One life- Multiple Identities
Did you ever see the Fritz Lang film "Metropolis" made in Germany in 1927?
The plot is straightforward. The
workers live and work in the bowels of the city out of sight of the
bourgeoisie. The industrialist in charge of the system has a robot prototype
created with the intention of replacing the worker’s with robots. The prototype, modelled to look like
one of the female leaders of the workers, is used to incite a revolt. This
backfires and the prototype is burned at the stake. As the flames consume the
robot the outer skin melts away and the true identity of the robot is revealed
to all.
It is classic Marx (Karl not Groucho) in parts. And according to Pike[1], the script represented the debates regarding architecture, aesthetics and urban technology that were heavily discussed in Weimar Germany as was the threat of labour unrest and the impact of American management practices like Taylorism and Fordism. I suspect Lang was no great thinker but he knew how to make a great film. He and his wife Thea von Harbou used architecture brilliantly. There is a worker city beneath a city and even further below worker’s meet clandestinely in catacombs running deeper into the earth. The use of scale is fantastic- huge machinery powering the city above, the high ceilings and gigantic doors of the manager’s office above the close confined spaces of the catacombs below.
Pike[2] argues that rather than the horizontal aspect we expect to find in a cityscape, “Metropolis” has a vertical aspect with three layers representing the myths of three foreign cities. Above ground is the 1920’s skyscraper city of New York, underneath it Victorian London full of poverty and inhumanity and further below is revolutionary and spectacular Paris. This method, Pike suggests, was employed because Berlin was considered at the time not to have it’s own distinct identity but to be an assemblage of competing and conflicting myths.
Surveillance is crucial to the efficient management of Metropolis but there exist places that the ruler of Metropolis cannot see. The catacombs are where revolution and religion can be discussed. There are also conduits between the different levels and through these conduits pass what Pike refers to as ‘threshold dwellers’. [3]
I find these conduits between different existences and the threshold dwellers who navigate these conduits extremely interesting. In dystopian novels and films the conduits are often architectural or technological in nature but in the real world they might be more abstract- an institution, an organisation, a chance meeting between two people. The threshold dwellers in dystopian novels and films are usually the chief protagonists. In real life they might be a traveller entering a new city, a negotiator or representative, or they might be any person who identifies them self as being a member of two or more groups.
Perhaps you are a threshold dweller. Are you moving between worlds and seeing things as only a threshold dweller can? Many of us are. As a parent of a school aged child and as a practicing artist I definitely feel like one.
Comments
Post a Comment