KLAATU YOU (2)

By: Miranda Mellis
January 8, 2020

One in a weekly series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite pre-Star Wars science fiction movies.

METROPOLIS | d. FRITZ LANG | 1927

Metropolis is an uncannily archaic film as much about itself as a set as it is about class struggle. Made of drawings, paintings, and sculptures, gestures and faces, its rendering of technology as monstrous and devouring is all the more poignant given how much this film is a work on paper. The precipitating event: Freder, son of ruling class boss Joh and deceased mother Hel who died giving birth to him glimpses the world of systematic oppression and suffering going on behind the scenes, as it were, of his pleasure garden of a life because Maria, a working class organizer, has brought a community of impoverished children up from below where the proletarians slave, to witness the rich and be witnessed by them: “Your brothers!” she says to Freder. His utopia is their dystopia. His now permanently shocked eyes stare and stare. Can the son of Hel handle the truth?

He staggers up and down between milieus, now to the heights of fashionable frippery, tyrannical power, and industrialist planning, then below to the depths of masses toiling, danger, death, and rebellions…

Parasite, Bong Joon-ho’s most recent film, is also plotted vertically. The gliding, frictionless lives of the rich are predicated upon competition, strife and pain literally “beneath them.” As above, so not below. The poor dwell in sub-basements where they are flooded, sprayed with insecticide, where they fight, plead, kill each other, where they hide and signal for help. Ease above, dis/ease below.

In Metropolis Freder (freer) wakes up. He is the mediator-figure between above and below. “Brother,” he says to a worker frenetically sweeping the arms of a clock-like disc. The worker swoons into the scion’s arms in exhaustion. Freder embraces him. He is held close and rests for a moment. Then he suddenly remembers: “The machine! Someone has to stay at the machine!” They grapple. The boss’s son says he’ll take over: “Listen to me! I want to trade lives with you.”

Parasite also involves the trading of lives, in this case, through betrayal, as one by one every member of the family of main protagonists plots to take another worker’s job. The conceit is that they assume these positions by pretending well: here class identity is a performance of roles in a script written by power, in which the rich do not know they are on a set. Their reality is an artifice. The obvious artifices of Metropolis at this historical distance enacts the fragility, malleability, and contingency of the situation, what moving out of your assigned role reveals.

On the planet Anarres in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambivalent Utopia, composers, scientists, philosophers — they too have to do their time below, in the mines. And if professors want to do away with coal mines and coal miners want to do away with colleges, the novel posits that they should instead trade lives: miners ascend to school, and professors descend to mines. The redistribution of labor, not wealth, is the plan of Anarres. Rather than the binary of perfection above and abjection below, glossy ease and miserable disease, the filthy rich and the pure poor, The Dispossessed imagines a third space, the realization of an ambiguous synthesis, a rough equality which all labor for.

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KLAATU YOU (2)

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