Self-Erasure and Existence in Serial Experiments Lain and Metropolis

The two films that I shall be exploring in this paper are Ryutaro Nakamura's Serial Experiments Lain and Rintaro's Metropolis. Lain follows the story of a young girl named Lain who is in junior high and starts experiencing increasingly strange events. She meets "alter egos" of herself, and as she becomes more and more enmeshed in the world of the Wired, which is an imitation of the Internet, she starts questioning her own identity and existence. As people start dying around her, she attempts to find out who is behind these events, while at the same time the boundaries between reality and the Wired are falling apart. In her search, she meets the 'God' of the Wired, who, as it is later revealed, tries to convince people to give up their physical bodies and so transcend their earthly lives to exist in the Wired. After Lain destroys the God in a final confrontation, she is able to reverse the strange events that have been happening since the start of the series in a sort of "All Reset." By erasing memories of herself from everyone else's memories, she ceases to exist to them and to herself.

Metropolis on the other hand is set in the future, where robots are constantly present as servants, or more precisely slaves, of humans, and are kept strictly in their place. Tima, created as a super-robot for the purpose of sitting upon the throne of the Ziggurat,[1] meets Kenichi, the nephew of the detective from Japan who was sent to capture the mad scientist that had created Tima. Rock, Duke Red's[2] sort-of-adoptive son and leader of the Malduks,[3] attempts to kill Tima out of both jealousy for his semi-affectionate regard for her[4] and prejudice against robots.[5] Nonetheless, Tima is able to escape his attempts with the help of Kenichi, though Tima eventually ends up in the Duke's grasp. In the final scenes, Tima loses her memories as her "robotic side" takes over, and seemingly fulfills her purpose by sitting upon the Ziggurat. However, she proclaims an apocalypse to punish the humans for their mistreatment of the robots. Kenichi is able to pull her from the throne and save her from completely merging with the throne. Seeming to have lost her memories, Tima attacks Kenichi. As the city crumbles around them, Tima regains her memories towards the end of the anime and unfortunately falls to her death from the great height of the Ziggurat to the ground below. Metropolis ends with Kenichi deciding to stay in Metropolis rather than go home with his uncle in the hopes of helping to rebuild Metropolis and create a better future, where presumably humans and robots can coexist.

Serial Experiments Lain and Metropolis are both very different, in subject matter as well as style. However, I feel that the importance of memory with identity and self present in both works are of interest, and I would like to explore the characters of Tima and Lain in particular. I intend to explore the concept of self or subjectivity and what that means when that self is erased in the figures of Tima and Lain. I claim that, despite their self-erasure, there exists identity within that erasure, rather than a lack of a self. Their self-erasure results in questions of identity and existence for these characters, and I shall attempt to prove that a new self is created, allowing for existence within erasure. Defining subjectivity in Lain and Tima however is problematic, given that one is possibly a computer program and the other a robot, therefore I believe that it is necessary to first define the self that is being erased.

In Lain, the series leaves the question of whether Lain is a computer program or not unanswered. One theory, according to The God of the Wired, is that Lain is a computer program, designed to break down the barriers between reality and the Wired, and that her physical body is one that he has given her. This theory would allow us to reconcile her apparent agelessness in the last episode.[6] The other theory would be that she has given up her body to "live on" in the Wired. Although this question cannot be definitely resolved, nonetheless in either case Lain has a self, the real-world self, one that exists or existed in what the anime presents as the real world. At this point I would like to mention that there are three Lains, her "alter egos", that make up Lain but cause problems in defining who Lain really is. This is a question that Lain, the real-world Lain, struggles with, as she is unable to connect who she thinks she is and what she knows and experiences as her existence, with the actions and character of Wired Lain that she only hears about through a second-hand source.


(Figure 1)

This image, taken from the artbook for Lain, is an attempt by the artists to differentiate between the three Lains. Their names are written differently[7] and as the image shows, there are certain expressions, postures, as well as speech characteristics unique to each Lain.

While these Lains present another problem in defining Lain's selfhood, the point is moot when in the end all of Lain is erased. However, although the different Lains are distinct, there is a merging of the Lains, at least of Wired & real-world Lain, that is shown by contrasting the behavior of Lain in episode two, "Girls", and episode seven, "Society". In "Girls", she has just received her Navi, which is basically a computer, but she is still shy and withdrawn, "unconnected".[8] Some of her classmates take her along to a club called Cyberia, but she does not know how to dress for the occasion and has clearly not been to a club before, a fact that a couple of them tease her about: "You're usually in bed now, aren't you, Lain?" says one, followed by, "Lain, don't you have anything better to wear at night?" This is also the first instance in which we hear about Wired Lain. As the anime progresses, real-world Lain seems to be incorporating Wired Lain, showing a merging as she becomes more confident and dresses a little differently. This merging culminates in "Society" in which there is a scene where Wired Lain sort of "takes over" real-world Lain's body.[9] The immediate contrast between real-world Lain and Wired Lain is shown clearly, as well as the struggle with identity that Lain faces.

During the series she increasingly questions who she is, and tries to reconcile her own memories, experiences, and who she thinks she is with her alter-egos. The climax of this struggle is shown in episode eight, "Rumors", in which all three Lains make an appearance following a certain rumor about Alice that Lain apparently spread on the Wired.[10] In these scenes, real-world Lain is shown buried under wires and cables, crying and helpless, while Wired Lain confronts Lain of the Rumor. "Who are you? You're not me. I'd never do what you do," Wired Lain says to her, as Rumor Lain laughs continuously. "Stop it! Why are you acting like the part of me that I hate? You--" With Wired Lain's hands wrapped around her throat, Rumor Lain laughingly cuts her off saying, "I'm committing suicide!" and continues, greatly amused, "Hey, I'm Lain, aren't I?" Both Wired and real-world Lain emphatically deny this, however that is not to say Rumor Lain is not a part of Lain.

This struggle in identity is resolved in a way in the end, though rather bittersweetly when Lain must erase memories of herself, and therefore her existence, from other's memories. "When you don't remember something, it never happened... If you aren't remembered, you never existed,"[11] says Alice, repeating Lain's words. Without the recognition of others, Lain ceases to exist in the real world. The disconnect in identities that Lain experiences is addressed by Scott Bukatman in Terminal Identity: the virtual subject in postmodern identity, in which he says,

The newly proliferating electronic technologies of the Information Age are invisible, circulating outside of the human experiences of space and time. That invisibility makes them less susceptible to representation and thus comprehension at the same time as the technological contours of existence become more difficult to ignore...There has arisen a cultural crisis of visibility and control over a new electronically defined reality. It has become increasingly difficult to separate the human from the technological...as electronic technology seems to rise, unbidden, to pose a set of crucial ontological questions regarding the status and power of the human...the Information Age, an era in which, as Jean Baudrillard observed, the subject has become a "terminal of multiple networks." This new subjectivity is at the center of Terminal Identity. (Bukatman 2)

Bukatman argues against the idea that cyberspace is a null space, and instead is a narrative space, a site of action and circulation that sets up for a new identity. This new identity is termed "Terminal identity: an unmistakably doubled articulation in which we find both the end of the subject and a new subjectivity constructed at the computer station or television screen" (9). It is this terminal identity that is created in Lain's self-erasure. I also argue that it is this terminal identity that is created, and exists, within the Wired that is more wholly Lain, and where she is able to resolve her struggle in identity, or at the very least comes to terms with her self-erasure and ceasing to exist. In the real world, the life that Lain leads is monotonous, and the world that she lives in is routine and life-less. As Susan Napier notes, "Increasingly in Japanese culture, the real has become something to be played with, questioned, and ultimately mistrusted" (421). She goes on to analyze Lain in its ability to portray the "fundamental concerns at the turn of the twenty-first century, most notably our sense of a disconnect between body and subjectivity thanks to the omnipresent power of electronic media" (Napier 431), and calls Lain a representation of the world of the Wired/Internet where reality and truth are constantly questioned (431).


(Figure 2: The same series of montages (like the one shown above) are shown in the beginning of every episode.)


(Figure 3: The above images are, left to right, from episode 1 and episode 2.)

Repetitive scenes and montages like the above screenshots signal Lain's life as lacking in some way. She is not completely free to be who she is as her different personas are segregated and it is not until the end with her self-erasure that she exists wholly in the Wired. In a way then, the cyber world has surpassed the real world.

Bukatman also mentions that vision is a "means for being absent from [oneself]", according to Merleau-Ponty, and allows through simultaneous projection and introjection the presence of self. Vision itself "is not a mode of thought or presence of self", but it allows for it (Bukatman 136). Despite Lain's self-erasure, she is able to appear in the real world and visit a grown-up Alice, who is able to see her and acknowledges her presence, though she does not remember who she is, only that Lain looks familiar. Evidence of traces of Lain that are left behind, in that sort of déjà-vu moment, are encouraging and allow for an affirmation of self for Lain according to Bukatman.

While Lain presented questions of identity in a human figure, the figure of Tima in Metropolis is presented from the start as robot. Despite this, she is made human from the very start of her existence; it is from her "birth" [12], where her first encounter with another being is Kenichi, that she starts her existence as human. I shall argue that Tima has essentially two identities: the human Tima given to her by Kenichi, and the robot Tima that is her design, what she is made for and to be. I find the character of Tima interesting in her divide between human and robot. She is made in completely artificial ways, with completely artificial organs and body parts,[13] yet, she claims, or at least wants, to be human and that she has human emotions, can love like a human and therefore she is not a robot.[14] Her attempt to reconcile her robot and human self is an interesting struggle that ultimately ends in tragedy; however, the question I ask then is whether Tima has created subjectivity for herself between the two given identities, when her human self is erased along with her memories in the final scene[15]. First however, I shall examine her claims of humanity.

Since her "birth" into the world, her focus has been Kenichi. He is her first contact with another being, and so she sort of "imprints" upon him, and follows him around, imitating him. Their first dialogue is evident of this. Kenichi attempts to find out who Tima is, and after a few attempts in which Tima simply repeats what he says, he moves on. "Who are you?" Kenichi asks. "'I' am who?" Kenichi enunciates for Tima, and, interrupting him, Tima says, "You are I." "No, no, no...you call yourself 'I'," Kenichi corrects. "'I' am who?" Tima asks again, a question that she repeats at the end of her life. This repetition of the identity question, a question that continues to be unanswered through the end of the anime, suggests she has never found the answer, and perhaps, neither will we.


(Figure 4: Her conversation with Kenichi at the beginning of the film.)


(Figure 5: At the end of the film, when her body is broken and in pieces, all that's left of her is the ghost of her consciousness in the form of her recorded voice.)


(Figure 6)


(Figure 7)

Her preoccupation with Kenichi can be a little creepy, and shows that Kenichi is her world. She only cares about Kenichi, is constantly asking after him when she is separated from him and taken by Duke Red, and even the clothes she wears are picked by Kenichi, her appearance is shaped by Kenichi, and finally, he is the one that I would argue gives Tima her humanity.


(Figure 8: When she first meets Kenichi. He hands her his coat.)


(Figure 9: Kenichi gets her clothes)


(Figure 10: Tima seeks Kenichi's approval)

Duke Red also bestows an identity upon Tima, one that is an amalgam of robot and human. Tima is an imitation of his dead daughter, but also designed to be a deity, one meant to sit on the throne of the Ziggurat and rule the world. Despite her robotic body, Tima acts as a child would, and grows as a child would, albeit rapidly, and develops into something more adult-like as she learns to read and write, and is able to speak by herself outside of simple imitation. Undoubtedly she is still child-like through the end, but her development cannot be denied. In this development is a similarity to how humans develop. Tima might have been "born" physically developed into the world, but mentally she develops through the course of the movie as a human child would, placing her outside the category of her fellow robots into a limbo between robot and human. Her humanity, it can be said, is in her questioning of who she is.

However, two things complicate this assertion. One is the literal formation of Tima's identity by Kenichi. The words "You are I" that Tima says are innocent, but at the same time resonate with Tima's behavior and her obsession with Kenichi, and it is Kenichi that shapes her He is also the one to assert her humanity.[16] With the influence that Kenichi has over Tima, it is difficult then to see Tima as a separate entity, when so much of the "human" Tima is made up of Kenichi. The second complication is that although she might assert that she is human instead of robot, she succumbs to her design at the end of the film and sits upon the throne, becoming the "super-being" Duke Red has had her created to be. In the final scenes between Kenichi and Tima, she acts as robot, attacking Kenichi as if she does not know him, and treats him as a vengeful robot towards a human.


(Figure 11)

However, the divide between human and robot remains, made literal in the careful split of Tima's face, half robotic and half human. Despite her turning into the "super-being" she was created to be, she surpasses what Duke Red meant for her to be, in becoming judge and God, deeming humanity unfit to live beside robots. Her self-erasure comes as a wipe of memory, the loss of the Tima that is arguably "human" and recognizes Kenichi, and as destructive as her self-erasure is, Tima has created for herself a new self, one complicated by both her erasure of self and lack of control over what she is doing,[17] and her subversion of the Duke's designs for her. In the end however, the two sides of her, robot and human, seem to be presented as incompatible when, she asks, "Who am I?" looking up at Kenichi as he urges her to hold his hand, trying to pull her up and save her.


(Figure 12: It is her robot hand that he is gripping, and unable to reconcile her robot and human self, she is unable to grip his hand back and save herself.)

Even though Tima perishes in the end, her consciousness transcends her physical being[18] as Lain's does, shown in the way Tima's voice still lingers like a ghost in the radio. Her memory lives on, she is not forgotten and, she is the impetus to Kenichi staying in Metropolis, giving him a reason to try to build a better future where robots and humans can coexist.

In examining subjectivity in both Lain and Tima, I found Sharalyn Orbaugh's article, "Sex and the Single Cyborg" of interest, despite the fact that neither Lain nor Tima are cyborgs. Cyborgs as Orbaugh defines them are, "that embodied amalgam of the organic and the technological—confounds the modernist criteria for subjectivity” (436). She explains her particular interest in cyborgs because of the complication in subjectivity that they present, as part machine and part human. She also discusses the fear present with the figure of the cyborg, a fear of the overtaking of the individual subject by the machine, and the complete abandonment of the organic body to advance to the next level of evolution. In my reading of her article, there is an assumption in her arguments, which is that there is a problem of subjectivity in cyborgs because of the mix of organic and machine. She implies that the organic is necessary in order to consider subjectivity, and the machine encroaches/problematizes that subjectivity. She does say however that ,“Cyborgs, which are by definition not naturally occurring, serve in a new but equally significant way to mark the borders of modern(ist) subjectivity and simultaneously to reveal the ways those borders are breaking down and being redrawn in postmodern, posthuman paradigms” (439). While cyborgs do present a new sort of subjectivity, they still problematize subjectivity according to Orbaugh. However, I argue that it is not necessary to have a physical/organic body in order to have subjectivity, proven in the characters of Lain and Tima.

Regarding the problem of memory loss with Tima and Lain, Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism[19] seems to suggest a possible rethinking of self-erasure and the resulting loss of existence (16). In dealing with subjectivity, Jameson presents a loss-of-self view that at the same time still recognizes the existence of the feelings that make up the self, but are not connected to the self (Frederic 15). He proposes a different sort of existence, a "mere existence" that does not carry purpose, rather than a complete loss of existence. While this somewhat agrees with my idea that the consciousnesses of both Lain and Tima are still present post-self-erasure, I cannot agree with his assumption that the lack of feelings or apathy is what characterizes self or subjectivity, and consequently that there must be a presence of feelings in order to obtain subjectivity. Instead, I believe that apathy can characterize subjectivity just as well as what Jameson counts as "true" feelings.[20]

In constructing a self within self-erasure, the characters of Tima and Lain, despite the resistance to losing the self in Lain or the confusion of existence for Tima, nonetheless are able to create some sort of existence for themselves that transcend their physical bodies and are affirmed by the other characters in a way, regardless of deaths or loss of memory. I conclude that there cannot be a complete loss of existence then since this is the case, and despite the erasure of self, the erasure of existence, there can be a creation of existence within that erasure. While we are not robots nor do we have the ability to erase memories, the questions of identity Lain and Tima are subjected to allows us to rethink our own ideas of self and subjectivity, and how our existence is situated and defined, whether it's on the "Wired" or elsewhere.


NOTES

1. The only information given in the anime about the Ziggurat is that it is the pinnacle of human technology, and that whoever sits upon it will rule the world, though how this is and whether the public is aware of the Ziggurat's power and purpose is unknown. However, I find it curious that despite the celebrations of the completion of the Ziggurat the anime opens with, it seems that no one asks questions about it or what Duke Red plans on doing with it. In fact, for the majority of the anime the Ziggurat is out of the picture despite its capabilities.

2. The de facto leader of Metropolis in the sense that he is popular with the people and holds power and influence. Boone however is the President, who is later usurped and betrayed by his own military by Duke Red's hand

3. The Malduks are portrayed as Duke Red's personal military group led by Rock, though they also act as vigilantes in policing the robots.

4. Tima is made in the image of Duke Red's dead daughter.

5. Rock believes that it is Duke Red who should sit upon the Ziggurat, not Tima, a robot.

6. She appears to a grown-up Alice looking the same as when they went to school together, after she has wiped the memories of herself from everyone's memories.

7. From left to right: kanji (Chinese-based characters) for the real-world Lain, katakana (characters typically used to phonetically spell out foreign words or non-Japanese names) for Wired Lain, and English for Lain of the Rumor. I would like to note here that it is interesting the artists decided to use English instead of hiragana (phonetic characters used for Japanese words, but also to spell out kanji) for example (Japanese writing system consists of kanji, katakana and hiragana).

8. Here I refer to what Lain's father says in episode one, "Weird", to Lain after she asks him for a new Navi: "I keep telling you that you should use a better machine. You know, Lain, in this world, whether it's here in the real world or in the Wired, people connect to each other, and that's how societies function."

9. In an important plot development in which men from Tachibana Laboratories speak to her about the situation of reality and the Wired merging, Lain is asked questions about who she is, whether she knows her parents' birthdays, etc.--questions designed to make her question her own existence. Lain is unable to answer these questions and is visibly shaken, having a bit of a mental breakdown when suddenly Wired Lain takes over, and acts completely opposite, uncaring and unimpressed.

10. Alice, the person Lain is closest to, has a crush on a teacher, and Lain, or more specifically Lain of the Rumor, reveals this secret to everyone through the Wired.

11. Episode 13, "Ego".

12. Refers to the scene where the laboratory in which she is made is burning down after Rock sabotages it, and she stumbles out, naked and out into the world for the first time.

13. Refers to the scene between Duke Red and Dr. Laughton in which Red goes to Laughton's lab to check on his progress with Tima and asks if she was made with real organs. If Laughton is to be believed, and for the purpose of this paper I do as I see no reason he would lie (Being that constructing Tima itself is illegal, and he also follows with, "Real organs are quicker, but they don't last as long"), then Tima is completely artificial.

14. Refers to the conversation between Duke Red and Tima at the top of the Ziggurat, after the truth of her robotic body is revealed. While it might seem like Tima does not know that she is a robot, I argue that she does not accept her being a robot for the reasons stated.

15. Reacting to the call of the Ziggurat, her design/robotic self is "activated".

16. Tima does not assert her own humanity at the beginning; it is Kenichi that assumes she has simply lost her memories, and that she'll regain them soon, of her family and her name--details that make up a human's life and starts to construct for her her humanity.

17. She was built to sit on the Ziggurat and so it is not really by choice that she does so since the human Tima is gone at that point.

18. This brilliant observation/idea was kindly contributed by a fellow peer, and was a great help in moving past the pessimistic end of Tima to a new way of thinking about her death, for which I am very grateful.

19. Jameson presents postmodernism as a waning of affect, where the problems of modernism, that of alienation and anomie, are no longer applicable, arguing that there is no self to cut ties from, due to the depthlessness and fragmentation of self. There is no complete whole subject, which modernism assumes in its discussion of alienation from self, and instead offers two-dimensionality, a loss of a center, and rather than no affect, there are "free-floating and impersonal" feelings.

20. I use Michel Gondry's film "Interior Design" in which a young lady transforms into a chair in order to live her life the way she wants, and not necessarily conforming to people's expectations of her as well as what and how her dreams and ambitions should be realized. Here, the individual is still there, but perhaps not recognizable in the traditional sense.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Logic of Late Capitalism. (1990): 6-16. Print.

Napier, Susan J. “When the Machines Stop: Fantasy, Reality, and Terminal Identity in ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’ and ‘Serial Experiments Lain’.” Science Fiction Studies 29.3 (2002): 418-435. Print.

Orbaugh, Sharalyn. “Sex and the Single Cyborg: Japanese Popular Culture Experiments in Subjectivity.” Science Fiction Studies 29.3 (2002): 436-452. Print.

"Interior Design" segment in Tokyo. Dir. Michel Gondry. Perf. Ayako Fujitani, Ryo Kase, Ayumi Ito, Nao Ohmori, and Satoshi Tsumabuki. 2008. Film.

Metropolis. Dir. Rintaro. Madhouse, 2001. Film.

Serial Experiments Lain. Dir. Ryutaro Nakamura. Triangle Staff, 1998. TV.

Black, White or Grey? Idealization, Idolization and Disdain for Robots in Rintaro’s Metropolis

Rintaro’s Metropolis depicts a world dominated by technology. In the city of Metropolis, robots carry out simple daily tasks and menial jobs. Almost everything in the upper level of the city is automated, and robots seem to be an integral part of day-to-day life. Throughout the film, there is a definite binary presented between the existence of this robotic technology as a positive or negative force. The robots are either praised and idealized, or hated and looked down upon. The film allows little room for the existence of a grey area. In this paper, I will attempt to explain what Rintaro is trying to say by presenting the issue in such a black and white manner, and the cultural and societal implications thereof, and the function of the characters in illustrating his point of view.

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.