Comparison Between 1984 'And Metropolis'

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Recommended: The dangers of totalitarianism 1984 by George Orwell

Both Metropolis and 1984 are didactic texts that reflect the paradigmatic concerns of their time through their shared narrative of oppression and social manipulation by a totalitarian state, desperate to sustain and perpetuate their power. Fritz Lang’s expressionist film Metropolis (1927) reflects the anxieties and discontent about socio-economic inequity in the Weimar Republic of Germany following World War 1. While George Orwell, through his novel 1984, offers a “dark vision of totalitarian modernity” (William H. Rehnquist) and it’s potential corruption of the world by reflecting the post-WWII fear of political extremism as tested by Hitler and Stalin to create their own oppressive dictatorships. 

Citizens of totalitarian states are oppressed in order for an elite minority to gain ultimate power and control.
In Metropolis Fritz Lang exposes the fear of political extremism during his time, as Joh Fredersen keeps the workers in a perpetual state of oppression and denies their humanity so they have neither the will nor ability to rebel. …show more content…

In 1984 Big Brother keeps the people of Oceania in a perpetual state of war and poverty and consequently oppression so they have neither the will nor ability to rebel. This perpetual state is initially framed in Oceania’s architecture of repression: “Vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses” juxtaposed with “The Ministry of Truth…towered vast and white above the grimy landscape”. The poverty and oppression of the citizens of Oceania is crucial in order for the oligarchy to perpetuate their power as “an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction of a hierarchical society” as those “who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves”.

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