'Saving metropolis': Body and city in the 'Metropolis' tales.

摘要

The image of the destruction of the city has a long history, and resonates disturbingly with current events. It seems to question the very possibility of creating an architecture—that is, of giving the world a form and thereby meaning. This thesis charts mutations of that imagery as it emerges in three visual narratives punctuating the last century: the Metropolis tales. These are Fritz Lang's film of 1926, Tezuka Osamu's manga or graphic novel of 1949, and the 2001 work anime or Japanese animated film by director Rintarô. Despite their differences, these tales exhibit a fundamental overlap of concern: each deals in its own way with crises in modern conditions of life, crises articulated not only in the imagery of the city but also in that of the broken bodies central to it. The thesis argues that this imagery, hovering at the brink of and ultimately passing beyond the line of apocalypse, articulates an undiminished human yearning to engage in a life project. In our time this yearning, this desire, takes on a new form in which the city and the body adopt a precarious and problematic relationship to their image. But perhaps the seeming instability of this condition as articulated in disrupted bodies and cities is a more faithful reflection of the fundamental human anxiety reflected in myth, and the more foundational destructuring involved in our perception and making of the world, than any whole and healthy body, than any utopia.