Savior of the Working Man: Promethean Allusions in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

Abstract

Loved and loathed since its 1927 premiere, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has inspired as many divergent readings as impassioned responses.1 Critics have decried its chauvinistic gender stereotyping, communist undertones, and apocalyptic overtones; its heavy-handed borrowing of Christian and Marian salvific imagery and narrative devices; and a simplistic melodramatic plot that culminates in one of the most notorious endings in cinematic history.2 Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, have even been branded as Nazi collaborators who used the film to support a nascent political ideology.3 Yet within this mixture of fascism and socialism, medieval and gothic, Christian and occult, this chapter throws one more brand onto the critical fire by offering another reading of Metropolis: through the myth of Prometheus.