Metropolis and Marxism

I was quite surprised to be watching a 1920s silent film in Religious Studies class this week, but after the discussion in class on Monday, it made a lot of sense why we watched it. The movie's many uses of religious themes and imagery to convey a very non-religious point illustrates just how useful and versatile religious allegory can be. In my opinion, the movie is critiquing the Marxist view that society must change through a revolution from below, because it clearly shows that a revolution from below can be disastrous, and it also advocates a mediator from above as the real solution. Noelle made an excellent point in class when she discussed how the intended audience of the film was the upper classes (since the lower, working, classes wouldn't have the time or money to spend at the cinema). With that audience in mind, it makes a lot of sense for director Fritz Lang to propose action from the upper rather than lower classes.

I don't remember who said it in class, but I agree with the idea that using religious imagery like this allows viewers to implicitly understand much more than is explicitly shown in the film, especially with the limits it has in being a silent film with so little dialogue. If Lang had wanted to get the same point across without using these religious themes, he would've had to work a lot harder in his character and plot development. Some of the examples of religious (Christian) imagery in the movie were the character Maria, the story of Babylon, and the idea of a mediator between high and low (like Jesus brought together God and humankind). Using these and other images, viewers' conceptual blending allows them to bring in well-known events and character traits from the Bible to supplement what Lang shows onscreen. The main point of the movie doesn't seem to be to promote these religious themes, especially since they're somewhat inconsistent with the Bible (the metaphor isn't uniform). Instead, especially considering the historical and geographical context of the film and filmmaker, it was intended to address socio-economic and political issues rather than religious ones. The religious overtones of the film simply made the task much easier by accelerating the plot and character developments.