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Berlin 41

wholesome heartland, the decaying city, the decadent underworld, and dangerous nature in the desert. Superman delivers Lex Luthor and Otis to jail; when the warden thanks him, he answers: Dont thank me, Warden. Were all part of the same team. His statement, Im here to fight for truth and justice and the American way, claries that his presence is necessary because the city and its urban inhabitants have lost the American way. Despite the lms openings announcement about the depression in Metropolis, the city in Superman is contemporaneous with the time the lm was made, and signifies decay and criminality, in short, the failure of modernity. In 1972, the urban housing project called Pruitt-Igoe had been blown up in St. Louis, Missouri, which postmodern architect Charles Jencks saw as the symbol of the end of modernism. Pruitt-Igoe was a modernist complex that included over 2,000 public housing units that had been built in 1951 by architect Minory Yamasaki. By the late 1960searly 1970s, it was clear that these urban projects of modernist visions had failed and the only response the city found was total destruction. Positioned after what was perceived as the failure of modernist architecture and urban planning to embody a utopian vision of the future, Superman espouses conservative values by subordinating the city to the nation, portraying the battle between good and evil, and portraying an asexual masculinity that romances and seduces the urban feminist.

city of Metropolis connects technology and futurism, socio-political problems, and their resolution. Anne Leblans sees in the lm a seismograph that with great accuracy registers concerns, conicts, and developments of the mid-1920s (96). Famous for its settings, the original production cost more than 4 million Reichsmarks, had a duration of seven hours, and did not recover its production costs. As already mentioned, the imaginary city of Metropolis is organized vertically. The spaces above, pleasure gardens and the large office of the owner of Metropolis, Frederson, are inhabited by the upper class, while below the workers toil in uniform and drab workplaces and houses, dressed uniformly and moving in unison from and to work. Maria, the daughter of a worker, mediates between the workers and Frederson, who wants the workers to be replaced by machines to enhance productivity, but Rotwang, a mad scientist, builds a seductive, evil robot in the likeness of Maria to incite revolution among the workers and ultimately destroy Metropolis. Fredersons son, Freder, and the real Maria meet and fall in love. The robot Maria incites the workers to revolt, but their chaotic actions result only in the destruction and ooding of their own quarters. When their children are at risk of drowning in the ood, Maria and Freder save them. The foreman reports to the hysterical masses that their children had almost drowned, and consequently they burn the false Maria at the stake. Freder, Maria, and Rotwang ght on top of the cathedral, and Rotwang falls to his death. The nal image of the lm shows Freder, Frederson, and the foreman shaking hands in front of the cathedral with Maria at their side, and the last intertitle reads: The heart connects the mind and the hand. With Marias help, Freder has come to be the connection between the alienated labor force and the owners of the means of production in industrial capitalism. Religious imagery is substituted for a political solution to the problem of class exploitation. Modern Weberian capitalism is embodied by Frederson, the boss of Metropolis, in his rational, profit-oriented relationship with those around him, including his son, Freder. Rational functionalism and automatism are also represented by many fetishizing shots of the machines that celebrate technology. Rotwang represents the danger of irrationality in capitalism, which could destroy the means of production as well as the workers. Ultimately, however, it is the spiritual connection of the heart between the hand and the brain, and the destruction of the atavistic and mysticalmagical embodiment of capitalism that makes possible a modern, rational, and humane capitalism for the future. The lms narrative drives towards that nal constellation encapsulated in its ultimate shot. Metropolis opens with a shot of a city signaling its abstract design, which reects the modernist vision of functionalism and the absence of decoration. Onto this shot
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The virtual city of the past

Whereas the early films of modernist science fiction portrayed dystopian and utopian visions in futuristic city settings, and films from the 1960s and 1970s show contemporary cities marked by dystopian narratives, the late 1990s saw a group of lms that showed cities of the future either real or simulated that were either decaying or belonged to the past. I read these lms and their cities as marking the passing of the promise of modernism and diagnosing the condition of postmodernity. Joshua Clover identies the collapse of virtual and past cities in what he labels edge of the construct lms (see also Sobchack 1999): lms in which the hero sees the simulation as nothing more (and nothing less) than what it is, recognizes the limited apparatus of what he once thought was innite reality (8). He describes the cities in three lms from the late 1990s as constructs in the past even though they are virtual cities: Trumans town in The Truman Show (1998), which is set in the 1950s, the pointedly motley but largely 40s noir metropolis of Dark City (1998), and the 1937 Los Angeles recreated by programmers in Josef Rusnaks The Thirteenth Floor (1999) (9). While the city was central to the invention of the science-ction genre and to the negotiation of utopian and dystopian visions of the future in Langs Metropolis, the signicance of the