The Mediator between the Heart and the Hands
That mediator, according to Fritz Lang's fantastic classic movie Metropolis, is the heart. In that movie, a sinister magnate named Johnathan Fredersen finds that his subterranean workers are being compelled by the gentle heroine Maria to seek a mythic "mediator" who will bargain for their rights. In an attempt to destroy the Union movement, Fredersen disguises a newly developed robot as Maria and orders the robot to incite the workers to revolution.
The workers begin destroying the machines of the Metropolis, which they needed to survive, at the insistence of the magnate's provocateur robot. Caught up in the passion of the moment, they fail to realize that they've left their children behind to be drowned in the depths as the demolished "heart machine" is unable to retain the water in the city's reservoirs.
Warning: Spoilers Follow
The robot sneaks from the mob and goes to a nightclub to titillate and enrage the men of the city's wealthy elite. Once the lights go out, they follow her into the streets to "watch as the world goes to the Devil". The workers, realizing that their children are dead, set out to kill Maria (who changes in their mind from Virgin to witch). The two groups meet and clash on the street.
Earlier, Fredersen's son, Freder, fell in love with Maria and became an advocate of her cause. After the heart machine is destroyed, he and Maria work to save the children, then get caught up in the chaos of the streets.
Fredersen realizes that his son in the streets with the workers and goes down to find him. In the climax, Freder is locked in a deadly struggle with the inventor of the robot, Rotwang, for the life of Maria as Fredersen looks on in terror.
According to Enno Patalas, a major theme of the film that resulted in its rejection in the 1920s (the film was a failure on its debut) and its appeal in the latter 20th century is "that as the only remedy of contradicting class interest, it offers an appeal to the goodwill of the social partners," the capitalist and the worker.
While that was perhaps the modus operandi of the Fordist, Keynesian world of the middle 20th century, what remains after over 20 years of deconstruction and cynicism is a society where the vestigial remnants of that world are sick and distorted. Keynesianism remains, for instance, in a government running huge, permanent deficits and spurring the economy though massive investment in military endeavors (much like the useless manipulation of the clock machine by Freder). Fordism has been replaced by the world of corporate raiders, in which the reprehensible antagonist of Oliver Stone's Wall Street becomes the spokesman for the real Wall Street; "Greed is Good," where market analysts attack Costco for being "too generous" because they provide a health plan their employees can afford, and where political discourse is reduced to counterproductive polemics.
In the movie, Freder--the son of the magnate--becomes the medator. In fighting Rotwang and rescuing Maria, he warms his father's heart such that, at the end, he can mediate a meeting of Frederson and a representitive of the workers.
So consider the epigram of Metropolis in our current society. Who is the mediator today? Where is the communal respect and mutual good will in today's America? And lacking them, can there be any other fate for our society but self-destruction?
[Jan 03, 2006] | [movies] | # | G
