Androgyny Image
Androgyny Image

Metropolis was a huge budget film made in 1924 by Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang. The film featured a robot fashioned after a real life character named Maria. The robot version is controlled by a hedonistic industrialist named Joh Fredersen who uses the creature to foment revolution which results in the near catastrophic deaths of many lower class workers. The film proposes a socialist ideal, showing the extreme class stratification in the future as utmost evil. The robot version of Maria, created through wealth and controlled by those in power, embodies the evils of class injustice. She (it) seeks to propagate that injustice, taking instructions from her evil creator and in her immoral state, even takes a job at one point as an exotic dancer. The androgynous robot, disguised as a woman, is powerful not as an embodiment of the complete, enlightened superhuman, but rather as a feared outsider meddling in the fragile, perhaps flawed, but beautiful natural human order

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Metropolis

Androgyny Image

Rotwang and his robot version of Maria