Maria in Metropolis

Metrópolis

 

In his revolutionary, astounding and influential futuristic science fiction movie ‘Metropolis’, masterful example of German expressionism in the year 1926, Fritz Lang was far ahead of a technological 2026.

It is a film with huge political implications, great human and social content of a moral order that speaks of the permanent class conflict. An anthropomorphic, bipolar robot is the mediator in a conflict where the face of love hides the abandoned heart of a human robot dressed in tin.

He errs in the romantic idea that only the heart, with its capacity to love, is able to mediate between hand and brain and unite reason and strength. Once the disguised robot is finally dead, the ideal of reason, strength and work prevails.

The reason of today is disguised behind the giant screen of a technology which engulfs all and which we can’t do without, isolating the 21^st century human into imagined groups that no one sees.

When uniformed, they unite strength and, away from their responsibilities, hide behind a virtual reality which is so unreal that no one is, and yet they all are, guilty or innocent.

Technology which, in turn, is created by the deficient hand of irresponsible man, waste of genes which expire.

If a robot does not create another, our own bipolar machines will continue to commit idiocies which reflect our moral and mental shortfalls.

The world as such, in its permanent battle of all kinds of crises and classes, will disappear in an enormous forest which swallows the individual in it, because as Kant says “man is nothing more than a piece of twisted wood” and, as I say, “with less heart than a tree”.