Satire In Brave New World And Metropolis
Literature is a translation of the world around us, offering insights into which core paradigms reflect the contextual factors that defined the thoughts and actions of humanity. The motivations of politics represent the best and worst of human nature, and through the study of the underlying political commentary in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (BNW) and Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent sci-fi film Metropolis, these motivations are demonstrated. Reflecting and critiquing the oppressive social and political values of their time, Brave New World and Metropolis each serve as a medium of exerting their composers beliefs. These dystopian texts serves as a catalyst for criticising the inability for a perfect society to eliminate revolution when imposing
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20th century Satirist Aldous Huxley felt dystopic satire was a powerful medium for social awareness and could ‘arouse in his audience such emotions that would make us want to examine our lives and change them.’ In his 1931 novel, Brave New World, Huxley ironically parallels human nature and depicts a dystopia where scientific progress has created a culture that cannot live with the values and governments accepted today, casting the reader into an environment where mankind has lost its humanity and. In the novel satire graphically represents how destructive the tendency to venerate science can be. Nature is suppressed and technology has coldly enslaved mankind rather than liberated it. In the hatchery 'the light was frozen, dead, a ghost' while the workers in the 'squat grey building' of the Conditioning Centre become mere “spectres of men and women.” They have been made into soulless drones who never question or challenge. Mankind has become mindless, “like aphids and ants” existing in an environment which is sterile and scientific. The Fertilising Room is described with a chilling tone of “frozen, dead, ghostly light” a place occupied by workers whose hands are 'gloved with a pale corpse coloured rubber'. Everything is mechanised and emotionless. The values of the Weimar Republic set the doctrine of the film in which visual forms reveal the ironic mastery of machine and industrialisation over man. Lang uses a montage of machines cross cut with the symbol of a mechanical clock ticking to midnight to emphasise the political and social chaos in his society. Additional cuts of steam vents signify the underlying pressures that plagued the Weimar Republic by in the interwar period, but also the ideological tensions that characterized the period. Tension leads to revolution in Metropolis. The worker’s revolution is a reflection of the
20th century Satirist Aldous Huxley felt dystopic satire was a powerful medium for social awareness and could ‘arouse in his audience such emotions that would make us want to examine our lives and change them.’ In his 1931 novel, Brave New World, Huxley ironically parallels human nature and depicts a dystopia where scientific progress has created a culture that cannot live with the values and governments accepted today, casting the reader into an environment where mankind has lost its humanity and. In the novel satire graphically represents how destructive the tendency to venerate science can be. Nature is suppressed and technology has coldly enslaved mankind rather than liberated it. In the hatchery 'the light was frozen, dead, a ghost' while the workers in the 'squat grey building' of the Conditioning Centre become mere “spectres of men and women.” They have been made into soulless drones who never question or challenge. Mankind has become mindless, “like aphids and ants” existing in an environment which is sterile and scientific. The Fertilising Room is described with a chilling tone of “frozen, dead, ghostly light” a place occupied by workers whose hands are 'gloved with a pale corpse coloured rubber'. Everything is mechanised and emotionless. The values of the Weimar Republic set the doctrine of the film in which visual forms reveal the ironic mastery of machine and industrialisation over man. Lang uses a montage of machines cross cut with the symbol of a mechanical clock ticking to midnight to emphasise the political and social chaos in his society. Additional cuts of steam vents signify the underlying pressures that plagued the Weimar Republic by in the interwar period, but also the ideological tensions that characterized the period. Tension leads to revolution in Metropolis. The worker’s revolution is a reflection of the