"...it's man devouring man our there, so who are we to deny it in here?"

Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang in 1926, is a movie I found rather puzzling. What is it about? Religion? Marxism? Robots stealing our women and murdering us in our beds? It seems to be a mix of all three, and then some. The movie is silent, with German intertitles; this inconvenience caused me a small bit of panic at the beginning, since it's been awhile since I had opportunity to practice my German (and I've never been good at reading it.) The translated subtitles were no help, as they were in Spanish, but somehow I muddled through, managing to understand the bulk of the intertitles- the overall meaning of the film, however, might have escaped me.

There seem to be two groups of people in the futuristic, industrial city of the film- the wealthy business owners who know little outside their frivolous Great Gatsby-esque world, and the workers, who slave away doing meaningless, senseless tasks adjusting steam engine-powered machines night and day, as the fate of the factories rest in their abilities to pull a lever to the right place at the right time. But then one day, one of the young upperclass gentlemen, the son of a factory owner, sees the children of the workers with an attractive woman, and apparently resolves to know everything about them. This takes him to a factory where an exhausted worker fails to pull his lever and the factory proceeds to explode in much steamy glory, causing mass injuries and hallucinations of the machines as savage gods and the workers, their human sacrifices.

Son-of-bourgeoisie, a.k.a. Our Dashing Hero (replete with lipstick and eyeshadow) flips out, and runs to his father, gesturing desperately about the plight of the workers. He presumably gets nowhere, because from there he runs away and trades places with a worker and gets his own lever to pull. (One begins to wonder if there is some subtext going on with all the characters grabbing their fellow men and also needing levers to pull.) While down in the factory-world, he meets the Attractive Woman again, finds out she's named Maria, and there is either an enormous religious revival going on (the Gaze of Eternity on her face and all the crosses seem to suggest this) or she is inciting some sort of proletariat revolt, or she's dissuading the proles from revolting; it's rather unclear. In any case, Our Dashing Hero falls in love with her, promises to meet her at the cathedral the next morning, leaves her with a kiss, and she is abruptly kidnapped by the Mad Scientist, who has just been in cahoots with Our Dashing Hero's father.

Mad Scientist terrifies Maria, who expresses her terror by clutching at her breasts and writhing suggestively. Then he restrains her on a table in a laboratory that is clearly scientific. The tubes and glass bulbs of bubbly liquid prove this, of course, as does the electricity field that Mad Scientist uses to transfer Maria's body over to the body of a robotic woman. In a strange twist of fate, this is almost the same plot device that the British television show Doctor Who uses for the Cybermen, and I more than half expected Robot!Maria to go kill everyone in sight and turn them into robots as well.

She doesn't, though. She uses her Super Robot Powers to swing her hips and turn the upper class men into drooling twits (it didn't take much) and her identical appearance to Maria to incite the workers to real revolt: anthropomorphized versions of the seven deadly sins are out dancing and Death plays a flute solo on a femur, while the workers mob the factories. This, for some reason, causes the underground worker cities to flood, and their children flee, panicked. To rectify this mistake they tie Robot!Maria to the stake on top of some wrecked cars and burn her. Everybody cheers.

Our Dashing Hero doesn't, though, because he thinks that his lady love was the victim of Society. Then Robot!Maria burns into just a metal frame, Our Dashing Hero sees real Maria on the roof, and climbs a ladder to rescue her. (There is a lot of ladder-climbing in this movie. Presumably there are metaphors attached.) But no! Mad Scientist is there, grabbing her again! Mad Scientist really has a thing for grabbing screaming women. Our Dashing Hero and Mad Scientist wrestle on the roof of the church while Maria screams, and then Mad Scientist is tossed to his death, which is of course the generally accepted order of things. Our Dashing Hero and Maria snog, the workers would cheer but they're too busy running off and possibly realizing that the lunatics are now in charge of the asylum, and the leader of the workers and Our Dashing Hero's father (the leader of the factory owners) reluctantly shake hands, realizing that "between brain and hands must the heart be." But only if my German is correct.