The city of Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1927) comprises three zones. At one extreme are the elite who live in skyscrapers in a privileged idyll, at the other, the working classes confined to a subterranean existence. Lang employs 30,000 extras to represent the workers, their actions uniform and mechanical as they synchronously wrench controls to power the machine of the city. The upper classes reap the benefits of industrialisation, living lavishly in the ‘Eternal Gardens’, where women dress in the latest fashions and men compete in athletics stadiums, all at the expense of the workers below.In the third zone lives Maria, a beautiful young teacher, neither elite nor labourer, who is able to bridge the two worlds. She captures the attention of Freder, the son of the city’s authoritarian founder, Joh Fredersen. Joh fears that Maria is inciting a worker’s revolt, and orders evil inventor Rotwang to kidnap her and transplant her appearance onto his latest invention, a robot in human form. Maria is connected to the robot via electrodes and wires, and Rotwang initiates the transformation. The robot is surrounded by hovering discs of light and crackling electric currents, while glass tubes transfer bubbling liquids from human to machine, until Maria’s counterpart emerges. Today she would be described as a cyborg, a term coined in the 1960s to describe an organism with biological and mechanical body parts.Whilst they share a likeness, the cyborg is radically different to Maria, and proceeds to rebel against her programming, instructing the workers to destroy their machines, subsequently flooding the city.Maria’s transformation into a vengeful robotic female coincides with an undercurrent of uncertainty on the role of women in German society of the time — the Weimar era (1918–1933). A decade earlier, in 1919, German women had achieved the right to vote. This provided the impetus for the rise of the New Woman in 1920s Germany, an independent and sexually liberated woman, who broke tradition by driving cars, attending nightclubs, and wearing skimpier clothing. For conservative Germans the New Woman represented a threat to the feminine ideal, and Lang mirrors these fears through Maria’s transformation. When Joh and Rotwang take her to a nightclub, passing her off as human, her provocative dancing on stage hypnotises the lecherous watching men, and their eyes fill the entire screen — a reflection on the sexuality of the emerging New Woman, and its power over men.Within this mix, Lang also plays upon the fear of new technology. The ruling elite use technology to their own advantage, and Cyborg Maria, herself a product of technology, disrupts the status quo, inciting fear and chaos in the dominant classes.At the time of release, Metropolis was not a success, but today it is recognised as one of the earliest science-fiction films, and has had a marked influence on film and popular culture. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) features a towering police station, similar to the ‘Tower of Babel’, the highest skyscraper in Metropolis, where Joh Fredersen lives. The English rock band Queen used original footage in their music video for Radio Gaga (1984), which opens with workers wrenching controls, and later shows the band members zooming between the city’s skyscrapers. In 2010, fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld created a shoot for Vogue magazine titled ‘Return to Metropolis’. The cover features a close-up black-and-white image of a model with vampish makeup, gazing directly into the camera which recalls the initial shot of the cyborg Maria’s awakening in the film.