An Imagined Utopia

As I read the essay “Utopia and Science Fiction,” I could not help but think of the film Metropolis.  It is a silent German expressionist film about the working class rising up against the rich society that controls them.  It clearly begins as a dystopian society where the machine is valued above the workers lives.  The movie shows many of the different modes of Utopia and Science Fiction.  For starters, it is about “social despair, the mood of a declining class or fraction of a class, which has to create a new heaven because its Earth is hell” (203).  The working class is trying to rise up against a society “primarily defined as technology and production…transcending the deep divisions of industrial capitalist specialization, of town and country, of rulers and ruled, administrators and administered, are from the beginning the central and primary objective” (206).  Before reading this essay, I had never made a connection between stories of social classes rising up against the machine/rulers/administrators as also being a story of fighting for a utopia.  It seems far more obvious now, especially in relation to the film, but I never thought of fighting for a better life as fighting for utopia, maybe because I’ve always imagined utopia as something unattainable. 

I think it is especially significant that the film is showing the working class fighting against a capitalist society in which they have no control over, but are simply used to the advantage of the administrators.  I think in many ways the film demonstrates how the rights of workers can and are taken advantage of, which is why revolutions and reform are so common among the working class.  What is also interesting about this film is that it does not necessarily assume that utopia will be achieved, but it shows that the possibility of reform can occur.  The son of the man who created the capitalist society is the one who becomes the mediator, trying to bring about social change after experiencing the degradation of the working class himself.  “It is probably only to such a utopia that those who have known affluence and known with it social injustice and moral corruption can be summoned” (212).  It is through him that a new world of reform and unity among the classes can possibly be achieved because he has lived both above and below the city, and understands the problems at hand.