Metropolis

After looking at excerpts from The Jungle and watching two films portraying the systematic lifelessness American workers experienced during the early 1900s, I thought back to a movie I had watched freshman year in my English class. The movie is titled Metropolis and was filmed in 1927. The film takes place in the year 2000 and is about how machines have come to rule over man in the workplace and to show the class differences between the rich and poor. This movie conveys the same ideas as the other sources we have looked at regarding workers during the early 1900s, especially because it was filmed during the 1920s and was trying to show what will happen in the future if society's "machine" is not destroyed.

One important aspect of this movie that is made quite clear is the difference between the elites' and workers' lives. The elites are wealthy, control everything, and live in heavenly gardens. The workers are very poor and live under the ground. All day, these workers work in terrible conditions pulling levers, controlling conveyor belts, flipping switches, and so on. Their jobs require no skill, just nonstop labor. The workers do not understand the big picture of it all, however; they do not even know what the world looks like above the ground. The movie worked hard to show how workers during the early 1900s are all part of a machine and have no understanding of the larger picture. The movie also shows how the elites who run the city have everything they want, yet they could never prosper without the workers. There is, therefore, a balance created between the two classes: they need each other.

The main character, Freder, is the son of an elite who travels down below ground to see what life is like for the workers; he discovers a world he never imagined could exist. He sees the awful labor these people must do everyday, and witnesses the death of a worker due to exhaustion. Freder rushes up to his father and tells him about what he saw; his father does not care about the worker at all, causing Freder to rebel and join the workers below ground.

Freder's father and a scientist invent a robot who can now replace the workers below ground, as it will not tire from exhaustion. If these robots were to take over the working class' jobs, an entire class of people would practically be wiped out from society. The robot is a significant part of this film because it shows how Man will be ruled by machine and to prove how the workers are themselves like machines.

This film really grinds the idea into the viewers minds how different these two classes of people are during the 1900s. The workers are not seen as people anymore, but simply as parts of a large machine they do not understand. The director of this film created this visionary masterpiece most likely to let the world know that if this societal system continues in the workplace, the future is going to be a very frightening place.