Within the first 20 minutes of Metropolis, our naïve hero, Freder, wanders out of the “pleasure garden” he’s spent most of his sheltered life in into the depths of his father’s great city, to follow a pretty girl he’s just met. He then watches in horror as dozens of workers are caught in a fire caused by a machine malfunction, hallucinating a giant mouth into which the bodies of the underclass are endlessly fed in order to keep the gorgeous excess of the titular city above running in order. The hallucination fades as quickly as it comes, but the vision stays with Freder: he now cannot see his home as anything but a machine run on the inhumane treatment of his fellow man. As a god whose food is the blood, sweat, tears, and bodies of Freder's "brothers" in the underground.

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Metropolis, a story about love, machines, and class warfare written by Lang's wife Thea von Harbou, is a behemoth of a movie. The 2010 remaster of the movie clocks in at around two and a half hours long, and that’s still not counting the footage that has been lost to time. Even discounting the fantastic visual effects and the energetic pace of sped-up silent film footage it can still be a bit of a slog to get through. It took me longer than a month to finish it, watching the first half of the movie in the living room of my pre-quarantine apartment in Ann Arbor to watching the second half on my laptop, cooped up in my family home. How much of that reluctance can be contributed to Plague Fatigue is uncertain, my point being it’s a toughie to watch. It’s also more of an anti-capitalist fable and romance than the philosophical sci-fi of something like Ex-Machina or even Blade Runner. It’s a boy-meets-girl story set in a world on the brink of a violent class revolution, though the setting is sci-fi it draws maybe more from biblical and Socialist texts as it does from HG Wells or Mary Shelly. 

 

Even so, its influence on sci-fi cinema is unambiguous. Where would Blade Runner’s retrofitted vision of 2019 L.A. be without Metropolis’s looming, gothic New Tower of Babel? Where would the dream-like capitalist dystopia of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil be without, well, the dream-like capitalist dystopia of Metropolis? Despite Metropolis’ timeless setting and story, it’s hard to imagine what our most engaging visions of the future would look like without it.

 

It’s also interesting to see different iterations and adaptations of the story of Metropolis, and how each artist takes these central tenets of the plot (futuristic setting, robots, and metaphors about class divides) and changes it to suit their needs and the expectations of different eras. Especially interesting is the drastically changing role of Metropolis’ villainous central spectacle: that of the Maschinenmensch.

 

The original Metropolis is about Freder, the plucky son of Joh Fredersen the inventor and “master” of Metropolis, a futuristic city powered by the backbreaking labor of the underclass. Freder is a frivolous young man, ignorant of the suffering that powers the pleasure garden where he spends his days chasing girls while his dad does the more cynical serious work of running the city. That is, until he meets Maria: a beautiful caretaker of the workers’ children and secret preacher who pleads him to see the working class as “his brothers”. This small cry for solidarity shames Freder out of his ignorance and sends him hurtling head over heels in love with Maria. From this point forward he devotes his life to earning Maria’s love and becoming the “mediator” between the underclass and the upper echelons of Metropolis’ society.

 

Of course having a son who is suddenly attuned to the plight of the people who keep his dream city afloat is very inconvenient for Fredersen, who teams up with a former rival, the mad scientist Rotwang (who totally wanted to bang Fredersen’s hot dead wife), in order to discredit Maria and crush the will of the workers once and for all.

 

The use of machines as tools for enabling excess, power, and cruelty is everywhere in Metropolis. Though I doubt Lang or Harbou truly meant Metropolis as an anti-science project, the camera revels in the excess of the upper city as much as it works to expose its moral failings, but nonetheless, it’s hard to find an instance in this movie where technology is advanced without the cost of untold suffering for the 99%. But nowhere is that more apparent in its central villainous figure: the Maschinenmensch, or “machine-human”. The Maschinenmensch, originally created by Rotwang to serve as a stand-in for Fredersen’s dead wife (whom he wanted to, and I cannot stress this enough, bang) becomes a tool in Fredersen’s quest to take down Maria and turn his son and the workers against her. Halfway through the movie, Rotwang kidnaps Maria in a hilariously overdone sequence and uses her likeness as a disguise for his beloved Maschinenmensch, in order to ruin Maria’s reputation.

 

Though the Maschinenmensch is, ostensibly, conceived as just another machine following the orders of Fredersen, a tool rather than a person itself, there’s something other worldly and sinister about Brigette Helm’s performance as cinema’s leading-robo-lady, especially when contrasted with her chaste, gentle performance as Maria. Maria is purity incarnate: she’s ostensibly a Madonna figure in the story as a beautiful young woman untouched by the lustful excesses of the world above who inspires adoration in the people she meets. She also functions as this figure promoting peace and understanding between classes, arguing that the “mediator between the head (the upper intellectual/wealthy classes) and the hands (the working underclass) is the heart”. Maria herself though, explicitly doesn’t want to become that mediator, she just wants to foster hope that a “real” mediator, Freder, will come along and finally fix the class divide. She’s a sympathetic, but very passive figure in the story.

 

If Maria is a Madonna figure then the Maschinenmensch is the Whore of Babylon, literally. Nearly the instant the Maschinenmensch is given Maria’s face, it wears a skimpy outfit and dances very goofily for the intellectual elites until it has them wrapped around its little finger. The ending of this sequence is a direct recreation of an image of the whore of Babylon, where the Maschinenmensch rises out of the stage posed on top of a statue of a beast with many heads. There’s a lot that hasn’t aged well about this sequence, there’s the racist imagery of the Maschinenmensch rising out of a prop supported by naked black men, the exotically-coded costume the Maschinenmensch wears, there’s the stupid dance, there’s the requisite nastiness of an evil sexual woman seducing men into violence implication, but the final image of this false Maria declaring her apocalyptic directive is still unbelievably striking.

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Throughout the movie, the Maschinenmensch acts as this conniving and devilish figure, tricking not just the workers into a violent and self-destructive uprising, but the social elites into greater and greater acts of debauchery and treachery. Of course this is all under the orders of Fredersen (and later, Rotwang, working against Fredersen for his own strange purposes) but the way it seems to completely revel in the destruction it brings feels very personal; it may just be the conduit of evil, but it’s having a great time nonetheless. Brigitte Helm, Maria’s/the Maschinenmensch’s actress, does this fantastic job of imbuing the Maschinenmensch with this really sharp and menacing body language. Her eye twitches, she slouches at this really particular slant, every part of her body curves in these incredibly expressive angles that totally contrasts with her softer, more ethereal performance as the heavenly Maria. It’s completely unhinged in a way that is as hammy as it is entirely menacing.

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Of course, the Maschinenmensch's reign of terror cannot last forever: the fable needs a happy ending, the virgin needs to be saved and exalted and the whore needs to fall and fall hard. The Maschinenmensch meets her end in a witch burning organized by the enraged workers, laughing all the way to the stake.The futuristic vision of Metropolis ends with the archaic death of an archaic archetype. 

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In 1949 in Japan though, visions of the future got a little stranger in Osamu Tezuka’s manga Metropolis. It isn’t quite accurate to call Tezuka’s Metropolis a direct adaptation. According to the father of manga himself, he didn’t actually base the narrative of Metropolis on Lang’s movie, rather he claims he based it off of a film still he saw from Lang’s Metropolis in a magazine. Nonetheless, the stories have a couple of pretty clear cut similarities: the great city divided strictly by class, the usage of technology as a fable about human ambition, the hyper-intelligent evil overseer of the city, the mad scientist, and, of course, a robotic humanoid central to the fate of the titular city.

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The central humanoid in this case is a young child instead of an ethereal seductress. Michi is a peppy lil' robot who believes he is a human, he was originally created by Professor Lawton for the villainous Duke Red, the leader of “The Red Party” (yeah...1949), a secret society bent on ruling the world through Michi’s incredible powers. When Lawton realized what Michi would be used for, he blew up his lab and raised Michi as his own son in a quiet little neighborhood in the suburbs. Of course their peaceful life doesn’t last for long, Lawton is eventually discovered and murdered by The Red Party, and custody of Michi falls into the hands of Detective “Moustachio” and his nephew Ken’ichi; leading Det. Moustachio on a wild journey into the heart of The Red Party, and inching Michi closer and closer to the truth of his creation.

 

In Tezuka’s Metropolis and in the characterization of Michi, Tezuka makes these two really interesting additions and subversions to Lang and Harbou’s original story: namely the robots themselves become a part of the abused working class, and the Maschinenmensch-stand in becomes not just an empathetic main character, but a character who defies traditional understandings of gender presentation.

 

While in Lang’s Metropolis, machines are used as a tool of oppression to the working class, in Tezuka’s Metropolis, the robots are members of the working class themselves. During his investigation into The Red Party, Moustachio finds a disposable army of robot slaves working in Duke Red’s underground facilities. He talks with one of them, a robot who calls himself “Fifi”, who tells him that these robots were “born in vain only to be slave-driven by ordinary humans, with no pleasure at all in life.” He later watches as Fifi is cruelly melted and destroyed, trashed for the simple act of being in the way of Duke Red’s plans. Fifi's last words beg Moustachio to destroy the pillar that his fellow robot’s programming is in so no more slaves can be created for The Red Party.

 

Additionally, while in Lang’s Metropolis the Maschinenmensch is a tool of evil embodying an outdated, extreme gendered archetype (the whore of Babylon), Michi is a character who both evokes sympathy from readers and embodies some really interesting ideas about gender identity. Michi, for most of the story, is a character dripping with dramatic irony: he’s a happy, earnest kid whose one dream in life is to find his real parents, a dream we know that can’t ever come true long before he ever realizes it. He’s also not always coded as male in the story: in fact, Michi’s design is purposefully androgynous to reflect his hybrid gender identity. He was designed to look like a fictional statue called “The Angel of Rome”, which depicts an androgynous angelic figure, and was made with a literal “gender switch” in the back of his throat, allowing him to move back and forth between feminine and masculine gender identities.

 

Though it can be argued that this acts more like a plot device or an example of how “inhuman” Michi is in-text, I think Tezuka treats this aspect of Michi’s character in a pretty unique way. Well, unique for 1949, anyway. When Michi first experiences a forced gender switch in the story (in order to hide from The Red Party, Ken’ichi disguises them as a “girl”), it bewilders them, but they also adapt remarkably quickly to their genderfluid identity. They spend the next few scenes of the scene as a “girl” before Duke Red discovers them and changes them back into a “boy”.

 

This second forced gender switch is more upsetting to Michi and ultimately triggers their realization of their true identity as an artificial being. This causes Michi to turn from a kind hearted super hero into an omnicidal maniac. From this point forward, the antagonist changes from Duke Red to Michi themself, as they assemble the Red Party’s robot slaves and plan to wipe out the humans and replace them as the dominant force on Earth.

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The last time we see Michi whole, their appearance is distinctly feminine. While Ken’ichi is confronting Michi on the top of one of Metropolis’ skyscrapers, they seem to be wearing a dress in addition to having long, flowing hair, perhaps signifying a purposeful “gender switch” Michi has done to themself. Neither the confrontation, nor Michi’s new form last long: they quickly and violently self-destruct within the next few pages, melting down to nothing until their heart stops, surrounded by the people who loved them. Michi dies the death of a tragic monster, too good to die and too dangerous to let live.

 

It’s unclear what Tezuka’s opinions were on gender and sexuality in the 1940’s, honestly what we see on display in this work isn’t great, but it’s really interesting to see him create a character with a genderfluid identity who is treated narratively so sympathetically and casually. In Michi, Tezuka is able to use their hybrid gender identity to reflect the dualism of their character, as someone who embodies both the best and worst of humanity’s scientific achievements.

 

The 2001 animated film adaptation of Tezuka’s Metropolis similarly occupies a hybrid identity, as it collages elements from Tezuka and Lang’s Metropolis, as well as some characters from different works by Tezuka. The new story follows much of the same patterns as Tezuka’s manga: a robot is made by a scientist for Duke Red, the nefarious leader of a secret society (now called the Marduk Party instead of the Red Party), the robot believes it is human, the robot lives peacefully with Kenichi and his uncle (now called Det. Shunsaku Ban), and the story ends with the robot realizing its true identity and trying to wipe out humanity before breaking apart and dying tragically.

 

Some of the changes made to the story are interesting extensions of the themes of both the original ’27 film and the manga. The city of Metropolis is still divided distinctly by classes and the robots are still treated as an underclass controlled by the wealthy, but now they are also othered and ostracized by frustrated working class humans who have lost their jobs to these lower-class citizens. This othering leads to an all-out race war between robots and humans in the middle of the movie, a war organized by the elites in a self-flagellating power-play between political factions. There’s also the addition of the character of Rock as Duke Red’s right-hand man/adopted son, who is personally threatened by Duke Red’s interest in the robot child. But the most significant story change regards the identity of the robot themselves: Michi, the genderfluid protagonist of the original manga has been replaced with Tima, a more traditional “girl” robot who functions as a protagonist and love interest for Kenichi.

 

This new story (written by Katsuhiro Otomo of Akira fame, a genius, and directed by Rintaro, who actually worked with Tezuka while he was alive!) is much more narratively cohesive than Tezuka’s Metropolis, but I feel a little wary about some of the changes made to the plot. I honestly have a lot of nostalgia and love for this specific adaptation. I first watched this movie when I was in elementary school and the things that I remember captivating me about the world and characters of Metropolis when I was a child still captivate me now: I love the lived-in retraux aesthetic of the city, I love the gorgeous and fluid animation, and I really love Tima as a protagonist. Her final lines, “Kenichi…Who am I?” still tug at my heartstrings and add this real extra dimension of tragedy to her own quest for identity.

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But after reading the ’49 manga, I really have to wonder why the intensely interesting work done with Michi’s gender identity had to be left behind for this new adaptation? I understand a lot of the changes between these adaptations were necessary in order to tell a bigger picture story, and expand upon the revolutionary work done by both Tezuka and Lang in their respective Metropolis (Metropoli?). But it still hurts to see a narrative element so incredibly progressive for its time erased by the work of later adaptations.

 

The character of the Maschinenmensch has, at this point, gone through an almost complete role reversal through each of these adaptations. In Lang’s Metropolis, it is a tool of oppression and foil to Maria’s Madonna figure, in Tezuka’s Metropolis they are a tragic monster inspiring both fear and love in the people who know them. But it wouldn’t be until Janelle Monae’s Metropolis-themed series of albums that the Maschinenmensch would finally become the hero of her own story.

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I know it’s weird to compare traditionally narratively-driven work to a series of concept albums, but hang in there. Monae’s Metropolis series of albums (Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase), The Archandroid, and The Electric Lady for clarity) are centered around the story of Cindi Mayweather (Android 57821) and her quest for free love and equal rights for androids after she falls “desperately in love” with a human named Sir Anthony Greendown. Following the plots of concept albums is not my strong suit but basically, Metropolis: Suite I centers around Cindi’s frantic escape from the government-issued bounty hunters, The Archandroid is about the struggle she faces fighting in the android revolution while reflecting on her relationship with Sir Greendown, and The Electric Lady takes place after Cindi has accepted her role at the head of the robot revolution.

 

Cindi Mayweather acts as both a main character of Monae’s Metropolis, but also as an author avatar of sorts for Monae herself. Many of Cindi’s songs about revolution sounds like they could apply just as clearly to Monae’s life and her struggles managing fame as a black celebrity. “Tightrope”, Monae’s breakout hit, works well as a song about Cindi carefully navigating her way through a world that hates her but also as a narrative about fame and Monae navigating a media landscape that has, uhhh, not been good to black people, especially black women. Listening to each of Monae’s Metropolis albums feels like you’re witnessing not only Cindy’s growth into her role as a revolutionary, but Monae’s growth as a performer: just as Cindy goes from nervous young android in love with someone she shouldn’t be to the confident graceful leader of a rebellion, so does Monae grow from a relatively unknown musician to a full-on star who can score amazing collaborations with goddamn Prince.

 

Not only are these albums narratively investing, they’re also just a joy to listen to. Monae balances multiple different genres and styles deftly and masterfully; only Monae can put a dreamy folk song like “Oh Maker” next to a frantic, wailing, punkish song like “Come Alive (War of the Roses)” and make it not sound unreasonably jarring. I’m still convinced that “Givin Em What They Loved” is the best damn song in existence and I’m still mad that it doesn’t have a music video, though with Prince involved it might’ve been too horny to actually get made. But what really stands out and endures with Monae’s Metropolis albums is her handling of the metaphor of the android.

 

In Monae’s Metropolis, she makes the symbol of the android as “the other” a central pillar of the series of albums, strongly tied to different types of real world oppression. She takes Lang and Tezuka’s vague robot class analogs and expands it to include racial and sexual oppression in a way that is direct and refreshing. In “Violet Stars, Happy Hunting!!!” she describes Cindi following stars to freedom like escaped slaves following the north star to safety. In “Mushrooms & Roses” she writes that androids are all “virgins to the joys of loving without fear” while nursing a crush on another android named Blueberry Mary (have I mentioned that Janelle Monae is a gay today???). In “Ghetto Woman” she sings specifically about her mother’s struggles working in a white man’s world, and expresses solidarity with lower-class black women trying to make it to their next paycheck.

 

Through the specificity of experience and the directness of her message, Janelle Monae’s usage of the android as metaphor reads super successfully in a sea of hokey failed sci-fi race metaphors. There’s a reason that Monae is cited so often in discussions regarding the genre of Afrofuturism- in her Metropolis series (and with her most recent album Dirty Computer) she is able to take inspiration from the visionaries before her in order to create a fully formed future for black people, one that acknowledges the enduring legacy of oppression foisted on “the other” while inspiring revolution.