the republic in the metropolis

The Republic in the Metropolis

T H O M A S H A L P E R A N D D O U G L A SM U Z Z I O

‘‘AMAP OF THE WORLD THAT DOES NOT INCLUDE UTOPIA,’’declared Oscar Wilde, ‘‘is not even worth glancing at.’’Even the most casual glance would alight on Plato’s Re-

public, which glows no less fiercely today than in the Athens of sometwenty-three centuries ago. How ought a society to be organized, itasks. We would surely want the society to be guided by virtue, Platoobserves, but few have the innate natural aptitude plus the educationand experience that are necessary to acquire knowledge of virtue. Thesefew guardians, possessing wisdom, are fit to rule ‘‘for the good of theircountry’’ (Plato 341). The great mass of the people—the auxiliarieswho implement the guardians’ policies and fight their wars and themore numerous producers who provide ordinary goods and services—must be subservient. They perform the vital tasks for which they aresuited, and, like the guardians, are essential for the proper functioningof society, but for Plato they have no political role, except to obey. If allthe people were granted power, he feared, decisions would be based noton knowledge but on mere opinion. What would result would bedemocracy, where roles and functions would be confused and misas-signed, leading to incompetence, corruption, disrespect for authority,and self-serving factionalism. Justice, then, in a sense is a matter oforganization: everyone needs everyone else, and society must be ar-ranged on the basis of division of labor and specialization of function,as determined by individual capacities and overseen by a virtuous elite.

The modern reader is apt to find this appalling. Where are the rightswe venerate? Or the privacy? Where is the political accountability? Orconcern with the fairness of burdens? The democracy Plato loathed we

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celebrate. Yet if we can lay aside our convictions and imagine thatevents have validated Plato’s ancient misgivings about democracy, wemight reach different conclusions and find The Republic’s prescriptionscompelling.

It is this that is considered in Metropolis (1926). One of the greatfilms of the silent era, it took two years to complete, employed some36,000 people, and bankrupted its studio, the largest in Germany.Metropolis was produced in a relatively calm interlude between regimechange, assassination, and apocalyptic inflation (1918 – 24) and massiveunemployment, political thuggery, and the rise of the Nazis (1929–33). The movie took much of its character from Berlin, which hadbecome what the film critic, Willy Haas, called ‘‘the Babel of theworld’’ (123), a place where the novelist, Stefan Zweig, could point to‘‘a kind of insanity [that] took hold of precisely those middle-classcircles which had hitherto been unshakable in their order’’ (287).Liberals prayed for the Weimar democracy’s success and radicals noisilyrejected the entire bourgeois ethos, both groups finding the strikingchanges liberating and long overdue. Meanwhile, many other Germansdismissed Weimar as incompatible with national renewal, seeing aroundthem what Plato would have recognized as symptoms of democraticdegradation. ‘‘Berlin,’’ declared the writer, Carl Zuckerman, ‘‘tasted of thefuture’’ (314). Sensing how terrible that future might taste, Fritz Lang,the Austrian-born director of Metropolis, tries to warn his German coun-trymen against the perils of imposing an authoritarian order on society.

Lang was inspired to make the film when, entering New Yorkharbor in 1923, he was awed by the vast and endless peaks and canyonsformed by Manhattan’s skyscrapers. Seeing the city from the ship’sdeck, he witnessed

a street lit as if in full daylight by neon . . . lights and topping themoversized luminous advertisements . . . . The buildings seemed to bea vertical veil, shimmering, almost weightless, a luxurious clothhung from the sky to dazzle, distract and hypnotize . . . . At nightthe city lived as illusions lived. [New York] was the crossroads ofmultiple and confused human forces irresistibly driven to exploiteach other, living in perpetual anxiety.

(Lang qtd. in Bogdanovich 15)1

Yet Metropolis opens not with a glittering cityscape, but rather withclose-ups of gears and machinery, and then focuses on columns of men

474 Thomas Halper and Douglas Muzzio

shuffling through a tunnel, like monks going to prayer. Masses ofhumanity form intricate geometric patterns; art deco factory wallsfeature humans as machine parts.

Lang’s futuristic city is ruled by a super-industrialist. The ‘‘mastersof Metropolis’’ live in towers and frolic in ‘‘pleasure gardens,’’ amidstpeacocks and fountains, while workers toil far underground in back-breaking and dehumanizing machine rooms that provide power for thevast enterprise. The city is divided into three levels: the workers’ city,farthest underground; the machinery controlling the city; and theabove ground city of the masters.

The machines, therefore, link the two levels of society—serving oneand enslaving the other—and in this recall a prominent theme intraditional European and American views of the city. The machinesenhance productivity, but, what is more serious, their consequences areprofoundly anti-human: when a mad inventor tells the super-indus-trialist of a robot he has created that never tires or makes mistakes, theindustrialist exclaims, ‘‘Now we have no use for living workers.’’ (A fewyears earlier, the Czech, Karel Capek, created a sensation with R.U.R., aplay about a corporation that mass produces robots to perform workthat humans consider drudgery; also wanting to escape the toil, therobots soon revolt.) Eventually, though, the workers destroy the ma-chines and kill the inventor in a euphoric frenzy. At the end, theworkers’ leader (pathetically aware of his subordinate status) and thesuper-industrialist shake hands. The workers and the rulers will remainseparate classes, but harmony—somehow—is achieved. Presumably,prosperity and cooperation lie ahead, but the fate of the machinery (andits products) is not clear. Does the answer to problems of the future liewith benevolent, technocratic despots? A mystical transformation ofthe human heart? Or, as Samuel Butler proposed in Erewhon, must allinventions be banned, lest machines evolve to a higher order and seizecontrol of humanity?

Plato saw clearly the consequences of the concentration of wealth ina small class. Both the presence and absence of wealth, he argued, aregreat forces of corruption, the former ‘‘the parent of luxury and in-dolence, and the other of meanness and viciousness, and both of dis-content’’ (442). The elite, once committed to reason and knowledge,would turn to the selfish pursuit of riches, but if power is simply afunction of money, the elite may be incompetent to address the prob-lems stemming from increasing inequality, where rich and poor are

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‘‘always conspiring against each other’’ (551). As the numbers of poorgrow, Plato predicted, they will eventually become desperate, rising upagainst ‘‘their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing others.’’The rich, having become soft from years of luxury, will be unable toresist them. The democracy of the poor, he believed, will be a creatureof its appetites, bringing with it an insatiable thirst for freedom, whichwill end in anarchy, which will end in tyranny. Lang does not take thestory this far, but he does make plain that in his Metropolis, as in Plato’sRepublic, the great threat to the system comes from the inability of thedifferent classes to work together for the common good.

By the 1920s, industrialization was altering the general under-standing of work. Heretofore work had generally been understood interms of personal virtues (reliability, conscientiousness, etc.) and vices(sloth, intemperance, etc.); certainly, this was how Plato viewed it.With industrialization, however, workers began to be thought of ashuman machines. Earlier, a German physicist, Hermann von Helm-holtz had coined the term ‘‘labor power,’’ which entered popular usageas referring to the conversion of energy into use, whether through amotor or human action; later, the Taylorites advanced a ‘‘scientific’’approach to maximizing worker efficiency (Taylor), and physiologistsstudied worker fatigue as if it were analogous to metal fatigue.Metropolis workers plainly are viewed by their masters as so manyhuman machines.

All this was to be expected, for Metropolis appeared during what wascalled the Machine Age, when commentators like Lewis Mumford an-nounced that machines were no longer simply extensions of the in-dividual—like a pair of scissors improving on a hand—but seemed tohave taken on an independent existence—like a conveyor belt. Thesenew machines (which Chaplin satirized in Modern Times [1936]) seemedindispensable to progress, which transformed them into icons in theeyes of self-styled practical men and women. Brazenly rational, theyspoke of efficiency and profits, and yet it was the romantic possibilitiesof machines and their promise to revolutionize life that held theseprophets in thrall. They were, in short, romantics who disdained ro-manticism, which they connected with the veneration of sentimentaltradition that they took to be a major obstacle in their path. It wasentrenched interests, they believed, who were truly romantic, for theseinterests rightly feared the consequences of change as challenges totheir current positions: men and women of leisure belittled trade and


technology, and workers viewed machines as low-priced competitors.These entrenched interests were people of faith, faith in the status quo.Yet the self-styled practical people, though they did not know it (andwould have denied it), were also people of faith, and their faith was inthe machine. Inventors, like Edison and Bell, were lionized; the mech-anization of society, like a force of nature, took on an aura of inev-itability; critics, smeared as hapless Luddites, were dismissed as naıveor stupid.

This romantic attachment to machines was embodied in the tri-umph of the machine aesthetic. Where earlier generations had endowednature with beauty—as in the landscapes of Constable, Church, orCorot—the Machine Age was enchanted by the forms, surfaces, andpower of machines. Wheels, gears, pulleys, edifices with their rigidityand symmetry—all were now admired not only for what they couldaccomplish but also for their unadorned utility that seemed to proclaimthe victory of the mind over obdurant forces that had until recentlyconfined humanity for millennia. No less than beauty itself was re-defined. Metropolis is awash with the machine aesthetic—its images areeasily the most striking in the film—and yet Lang’s point is not toworship machines but rather to permit us to understand howbewitching they can be.

Metropolis’ stark bifurcation between haves and have-nots is a ven-erable literary device for generations found in fiction (e.g., Halper) andnonfiction (e.g., Riis) alike. Often, as in Metropolis, the divide is lit-erally vertical, as class reinforces place and metaphor is made tangible;years later in Blade Runner (1982) and Batman Returns (1992), verticalspace also is made to reproduce class distinctions. The bifurcation isjarring not only for ethical reasons, but also because it conflicts withour experience of cities as what Walter Benjamin termed ‘‘porous’’places (169, 171). Urban events and locales, we take for granted, arenot walled off, but jostle and penetrate other events and locales, oftenin odd, striking, or ironic ways. Different races, classes, and ethnicitiesare thrown together and thrown apart. Improvisation and the unex-pected appear everywhere and anywhere (and are widely credited withmaking city life stimulating), leaving change so pervasive that we bragthat we cannot step on the same street twice.

Movie cities, on the other hand, are rarely porous, usually creatingself-contained little worlds: the little gangster world of Scarface (1932),the little high society world of Dinner at Eight (1933), or the little


Broadway world of 42nd Street (1933). All of these city films were madeat about the same time, and yet each focused so exclusively on its ownlocale that no viewer of one could infer the existence of the others.Metropolis, however, is, above all, extraordinarily comprehensive. In-stead of creating an individual building or a complex of buildings oreven a neighborhood, Lang advanced the idea of an enormous, inte-grated city—made possible and desirable by wondrous technologies.His city, though, is no monolith: the film depicts the interaction of thevarious parts and the destruction of the barriers between them, as whathad been impermeable became in a spasm of violence confusinglyporous.

In its focus on creation and destruction, Metropolis is also an im-mensely elaborate commentary on the Futurist movement, which hadpreoccupied many European intellectuals for over a decade. Defiantlyconfrontational, Futurists rejected the traditional city, viewing its de-fenders as timid, sentimental, and hopelessly behind the times. ‘‘Takeup your pickaxes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable citiespitiously!’’ urged the first Futurist manifesto (Filippo Tommaso Ma-rinetti qtd. in Appollonio 24). Revolutionary and not evolutionary,Futurists sought not the improvement of works of the past but theirobliteration. Disdainful of reform, they also showed only intermittentinterest in the low-density city, spacious, tranquil, and full of parkland;not for them the Victorian English garden city ideal of small townssurrounded by greenbelts (e.g., Howard). Signs of the triumph oftechnology were everywhere, they proclaimed, and cities should nothide from it, but instead, display it and appreciate its beauty andpower.

Futurism was a European movement, for Europe seemed beset bythe illusion of permanence, or at least, stability. Public buildings,homes, even pubs often were so old that their creation belonged toanother epoch, one before electricity or indoor plumbing. (America,and especially New York, however, celebrated the new, knocking downthe old in what Henry James called a ‘‘perpetual repudiation of thepast.’’) Destruction of the old thus must precede construction of thenew, harming as well as helping, and often leading to a nostalgicreconstruction of what had been demolished a couple of generationsearlier. In the process, what becomes evident is the disguised fact thatbuildings occupy contested space. They are not, like the Grand Canyonor Niagara Falls, placed by God nor is their continued existence always


an accepted fact. The 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center isonly the saddest and most spectacular reminder of this, but in Me-tropolis, too, the workers (like the Futurists) would have demolished theglories that had oppressed them.

Metropolis appeared at a time of fascination with La Ville Radieuse ofLe Corbusier in Paris and with the architecture of Walter Gropius andother members of the Bauhaus at Weimar, though treatises on the idealcity were hardly new. In the Renaissance, for example, Italian intel-lectuals (e.g., Leon Battista Alberti, Antonio Averlino, Pietro Catano)had devised numerous plans, perhaps influenced by Plato’s detaileddepiction of the ideal city of Atlantis (Friedlander ch. 17). (Very rarelywere these schemes implemented, although they famously influencedPierre L’Enfant’s plan for Washington.) But the acceptance of Le Cor-busier and Bauhaus in Lang’s Germany, according to Pevsner, was‘‘universal’’ (409), and after World War II, this architecture, named theInternational Style, was to conquer the downtowns of nearly every cityin America and become the standard for buildings in Western Europe,as well. Modern buildings were to be ‘‘logically transparent and vir-ginal of lies or trivialities, as befits a direct affirmation of our con-temporary world of mechanization and rapid transit’’ (Gropius 82).Style? This suggested the fussy ornamentation of the Beaux Arts or theart deco. Far better a style of no style (what Mies van de Rohe latertermed beinahe nichts or ‘‘almost nothing’’) that followed the functionsto which the building was dedicated. (Le Corbusier’s famous maximwas that ‘‘a house is a machine to live in,’’ though so besotted was hewith often unworkable aesthetics that his renowned Villa Savoye inPoissy quickly became uninhabitable.) Hence, Le Corbusier’s PlanVoisin of 1925, which would have plopped 18 60-story residentialskyscrapers in the heart of Paris’ Right Bank, or the Bauhaus’ LudwigHilberseimer’s proposal to replace large existing sections of Berlin withorthogonal grids of residential towers. (Per contra, after World War IIthe distinguished British architects, Alison and Peter Smithson, pro-posed leaving downtown Berlin in ruins and constructing a new city ofinterconnected towers elevated above the debris.)

The Platonic urge to impose order on disorderly cities was not merelya dream of urban planners. Years earlier, Haussman had swept aside thenooks and crannies of old Paris and replaced them with grand boule-vards, and Trezzini, earlier still, had done the same for St. Petersburg.Geometry and symmetry were taken as emblems of modernity and


rationality, which would enable the authorities to exercise control overwhat had been only vast, discordant mess. As the narrator in Dickens’Our Mutual Friend described the scene:

They were in a neighborhood which looked like a toy neighborhoodtaken in blocks out of a box by a child of particularly incoherentmind, and set up anyhow; here, one side of a new street; there a largesolitary public-house facing nowhere; here, another unfinished streetalready in ruins; there, a church; here an immense new warehouse;there, a dilapidated old country villa; then, a medley of black ditch,sparkling cucumber-frame, rank field, richly cultivated garden,brick viaduct, arch-spanned coral, and disorder of frowsinessand fog. As if the child had given the table a kick and gone tosleep. (218)

Industrialization, by attracting multitudes of workers and generating aprofusion of products and waste, had given rise to filth, ugliness, con-fusion. Urban planners, like parents tidying a child’s room, would set itright. Except, of course, that after the parents depart, the mess returns.Thus were the wondrous prospekty of Trezzini soon engulfed inRaskolnikov’s slums (Dostoyevsky). (The preoccupation with symme-try and order is also found in such modern ideal cities as Brasılia[Brazil], Chandigarh [India], and Putrajaya [Malaysia], all widely crit-icized as cold, unfriendly places.)

We want buildings not only to shelter us, observed Ruskin, but alsoto speak to us, and the modernists plainly intended that their buildingsspeak of hope. Equally, though, they spoke of contempt. Which is tosay, the modernists not only saw tomorrow as better—more efficient,more beautiful, more productive, more safe and clean and healthful—but viewed ordinary people as the chief obstruction—which had to beremoved completely and for all time. Personal idiosyncrasies, tradi-tions, habits, customs, behaviors that had accreted over the years weresimply so many irrational hindrances in the way of rational progress.There is thus no reluctance or apology that accompanies trampling onthe wishes of the multitudes. These would-be guardians did not notice(or if they noticed, did not care) how uncomfortable these housingarrangements would make their residents, how vulnerable to break-downs and crime the buildings were, and how the residents, feelingabused, would respond with abuse. (In 1923 Le Corbusier designedausterely modernistic homes for factory workers in Lege and Pessac,


studiously omitting all local and rural touches; the tenants soon addedvernacular touches of their own, trumping his asceticism.) Thus, Lang’ssuper-industrialist, like Le Corbusier, imagined himself a platonicphilosopher king, paternalistically pursuing the interest of all by en-suring that ‘‘Each man will live in an ordered relation to the whole’’(Rowe 152). No wonder a renegade designer worried, ‘‘My biggest fearis that architecture is necessarily a kind of totalitarian activity, a kindof prison, in that when you design a space you’re probably designingpeople’s behavior in that space’’ (Vito Acconci qtd. in Chen 122). Andno wonder Gropius and Le Corbusier competed to design Stalin’sBrobdingnagian Palace of the Soviets (Sudjic).

The marvelous parade of the evidence of progress and prosperity wasmade visual in Metropolis’ breathtaking cityscape, especially its innu-merable skyscrapers. Of course, steeples, camponiles, bell towers, andso forth had been ubiquitous in Europe for centuries, and antiquityknew the pyramids of Egypt and the ziggurats of Mesopotamia. Butthough skyscrapers may be potent aesthetic and psychological state-ments, they also are a function of a myriad of mundane factors, allinvisible to the casual observer: local zoning and tax laws, interest ratesand real estate markets, and, not least, technological innovations. Andso skyscrapers had to await the characteristically modern inventions ofthe elevator and iron frame construction, appearing first in New York’sEquitable Building in 1870 and by Lang’s time dominating commer-cial Manhattan and becoming monuments to great corporations.(Fearing that skyscrapers would destroy their cities, Chicago, Boston,and Philadelphia legislated height limits, inadvertently directingnearly all tall buildings to Manhattan, where they transformed the cityand gave it a unique international identity [Rasenberger].) As early as1907, the New York World headlined, ‘‘How Far Can New York Climbinto the Sky?’’ (Baker and Brentano).

These buildings, emblematic of progress and awesome in theirenormous height and size, had captivated movie makers almost fromthe beginning. Early actuality films (e.g., Sky Scrapers of New York City,from the North River [1905], Panorama from Times Building, New York[1905]) often featured the New York skyline, and were particularlypopular with audiences outside New York City. At about the sametime Metropolis was released, The Stock Punch (1925) thrilled viewerswith a tale of a young Ivy Leaguer testing his mettle by workinghundreds of feet above ground on a skyscraper under construction.


But none of these films was as aggressive as Metropolis in showing offthe wonders of skyscrapers, airplane taxis, and all the rest, and somescenes have a pinch-me-I’m-dreaming quality that audiences foundstunning. Banished were the buildings moviegoers encountered every-day, with their ornamental riffs of ages gone by. Energy and movement,heretofore confined to the street level, now extended upwards, almosttouching heaven itself. Le Corbusier, appalled by disorder, congestion,in a word, humanity, proclaimed, ‘‘We must kill the street.’’ Andaround the same time, Harvey Wiley Corbett and a committee of NewYork’s prestigious Regional Plan Association proposed that certaintraffic-congested sections of Manhattan be equipped with elevatedpedestrian walkways twenty feet above street level, complete withfootbridges at intersections. (The great Asian megacities of the twenty-first century—Shanghai, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kuala Lampur—alsofeature highways, walkways, escalators, and shops elevated above theearth.) But Lang is not taken in by these facile reveries or by theirmanifestation in Metropolis as gee-whiz glitz. He compels us to lookdeeper, for he is unsparing in depicting the harshness, the brutality,and the sheer human suffering that paid for these wonders—and thecold sterility that mars their beauty. In this, he presaged the argumentsof Jane Jacobs and her intellectual progeny, who conceived the mod-ernist impulse as antithetical to the jumble of personal forces that hadmade the traditional city vibrant, fascinating, viable, and alive.2

Lang’s critique points to the political dimension of architecture. Ofcourse, skyscrapers, like the Gothic cathedrals of an earlier epoch, areexpressions of power, knowledge, and wealth designed to overawe themultitudes. They are also among the most ostentatious profitengines—‘‘A skyscraper,’’ declared Cass Gilbert, the architect of NewYork’s ‘‘Cathedral of Commerce,’’ the Woolworth Building, ‘‘is amachine that makes the land pay.’’ But beyond a certain point, Langknows, skyscrapers cease to be about rational goals, like money-makingor efficiency, and are about psychology—specifically, the ego and au-thority embodied in hugely tall edifices and their accouterments. Thus,today’s projected Moscow City Center, nearly two thousand feet talland bristling with such environmental features as rain and snow har-vesting and natural ventilation; or a projected Dubai condominiumand hotel topping out at 2,300 feet. But the political dimension existsnot only at this symbolic level: the daily operations of the Metropolis,Lang repeatedly reminds us, rest on the exploitation of the weak by the


strong and the many by the few. Yet the revolt of the exploited, drivenby a rage that leaves no room for thought, is equally terrible. From itsconfusing mix of modernism, Marxism, and Christianity, the moviepleads for reasonable, humane compromise; indeed, one character pre-dicts the arrival of the Mediator who will set things aright. The mod-eration of Lang’s message clashes with—but is a response to—theextremism so vividly portrayed.

Metropolis is rooted in science fiction—indeed it has been hailed asthe ‘‘first great achievement of the science fiction cinema’’ (Manville andReginald 32), one of the oldest movie genres. It was not long after JulesVerne and H. G. Wells mesmerized the reading public that A Trip to theMoon (1902), The Comet (1913), and Message to Mars (1913) drew crowdsto movie theaters. But though ordinarily set in the distant future,science fiction is ‘‘always about the year it was written,’’ observed Wil-liam Gibson, one of the genre’s most celebrated authors. Or as a shrewdfilm critic put it, ‘‘the essence of the SF film’s technological imaginationis nothing technological [but rather] the phenomenologically feltmeaning of technology’’ (Sobchack 145). And so it is unexceptional thatMetropolis reflected the aspirations, concerns, and feelings of ambivalenceof German intellectuals in the up-and-down 1920s: there was a dreamof socialism and a fear that it might bring on an economic debacle, apassion for modernism and a distaste for its amorality, a yearning forprogress and a trepidation toward change, a commitment to democracyand a scorn for Weimar as a vulgar barrier to greatness.

Yet Lang’s technological dystopia is not a real city but a mythic city,and while some mythic cities may be creations of philosophy—theAthens, say, of Plato—or literature—the London of Dickens—modernmythic cities tend to be products of movies. This is true not only forliteral cities, particularly New York and Los Angeles, whose mythicpersona is no less a work of the movies than Wyatt Earp’s Tombstone orAndy Hardy’s Carvel. It is also true for urban archetypes, like thetechnological dystopia, Metropolis. Pride, manifested in an exagger-ated faith in those celebrated children of reason, science, and technol-ogy, is our undoing. Our humanity, sometimes our physical survival areimperiled. And it is our own fault. The mind that is our glory is alsoour ruination. Our most rational and ardent pursuers of progress aremore dangerous to us than are our sworn enemies.

On one level, Lang’s urban dystopia reflects if not a rejection oftechnology and reason, then at least a marked ambivalence about their


brood. Once upon a time, perhaps, technology and reason seemed proofof inexorable social advancement, for they built on what had comebefore, improving it in the interest of a better life for all. ‘‘What iscalled Western or modern civilization,’’ a famous historian observed, ‘‘isin reality a technological civilization’’ (Beard). Except that even in thehigh spirited days of his remark, the wholly benign consequences oftechnology and reason appeared less a conclusion from evidence than ahope with feathers. This was most clearly evident in the countryside,where the pastoral and the technological often collided (Marx). Even inthe cities, though, the self-styled Platonic guardian, Le Corbusier,could rarely persuade with his sunburst panacea of technology. Fortechnology and reason could certainly perfect means, but the ends weseek are beyond their reach. More recently, the enemies of reason seemeverywhere. On the left, New Agers consult astrologers, dialogue withthe dead, and embrace a psychotherapy aimed at subjective revelation.Meanwhile, the evangelical right has given rise to a pop spiritualitythat privileges optimism and moral platitudes at the expense of criticalthought; antiscientific beliefs, like creationism and faith healing,generate mass followings. Thus, though today’s America itself mightappear a powerful advertisement for reason and technology, its peoplewho bask in its benefits do not always agree. To the extent that we areflawed (or sinful), they remind us, technology and reason merely makeus more formidable fools (or knaves). In that sense, technology andreason are not always a blessing. The hope of the Enlightenment, theyoften seem to us a curse.

In this light, consider cities, where technology and reason havemade a revolution. Could present-day Houston exist, for instance,without cars, air conditioners, elevators, and a thousand other me-chanical inventions? Machines, however, are not people, though theysometimes are valued more highly. And they always bring with them atrain of unanticipated consequences. Did anyone deliberately intend tocreate the phenomenon of Houston in August?

In other words, technology, for all the rationality involved in itscreation and development, is said to have acquired an irrational char-acter: ‘‘Cars are designed to go faster than it is safe to drive; food isprocessed to take out nourishment; housing is expertly designed todestroy neighborhoods; weapons are stockpiled that only a maniacwould use’’ (Goodman). In Metropolis, as a contemporary critic ob-served, machines were like ‘‘gigantic, purring gods grinding down life.


Machines, machines, machines, sliding through the earth, challengingthe cosmos, pounding out human resistance as they set the awfultempo of life’’ (Gerstein). The ironies are inescapable: movies, one ofthe modern era’s most prominent triumphs of technology, pronouncethemselves skeptical about technology; moviemakers, among the mostskillful of manipulators, warn us about duplicitous image peddlers.

The ambiguity toward technology suggests another ambiguity: oneperson’s utopia may well be another’s dystopia. In Campanella’s City ofthe Sun, the authorities control the individual’s choice of spouse andeven the day, time, and place of sexual encounters. This seemed to himnecessary to achieve the perfect ordering of society for the commongood. Four centuries later, readers are apt to react with diminishedenthusiasm. Campanella’s perfect ordering now seems much too em-phatic in its ordering; indeed, its intrusions suggest that totalitari-anism may simply be utopianism in action.

Final Words

Plato insisted that the state was only the individual writ large, but as wecontemplate his Republic it seems more closely to resemble not a personbut a well functioning machine overseen by a competent engineer. Thesheer size of modern societies and their extraordinary technologies havemade them, as metaphorical machines, vastly more complex than Platoever could have imagined, which means that they are much harder tooperate but also much more alluring. All of which suggests that mis-takes will be made. Engineers, of course, know this, too, and the mod-ernists who would engineer a Metropolis, observing the bloodshed itproduced, might assume that the mistakes lay in the details of itsoperation—and that a new and improved Metropolis could avoid them.Similarly, Plato’s guardians might complain that their auxiliaries hadfailed in some ways in carrying out their broad policy instructions. ButLang appears to argue that the mistake goes much deeper and is ir-remediable, and consists in the attempt to impose a comprehensive,rational order on society. It is not simply that the mistakes of the oldorder will be superseded by new ones. Rather, the entire enterprise isdoomed: if it fails, it will generate violence and suffering; worse still, ifit succeeds, it will extinguish liberty and individuality. (Lang is some-what ambivalent in his rejection of the utopian impulse—the film ends,


after all, with the antagonists determined to reach an accommodation—but the viewer cannot help seeing this as a hopeful non sequitur thatclashes with everything that came before.)

The problem is not reason, Lang seems to say, but the Platonicworship of reason, which cons us into believing that the wisest amongus are immune to human weakness. Metropolis is exquisitely orga-nized—perhaps, initially, in accordance with the knowledge of vir-tue—but its hedonistic elite certainly argues for the proposition thatpower corrupts, for they are zealously committed to using all theirmany advantages in furtherance of their own narrow ends. The moviealso charges, however, that lack of power corrupts: the workers’ rage,though understandable, so twists them that they are as self-serving intheir vengeance as their exploiters are in their greed. Knowledge ofvirtue (and society organized in accordance with this knowledge) can-not withstand the inevitable surge of self-interest, which will even-tually overwhelm any barriers we have built against it. The asceticsociety conjured by Plato cannot survive life’s temptations any morethan the sterile homes designed by Le Corbusier could resist the res-idents’ urges to tweak them to make them their own. Lang is notclaiming that it is foolish to speak of virtue or to seek knowledge of it,but only that it is naıve to suppose that any organization can guaranteeit and that those in charge may be trusted always to pursue it. It is agrim message, this reply to Plato, but a powerful one.

Notes

1. In an eerie echo, the celebrity architect, Daniel Libeskind (2005), reports his first glimpse of

the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor: the image was ‘‘so iconic that at times it feels as if I

assumed it from an old RKO newsreel.’’ In fiction, of course, the scene of the new arrival

stunned by a great city has become a cliche; perhaps the greatest example is found in Balzac’s

Lost Illusions.

2. The object of Jacobs’ anger in The Death and Life of Great American Cities was the greatest of the

early postwar housing projects, the 11,232 apartment Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan. Not-

withstanding what she took to be its ‘‘dullness and regimentation,’’ it has attracted years long

waiting lists since it opened in 1947. Its residents often speak of it as a pleasant small town.

Works Cited

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Thomas Halper, professor and chair of political science at Baruch, haswritten on military crises, British kidney policy, judicial reasoning, movies(usually with Muzzio), and other topics. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he haslong had a voyeuristic interest in metropolises.

Douglas Muzzio is professor of public affairs and codirector of the Center forInnovation and Leadership in Government at the School of Public Affairs atBaruch College/CUNY. His specialties are public opinion, elections, urbanpolitics, and public policy. He has written extensively (usually with Halper)on the cinematic representation of the American and British city, as well as onimages of the small town and suburb in American movies. He grew up on adead end in New York, but did not end up on one.


the republic in the metropolis

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