“Metropolis”

Metropolis is a must-see for those interested in dystopian story-telling. It’s influence on later movies is easy to see (Blade Runner, Batman (1989), Gattaca and on and on).

H.G. Wells disdains Metropolis. Egbert, and those on imdb think it brilliant.

What is each side valuing that leads to such a rating? And why does Wells feel like a bit of a lone voice?

As Wells notes, it adds nothing to the conversation on the social and political trajectory of mankind. Hackneyed and oversimplified, it gives socialism a bad name and reinforces misapprehensions about the state of relations amongst classes, even in the time it was written. Yet it is now a “must-see classic,” and hundreds admire it for its aesthetic and story-telling brilliance. These quotes from Wells and Egbert sum up the difference:

Wells:

But a mechanical civilization has no use for mere drudges; the more efficient its machinery the less need there is for the quasi-mechanical minder. It is the inefficient factory that needs slaves; the ill-organized mine that kills men.

The whole aim of mechanical civilization is to eliminate the drudge and the drudge soul.

Egbert:

Lang develops this story with scenes of astonishing originality. Consider the first glimpse of the underground power plant, with workers straining to move heavy dial hands back and forth. What they’re doing makes no logical sense, but visually the connection is obvious: They are controlled like hands on a clock. And when the machinery explodes, Freder has a vision in which the machinery turns into an obscene devouring monster

“Metropolis” does what many great films do, creating a time, place and characters so striking that they become part of our arsenal of images for imagining the world. The ideas of “Metropolis” have been so often absorbed into popular culture that its horrific future city is almost a given (when Albert Brooks dared to create an alternative utopian future in 1991 with “Defending Your Life,” it seemed wrong, somehow, without Satanic urban hellscapes). Lang filmed for nearly a year, driven by obsession, often cruel to his colleagues, a perfectionist madman, and the result is one of those seminal films without which the others cannot be fully appreciated.

 

Metropolis evokes the feel of dystopia without mind to the practicalities of what it is like to exist in the complex chemical equation of capitalist-determined relations. It allows an opportunity for viewers to feel a sense of connection to those in a similar plight. The workday of the low class is illogical. The feeling of marching in to work in such misery is accurate. The blandness of the middle class goods is illogical. The feeling of boring same-ness is accurate.

Wells’s disgust for the movie stems from his intense commitment to furthering a complex and collective understanding about the state of society. Yes, that understanding is undermined by creating such blatantly false pictures of the relationship between power and science, and the relationship between those who wield power and those who are oppressed by power. We do need stories that help further our sense of how science, technology, mythologies of ‘normal’ etc help to create the world we live in and the world we will live in.

We also need what is powerful in its simplicity. We need stories that connect us to each other, and help us understand on a visceral emotional level what it is like to suffer.

I do wish, though, that as a culture concerned with dystopias, we were more interested in how these stories shape what we understand about science and technology. The madman scientist (or master manipulator of innovative technology) is limiting and dated, and yet continues to make appearances.

The emotional impact of a story and the intellectual impact of a story should not get measured by the same yardstick.

I don’t think Oryx & Crake is very good story-telling

This past week I picked up John Brunner’s Sheep Look Up, and my nebulous discomfort with Margaret Atwood’s hit Oryx and Crake trilogy finally became articulate in my brain.

I tore through Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake series, as I did with every other thing she’s written.

But this trilogy left me unsatisfied in a way that I’d been having trouble pinning down (other than being annoyed at the obsessed-with-love middle aged female protagonist of the third one. I mean, sure we are all hungry for the comfort of love, but too much text is devoted to sheer neediness). I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was troubling me. The prose was beautiful, I empathized with some of the characters (not Jimmy by a long shot). I mean, I didn’t love how doomsday it was, but it worked for the story. Then I started reading John Brunner’s Sheep Look Up (1972) and my distaste found sharp focus in the contrast.

• Atwood’s central characters all have varying degrees of narcissism.
• They are also all middle class. There is not really any low class perspective. Sure, the Adammites have all stepped out of society, but most of them stepped out of middle and upper class society. Where are the people who have simply struggled to survive through the political and social disasters? What little attention there is to this is just not as fully imagined as it really ought to be, but reflects more of how middle class people imagine poverty is like, rather than how it is actually lived. Dystopias and post-apocalypses really ought to incorporate a multi-class perspective.
• And for that matter, a multi-national perspective. Sure, Oryx is not from America, but big woop, she’s not actually a character so much as a body in which various characters’ fantasies can reside. Where is the sense of an interconnected world?
• Which connects back into the narcissim—America, in the novel, is the special one. It is special in that it is tortured and evil enough to sow the seeds of destruction, and yet good and pure enough to also have the seeds of redemption in the form of the Addamers and the Crakers.
• The storyline is one massive oversimplification of the scope of the problems facing us today and the potential futures ahead of us. I mean, my god what a fantastical unreality of how it will ‘all go down.’ Some special person in a privileged position makes a decision?

More like the masses continue to make mundanely selfish small decisions, content to ignore how people with power and money manipulate the government and ignore environmental consequences and indigenous rights… and doom creeps up on us, and people only really notice when their lives become worse, when their kids start being born diseased, or they can’t afford food or medical bills anymore. More like how it plays out in Sheep Look Up.

If we are going to have stories of how we get to doomsday, let’s look at how they connect with the everyday life, not these fantasized overblown characters who only have a semblance of being real people. In this day and age, we don’t need any more heroes. Heroes only allow us to continue to fool ourselves into thinking someone else will step up and make the sacrifice, instead of looking to where in our own lives we could stand to be a little more giving, a little less selfish.

Not to say we should all buy hair-shirts, or shoulder the responsibility of the world, just that it is incumbent upon all of us to avoid becoming complacent about our ‘goodness.’  Oryx and Crake, with its fantastical plotline, and narrow vision, invite complacency and wish-fulfilment fantasizing that is worse than the complacency and wish-fulfillment of comic book heroes because it pretends to be somehow in a morally superior position because ‘nothing was added to this book that isn’t drawn from reality.’

I don’t want to make this post too long, or I’d go into more detail, but Sheep Look Up is a much more realistic, complex picture, of how we might find ourselves teetering on the brink of destroying the planet than anything else I’ve ever read. Especially compared to recent hits such as Atwood’s series, and Bacigalupi’s Wind Up Girl.

Writers ought take more seriously the responsibility of writing in the space of the imagined death of our way of existing. John Brunner is an example of how it ought to be done—he looks at the systems and how they interconnect: police forces, t.v. personalities, race, parenting, our need to keep our jobs, insurance, medical costs, the market, international politics, etc.

He doesn’t just tell a story prettily, he tells it in sharp shocks that reflect a deep understanding of how freakin complicated a global system is.

A comment on dystopian scholarship

One of the ideas that didn’t make it into my thesis:

 

In reading through dystopian scholarship, there is a pervading belief that writing about novels that write about society’s ills somehow makes the world a better place. I’m not saying it doesn’t, but the high-falutin’ rhetoric is a bit much for my taste. Reminds me a bit of Vashti in “The Machine Stops,” where she and her friends spend all their time making and listening to ‘speeches’ in separate rooms.

or of the flappers in Gulliver’s travels

My problem with this rhetoric is it seems to assume that the sheer act of scholarly criticism is affecting the system. Having taught for 3 years as well as worked with students in a Writing Center, I have to say…….. it doesn’t. Most people do not learn very well solely inside abstractions. They need real-world, personal stuff as part of the conversation. Thinking that translating a dystopian novel into a set of shared abstractions will make things better is incredibly near-sighted on several fronts.

1) Marxist jargon is alienating and obtuse. It seems to like being this way. It serves as an unnecessary gate-keeper to important ideas.

2) A set of shared abstractions IS important, but circulating them inside scholarly journals in obtuse language has minimal impact on society.

3) The stories speak for themselves. The stories that have the most impact on people’s thinking are film. If we really care about monitoring stories for their viability as useful stories for the current problems, we should become a louder, more coherent voice responding to film, responding to the incredibly conservative rhetoric of Hollywood.

I also wrote about dystopian fiction because I want to ‘change the world.’ In writing it, in realizing how few people would read it, compared with how many people I interact with, let alone how many people I might interact with, it’s clear that if I really want my reading of some social critique novel to make a difference, it will be in every day conversations, or in my decisions to participate in protests, etc.

I would love to see the rhetoric surrounding dystopian interpretation become more realistic. If scholars do want to talk about how their interpretation helps, I want to see hard data–how are they using it in their teaching? How are they using the ideas in helping the world be a better place in some sort of activist role they are engaged in?

We have to quit pretending through our rhetorical conventions about literature that literature is an aorta. Part of the lifeblood of humanity, the aorta of a fair chunk of humanity, but it is not an aorta.