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Robot Maria In Fritz Lang's Metropolis

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Robot Maria In Fritz Lang's Metropolis
The conflict between the individual and the state is perpetuated in Metropolis, and it is in its plot that the modernists fears of the machine age are evident.

Robot Maria is used as a narrative device in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to orchestrate chaos and disunity in the city, perpetuating the conflict between the Head and the Hands. Rotwang creates her as the antithesis of Maria and the personification of vice, so Joh Fredersen can use her to “…sow discord between them and her!” It is in the visual representation of the transformation from women to machine, “It is time to give the Machine-Man your face!” that the modernists fears of the dehumanising effect of the machine age is clear.

The conflict between the Head and the Hands is exacerbated from her creation onwards as she incites sin, envy and lust. In a biblical allusion Robot Maria is likened to the Whore of “Babylon, the Mother of Abominations of the Earth” where John the Prophet speaks …show more content…
Maria works to magnify the workers discontent and destroy their hope in a Mediator that was to bring political change, mirroring the hope of Fritz’s time. She incites this discontent and conflict in her preaching “who is the living fodder for the machines for Metropolis?! Who smears the machine-joints with their own marrow-?! Who feeds the machines with their own flesh?!… Kill them - the machines!!” The workers destroying the heart machine is symbolic as the heart is a symbol of our humanity and compassion and is what keeps the body going, in destroying the life source they are destroying their humanity and the city. This idea is extended in “The Mediator between the head and the hands is the heart”, the hope that the heart would be able to bridge the gap between the two classes seems to be destroyed by the destruction of the heart
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