This article is part of a web-original series
Marco Cian (Hyogo)
Oh oh. I can’t even take it in…
Heheh. Anyways.
Metropolis
Metropolis. City of the future, where mechanical marvels of all shapes and sizes exist, and where Duke Red, the city-state’s wealthiest citizen, seeks to build his greatest achievement yet. A Ziggurat, a shining tower that shall pierce and tame the heavens just as Babel sought to do millennia ago. While Duke Red talks of a brighter future though, all is not well in paradise.
Detective Ban and his nephew Kenichi have come to Metropolis in pursuit of a dangerous criminal, who is now building a new kind of robot, whom Kenichi stumbles upon and names Tima. But just what kind of robot is Tima? And how does she relate to Duke Red’s plans with the ziggurat? Ban will have to use all his detective skills to find out, before the city tears itself apart in a war between its robot and human citizens.
I was eager to revisit this for my cyberpunk summer because I wanted to see if it could even really be thought of as a cyberpunk. Cyberpunk, for better or worse, is a very distinctly 80s and 90s genre, with it slowly being reduced to a set of aesthetics and nostalgic vibes as those decades themselves exit reality and exist only in memory and stories. This, meanwhile, is a movie from the 2000s which was inspired by a manga from the 40s and a film from the 20s. There’s not a trace of 80s or 90s to it, even as Roger Ebert favorably compared it to Blade Runner (Ebert was a real one for defending this movie).
And yet, Metropolis rather manages to illustrate nicely how a cyberpunk could be constructed without the trappings of Reagan era excess by focusing on an earlier, but no less gilded and decadent, age: the Roaring 20s.
The art deco architecture, the old tunes in the soundtrack, and the revamping of political struggles from that decade for a sci-fi setting present an amazing snapshot, similar to the Old Edo of torimonocho. Instead of a future that is today turned up to 11, this is a future that is actually our past, turned up to 11 as a warning for the present.
Unlike Fritz Lang when he captured the class conflict of Weimar Germany, we now know precisely what will happen to Germany after 1929, and how things are about to get much, much worse for the people there. With the benefit of hindsight, the Metropolis filmmakers are able to show the rise of the Marduks, the city’s very own fascist party (and that’s not just conjecture, Detective Ban explicitly expresses worry over how much like Nazis the Marduks are), and a system of cybernetic suppression and exploitation without a single 80s megacorporation in sight.
It’s a chilling portrait, and a frustrating one, as the robots and poorer humans are both ruthlessly exploited by fascism, and yet the response of human socialists is to direct just as much energy against the robots as the fascists (leading to them being rooted out just like in our world). You get the sense that the exploitation persists largely because many of those exploited dream of one day being the exploiter, or are at least more eager to defend their place on the ladder than to tear the ladder down.
Meanwhile, I find it fascinating now, something I missed when I first saw this movie as a kid, how much the character of Rock is lying to himself. Rock is the official leader of the Marduks, which are funded not-so-secretly and really run by Duke Red, our main villain (in case you hadn’t already guessed). Rock refers to Duke Red as his father, but Red always rebuffs him when he does so, since Red insists Rock is only some war orphan he found and adopted, not his real son. Meanwhile, Red is building a robot replicant of his dead daughter in Tima for the nefarious schemes he intends to put the Ziggurat towards, and Rock spends the whole film trying to kill her. Rock insists throughout the movie that he can’t let his father be corrupted by machines, since the whole point of the Marduks is to preserve the purity of the human race. But it’s so obvious that really he just can’t stand the idea of being replaced as Red’s child. And if an insecure manchild desperate for the approval of a father figure who only sees him as a tool to be used and thrown away ain’t just an apt metaphor for fascism itself…
To top it all off, the film has a bombastic, operatic quality to everything, like Fritz Lang’s Nibelungen. (Fun fact, the writer of this movie, Katsuhiro Otomo, also wrote Akira, whose protagonist was named after the protagonist of Gigantor, whose creator also had a darker and edgier remake of his work with Wagnerian opera sensibilities in Giant Robo. There’s some pithy quip I could make about all that but I’m not quite sure what).
There’s a lot more I have to say about this movie. It’s really good and really rich and deep. But I have a feeling these things might be better addressed in
Is this a Cyberpunk?
Cyberpunk is about the little people – Very much so. More than that, Metropolis showcases the depressing tendency for the little people to be easily manipulated into eating their own instead of directing their rage at their oppressors. The human socialist movement gets played like a fiddle by the fascists in this, and all because they can’t let go of their rage over robots “taking their jobs”. Meanwhile, the fascists maintain power largely by fostering hatred towards robots, despite the fact that their industry can’t be maintained without the slave labor provided by robots. So the powers that be regularly cull the robot population to keep them down and encourage public lynchings of robots and such, while making sure not to kill too many so that they can keep working the factories and mines. It’s incredibly bleak.
Cyberpunk is pessimistic – No, actually. Cynical, yes. But in fact this story has a happy, if bittersweet, ending. By the end of the movie the fascists’ plots for power have only resulted in Metropolis burning itself out and being destroyed. The death toll is high and things look bleak. But there are still survivors, human and robot, and the destruction of their home has forced them to put aside their differences and work together to rebuild things. It took the total destruction of Metropolis to accomplish, but a new, more equal Metropolis can rise from its ashes. I’ll admit, I don’t know too much about Germany in the immediate aftermath of WWII, but things don’t sound like they were as cooperative as in Metropolis. As far as I know, there were still many years of hatred and violence in store for Germany even after Hitler’s death. But Germany today is a pretty good place, I think. And so I don’t think this conclusion is as naive or poorly-aged as it could have been.
Cyberpunk isn’t about changing the world – Uh… no, actually. Or at least, our protagonists don’t change the world. The movers and shakers and powers-that-be change the world, and are destroyed when they can’t control the power they sought to unleash (such is fascism’s eternal fate), but the most our heroes do is simply spread as much kindness and decency as they can. However, the film presents this as how one does change the world for the better. Kenichi can’t rebuild Metropolis single-handedly, but he can be a part of the overall effort, a part of something bigger than himself.
Cyberpunk is set in today, turned up to 11 – Not quite. See above.
Cyberpunk wants to look cool – Very much so. This whole movie is basically trying (and, I think, succeeding) in updating Tezuka’s art style and making it grittier and cooler like Akira, which, hey. It works, so I don’t mind.
I’ll admit, watching this as fascism is once again on the rise was not the most pleasant experience, but this note the film ends on is as good a message as any I think to leave to those of us who are frightened and scared. Spread as much decency and kindness as you can. And I’ll see you in the next one.