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Quyen Nguyen

Metropolis, an Ugly Beauty

Society is very similar to a human being. Many people view society from the physical
features on the outside (like human beings), but they do not see the blood running through the
veins, the bones that hold it up, and the chemicals in the brain that creates emotions and
thoughts. Society, like a human being, can have an internal disease (such as cancer) that rots the
insides, but other people cannot really see on the outside until the insides are completely rotten
and it makes society look so sickly. Fritz Langs city of Metropolis is seemingly a utopia to the
high-class society as they fail to realize what creates utopia is the sweat and blood of the workers
who runs the machines underground, the spatial schema of Metropolis intertwined and
opposed emblems of community, control, infection, and corruption (Bird 41). When the main
character, Freder, understands that the city that his father had built had an ugly secret, he was
disappointed. A society with beautiful physical features is known as a utopia, and it can still have
cancerous internal body without anyone knowing it. People worshipped the society that is
disguised as a utopia or as an idol, without knowing how rotten it really is internally.

Summary of Metropolis
In order to understand the concept of this essay, the summary of Metropolis must
provided. In the year of 2026 in the city of Metropolis, there are two classes that occupy the city:
the wealthy industrialists and their family, and the underground workers who run the machines
under Metropolis. Freder Fredersen, the son of the citys leader John Fredersen who resides at

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the Tower of Babel, spends most of his time in the pleasure garden that was created by the
industrialists for their sons to toil their time away. Freder meets Maria, a schoolteacher who
brings the underground workers children to the pleasure garden so they can look at how the rich
live their lives. Freder becomes infatuated with Maria and follows her to the underground
machines, where he witnesses several workers being killed from an explosion. Freder tells his
father what has happened and his father brushes him aside. Freder upset, decides to switch places
with a worker who looks alike to him, so Freder can learn what it is like to work with the
machines. Meanwhile, Joh Fredersen collaborates with an inventor named Rotwang who build a
robot to be a replacement for Joh Fredersens deceased wife. Joh and Rotwang discovers Maria
and a bunch of underground workers in a gathering (including Freder) and Maria tells the worker
they need a mediator that can join both the working class and the upper-class because the
mediator between the head and hands must be the heart. Freder volunteers to be the mediator
because he is in love with Maria. Joh, however, tells Rotwang to make the robot look alike to
Maria in order to ruin the workers. Rotwang kidnaps Maria in order to duplicate her look to the
robot. The robot becomes the false Maria and creates havoc in Metropolis, including getting men
to kill each other for her affections as well as getting the workers to destroy the machines. Freder
realizes this Maria is not the real Maria and begins looking for the real Maria. The workers
manage to destroy the machines, and causes the city to flood, leaving their children in danger.
The real Maria and Freder rescues the children before they are killed by the flood. The workers,
realizing that their children might have been dead, burns the false Maria at the stake. In the end
of the movie, Freder becomes the mediator between the working class and the upper class.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me

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A utopian society is usually followed blinded by its followers, and these followers
worship it like an idol. However, religion can be at times vague and this makes it easier for
people to follow false gods, such as a utopian society. In A Very Old Man with Enormous
Wings by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the people could not tell if the old man with wings was an
angel or not, so they consulted a priest who decided that the old man with wings was not an
angel, because nothing about him (the old man) measured up to the proud dignity of angels.
People are confused of who to worship and what to believe so they put all of their trust into a
seemingly perfect society. When the perfect society fails the followers, the followers become
emotional and become more vulnerable. In Metropolis, the underground workers put all of
their trust into the robotic Maria when she tells them to destroy the machines. After the machines
were destroyed and the city was flooded, the underground workers realized they have
jeopardized their childrens lives, they turn on the false Maria and burned her at the stake. The
Tower of Babel, in the Old Testament, was built by the Earths population with a united language
to create a tall temple to be able to be closer to God. The Tower of Babel in Metropolis was
created to be the pinnacle of society, and for others to look at it as an idol rather than to worship
God. In the Old Testament, the Tower of Babel was built to be closer to the heavens and to God,
but not in a faithful sense, but rather an arrogant one; the people want to show they are as
powerful as God. The people showed their arrogance by designing to make a tower with its top
in the heavens, but it said that the Lord had to come down to even see this massive city and the
tower (Strawn). In the end, God tears down the tower and blows people to different parts of the
Earth with different languages as a lesson to not be arrogant. In Metropolis, the citizens were
able to unify under one language by the mediator, Freder, at the end of the movie. People
begin to worship society that they believe to be perfect, only for it to end in turmoil.

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With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

Behind every great society or invention, is a powerful man behind it. This principle can
be relative to the great and powerful Oz behind the Emerald City, to Ty behind the Circle. Every
perfect society or relationship has someone with power behind it. In Another Evening at the
Club, the wife seems to hold the power in the relationship and over her husband, and it is her
power that she has over her husband that influences him to react in a certain way. This is the
same effect that happens to Freder and the underground workers with Maria in Metropolis.
Freder was so in love with Maria that he would volunteer as a mediator The underground
workers would listen to the false Maria when she told them to destroy the machines. Ty from
The Circle also holds a certain amount of power in the community, without being seen. People
in the Circle talked about Ty often, that he hired the other Wise Men, was the reason why the
Circle was successful, and then disappeared. While people did not know who Ty was, he
continued to hold a certain amount of power in future plans of the Circle, was the mastermind
behind the Circle, and yet, was never seen by anyone. Ironically, this is the same case for the
movie Metropolis as well; the director of Metropolis, Fritz Lang, began to hate his own
movie when the Nazi party started using his movie as propaganda because Metropolis was a
massive turbine built to provide a negative charge against Soviet propaganda, and to idealize the
top-down social model quickly constructed out of National Socialism (Atkinson). A utopian
society must have a leader, but it is a more powerful one when the leader is a mysterious one. A
mysterious leader gives the illusion that there really is not a leader, and it gives society a utopian
look, that everyone is equal. This is the case with Joh Fredersen being assumed the leader when
it is really Maria, the wife is really the leader with the husband being the image in Another
Evening at the Club, and Kalden is really the mysterious leader of the Circle. This demonstrates

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that people would follow blindly into society without knowing how it functions, so when society
crumbles, citizens are left confused.

Ignorance is Bliss
Usually, when people find out the ugly truth, they are usually disappointed and/or hurt. In
the case of a dysfunctional but otherwise utopian by all appearances society, many of these
citizens act in alarming ways, and some act calmingly. In The Ones who Walked away from
Omelas, the citizens live in a utopian society and were fully content. However, when they found
out the secret to their happiness is because the only way they can maintain the happiness is if a
child is tortured. Some of these citizens cannot bring themselves to live in a city with this terrible
secret so they left Omelas. In Metropolis, Freder sees an explosion underground after
following Maria, and witnesses the sacrificing of the underground workers as if they were
slaves as the Mayans would have human sacrifices to appease their gods. Freder realizes that the
sacrifice is for the sake of the city, so he finds his father to tell him what he sees, and decide to
work as an underground worker to be with the other underground workers. However, not
everyone takes the news of being manipulated and realizing how rotten their seemingly perfect
society really is. In The Circle, Maes friend, Annie, was very devoted to the community that
she volunteered to have her ancestors looked up to prove a technology that the Circle had
recently invented. When Annie found out her ancestors were slave owners, she started to doubt
the Circle and how important privacy was, and went into a coma. This is a similar case in
Metropolis, when the underground workers realized that they had follow blindly to the false
Maria, so they immediately start burning the false Maria at the stake instead of thinking about
the situation calmly.

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Conclusion
The problem with a utopian society is not really the society; like a human, society cannot
help itself from being sick or ill. The issue at hand is the people that follow the utopian society
like a person following a bankrupted financial advisor. People follow blindly a utopian society
that they do not understand because they do not want to think or try to understand it.
Worshipping a society that is rotten to its core will only lead in destruction and despair, and
leaving people feeling hopelessness and regret.

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Work Cited

Atkinson, Michael. "The Politics of a New Metropolis." - In These Times. N.p., 25 Nov. 2010.
Web. 30 June 2016.

Bird, Lawrence. (2012). Dialectical Imaginaries: forms of life, forms of fascism in the
Metropolis of film, manga and anime.Critical Planning, 19. UCLA: Retrieved from:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3k1804kw

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, and Gregory Rabassa. A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: And the
Sea of Lost Time. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.

Strawn, Brent A. "Focus On Tower of Babel." Focus On Tower of Babel. Oxford Press, n.d. Web.
30 June 2016.