Superman and Metropolis

by Adrienne So

Having friends with operative critical faculties is an awful burden. You're not allowed to enjoy things that normal people do, like listen to commercial radio or eat Cheez Whiz. Things like music and movies have to be "good" instead of "fun". When I can convince people to do things like watch movies starring Kate Hudson, I sometimes catch them looking at me from the corners of their eyes, in the same way that I look at my goldfish when I feed him. I drop in those little dried flakes of grossness and he gobbles them up, and I think to myself, "Look how happy you are, you little idiot."

But I, unlike my goldfish, am aware of my own ignorance and so I agreed to watch Fritz Lang's 1927 classic, Metropolis. Not because I thought I'd enjoy it, but because I knew I should watch it, the way I had to read Beowulf for English class. Metropolis is the great grand-daddy of all science fiction, it is to science fiction what Moses was to the Jews, and so even if it is a silent film and barely three-quarters intact, I agreed to see it.

It's not fair to judge Metropolis by modern standards, which is unfortunate because those are the only ones I have. I guess if MY brain was only three-quarters intact, I wouldn't make any sense either. And I guess for 1927, the special effects were dazzling, but that was clearly not a robot but a woman wrapped in painted cardboard tubes. You're also going to have to do a lot more than spray some babies with a fire hydrant to convince me that the world is flooding. I saw Waterworld. Kevin Costner had gills and drank his own piss. You can't beat that shit in 1927.

The reason why you should still see Metropolis, though, is for the composition of its scenes, which are eerily familiar to any comic book reader -- or anyone who is, like I am, a fan of the old Superman comics and cartoons. What you may not already know is that Fritz Lang derived his dream vision of the future from his first view of the New York City skyline, and the creators of Superman immediately caught on to that. Siegal and Schuster named Superman's Earth home city after Fritz Lang's movie, and the opening sequence of the original cartoon is virtually identical to the opening sequence of the movie, with the backlit city skyline superimposed with pumping machines and twirling spotlights.

Metropolis would be enjoyable to anyone who has a comic book brain, or a small one, like I do. The scenes are oddly disjointed -- pan over Pleasure Gardens, cut to Freder's smiling face -- just like the panels of a comic book. The Overworld looks as familiar as the Grecian paradise of Krypton, except that for some reason the Overworlders wear knickerbockers instead of robes -- probably because they're German.

Siegal and Schuster probably cribbed even the storyline of Superman from Metropolis. Kal-El, now living as Clark Kent in Metropolis, is rallied to action by the gutsy, compassionate female reporter Lois Lane. Likewise, Freder, son of Fredersen, is playing in his knickerbockers in the Pleasure Gardens when the beautiful Maria appears, surrounded by twenty dirty starving orphans -- this is another part that the movie doesn't explain very well. He abandons the Overworld to rescue his "brothers" and even disguises himself as one of the workers.

His disguise is also about as effective as Clark Kent's. You can't put a pair of glasses on a 225-pound bodybuilder and convince me that he's just an ordinary reporter, and you can't put a funny hat on a man with that much makeup and have me believe that everyone thinks he's just worker 11811, not when every other worker looks like they've been imprisoned in a Russian gulag for several years.

So seeing Metropolis was good, like seeing your great grand-daddy. It might not be as fun as a Saturday playing Frisbee in the sun, but it's good to see where you came from. The funny part is that the moral of both Metropolis and the Superman comics is that science is evil and can only be defeated by superpowers and a big heart. But both were dreamed up by big pansies whose superpowers were definitely limited to just extreme fantasizing, which is pretty pathetic.

Which is why, in the end, I like Cheese Whiz and movies starring Kate Hudson. If you never have to think, you never get sad.