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The Biblical Analogies in Metropolis

 September 1, 2022

Metropolis is an extremely eye opening film exposing the classist ways of society: something that was an issue in 1927 when this film was released, and still exists today. Throughout this film, it is impossible to ignore the various biblical allusions that are made. I found this to be very fascinating and wanted to analyze a few of these analogies. 

The first biblical allusion I noticed was the "new Tower of Babel." In the city of Metropolis, a huge, lavish tower is built, and everyone is in awe of it. The Tower of Babel is a story from the Bible that depicts humans in their evil ways of pride and arrogance. The moral of the story is that humans greedily want to be equal with God. This is exactly what you see in Metropolis: men striving for wealth and power, while trying to control everything in sight. You notice specifically how Rotwang is playing God: he creates his own human robot. He is even shown with the symbol of a pentagram: a sign of evil and Satan. In contrast, Maria is a source of light representing good. She is depicted with candles and crosses around her and she is constantly glowing. Rotwang wants to destroy Maria, just as the devil wants to destroy all that is good. 

I really enjoyed this film and am glad that I was able to watch it, because I probably would not have come across this movie on my own outside of this class. While I found the biblical allusions to be the most interesting, the entire message about classism was also something I enjoyed analyzing. What amazes me the most is the awareness of the issue dating back to 1927 and the fact that it is still an issue today. 

Sophia Demitrio

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