Lang's Metropolis

The Marxist social critique has spawned various mediums of popular culture, none more so than that of film. One of the examples I always think of is the darkly modern and realistic Metropolis; depicting a Marx-like class struggle. A city of duel classes; of the bourgeoisie capitalists who live in the sky and control the lives of the homogenized proletariat who exist underground. For the masses of workers the mode of production is their life; “the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it” (Marx The German Ideology). This film is not just about the commodification of man, but it shows the results of years of this type of commodification; that the human can never be efficient enough to satiate the hunger of capitalism, so there must be drastic measures to replace man with that which can meet the demands. The workers are therefore sacrificed to the machinery that replaces them, which takes the form of the M-Machine. Marx pointed out the realities of the capitalistic system in an attempt to educate and enlighten those inherently at odds with such a system—the proletariat.

A clip showing the strict deviation between the uninhibited and lavish life of bourgeoisie and the dark realities of the homogenized proletariat.

A Freudian 'Hamlet'

Most of what Freud said was bull shit, but his ideas persist to this day and laid much of the foundations of modern psychoanalysis. Though Freud’s theories that are laid in foundations of science and subjectivity are few, his other theories make for good conversation and literary analysis. We where to use a Freudian analysis of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and mine is along these lines:

Hamlet’s guilt lies in his desire to kill his uncle, and the possession of his mother—always a desire—has been won by Claudius. He hesitates killing Claudius because Claudius is a familial representation (something close in blood and spirit) of Hamlet’s repressed childhood fantasies (to possess his mother sexually, as is every boys fantasy according to Freud). To kill Claudius is to kill a part of himself, or at least the actualization of his desires. Claudius has shown Hamlet the repressed wishes of his own childhood, and Hamlet is therefore unable to kill his uncle until his mother dies and the union (and therefore Hamlet’s repressed guilt) is broken.