In the film, there are two major leaders of the two sides of the good/bad technology binary. First, there’s Duke Red (an influential and popular political leader in the city) commissions creation of a super-being robot to sit on the throne atop the city’s newly completed ziggurat. Duke Red’s plan is for this robot called Tima is for her to function as a deity, as a symbol of the pinnacle of human intelligence, the culmination of scientific knowledge. He plans on using Tima as a means of control over the rest of the world.
On the other hand, there is a great deal of anger and unrest in regards to the existence of robots in the city. In Zone 1, the level just beneath the surface level of the city, evidence of this animosity is prevalent. Kenichi, his uncle and Pero- a detective robot- find themselves in Zone 1 as a fire breaks out, and the public sentiment about robots is almost immediately made known. Some citizens gather to watch the fire and when they realize that Pero is there, the scene immediately turns violent. A group of already angry revolutionaries have gathered, insisting that “the ones up there are trying to kill us!”(Metropolis)
(Figure 1)
One man sees Pero and shouts “Robots out!”(Metropolis) and hits Pero in the face. (Fig.1) “First you take our jobs and now you’re trying to kill us!” (Metropolis) he shouts, indicating the fears and beliefs shared by those who live in the
(Figure 2)
lower levels of Metropolis. The levels of the city are increasingly more impoverished the further down they are, and their inhabitants resent the robots for stealing their jobs and thus contributing to the decline of their already dismal living conditions. Throughout the film, there are many examples of jobs that could easily be done by humans but are done by robots instead. For instance, on the surface lever of the city, there are robots to walk dogs and sweep the streets. (Fig. 2) In Zone 1, we see that fire fighting has been robotized as well. The Albert II robot is a model whose main function is to pick up trash, another task that can be done perhaps more effectively by humans. The issue with this is that menial tasks like sweeping, picking up and sorting trash are somewhat tedious and possibly even humiliating jobs to perform. This is probably the reason why robots like the Albert II were invented, to keep humans from having to do drudgery and tedious, sometimes dangerous work. The citizens of the lower levels of Metropolis are desperate, though, so jobs like the ones I’ve described suddenly seem desirable.
In the film, it doesn’t seem as if it’s possible for the society of Metropolis to function with or without robots. Oddly enough, the people on the upper level of the city seem almost apathetic toward the issue. Though there are a few moments of panic when the Malduks- Duke Red’s vigilante army- shoot and dispose of robots operating on the wrong level of the city, or robots that have gone haywire. It’s strange that the people on the upper level aren’t more disturbed by these shootings and the destruction of robots. I believe the reason that they are so apathetic toward the violent treatment of the robots is because of the very fact that they are robots, not humans. The reaction to that kind of violence against humans on the same regular and public basis would be completely different- but the people on the surface level of the city feel no moral obligation to the robots. Their shock to the acts of destruction carried out by the Malduks is mainly a response to the aspect of chaos appearing in their neat, organized lives. Once the robots have been disposed of, the inhabitants of the surface level of Metropolis simply walk away and carry on with their lives.
(Figure 3)
There are no protests against robots in the streets of the upper levels, and no direct idolization of them either. While the people on the upper level of the city seem to not view robots as either bad or good, I don’t believe that they occupy the grey area because they seem completely unaware of the technology in their city. They move through life almost as if they themselves are robots- unaware of their surroundings, focused on the task of living their peaceful, picture-perfect lives. During the ziggurat celebration, a sort of press conference is held with Duke Red, the President and other political figures. A reporter asks “Is it true that there are military facilities in the Ziggurat?”(Metropolis) The question is never answered. Directly after this scene is one of the people in the streets chanting with vacant, smiling faces “Hurray for the Ziggurat! Long live Metropolis!”(Metropolis)
(Figure 4)
They appear unquestioning of the power of the president and Duke Red and the purpose of the ziggurat, perhaps due in part to the aforementioned apathetic and controlled state of their daily life in the city. The city’s upper level appears clean and safe, and those who live in it buy into this illusion of security. For this reason their reactions to the evidences of the apparent robotic crisis brewing around them are fleeting. They have no reason to believe that- or to care if- anything negative comes of the robots that make their lives simple and tidy. Their near-apathy can’t be considered a midpoint between positive and negative emotion- it’s a complete lack of either.
The closest the film comes to addressing the possibility of the existence of a grey area is in the opening minutes of the film, in which two men discuss the role of robots in their society. The first man to speak says “Those robots are getting big ideas. They don’t know their place!” The second man retorts, saying, “…our economy is unthinkable without robot labor.” (Metropolis) While the first man clearly is opposed to the idea of robot labor and use in the city, the second man doesn’t exactly represent the opposite end of the argument. He doesn’t deny that the robots might be overstepping some boundaries and interfering with human life- he simply points out that they are a necessary part of life in Metropolis- but he doesn’t idealize their existence either.
Duke Red and the Malduks present an issue to the understanding of the good technology /bad technology dichotomy in that their motives and beliefs seem to contradict one another. Duke Red is perfectly willing to put a robot on a throne from which it is to rule the world, yet the political group that functions with his funding has the primary purpose of destroying robots. This is problematic to the idea of robots as either a good or bad thing within Metropolis. Why would the leader of a group who aims to eliminate robots willingly put a robot in a position of power? Perhaps Duke Red believes that within the category of robots there are two subcategories- good and bad. For Duke Red, Tima is a good robot, an ideal robot, while the robots used for labor are bad. There are a couple of reasons why Duke Red classifies Tima apart from the labor robots. First, Tima is meant to be a replica of Duke Red’s dead daughter. Duke Red is emotionally invested in Tima because of this, while he has no emotional connection to the robots that perform chores throughout the city. Secondly, Tima is created for a task much different than those of the labor robots. While it’s the labor robot’s jobs to keep the city clean and running, it’s Tima’s function to sit on the throne inside the ziggurat to show the world how technologically advanced
(Figure 5)
Metropolis is, thus establishing a the city and those who run it as being in a position of power. (Fig. 5) Even within Duke Red’s reasoning for separating Tima from other robots, we see a fairly distinct opposition and no real grey area. Tima is beautiful and serves a lofty purpose, and the labor robots are ugly and meant only for the completion of unskilled labor. Duke Red refers to Tima as a super being, and when she asks whether or not she’s a robot, he is reluctant to tell her that she is. Instead of telling her that she’s a robot, he says “Oh don’t be silly, you’re nothing like those piles of junk!” Tima asks “Then am I human like Kenichi?” Duke Red is at a loss for words for a moment, then finally says, “What are you saying? You’re no mere human being ruled by emotion and feeling, torn between morality and love! You are the super-being.” (Metropolis) In this exchange, a few things become clear. First, Duke Red is not against robots. He is aware of the negative connotation of the word robot in the context of his society, hence his hesitation in identifying Tima as a robot. Duke Red’s idea of a good robot is a sophisticated, human-like robot like Tima. Bad robots- junk- are the kind that are used to do labor. What’s interesting is that Tima herself if unwilling to identify as a robot. She wants to be human so badly, which speaks to the fact that what little human life she has experienced has given her the notion that being a robot is a bad thing.
Dr. Laughton and Duke Red each represent the idolization and idealization of robots. Duke Red not only wants Tima
(Figure 6)
to be created so that she can sit on the throne of power, he wants her created in the image of his dead daughter. Dr. Laughton, the scientist Duke Red charges with the task of creating Tima, is completely in love with technology. He regards Tima as his finest creation, his masterpiece. He is unwilling to give Tima to Duke Red because he wants to keep her for his own. Dr. Laughton expresses his love for Tima and his secret plan to keep her moments after Duke Red leaves his laboratory, proclaiming “I’m not giving you to anyone… She will be my masterpiece!” (Metropolis) Duke Red and Dr. Laughton are both obsessed with having the most perfect, technologically advanced robot, a testament to the fact that a beautiful, elegantly and seamlessly made robot is more desirable than a functional, hard working one. (Fig. 6) Tima is the epitome of beauty with her blonde hair, big blue-green eyes and fair, peachy skin. Fifi, an Albert II trash robot that befriends Tima and Kenichi, looks like a trashcan with vaguely human features- eyes, ears, mouth, arms etc.- but there is nothing beautiful or elegant about it. Tima and Fifi are both robots, but one is obviously for labor and the other for show. Perhaps the apathetic stance the citizen of the upper level of the city that I mentioned earlier has something to do with this clear difference in appearance between labor robots and humans. The dehumanization of these labor robots makes it easy for humans to overlook the mistreatment they endure and to be completely unaffected by the violence carried out against them in public on a fairly regular basis. I would also go so far as to equate this response to slavery, racism against ethnic groups and undocumented, immigrant laborers. When one group of people can manage to make another group seem less human, they can tolerate or turn a blind eye to the injustice with which they are treated. The dehumanization of the labor robots allows the people of Metropolis to ignore the fact that they are needlessly destroyed and relegated to such demeaning tasks as trash sorting, and the dehumanization of ethnic groups in the U.S. (and other parts of the world) allows people to remain apathetic to their mistreatment as undocumented laborers and to the issue of immigrant rights and safety. These classifications based on appearance fall neatly –and somewhat ironically-into the “black and white” molds. The dichotomies remain between good and bad, beauty and brawn, leisure and labor, leaving no reason of room for the grey area to exist. Tima’s very convincing human performance lands her in the good, beautiful and leisurely category, like the humans who live on the upper level of the city. Their function isn’t to work; it’s to carry on neat, picture perfect lives in their neat, picture perfect city. Fifi (and all the other labor robots) are meant only for hard labor, not for beauty or leisure.
Tima’s existence as not quite human and not quite robot play a large role in the blurring of the black and white lines between humans and robots. In States of Emergency: Urban Spaces and the Robotic Body in the Metropolis Tales, Lawrence Bird talks about bare or naked life, “subject to authority that legally places [it] outside the law”. He defines Tima as a “hybrid figure…who remain[s] poised between inorganic and organic, true and false, good and evil. She seems capable of adopting any identity, and not surprisingly, her tag line in the film is ‘Who am I?’ She is an embodiment of bare life.” (Bird 141) Tima is subject to authority, the authority of Duke Red and the president. Being that she’s a hybrid of a human and a robot, she is outside of the law, as Bird states. There is no place in the law for a being like Tima. She has mechanical parts, yet she moves, speaks, learns and thinks freely in the same way a human does. Tima defies the popular perception of robot.
Atlas and his resistance are most angry with the robots about the fact that they are doing jobs that the poor and unemployed inhabitants of the lover levels of the city could have. As the man in the very beginning of the film noted, however, society couldn’t function without these robots. Bird comments on the two revolutions that take place in the film: the human revolution and the robot revolution. “The first rebellion, on the part of human revolutionaries, proves unsuccessful. Despite its earnestness and good intentions, it is an entirely conservative revolution, with the goal of overturning Duke Red and returning the city to a time before robots.”(Bird 141) To Atlas and his revolutionaries, all robots are bad because they take jobs away from humans. Following this logic, it would be wise to do away with technology altogether to create as many jobs as possible. This was the aim of the rebellion. However, the revolt is unsuccessful, as Bird notes, due to its completely one-sided view of the issue. The goal of the human revolution is to return the city to a time before robots, but to simply eliminate all robots is not a viable option. To think in entirely black and white terms, to ignore the possibility of a grey area is not reasonable and for this reason, human rebellion fails. Bird suggests that the failure of this revolution serves as “a warning against conservative revolution and thus as a critique of the complicity between Lang’s film [the original silent film by the same name] and National Socialism.” (Bird 141) I would argue that Rintaro is not only warning against a conservative revolution, or against adopting extremist political like National Socialism (practiced by the Nazi party), but against allowing ourselves to have a belief system the falls only into categories of black and white, but never grey, simply because it’s easiest to argue and understand an issue in it’s most basic, concrete and definite form. As Atlas and his fellow angry citizens believed that the robots were the only cause of their problem of poverty, Duke Red believed that using technology like Tima and the highly mechanized ziggurat, the products of the pinnacle of human knowledge, was the only way to take over the world. The fact of the matter is that neither Atlas nor Duke Red succeed in their one-sided quests to eliminate or elevate robotic technology illustrates what I believe is Rintaro’s point and meaning for this work: unless there is compromise, reason, or a grey area, there can only be dystopian society. The film ends with Kenichi and the surviving robots coming out of the wreckage of the ziggurat, which was brought down by Tima in the robot rebellion. The image of Kenichi and all the robots gathered around him with pieces of Tima evoke a certain sense of hope, born of the idea that if humans and robots can find a middle ground, there is a way to build a society that won’t self destruct the way the society of Metropolis did.
Metropolis shows it’s viewer that although things may appear to be simply black and white, there are tricky moments in which there may appear to be a grey area, moments that are too tricky for people to cope with, and for this reason they are ignored even though the answer to many problems may lie in that very grey area. The fact that the film shows both sides of this dichotomy illustrates an important point: robots can be good as well as bad. People in the society of Metropolis as well as in real life, modern day societies, are quick to take sides and jump to conclusions. By setting up clear distinctions within the social structure between human and sub- or non-human, we perpetuate violence against groups that might not be as different from us as we perceive them to be. Rintaro is showing us in Metropolis that living in black and white is a recipe for disaster and self-destruction, while allowing ourselves to occupying the grey space in between our polarized beliefs is constructive and the key to achieving harmony and peace in society.
WORKS CITED
1. Bird, Lawrence. "States of Emergency: Urban Space and the Robotic Body in the Metropolis Tales." Mechademia 3 (2008): 126-48. Print.
2. Metropolis. Dir. Rintaro. Perf. Rintaro. Sony Pictures Entertainment, 2001. DVD.
Duke red is a member of my team.
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