The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis

Abstract

Fritz Lang's famous and infamous extravaganza Metropolis has never had a good press. While its visual qualities have been praised,' its content, more often than not, has been condemned as simplistic, ill-conceived, or plain reactionary. When the film was first released in the United States in 1927, Randolph Bartlett, the New York Times critic, reproached the director for his lack of interest in dramatic verity and for his ineptitude in providing plot motivation, thus justifying the heavy re-editing of the film for American audiences.2 In Germany, critic Axel Eggebrecht condemned Metropolis as a mystifying distortion of the unshakeable dialectic of the class struggle and as a monumental panegyric Stresemann's Germany.3 Eggebrecht's critique, focusing as it does on the emphatic reconciliation of capital and labor at the end of the film, has been reiterated untold times by critics on the left. And indeed, if we take class and power relations in a modern technological society be the only theme of the film, then we have concur with these critics. We would also have agree with Siegfried Kracauer's observation concerning the affinity that exists between the film's ideological punch line, The heart mediates between hand and brain, and the fascist art of propaganda which, in Goebbels' words, was geared to win the heart of a people and keep it.4 Kracauer pointedly concluded his comments on Metropolis with Lang's own words describing a meeting of the filmmaker with Goebbels that took place shortly after Hitler's rise power: 'He (i.e., Goebbels) told me