Science Fiction, Ecological Futures, and the Topography of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis

Since 1927, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has circulated as stills, clips, and a sequence ofincreasingly more complete cuts in the global social imaginary. Whilst scholars havecritiqued this science fiction film from gender, techno-culture, and German sociopoliticalperspectives, this article analyzes the film afresh by reading it ecocritically. Thearticle moves through three key components of Metropolis. The first movementexamines the representational and ideological contradictions within the variety ofmachines inside the diegetic city to deconstruct the common interpretation of the film’smachines as dehumanizing and alienating people from a “natural” world. The secondmovement reads the film’s urban topography, dwelling particularly on Rotwang’s houseas indigestible history and the Club of the Sons as “nature”-themed fantasy place. Third,the article analyzes what I am calling the film’s “organ dialectic” of antithetical hand andhead sublated in the heart to show how this metaphor structure complicates not onlythe film’s conclusion but also common ecological epistemological and ontologicaltheories that invoke the organic and the mechanic. Ultimately, the article assemblesthese three analytical components to argue that contradictions within the narrative,representational, and rhetorical structures of Metropolis illuminate crucial ideologicalchallenges of thinking ecology and technology together, whether in 1927 or today.