Similarities Between 1984 And Metropolis

By developing clinical political landscapes devoid of authentic human relationships, Orwell’s darkly satirical novel 1984 (1949) and Lang’s silent German Expressionist film Metropolis (1927) challenge our faith in the future of humanity. An anticipation of the destructive industrial modalities of the Weimar Republic, Lang presents a world built on shameless exploitation and systematic oppression of the working class. Writing in shadow of World War II, Orwell projects a much more nightmarish vision wherein the human capacity for autonomy is quashed by a totalitarian government. While Lang advocates for social harmony Orwell, deeply disaffected by the Second World War, suggests political and ideological extremism will permanently subjugate
Conflating Stalinism and Nazism, Orwell’s thinly plotted, closely framed, novel disparages totalitarianism as a flawed political solution to the rampant Capitalism witnessed in Metropolis. Orwell satirises aspects of totalitarian rule through Winston’s emphatic observation that “nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull”, revealing that ‘life’ was under extreme scrutiny. The inexorably pervasive surveillance is underpinned by the motifs of the telescreen and hidden microphones, metaphorically reducing the individual to a “beetle under a magnifying glass”. Within this insidious system of panoptic control, the regime eradicates any opportunity for a future where genuine human relationships can be developed. Further, the paradoxically titled Ministry of Truth’s continual fabrication destroys any sense of an objective reality - echoing of Stalin’s self-aggrandising rewriting of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. By systematically critical thought from its people, the regime effectively vitiates the very essence of humanity. Within a world where truth and privacy is expunged, Orwell prophesizes that abuse of totalitarian forms of power will permanently extinguish the human capacity for autonomy. Reflecting Frederson’s cruel segregation of the working class to maintain his
Denouncing authoritarian ideology, revealed in both portentous dystopias is the clinical nature of political extremism which expunges the human capacity for autonomy in favour of productivity. The intertextual perspectives provided ultimately convey the difficulty, or even impossibility, in preserving the sanctity of the human spirit amidst the overwhelming rationality of