Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Clarke, David B

Titel

Metropolis, blood and soil: the heart of a heartless world

Ist Teil von

• GeoJournal, 2015-12, Vol.80 (6), p.821-838

Ort / Verlag

Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

SpringerNature Journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Fritz Lang’s (1927) Metropolis has been subject to innumerable would-be allegorical interpretations. The present paper offers an analysis of the film’s structure in relation to Lévi-Strauss’s account of myth, where myth provides an imaginary solution to a real contradiction. Adopting a formalist approach, the paper avoids viewing the film as a simple reflection of Weimar culture or anticipation of a National Socialist future, allowing an assessment of the antimonies the narrative negotiates to steer the analysis. The film’s ostensibly central contradiction—defined in terms of class conflict and its mediation—is taken as a point of departure, considering the role of the ‘heart’ in mediating between the ‘head’ and the ‘hands’ in terms of a gendered discourse centred on the opposition between nature (figured as feminine) and culture (masculine). This is pursued in relation to technology and artificial life; the film’s psychoanalytic resonances; and the religious overtones accompanying its Oedipal aspect. Addressing the film’s problematization of the Oedipal narrative arising from the absent mother, the paper highlights Metropolis’s previously unacknowledged debt to the Parsifal myth, characterized by Lévi-Strauss as an ‘inverse Oedipus’. The film’s double structure, superimposing elements of Oedipus and Parsifal, sheds light on its ambivalent reception, which—as the product of one of the most creative and convulsive periods of twentieth-century history—is framed in terms of the distinction between neurosis and psychosis. Having focused squarely on the film’s mythical dimension, the paper closes with the possibility of an ‘Anti-Oedipal’ reading and points towards a fuller allegorical interpretation.