Anatomy of a Scene: Maria’s transformation in ‘Metropolis’
If it weren’t for the title cards, Metropolis would look as though it was made yesterday. The 1927 science-fiction film by German director Fritz Lang was released just over twenty years after the Lumiere Brothers presented the first moving pictures to the people of Paris. The film remains one of the most important foundational science fiction movies and is as haunting today as it was nearly a century ago. Here we’ll be looking at one of its most impressive scenes, the transformation of Maria.
Maria’s transformation from robot to human is undoubtedly iconic. Over the years, it has become synonymous with the science fiction genre. But before we dissect the scene, let’s remind ourselves of what’s happened so far. The film takes place in the futuristic realm of Metropolis, a city in which the affluent classes reside in lofty skyscrapers high above the murky underworld below, where workers and undesirables live a life of drudgery. When the son of Metropolis’ leader, Freder, discovers the plight of the workers, he befriends the rebellious Maria, putting him at odds with his father.
When Joh Fredersen learns of this forbidden romance, he instructs the scientist Rotwang to craft a seductive doppelganger of Maira. The gynoid (human on the outside, robot on the inside) is subsequently utilised by Rotwang to impress and seduce the aristocrats of Metropolis. Cue an extravagant cabaret dance sequence.
In the transformation scene, we see Rotwang in his laboratory. Surrounded by impressive-looking equipment, he connects Maria, who is being held in a coffin-like chamber, to her robot counterpart. Rotwang is highly evocative of Dr Frankenstein, the archetypal mad scientist from Mary Shelley’s proto-science fiction novella Frankenstein.
For this scene, Lang drew from another but equally gothic source: the 1920 adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, which saw director John S. Robertson use a combination of prosthetics and slow-dissolve to depict the transformation of the respectable Mr Jekyll. Lang uses the same dissolve effect to portray Maria’s transmutation, concluding with one last reference to Frankenstein: the opening of Maria’s eyes, which conjures up that haunting line: “I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open.”
Of course, part of the reason the scene is so effective is that it subverts Shelley’s original text. Unlike Frankenstein’s creature, Maria is beautiful, angelic and highly feminised. Where the monster is outwardly horrifying but inwardly pure, Maria is outwardly pure and inwardly psychopathic, eventually causing havoc when she goes AWOL in Metropolis. Lang’s transformation scene works because it is rooted in the foundationary texts of science fiction. Of course, it would be nothing without Lang’s incredible eye for design and control of filmic techniques. It was surely these strengths that have allowed Metropolis to endure as one of the most influential films of all time.
