In Fritz Lang’s 1920s silent classic Metropolis, one of the movie’s most famous scenes shows the male protagonist working on a machine (picture) that basically features a large clock-style dial and two hands. Every so often, some light bulbs arranged around the dial would flash, and the worker would have to link the two bulbs to each other by turning the hands into the appropriate positions. In the video to Queen’s Radio Gaga, which borrowed a lot of Metropolis material, Freddie Mercury is seen doing this.
What could this machine be for?
I gather it was probably intended to simply symbolize the inhumanity of the industrial society, without Lang having any specific purpose in mind it could fulfil if it were real. Yet I wonder if one could come up with a “logical,” plot-inherent answer to this question.
I agree that it’s completely illogical. If you have switches closing somewhere that light up the signal bulbs in the first place, you might just as well use them to operate whatever mechanism the hands are supposed to be controlling. Or why have a gigantic dial when something that could fit on a desktop would do? Lang just wanted a visually compelling example of a physically and mentally grueling task.
(Of course, given that in half the offices in the U.S. people are still doing tasks manually or by analog that would be much simpler digitized, you can’t argue logical efficiency where legacy systems are used )
I agree that the machine itself is only visually interesting; I do not see a clear useful purpose to it.
However, the argument that the operator would just as easily be replaced by an extended mechanism is anachronistic. That’s the way it is done today, with far advanced technology and a different look at the costs of automation versus labor. At the time Metropolis was made, AFAIK, labor was still very cheap for modern Western standards, and building a machine was for many tasks very capital intensive. Much easier to hire someone to do the job, even if he wouldn’t exactly have much fulfillment in it.
I’m sure that the visual intent was to liken the workers to cogs in a machine (at one point a clock is superimposed over the image – I just watched the restored version last night on DVD).
BUT, I have to disagree with those who said this serves no purpose. Back in th 1920s, when this was made, ther often was no effective means of coupling readings from instruments (especially sensitive instruments) into a machine for feedback. Read C.S. Forester’s novel The Ship, for instance – it’s set in the 1940s, yet there is a chamber inside the ship where they have men doing exactly what Freder is doing in Metropolis – they manually adjusted “clock arms” on dials to follow the readings on wind vanes and anemometers for what we would call the Fire Control Computer, the mechanical calculating device that told you where to point the guns so you’d hit your target. Apparently it was easier and more reliable to have people “following” the output than to try ad couple it in directly.
By moving the hands of the big clock to the lighted bulbs, the operator is mechanically placing a Big Fluffy Mattress in a perfect trajectory beneath each mechanic who has been blown into the air offa the Big Moloch Machine.
And STILL there are some people who say that Joh Frederson is no humanitarian.
Perhaps some sort of valve-control system. We’ve seen how easily the workers’ area was flooded, after the power plant was destroyed. Obviously, the power plant required a large amount of water…possibly as coolant, or even just to drive some sort of hydroelectric turbines.
I’d guess that the clockguy’s panel indicated which section of the powerplant—either an individual turbine, or a reactor—needed more water at the moment. If the water supply was actually more limited than the demand, the system might have been set up so that 100% of the water would be going to, say, 80% of the reactors at any given time, leaving the other 20% on the verge of meltdown, but still producing some power. The trick would be to keep that 20% constantly rotating, like the pistons in a car engine.
Or; the clockguy is actually operating the innards of a weird, nonsensical, clock. (Hey, the Metropolians already running decimal time. Who knows what other freaky ways their clocks run differently?)
a.) fredersen’s wristwatch is on ordinary 12-hour time
b.) the large clock dial over the “10 hour” clock is graduated in 24 divisions.
I’ve been trying to figure out if Fredersen just thinks the 10-hour day doesn’t apply to him, or if the 10-hour clock is just some kind of “shift” clock.
Gotta love the Art Deco numbers, though, with the mising parts.
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