“In awe”: How ‘Metropolis’ inspired David Bowie’s artistic outlook
In the 1930s the Nazis used the phrase ‘Berlinerluft’ to describe what they perceived to be an alkaline chemical present in the air within the blossoming bohemia of Berlin. They saw this as the only feasible explanation for the ‘excessive self-liberation’ apparent in the party city. Naturally, David Bowie was desperate for a whiff of it.
This absurd Berlinerluft belief is a ludicrous truth in the pages of history. However, the evidence was empirical; when you’ve got cultural priestesses like Anita Berber stirring a concoction of drugs with a white rose and eating the petals, then a favourable pH scale must surely come into the madness. So, Bowie and Iggy Pop were drawn towards this strange land where a very particular sort of art and hedonism seemed to collide.
When the dishevelled duo did move there in 1976, Bowie would proclaim that the divided city provided “the greatest cultural extravaganza that one could imagine.” While a myriad of reasons drove him there, not least the prospect of getting sober in relative paparazzi-free peace, two films were also at the centre of his choice. As he told Uncut in 2001, he was drawn towards the hub of all things unusual because it was “where Metropolis and [The Cabinet of Dr] Caligari had originated.”
Metropolis might have been from 1927, but its grandeur seemed to defy that date, and its prescience certainly surpassed it. These would be two factors that Bowie would always look to mirror in his work. “It was an art form that mirrored life not by event but by mood,” he explained. “This was where I felt my work was going.”
According to his ex-partner, Amanda Lear, his obsession with the movie ushered his own art in this direction. “We saw Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and David was in awe of it,” she told the Miami News in 1978. “He rented the film and ran it over and over again in his house. And that’s where Diamond Dogs came from—the whole staging and album and everything, Bowie got from Metropolis.” Even prior to that, he had originally wanted to call The Man Who Sold the World, Metropolis, in honour of the film.
The film’s otherworldly way of using dystopian sci-fi to reflect the social divides of the time was ingenious. It might not have looked like 1927, but it delved into the future with the current times in mind—this is something Bowie also looked to do with his music. As he famously said, “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.”
The film’s final inter-title describes its message, a message that is still just as pertinent: “The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart”. During the days of Weimar, the concern was that the heads of power lacked any heart when they were dealing with the working hands of the lower classes. The film depicted a vast class divided in a futuristic city, where the young son of an elite leader must try to bridge the gap with compassion.
Although it was silent, the ‘mood’, as Bowie suggested, was overwhelmingly telling. In many ways, the same can be said for songs like ‘Warszawa’—the spoken tongue may well be gibberish, but somehow it evokes a sense of perturbation about the post-industrial future. While it is hard to imagine that Bowie would’ve been stuck making ‘The Laughing Gnome Pt XI’ if it hadn’t been for Metropolis, it is easy to see exactly when and how it began to influence his work.
