Summary
We see Josaphat wandering down the stairs, dejected. He goes to shoot himself, but Freder runs up before he can do so. Meanwhile, Fredersen looks at his door fretfully.
On the stairs, Josaphat confides to Freder that it was devastating to be fired by Fredersen so unceremoniously. Freder comforts Josaphat and asks if he wants to accompany him somewhere, writing something down, and telling Josaphat to go home and wait for him until he calls later on. He tells him he must go into the depths, "to be with my brothers."
Meanwhile, in his office, Fredersen tells a man that he wants to be kept abreast of his son's whereabouts and actions.
Freder wanders down into the workers' city yet again, where he is met with a thick smoke upon entering. He approaches and addresses one of the workers as "Brother." When the worker falls down, Freder holds him as the worker protests, "Someone must stay with the machine!" Freder assures him that he will stay with the machine in the worker's place.
For a moment we see Fredersen's assistant, who has been tasked with keeping tabs on Fredersen's son, reading a newspaper and keeping an eye out for Freder, watching his car. The scene switches back to Freder in the workers' city, manning a large wheel with help from the worker, with whom he has switched clothing. Freder hands him a piece of paper with Josaphat's address and sends the worker to wait for him at Josaphat's home. He takes the worker's hat and the worker goes to Josaphat's apartment wearing Freder's clothing. As the worker gets in the car, the assistant Fredersen enlisted to keep an eye on Freder mistakes the worker for him and decides to follow him.
In the car, the worker sees a woman in a nearby car and admires her, but the car soon speeds away and he loses sight of her. Suddenly, a man begins dropping papers from a height above, and the worker picks one up which reads, "Yoshiwara." As more and more papers fall, they flood the screen. We see a montage of different people and decadent situations, including upper-class people dancing, a man playing a piano, and various party scenes. The worker passes the card that just landed in the car up to the driver, asking him to take him there.
A supertitle reads, "In the middle of Metropolis is a strange house, overlooked by the centuries...Here lives Rotwang, the inventor." We see Rotwang in his home, looking over some plans. An assistant enters and announces the arrival of Joh Fredersen, who pulls a rope that opens a curtain to reveal a large face. Rotwang emerges and looks startled, closing the curtain hastily and scolding Fredersen in some way. Fredersen tells him, "A brain like yours should be able to forget," but Rotwang fires back, "Only once in my life did I forget anything: that Hel was a woman, and you a man..." Fredersen pleads with the inventor, "Let the dead rest in peace, Rotwang...For you, as for me, she is dead."
Rotwang begs to differ, insisting, "For me, she is not dead...for me, she lives!" waving his arms passionately. He then says, "Do you think that losing a hand is too high a price to pay for re-creating Hel?" alluding to his prosthetic hand, then offering to show Fredersen his artificial robotic recreation of Hel, the woman they both once knew. He brings Fredersen over, then turns the robot on, and as her face lights up, she begins walking forward slowly. Rotwang gives her an instruction and she walks towards the end of her platform before reaching out to Fredersen.
"Isn't it worth the loss of a hand to have created the man of the future, the Machine-Man?!" says Rotwang, once again showing Fredersen his prosthetic hand. He then tells Fredersen that he will make another robot that will be indistinguishable from a mortal human in the next 24 hours. Fredersen is frightened by the robot and tries to touch it, but Rotwang insists that the robot belongs to him, since Fredersen got Hel's son, Freder.
Fredersen then tells Rotwang that he has come for advice and pulls out the two plans that were found in the explosion, asking Rotwang to help him interpret them. Meanwhile, in the workers' city, a worker comes up behind Freder, thinking he is the other worker, and tells him that "she" is calling another meeting at two o'clock, when the workday is done. Back in Rotwang's office, Fredersen looks at his watch as Rotwang examines the plans.
The scene shifts back to Freder working at the machine, when suddenly he notices the nearby thermometer rising just as it did before the explosion. Growing weary, he yells, bemoaning the fact that his 10-hour shift feels like an eternity.
Rotwang tells Fredersen that the plans are a map of the catacombs underground in the workers' city. Fredersen examines the map before saying, "I should like to know what my workers are doing in the catacombs..." Rotwang leads him down a staircase to go investigate the catacombs. They climb deeper and deeper, down various cellar staircases, and into the depths, each holding flashlights. Down in the catacombs, they see the workers assembling in a large group. Among them is Freder who holds his heart in exhaustion.
When Freder looks up, he sees the woman who he saw in the garden with the schoolchildren, giving a speech in front of a shrine of candles. He falls to his knees in admiration. Meanwhile, Rotwang and Fredersen find a small portal through which to spy on the meeting. The woman, whose name is Maria, tells the workers the legend of the Tower of Babel.
We are transported into the legend, in which a man tells a group of followers that they ought to build "a tower whose top may reach unto the stars...and on the top of the tower we will write the words: Great is the world and its Creator! And great is Man!" We see plans for the Tower of Babel and a group of people gathered around it, as a supertitle tells us, "The minds that had conceived the Tower of Babel could not build it. The task was too great. So they hired hands for wages."
After we see throngs of workers setting out to build the Tower of Babel, another supertitle reads, "But the hands that built the Tower of Babel knew nothing of the dream of the brain that had conceived it." We see large groups of slaves building the Tower of Babel, then cursing the leader who makes them work so hard. The narration continues: "People spoke the same language, but could not understand each other." As the workers rush towards the leader, words are projected across the sky above the tower that read, "Great is the world and its creator and great is man."
The scene shifts back to Maria telling the story, saying, "Head and hands need a mediator. The mediator between head and hands must be the heart!" Many of the workers bow their heads as if in prayer, as one stands and asks, "But where is our mediator?" Maria closes her eyes reverently and tells the man, "Wait for him, he will surely come!" When one of the men says that they will wait, but not much longer, Fredersen pulls his head out of the window, worriedly.
The workers disperse, and as they do, Freder calls to Maria, as Rotwang watches from the window. Maria walks towards him, her hand open to him, and touches his face before saying, "Oh mediator, have you finally come?" He accepts the role dutifully and she kisses him, much to his delight. Meanwhile, Fredersen tells Rotwang to build the robot in the likeness of Maria, saying that he plans to ruin her plan and "destroy their belief in this woman."
Analysis
After seeing how cold his father is in the face of human suffering, Freder cut ties with him and becomes a revolutionary. While he thought that his father might listen to his critique of the system under which they live, he finds that Fredersen sees the capitalistic hierarchy as all part of the order of things. When he fires Josaphat, his loyal assistant, Freder sees just how naive he has been and decides to begin rebelling against his father to help the workers below.
Even though Fredersen sends a messenger to go and keep an eye on Freder to make sure he does not get into any trouble, Freder manages to outwit this operation by switching clothing with one of the workers and sending the worker to Josaphat's apartment in his stead.
Metropolis is consistently visually stunning. When the worker leaves the workers' city for the first time, the car he is taking is flooded with papers that fall from the sky into the car and we see a montage of various scenes from the above-ground city, where people live more leisurely and pleasurable lives. Smiling faces in various headdresses and nice outfits appear on the screen smiling at the camera. It is a kind of whirlwind tour of the gay party lifestyle of those who live in the city above ground. Music and pageantry abound, and we get to see it as if for the first time through the eyes of the worker with whom Freder has switched places. Fritz Lang has an eye for the striking spectacle, whether it is the steam and mechanized infrastructure of the workers' city or the eye-catching glitter of the wealthier classes.
The plot of the film becomes more complex when Fredersen goes to visit the inventor, Rotwang, and we learn that they have a history. Not only that, but Rotwang has taken the liberty of creating a robotic version of a woman—Hel—that they both once loved. The sight of the robotic woman is one of the most iconic images in the film. She is a magnificent figure in metal armor, a 1920s fantasy of a robotic woman, and a marvel for the two men who seek to avoid the despair of death by recreating the woman they lost. Her face lights up and she moves with a steady grace, a symmetrical ease and moderation.
As much as Metropolis is a science fiction film, an examination of a distant future unlike any we have seen, it is also a meditation on the ancient past. Nowhere is this more evident than in Maria's telling of the legend of the Tower of Babel. Fritz Lang stages the myth, and we are pulled into the biblical story, an allegory for the hubris of man trying to emulate God. Its visual style retains the unusual and unique qualities of the futuristic landscape it creates, with completely new characters and set pieces. The visual effects remain striking and impressive in their detail, and this re-staging of the legend of the Tower of Babel adds to the symbolic weight of Metropolis' message.
