Savior of the Working Man: Promethean Allusions in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)

Abstract

Loved and loathed since its 1927 premiere, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has inspired as many divergent readings as impassioned responses.¹ Critics have decried its chauvinistic gender stereotyping, communist undertones, and apocalyptic overtones; its heavy-handed borrowing of Christian and Marian salvific imagery and narrative devices; and a simplistic melodramatic plot that culminates in one of the most notorious endings in cinematic history.² Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, have even been branded as Nazi collaborators who used the film to support a nascent political ideology.³ Yet within this mixture of fascism and socialism, medieval and gothic, Christian and occult, this chapter throws one more brand onto the critical fire by offering another reading of Metropolis: through the myth of Prometheus.