The New Tower of Babel
Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang and his wife and collaborator, the screenwriter and novelist Thea von Harbou, conceived Metropolis (1927) together—Von Harbou writing the novel and screenplay while Lang directed what became the most expensive production in German cinema history.1 The film imagines a futuristic city dominated by the “New Tower of Babel,” the seat of the technocrat ruler Joh Fredersen, who oversees a two-tiered world: an upper city of skyscrapers, air taxis, and pleasure gardens, and a subterranean level where workers tend monstrous machines in punishing ten-hour shifts. Production designer Erich Kettelhut’s set designs ran the gamut from abstract cityscapes in the tradition of the Futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia to cavernous Christian catacombs, Art Deco interiors, and the Gothic cathedral. The past and future collapsed into a single architectural montage.
When Fredersen’s son, Freder, descends to the workers’ city, he witnesses the human cost his father’s order depends on, and is drawn to Maria, a young woman who preaches patience to the workers in the catacombs beneath the city. At the center of the film, Maria tells them the story of the Tower of Babel as a parable of class division: the tower was imagined by those who sought the stars and built by workers excluded from that vision. When the laborers, ignorant of the plan, revolt, the project collapses. Threatened by Maria’s influence, Fredersen enlists the inventor Rotwang to create a robot double of her—a Maschinenmensch—that incites the workers to a catastrophic revolt, flooding their own city and nearly destroying themselves. The upheaval is contained, and a reconciliation is brokered. In From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer dismisses this resolution as ideological sleight of hand—Maria’s vision is a “sham alliance between labor and capital” rather than structural change. The industrialist’s “robot stratagem”—the false Maria who incites the workers to self-destruction—fails in its immediate aim but succeeds in establishing “intimate contact” with the workers:
“[…] the industrialist acknowledges the heart for the purpose of manipulating it; that he does not give up his power, but will expand it over a realm not yet annexed—the realm of the collective soul.” (Kracauer and Quaresima 2004)
Metropolis emerged from German Expressionism, and the movement’s limits clarify the film’s own. Walter Benjamin wrote that expressionism was the “mimicry of revolutionary gesture without any revolutionary formation” (Jameson 2020). Metropolis’ revolutionary imagery—a popular revolt that echoes a mythological one, the resulting flood and destruction of the machines—stages the appearance of upheaval without producing any societal reorganization. The film’s actual resolution leaves every power relation intact. The gesture of revolution is performed so that the structure of domination can absorb and survive it.2 German critic Anton Kaes notes that by 1927, the Expressionist utopia of Georg Kaiser’s Gas plays and Ernst Toller’s Die Maschinenstürmer (The Machine-Wreckers)—which had advocated revolution and a radically antitechnological humanism—“had itself become dystopian in the context of the modern industrial society that Germany unquestionably was.” The film only “dramatizes the reaction of German modernism against an overpowering modernity, one that had undermined and negated its emancipatory and Utopian potential” (Benson et al. 1993). Metropolis could neither dismiss this utopianism nor fulfill it.
Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels expressed his delight in Metropolis directly to Lang after the Nazis took power and offered him the directorship of the Reich’s film industry. Lang agreed to everything, then fled Germany for Paris that evening, leaving almost everything he owned behind. In the same year, 1933, Von Harbou divorced Lang and joined the Nazi movement. Lang later told American filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich:
“The main thesis was Mrs. von Harbou’s, but I am at least 50 percent responsible because I did it. I was not so politically minded in those days as I am now. You cannot make a social-conscious picture in which you say that the intermediary between the hand and the brain is the heart. I mean, that’s a fairy tale, definitely.” (Bogdanovich 2012)
A detail present in Thea von Harbou’s novel but absent from the film names this anxiety more explicitly. In the novel, Joh Fredersen’s son confronts him directly:
“Are you not afraid, father (supposing that the statistics are correct and the consumption of man is progressing increasingly, rapidly) that one fine day there will be no more food there for the man-eating god-machines… ?”
“The case is conceivable,” said the brain of Metropolis.
“And then?”
“Then,” said the brain of Metropolis, “by then a substitute for man will have to have been found.”
“The improved man, you mean—? The machine-man—?”
“Perhaps,” said the brain of Metropolis. (Von Harbou 2002)
The Maschinenmensch—the robot that “mad scientist” Rotwang creates and gives the face of Maria—is really a prototype for the total replacement of labor. The reconciliation at the end of the film is a holding pattern: the “heart” (in this case a sort of human-resources sham messiah in the figure of Joh Fredersen’s son) mediates only until the hands can be dispensed with entirely, a pause actually caused by the killing of the only scientist capable of producing Maschinenmensch en masse.
The Maschinenmensch functions as what Angus Fletcher calls an allegorical agent—a “daemonic” figure embodying a single compulsive purpose endlessly replayed, “like a perpetual motion machine” (Gunning 2000). The robot dominates Metropolis not only in the false Maria but in the dehumanized mechanical movements of the workers themselves. When they march in formation to the machines, when their bodies compose the visual figure of a hand, they are already Maschinenmensch—the robot merely makes visible what is already the condition of labor. This is why the figure resists any single reading: it proliferates as labor replacement, as feminine threat, as cinematic simulacrum, as mask. Its meaning is allegorical rather than symbolic, generated through accumulation rather than resolved in a single key.
The figure condenses multiple anxieties that circulate through central European culture in the 1920s. Alfred Thomas identifies a “homology between threatening women and out-of-control technology” running through Paul Wegener’s The Golem (1920), Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and Karel Capek’s R.U.R. (1920)—all produced within a seven-year span. In Capek’s play, which gave the world the word “robot” (from Czech robota, forced labor), artificial beings created to free humanity from work eventually rise up and destroy their creators. Capek was “conscious of the golem legend of old Prague,” and the play shares the golem’s moral logic: the hubris of creation, the creature that exceeds its maker’s control. Like the tower, the robot is an image of organizational ambition that carries within it the teetering possibility of its own catastrophic reversal.
Rintaro’s 2001 anime Metoroporisu, an adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s manga (itself inspired by a single still from Lang’s film), re-interprets the New Tower of Babel into a structure called the Ziggurat—explicitly linking Lang’s futuristic tower back to the ancient Mesopotamian prototype. The chain of influence runs from Akkadian temple architecture, through Genesis, through Bruegel, through Lang, through Tezuka, through Rintaro, each iteration reactivating the same image: the structure that reaches toward heaven, the confusion that follows, the fall. Doomed revolutions figure through each retelling. But where Lang’s Metropolis treats the machine as an instrument of the industrialist’s deception, Rintaro’s Metoroporisu has an empathy for the machine as a sort of next-in-line lumpenproletariat in a series of thwarted revolutions. In the film, two detectives from Japan investigate organ trafficking in a retro-futuristic city dependent on robotic labor. A disenfranchised human worker’s movement vying for legitimacy is betrayed by its secret government sponsors; fascists exploit anti-robot sentiment to seize power; and Tima, an advanced robot who appears fully human, revolts on behalf of robots in a disastrous assault on all the humans of the city.3
What makes the tower an allegorical image in Benjamin’s sense is that it refuses to settle into either representation. It is neither simply the origin (the mythological beginning of nations, languages, differences, the first failure to organize, ruin) nor simply the end (a technological pinnacle, the projected eschaton, the catastrophe to come). It freezes these two temporal moments into a single image, and in doing so it petrifies the future—as though what will happen has already been determined, because it has already happened once before.4
The tower exists at the threshold between the dungeon of the mythological past and the megastructure mirage of a projected future— between genealogy (the Table of Nations, the ancient catacombs beneath the New Tower, both conjuring a natural history of biological production) and the city (a technological intervention that begins human history, whose material is symbolic language).5 In each of the texts considered here, the tower is simultaneously under construction and in ruins. The Babel of Genesis is never completed; Lang’s New Tower is besieged from below; Rintaro’s Ziggurat collapses in fire. The image always contains both its aspiration and its failure, and this is what gives it its allegorical force.6
The strength of Lang and Von Harbou’s Metropolis, which I failed to absorb in my first viewings, is that its heaping of images makes it fecund earth for these sorts of allegorical readings.
Harbou (or Lang) do not seem capable of a truly feminist critique any more than of a Marxist, Freudian or Christian resolution. Instead, we have a text whose allegorical energies seem unable to coalesce into a single grand narrative, but rather ceaselessly generates reference to nearly all the narratives - political, religious, occult, aesthetic, sexual - that circulated through Weimar culture. (Gunning 2000)
If the strength of allegory is that the creation of meaning happens in the mind of the viewer, then we can easily read Metropolis in allegorical mode just based on the density of images and potential readings alone, regardless of authorial intent- and importantly, we can read the fall of the Tower of Babel as that fall into a state of plural allegorical readings of images and text after the loss of symbolic authority, unfixed from its position as an origin story, but rather as something ripped out of time and the chain of causality. Broken free of the prison of the film itself, each image from Metropolis is a shattered hieroglyph which seems to speak on its own with a different message to each viewer, while still containing a holographic image of the time and conditions that birthed it.
Lang conceived the film after seeing New York for the first time from shipboard at night—“a nocturnal New York glittering with myriad lights”—and the screen metropolis is a kind of super New York realized through the Schufftan process, an ingenious mirror device that substituted miniature models for giant structures.↩︎
My thoughts turn to the media spectacle of the fascist insurrection of January 6th 2021. A confused rabble assaulted the US Capitol Building, gained entry, took selfies and left while the rest of the country witnessed it as a mediated event. The attackers primary demands were not structural change but a religious expression of inchoate rage. Benjamin: “Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses—but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life (Benjamin 2002b).”↩︎
Metropolis and Metoroporisu have distinct takes on the gender of their central robotic figures. Maria embodies a cartoonish dichotomy of female stereotypes (Madonna/Whore), while Tima is girlish yet sexless, a Chaplin-like tramp whose romantic connection with protagonist Kenichi is crush-like but never sexual. Her final transformation is into a Terminator-esque automaton marked by a single red eye. In Tezuka’s manga, the character is called “Mitchi” and can change sex at will; Mitchi’s breakdown stems from discovering that, as an android, they have no parents. The difference in affective register—Maria as uncanny threat, Tima as object of empathy—tracks a broader divergence researcher Sunny Yoon identifies between Eastern and Western technological imaginaries: Western AI inherits what N. Katherine Hayles calls the “Platonic backhand,” a disembodied orientation that produces humanoids provoking the uncanny, while Japanese audiences tend to perceive humanoids with affinity, shaped by the very pop culture lineage (Astro Boy, Ghost in the Shell) through which Tezuka reaches Rintaro (Yoon 2025). Tima is not a deception wearing a stolen face but a soulful being denied agency by the political order of the city.↩︎
“Walter Benjamin, speaking of the baroque allegoricists, complained that ‘these allegories fill out and deny the void in which they are represented just as ultimately, the intention does not faithfully rest in the contemplation of bones, but, faithlessly leaps forward to the idea of Resurrection.’ The resolution of Metropolis [1927] also makes this faithless leap, but seems to lose its footing, while the aesthetic energy of the film remains true to ‘the contemplation of bones.’” (Gunning 2000)↩︎
The cuneiform writing system employed by the Babylonians was, until recently, the earliest known system of its kind, and as such represents a delineation between “history” and “pre-history.”↩︎
Robert Smithson, surveying the suburban wasteland of Passaic, New Jersey in the late 60s, described what he called “ruins in reverse”—“the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built” (Smithson 1967). Our tower is a palindrome of ruination, an origin story that falls into ruin, pre-ruins building towards a structure which never culminates.↩︎