Foreword: "Standing Tall" serves as my first official college essay, written for my First Year Seminar (Cities and Cinema) course, the advanced, freshman year English class focusing on rhetoric, but also placing a heavy focus on films and their respective locations. We have looked at films that profile the cities of Berlin and Tokyo for now, and are closing on some other major international cities towards the conclusion of this trimester (the end of November).
When it comes to the traditional organization and creation of a city, numerous things are mapped out and analyzed before construction takes place, so transportation, navigation, and a certain rhythm can be achieved. This is the part that is perfunctory and passively accepted as a part of industrialized planning; the ideas that are intently examined by people are the symbolic and metaphorical representations of the ideas communicated by the city, through its inherent
verticality. For almost a century, verticality has been an intricate part of urban filmmaking and studies, communicating an idea or a system through the general, upright layout of a city. Two prime examples in film where verticality takes on its own separate meaning are Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, released in 1927, and Spike Jonze’s Her, released in 2013. While the films’ release dates are spaced out by almost ninety years, both Lang’s Metropolis and Jonze’s Her illustrate ideas of verticality in order to create their own futuristic worlds and ideas brought forth by societal urbanization, with Metropolis predominately focusing on representing a stern class system and inequality and Her using the idea to detail a technology-driven society.
Serving as the first feature-length science fiction film and a jumpstart to the German expressionist movement, Metropolis concerns a dystopian society, where the gap between the working class and the elite is as large as ever. The film focuses on the sharp divide between the lives of dehumanized, overworked employees of the city, working around the clock like programmed automatons to keep the city running, while the elite class seem to find new ways to oppress the working class. Despite this divide, a man in the upper class winds up falling in love with a woman from the working class, leading to unforeseen consequences in the city.
In Jonze’s Her, we are placed in an undisclosed time in the future, when technology has redefined life so much so that even the buildings and the layout of the city have taken on a sleeker, more computerized look. We follow a man who buys a new computer operating system, equipped with artificial intelligence so advanced that he can have a conversation with it on intimate, emotional levels. His operating system, simply a computer with a female voice, becomes his romantic interest, and the film shows the progression of their relationship in ways that transcend the boundaries of man’s relationship with technology.
Both Metropolis and Her bear the same idea of questioning the future and what it holds, one with a political focus and, the other, a technological one, with both films illustrating this idea through the use of verticality. The concept is immediately brought forth by the way each director structures and, in turn, portrays their respective city. Metropolis, in its opening scenes, shows a city run in the form of gears turning and people tirelessly working, where Her shows a spacious, more atmospheric city, captured with large amounts of headroom and a wide lenses to be all inclusive to its cityscape. Film critic Roger Ebert makes note of Metropolis’s verticality saying, “Lang tells of a towering city of the future. Above ground, it has spires and towers, elevated highways, an Olympian stadium and Pleasure Gardens. Below the surface is a workers' city where the clocks show 10 hours to squeeze out more work time, the workers live in tenement housing and work consists of unrelenting service to a machine” (1).
Finally, there’s an element of urban loneliness explored in Metropolis and Her, effectively communicated through verticality. Metropolis, right off the bat, makes note of its crowded environment, showing a countless band of worn workers piling into factories to begin their ten-hour routine. The streets and buildings are crowded, and when we see these workers pile in buildings in a shoulder-to-shoulder fashion, we question if there is any element of personal space at all. With Her, the same sort of issue arises; Los Angeles has streets infested with people but all are too absorbed in their technology to take any notice. Our lead character in Her is desperately lonely, starved for companionship, and, in a world where technology is accessible and lightning fast, finds it with his artificially intelligent operating system. Many scenes in Her show our star wandering waywardly down crowded plazas and in spacious subways, all occupied with people with one thing in common – no immediate desire for any human interaction whatsoever, and ironically, living near large buildings with hundreds of people. Author Barbara Mennel comments on the themes often explored with the vertical city, specifically speaking of Berlin, by saying the films often “thematize urbanity, especially the period’s understanding of the dangers and pleasures of modern urban life: crime, anonymity, a loosening of morality, and class struggle…”(Mennel 23), further acknowledging the use of darker elements in urban films.
In summation, verticality can detail many different concepts, such as inequality, integrated yet unequal environments, and even ideas of alienation and loneliness in crowded spaces. Metropolis and Her are just two examples in a populated genre of films looking to explore city-life, some with optimistic or pessimistic undertones. While both films explore the future with a slightly similar focus, both films look to detail their own futuristic environments and themes on city-life and urbanization through an intimate use of verticality and structural awareness, making both films efficiently-organized efforts detailing elaborate themes with inherent aspects to their setting.
As with high school, I will make a priority of publishing the major essays I write in college (not all, but most), and work to give an overview of them and state their purpose. This essay was dubbed "The Vertical City," where we were required to pick another film and analyze its visual representations of verticality alongside Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis, along with describing what the ideas of verticality bring about in a symbolic manner. I chose to compare Spike Jonze's Her, and received an A- (90%) on this essay, complimented for my "admirable" detail and full use of each praise but quietly criticized for my lack of diction.
Nonetheless I present you with the version of "Standing Tall" I submitted for a grade.
[....]
Standing Tall: An examination of verticality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Spike Jonze's Her
The symmetrical cityscape in Metropolis.
verticality. For almost a century, verticality has been an intricate part of urban filmmaking and studies, communicating an idea or a system through the general, upright layout of a city. Two prime examples in film where verticality takes on its own separate meaning are Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, released in 1927, and Spike Jonze’s Her, released in 2013. While the films’ release dates are spaced out by almost ninety years, both Lang’s Metropolis and Jonze’s Her illustrate ideas of verticality in order to create their own futuristic worlds and ideas brought forth by societal urbanization, with Metropolis predominately focusing on representing a stern class system and inequality and Her using the idea to detail a technology-driven society.
Serving as the first feature-length science fiction film and a jumpstart to the German expressionist movement, Metropolis concerns a dystopian society, where the gap between the working class and the elite is as large as ever. The film focuses on the sharp divide between the lives of dehumanized, overworked employees of the city, working around the clock like programmed automatons to keep the city running, while the elite class seem to find new ways to oppress the working class. Despite this divide, a man in the upper class winds up falling in love with a woman from the working class, leading to unforeseen consequences in the city.
Joaquin Phoenix in his penthouse in Her.
In Jonze’s Her, we are placed in an undisclosed time in the future, when technology has redefined life so much so that even the buildings and the layout of the city have taken on a sleeker, more computerized look. We follow a man who buys a new computer operating system, equipped with artificial intelligence so advanced that he can have a conversation with it on intimate, emotional levels. His operating system, simply a computer with a female voice, becomes his romantic interest, and the film shows the progression of their relationship in ways that transcend the boundaries of man’s relationship with technology.
Both Metropolis and Her bear the same idea of questioning the future and what it holds, one with a political focus and, the other, a technological one, with both films illustrating this idea through the use of verticality. The concept is immediately brought forth by the way each director structures and, in turn, portrays their respective city. Metropolis, in its opening scenes, shows a city run in the form of gears turning and people tirelessly working, where Her shows a spacious, more atmospheric city, captured with large amounts of headroom and a wide lenses to be all inclusive to its cityscape. Film critic Roger Ebert makes note of Metropolis’s verticality saying, “Lang tells of a towering city of the future. Above ground, it has spires and towers, elevated highways, an Olympian stadium and Pleasure Gardens. Below the surface is a workers' city where the clocks show 10 hours to squeeze out more work time, the workers live in tenement housing and work consists of unrelenting service to a machine” (1).
In Metropolis, we see the structural layout of the average building forms a class system, with the richest members of society on top and the poorest members on the bottom. This allows for ideas of ascent and descent to come into play, with society’s richest residing comfortably overlooking the cityscapes, while the poorest reside in dark, underground bunkers with little light or surface resources. With Her, the structure is similar, but we see less of the latter focus in the film. Instead, we see a larger focus on who resides on the top of those large high rise buildings, where the richer members of society live. The main character of Her is a wealthy but introverted Los Angeles resident who, like most of his residential neighbors, prefers interacting with technology over his human companions, but the demonstration of this structural sociology is shown in the regard that most of the characters in the film, who are just as well off as our lead, live near the top of the large buildings in Los Angeles, in lavish penthouses or lofts. With that being said, both Metropolis and Her function similarly when it comes to creating an idea of a certain class system by structuring their skyscrapers in such a way that separates, while simultaneously integrates, society’s poorest and wealthiest.
Another apparent aspect of Metropolis and Her is how they create atmospheres and themes based on key features of their environment, again, through the use of verticality. This is a stylistic touch employed by the respective directors of both films that allows for some visual flair to be included. Metropolis, on one hand, is often very symmetrical, showing buildings, traditional and unconventional, that are identical on both sides. The film takes time to illustrate the film’s environment by intently looking at the buildings that make up this dystopian society, creating an environment through photographical/locational touches. Kristen Whissel, in a lengthy piece on verticality, writes, “Skyscrapers, national monuments, elevator shafts, upended ocean liners, high towers[…], and chasms all function with equal efficiency to polarize conflict, to frame possible outcomes in terms of a devastating fall and/or a willfully insurgent rise” (2). Whissel states the significance of the prolific fixation on these buildings is for the director to hint at these recurring themes.
In Metropolis, the scenes focusing on towering skyscrapers, and those working in them, for a lengthy amount of time polarize viewers with their themes of urban alienation and employee inequality, creating a plethora of issues for the viewer to contemplate. Her’s frequent focus on buildings is for different purposes than Metropolis, subtly showing futuristic buildings that, at first glance, don’t seem to look much different than the skyscrapers we see today, but show their technological efficiency and their aesthetic sleekness is far beyond the modern tower today over time. Her shows these buildings’ exteriors quite frequently, from a distance, and their interiors with an abnormal and sometimes jarring amount of headroom for its characters, showing how tiny and almost myopic the characters appear in such buildings. The technological and aesthetic superiority of these buildings are incomparable to the technologically-savvy people within them, and Jonze portrays this using techniques adhering to the admiration and the fixation with the vertical city. The fact that such simple shots contribute to such important meanings places these films at a level that is, thematically, more significant, and further establishes the impact and far-reaching abilities of verticality.
Finally, there’s an element of urban loneliness explored in Metropolis and Her, effectively communicated through verticality. Metropolis, right off the bat, makes note of its crowded environment, showing a countless band of worn workers piling into factories to begin their ten-hour routine. The streets and buildings are crowded, and when we see these workers pile in buildings in a shoulder-to-shoulder fashion, we question if there is any element of personal space at all. With Her, the same sort of issue arises; Los Angeles has streets infested with people but all are too absorbed in their technology to take any notice. Our lead character in Her is desperately lonely, starved for companionship, and, in a world where technology is accessible and lightning fast, finds it with his artificially intelligent operating system. Many scenes in Her show our star wandering waywardly down crowded plazas and in spacious subways, all occupied with people with one thing in common – no immediate desire for any human interaction whatsoever, and ironically, living near large buildings with hundreds of people. Author Barbara Mennel comments on the themes often explored with the vertical city, specifically speaking of Berlin, by saying the films often “thematize urbanity, especially the period’s understanding of the dangers and pleasures of modern urban life: crime, anonymity, a loosening of morality, and class struggle…”(Mennel 23), further acknowledging the use of darker elements in urban films.
In summation, verticality can detail many different concepts, such as inequality, integrated yet unequal environments, and even ideas of alienation and loneliness in crowded spaces. Metropolis and Her are just two examples in a populated genre of films looking to explore city-life, some with optimistic or pessimistic undertones. While both films explore the future with a slightly similar focus, both films look to detail their own futuristic environments and themes on city-life and urbanization through an intimate use of verticality and structural awareness, making both films efficiently-organized efforts detailing elaborate themes with inherent aspects to their setting.
Works Cited
Ebert,
Roger. “Metropolis Movie Review.”
Rev. of Metropolis, by Roger Ebert.
Roger
Ebert, 2010. Web. 5 Oct. 2014.
Mennel,
Barbara. Cities and Cinema. New York:
Routledge, 2008.
Print. 5 Oct. 2014.
Whissel,
Kristen. “Tales of Upward Mobility.” Film
Quarterly 59.2 (2006): 2.
University
of California Press. Web. 5 Oct. 2014.
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