dominance of the Oedipus complex. He does not forgive his mother for having granted the favour of sexual intercourse not to himself but to his father, and he regards it as an act of unfaithfulness.

^[Of course, Von Harbou would have been filtering any Oedipal concepts through her novel's heavy Judeo-Christian religious structure. But as mentioned in the last post, Freder does not get directed by Rotwang to seek out his father, and there's no evidence that Freder even knows that the mystery-house belongs to Rotwang. He does know of Rotwang's affiliation with Fredersen, though because Freder tells a confidante that he wonders if Rotwang and his father have a hand in Maria's disappearance. With that theory in mind he seeks out his father's "New Tower of Babel."

 The film is actually a little more explicit this time about clarifying Maria's primary purpose for seeking out Fredersen. A brief scene shows Fredersen giving Maria her assignment, to go among the underground workers, preaching violence so that they will revolt and so Fredersen can crush them--and then Freder barges in, seeing his father with the Fake Maria. The book is more ambiguous. We don't see Fredersen talking to Futura; Freder simply intrudes on the two of them, with his father embracing Futura. In fact, he seems to be in full seduction mode: "She [Futura] was not struggling. Leaning far back in the man's arms, she was offering her mouth, her alluring mouth..." Up to this point Fredersen has seemed utterly asexual, obsessed only with power, and he certainly showed no interest in Maria when he spied upon Freder and her in the underground city. Futura, as far as the reader knows, has never been anywhere or done anything, but somehow Rotwang has imbued her with a mature, knowing sexuality. Fredersen knows that Futura is just a robot, not his son's true love, but though I'm still working my way through the novel, I suspect Von Harbou will not make further comment on this curious book-scene.

Still, whatever Von Harbou had in mind, symbolically Fredersen is messing with the image of his son's beloved. Thus she has him reversing the usual course of the Oedipal configuration, where the son becomes possessive of the mother and envies the fact that she gave her "whorish" attentions to the father rather than the son. 

In both book and film, Freder goes berserk and attacks his father, who simply fends him off. Maria watches the father-son conflict a bit and then leaves the room, after which Fredersen convinces his son that he hallucinated the whole incident. Freder falls ill and is confined to bed. Later he has a long conversation with a confidante, during which he recapitulates some of the imagery of the Seven Sins imagery he saw at the cathedral, and brings into it the Scarlet Woman imagery, which apparently he acquired from his own religious education, whatever that was. Freder's ramblings about the Scarlet Woman go on for two chapters before they terminate with the confidante telling Freder that he's seen Fake Maria dancing at some men's club. Lang cuts most of Freder's speech or substitutes hallucinatory imagery, and then moves on to the subject of Fake Maria bringing all the boys to the yard.     

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 3

 During Frederen's visit to the laboratory of Rotwang (whose name in German means "red cheeks"), the reader learns (pretty much as in the film) that the two middle-aged men once contended over a woman named Hel. It's broadly implied that she first belonged to Rotwang, only to be lured away by Joh Fredersen. Hel bore Fredersen's child and apparently died in childbirth, intimating that Freder was raised without a mother-- which might explain why he has such an ardent fixation on a Madonna-like image of a "virgin-mother," to use his own term. This also suggests that Maria, who is said to possess "Madonna-eyes," is also a mother-substitute.

Though Fredersen and Rotwang share an old enmity, they continue to collaborate, Rotwang perhaps serving as a court sorcerer to the tyrannical Metropolis Master. Fredersen has learned that the rebellious workers show allegiance to the strange woman named Maria, and he wants to quash her influence. Rotwang just happens to have devised a prototypical female android, sometimes called "Futura," and he plans to make it look and act like a parody of Maria.

Freder, finishing the shift he took over from Georgi, is informed that the workers plan to assemble to listen to Maria, so of course he attends. Maria is, as it happens, counseling the workers to pursue the path of peace and not revolt. (Both Fredersen and Rotwang also attend this meeting in secret, but Fredersen evidently does not think of using Maria to tamp down the rebel movement, but instead commands Rotwang to continue with the plan with Futura.) Freder pledges love to Maria, and as one might expect it's a very sanitized romantic moment, though Freder does indulge in a bit of stormy sentimentality. They part, planning to meet again at the cathedral, and Rotwang kidnaps Maria.

Freder shows up at the cathedral-- where he somehow knows that Hel, the mother he never met, uses to attend--but Maria isn't there. Freder sees statues representing the Seven Deadly Sins (also in the film), and a priest who hates his father asks him to leave. He wanders the city and just happens across the old house where Rotwang maintains his library. He hears Maria calling to him, albeit with ambiguous phrases, so he breaks in . Rotwang merely moves Maria to one of the house's many rooms and lets Freder exhaust himself running around the house, whereon Freder collapses. The only major difference between book and film is that in the film, Freder hears a priest at the cathedral lecturing about the "Scarlet Woman" from Revelations. This was Lang re-purposing some lines of internal dialogue in Freder's head later, where Freder thinks about the so-called "whore of Babylon" when he thinks he's been betrayed.

In the book Rotwang, who didn't know Freder was coming, claims that he wants to emotionally torment Maria so that he can make Futura's head more closely resemble that of the original. (That, and Rotwang also just wants to torment the son of his unfaithful lover Hel as a way of getting back at Fredersen.) Rotwang taunts Maria, claiming that she's naive to assume that Freder has not had other women before her (though the book affirms that he has not), but Maria does not respond. That scene ends with the statement that Rotwang has not yet finished the head of the false Maria. Later, Freder awakens and happens to see Fake Maria leaving, but though he follows her, he's not able to catch up with her. The book does not include any extended scene in which the mad scientist uses advanced technology to morph Future's countenance into that of Maria. In all likelihood, Von Harbou only intended to suggest that Rotwang worked on the robot's head just like a puppet-maker would. Lang, in setting up the film's action with Von Harbou, was probably the one who knew best what visual effects he could use to make Futura's transformation more startling, and so he was dominantly responsible for that content in the 1927 movie.

Also in the film, Lang does not have Freder spy the departing Futura and try to follow her. Rather, Rotwang appears before Freder and tells him that Maria "is with your father," knowing that the young man will come to the wrong conclusion.     .  

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 2

 In the 1927 film, Freder tries to follow Maria, but loses her and finds himself in the City of Workers, where he seems utterly shocked to see the dehumanized condition of the workers. In the novel, though, Freder does not follow Maria because he knows he's being watched by the agents of his father. He is also fully aware of the workers' situation, for he knows that his father Joh Fredersen has forged Metropolis in this image. Von Harbou draws many comparisons to pagan imagery here, particularly that of Moloch, devouring the workers as the idol Moloch received the sacrifices of children (though of course the workers do not actually perish, they merely live lives of quiet dehumanization).

  Also in the film, Freder seeks out his father and engages him in a fruitless conversation, in which Freder tries to understand why so much suffering is necessary. Von Harbou's novel is much more specific than the screenplay in laying out Fredersen's merciless philosophy, stating that, "That men are used up so rapidly at the machines, Freder, is no proof of the greed of the machines, but of the defiency of the human material." The two of them talk at cross-purposes, and Freder leaves, though Fredersen orders one of his flunkies to keep tabs on the youth. During this colloquy, Fredersen is also advised that there may be insurrection brewing in the underground City of Workers.

More or less the same is that the frustrated Freder eventually extends the hand of brotherly love to an afflicted worker named Georgi, taking his place at his machine and letting Georgi leave the hellish underground. Lang's film birthed the unforgettable image of Freder in his work-clothes contending with the hands of a giant clock, while the novel gives us a less compelling image of Freder manipulating some sort of hoses. These Von Harbou compares to the image of the elephant-headed Hindu deity Ganesha. Von Harbou does not make clear what new dispensation Freder is following, though it's implicit that he wishes to feel closer to Maria by following her brotherhood precepts.

At various parts of the early chapters, Von Harbou makes reference to "Yoshiwara," a gambling-den, presumably open only to those with money. In the novel, when Georgi leaves the underground in a cab, he witnesses some of the denizens of Yoshiwara-- presumably Japanese, though Von Harbou does not use the name at this point, calling the denizens only "yellow-skinned fellows" who leap about shoving advertising hand-bills into the hands of passersby. Georgi, who's been given some money by the man who took his place, uses that money to gamble at Yoshiwara for about a chapter. The Fredersen agent assigned to follow Freder ferrets out Georgi and seeks information on the son of the Metropolis Master. The film just shows the agents accosting Georgi after his illicit visit. This is just as well, for if Von Harbou meant to depict Yoshiwara as a den of iniquity, possibly a brothel as well as a gambling-house, she failed, as the chapter on Yoshiwara is thoroughly dull. There are a couple of references to persons with Japanese names or heritage, though there's no clue as to what Japan signified to the author herein. 

Another odd detail in the novel is that Von Harbou devotes a lot of space to a Christian church whose archaic look contrasts with the ultra-modernity of Metropolis. Fredersen left the church in place because its denizens were fanatics and he didn't want to create martyrs by kicking them out. This holy building is contrasted to the laboratory of Rotwang, a small house decked out with cabalistic symbols. It's to this location that Fredersen appears to charge mad scientist Rotwang with a mission: to undermine the brewing insurrection, led by the saintly Maria, by making a not-so-saintly duplicate of Maria and making her look bad.     

More to come...

     

     

THE READING RHEUM: METROPOLIS (1925) PART 1

 I've just started re-reading Thea Von Harbou's METROPOLIS for the first time in perhaps forty years, as it occurred to me that it might prove interesting to compare the book with the screenplay for the 1927 movie in its extant versions. But because this entails a lot of detailed analysis I'm posting my reactions as I go along, which I haven't done with a prose novel review since I did Rider Haggard's SHE on this blog. My understanding is that Von Harbou began the novel with the expectation that her then-husband Fritz Lang intended to adapt it for the UFA studio, and that she completed the novel before she wrote the screenplay. It's possible Lang had some input into the novel but I have no evidence of this. 

The first thing I'll point out is that the city of Metropolis, which means roughly "mother-city," is the true star of the story, easily eclipsing any of its human characters. That said, the viewpoint character Freder is almost as important in the novel, if not so much the truncated original release. The name "Freder" is generally translated as "son of Frederick," which itself means "peaceful ruler." Von Harbou only calls Freder by his first name, but his father, Joh (short for Johann) Frederson is called by his full name. One online source says that both "Freder" and "Fredersen" can be patronymics," but I don't know if Von Harbou intended this to carry any special symbolism. I think, for reasons I'll show later, that Von Harbou might have chosen the name "Freder" because it sounds like the Latin word "frater," meaning "brother." 

The 1927 release opens with a quick montage of scenes in Metropolis, with the memorable image of dozens of identically clad workers trudging down into "the City of Workers." After that, the film shifts to "the Club of the Sons," a paradisical pleasure-dome for the male children of the city's movers and shakers. Freder is first seen cheering on other young men engaged in sports, and playing tag with a cute young serving-girl-- all of which is meant to suggest that he's unaware of the suffering of the lower classes.

The novel, however, starts with what seems much like a "sturm-and-drang" moment from a 19th-century German novel. Freder is still at the Club when first viewed, but he's in a room with star-designs on the ceiling, playing an organ and apparently working himself into a froth about some tormenting matter. By the second page it's disclosed that he has some obsession with an idealized image of femininity, which in early chapters Von Harbou calls, at least three times, "the austere countenance of the virgin, the sweet countenance of the mother-- the agony and the desire with which he called and called for the one single vision for which his racked heart had not even a name..."

 Now, why is Freder so "racked" by thinking about what sound like rather pacific images of femininity, both of which have strong associations with Christian imagery? I find it interesting that both "virgin" and "mother" become blended in the icon of Mary Mother of Jesus, but I don't think Freder is so wrought up by any sort of religious vision. What I think Von Harbou is editing out is the other half of what Sigmund Freud, in 1905, called "the Madonna-Whore Complex." In this formulation, Freud observed that young men felt ambivalence toward females their own age, for though the men had been raised from childhood by non-sexual mothers, or "madonnas," what young men in their maturation wanted from females was their sexual availability. I think it's likely Von Harbou was aware of Freud's theory, but that she elided the scandalous part of it to make her protagonist seem more noble and selfless-- though even in 1925, I feel sure that most readers would have made the same correlation I've made, that Freder is tormented by his natural biological concupiscence. A later scene with Freder in the Club with other young men does NOT show him canoodling with barmaids, and in conversation with his father in the novel, he as good as admits to being a virgin. 

Back to the novel: Freder dolefully leaves the organ-room and mixes with other young men in the stadium of the Club, where he is served a drink by a sexy young woman-- the book's first image of a provocative female-- but Freder certainly does not pursue this girl.

Then book and film enter a parallel course, for into the Club comes a pretty young woman-- later given the name "Maria"-- who is surrounded by an entourage of children. In both works Maria's only purpose seems to be to show the children the pleasures of the city's idle rich, though she does so without condemnation. Speaking of the wealthy swains, she tells the children, "Look, these are your brothers." She does not seem to see Freder, but he immediately recognizes her visage to be that of the "virgin mother" with which he's obsessed. Maria and the children then leave the Club-- which leads to another divergence I'll address in Part 2.