Satire In Brave New World And Metropolis
Literature is a translation of the world around us, offering insights into which core paradigms reflect the contextual factors that defined the thoughts and actions of humanity. The motivations of politics represent the best and worst of human nature, and through the study of the underlying political commentary in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (BNW) and Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent sci-fi film Metropolis, these motivations are demonstrated. Reflecting and critiquing the oppressive social and political values of their time, Brave New World and Metropolis each serve as a medium of exerting their composers beliefs. These dystopian texts serves as a catalyst for criticising the inability for a perfect society to eliminate revolution when imposing
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totalitarian values of a collectivist state, and suppressing the freedom of their people, proving the power of language used by composers to function as an empowering agency to provoke political thought.
Throughout the work of both composers, satire is used to attack the idea of progress taken too far without regard for the consequences.
20th century Satirist Aldous Huxley felt dystopic satire was a powerful medium for social awareness and could ‘arouse in his audience such emotions that would make us want to examine our lives and change them.’ In his 1931 novel, Brave New World, Huxley ironically parallels human nature and depicts a dystopia where scientific progress has created a culture that cannot live with the values and governments accepted today, casting the reader into an environment where mankind has lost its humanity and. In the novel satire graphically represents how destructive the tendency to venerate science can be. Nature is suppressed and technology has coldly enslaved mankind rather than liberated it. In the hatchery 'the light was frozen, dead, a ghost' while the workers in the 'squat grey building' of the Conditioning Centre become mere “spectres of men and women.” They have been made into soulless drones who never question or challenge. Mankind has become mindless, “like aphids and ants” existing in an environment which is sterile and scientific. The Fertilising Room is described with a chilling tone of “frozen, dead, ghostly light” a place occupied by workers whose hands are 'gloved with a pale corpse coloured rubber'. Everything is mechanised and emotionless. The values of the Weimar Republic set the doctrine of the film in which visual forms reveal the ironic mastery of machine and industrialisation over man. Lang uses a montage of machines cross cut with the symbol of a mechanical clock ticking to midnight to emphasise the political and social chaos in his society. Additional cuts of steam vents signify the underlying pressures that plagued the Weimar Republic by in the interwar period, but also the ideological tensions that characterized the period. Tension leads to revolution in Metropolis. The worker’s revolution is a reflection of the
attitudes within Germany as it struggled to repay its debts to foreign nations, under the Treaty of Versailles. The necessity of industrialisation is represented by the verbally ironic appeal of the foreman, “If the heart machine perishes… the entire worker’s city will be laid to waste.” Lang conveys that although life is miserable in Metropolis, it is dependent on the coexistence of workers and the “Heart-Machine.” The machines are indeed the source of the workers subordination and repression, but the source of their livelihood as well. Hence, Lang examines his era in which the solution for their debt is to sacrifice the freedom of the individual for rapid industrialisation.
Composers hold the ability to manipulate their texts to commentate a political perspective that reveal their purposes and motives which engages audiences to question moral and ethical positions and examine their own values to form opinions. Huxley’s Brave New World manipulates textual form through satire to draw on the reader’s knowledge of the period presumably ‘Before Ford’ in order to make the ignorance of the denizens of the Brave New World seem ridiculous. The state’s reworking of the word of God as it appears in Mark, “What God has joined, let no man put asunder” into “What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder” is a palimpsestic rewriting that draws attention to the hubris of the Director of Hatcheries and the State apparatus that meddles in human biology to enforce social control. The Director’s obvious ignorance to his own allusion works by drawing on the reader's knowledge, and their notice of the characters lack of the same. Huxley carefully positions us to reject the D.H.C. and by extension his parroting of totalitarian policies, writing for an politically aware audience to warn them about the pursuit of dogmatic political ideologies influenced by his subscription to Humanism which informed his rejection of this sort of totalitarian manipulation of subject populations. Lang’s ‘Metropolis’, further demonstrates how this dystopian genre has been used as a medium to critique the heavily imposed ideologies for a composer. As Joh Fredersen the master of Metropolis is seen standing at a large window in a wide shot, the following tracking shot of a mass of workers with bowed heads creates a juxtaposition between the above world of happiness, and the underground world of the workers where their freedom is taken away in order to benefit the mass society. As Frederson’s son asks, “Where are the people who built your great city?” and his father responds with “where they belong” the heavy orchestral music emphasises how the government values happiness for society by eliminating their freedom of those who are are already lesser. This reflects upon the values of post WWI Germany as a predicament of the impact of National Socialism and Nazi Germany as the freedom of the lower class became evidently more suppressed for the benefit of the higher class, a world of which director, Lang, lived through. Both of these texts are a reflection of their composer’s context throughout time and a demonstration of how their texts have been shaped by the societal values and situations of their time.
The representation of political power as it manipulates the social contract to control and impose its political motives on a society brings out the worst of human nature.The problems of mass politics in the 20th century included the control and maintenance of vast populations through a totalitarian regime. In BNW, the language used to describe this control is "the principles of mass production at last applied to biology", suggesting not just a criticism of totalitarian regimes but also a criticism of capitalist consumption and liberal political perspective. The caste system created by the Bokanowsky Process is a satirical take on the Marxist idiom 'for each according to their ability, each according to their need', the caste system is an intensification of the class division between workers and the bourgeoisie. Infants in the world state undergo dehumanising conditioning to segregate them into intellectual social classes called ‘castes’. The purpose of which is defined by the motif of the world’s mantra “Community. Identity. Stability” The deliberate placement of ‘identity’ between ‘community’ and ‘stability’ provides an element of satire that implies personal identity is merely a manufactured product designed by the world controllers to ensure subservient compliance with the ‘caste system’ and pre-determined societal roles.
totalitarian values of a collectivist state, and suppressing the freedom of their people, proving the power of language used by composers to function as an empowering agency to provoke political thought.
Throughout the work of both composers, satire is used to attack the idea of progress taken too far without regard for the consequences.
20th century Satirist Aldous Huxley felt dystopic satire was a powerful medium for social awareness and could ‘arouse in his audience such emotions that would make us want to examine our lives and change them.’ In his 1931 novel, Brave New World, Huxley ironically parallels human nature and depicts a dystopia where scientific progress has created a culture that cannot live with the values and governments accepted today, casting the reader into an environment where mankind has lost its humanity and. In the novel satire graphically represents how destructive the tendency to venerate science can be. Nature is suppressed and technology has coldly enslaved mankind rather than liberated it. In the hatchery 'the light was frozen, dead, a ghost' while the workers in the 'squat grey building' of the Conditioning Centre become mere “spectres of men and women.” They have been made into soulless drones who never question or challenge. Mankind has become mindless, “like aphids and ants” existing in an environment which is sterile and scientific. The Fertilising Room is described with a chilling tone of “frozen, dead, ghostly light” a place occupied by workers whose hands are 'gloved with a pale corpse coloured rubber'. Everything is mechanised and emotionless. The values of the Weimar Republic set the doctrine of the film in which visual forms reveal the ironic mastery of machine and industrialisation over man. Lang uses a montage of machines cross cut with the symbol of a mechanical clock ticking to midnight to emphasise the political and social chaos in his society. Additional cuts of steam vents signify the underlying pressures that plagued the Weimar Republic by in the interwar period, but also the ideological tensions that characterized the period. Tension leads to revolution in Metropolis. The worker’s revolution is a reflection of the
attitudes within Germany as it struggled to repay its debts to foreign nations, under the Treaty of Versailles. The necessity of industrialisation is represented by the verbally ironic appeal of the foreman, “If the heart machine perishes… the entire worker’s city will be laid to waste.” Lang conveys that although life is miserable in Metropolis, it is dependent on the coexistence of workers and the “Heart-Machine.” The machines are indeed the source of the workers subordination and repression, but the source of their livelihood as well. Hence, Lang examines his era in which the solution for their debt is to sacrifice the freedom of the individual for rapid industrialisation.
Composers hold the ability to manipulate their texts to commentate a political perspective that reveal their purposes and motives which engages audiences to question moral and ethical positions and examine their own values to form opinions. Huxley’s Brave New World manipulates textual form through satire to draw on the reader’s knowledge of the period presumably ‘Before Ford’ in order to make the ignorance of the denizens of the Brave New World seem ridiculous. The state’s reworking of the word of God as it appears in Mark, “What God has joined, let no man put asunder” into “What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder” is a palimpsestic rewriting that draws attention to the hubris of the Director of Hatcheries and the State apparatus that meddles in human biology to enforce social control. The Director’s obvious ignorance to his own allusion works by drawing on the reader's knowledge, and their notice of the characters lack of the same. Huxley carefully positions us to reject the D.H.C. and by extension his parroting of totalitarian policies, writing for an politically aware audience to warn them about the pursuit of dogmatic political ideologies influenced by his subscription to Humanism which informed his rejection of this sort of totalitarian manipulation of subject populations. Lang’s ‘Metropolis’, further demonstrates how this dystopian genre has been used as a medium to critique the heavily imposed ideologies for a composer. As Joh Fredersen the master of Metropolis is seen standing at a large window in a wide shot, the following tracking shot of a mass of workers with bowed heads creates a juxtaposition between the above world of happiness, and the underground world of the workers where their freedom is taken away in order to benefit the mass society. As Frederson’s son asks, “Where are the people who built your great city?” and his father responds with “where they belong” the heavy orchestral music emphasises how the government values happiness for society by eliminating their freedom of those who are are already lesser. This reflects upon the values of post WWI Germany as a predicament of the impact of National Socialism and Nazi Germany as the freedom of the lower class became evidently more suppressed for the benefit of the higher class, a world of which director, Lang, lived through. Both of these texts are a reflection of their composer’s context throughout time and a demonstration of how their texts have been shaped by the societal values and situations of their time.
The representation of political power as it manipulates the social contract to control and impose its political motives on a society brings out the worst of human nature.The problems of mass politics in the 20th century included the control and maintenance of vast populations through a totalitarian regime. In BNW, the language used to describe this control is "the principles of mass production at last applied to biology", suggesting not just a criticism of totalitarian regimes but also a criticism of capitalist consumption and liberal political perspective. The caste system created by the Bokanowsky Process is a satirical take on the Marxist idiom 'for each according to their ability, each according to their need', the caste system is an intensification of the class division between workers and the bourgeoisie. Infants in the world state undergo dehumanising conditioning to segregate them into intellectual social classes called ‘castes’. The purpose of which is defined by the motif of the world’s mantra “Community. Identity. Stability” The deliberate placement of ‘identity’ between ‘community’ and ‘stability’ provides an element of satire that implies personal identity is merely a manufactured product designed by the world controllers to ensure subservient compliance with the ‘caste system’ and pre-determined societal roles.