And half of us go to high paid jobs that are not somehow more human than what he depicted.
Beware the cultural, subconscious lie that "more money means you're happier". Plenty of low-paid people are happier at their jobs than plenty of millionaires.
"Money, if it does not bring you happiness, will at least help you be miserable in comfort."
Money may not bring you fulfillment, or love, etc. But currently, it can decisively solve most of Maslow's hierarchy-of-needs (with a few exceptions like illness). The unhappiness from having a hole in Maslow's hierarchy is a pretty bitter, cruel thing - especially if reaches the point of losing family members or friends.
('Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.'), for the purists.)
The argument is about the future and what it could look like. The hope of machinery is that it can free us. And yet if we look around, much of labor is rote and serves merely to sustain existence. Instead of freeing us, we are incorporated into the machine framework, and it has reduced our humanity. That's what Lang warned us about and that's what we're finding.
Earlier today I spent some time to read about "Lawrence of Arabia" (I watched it a couple of days ago, essentially for the first time in my life), and I discovered so many interesting things, such as:
1) The movie received 7 oscars!
2) It was based on the life of T.E. Lawrence
3) The director, David Lean, also directed "Bridge on the river Kwai" in 1957 (which also won some oscars), before working on Lawrence of Arabia.
4) There's no love story. The movie lasts for almost 4 hours! It was shot in 70mm.
5) It's interesting how the protagonist's sexuality is never openly discussed, but it's hinted that he might have been homosexual.
Etc. So, after half an hour reading about it, I realized how much more there is, besides the movie itself.
Your comment on Metropolis gave me similar insights about that movie. Thanks again for sharing it.
Lang wasn’t saying, “This is the future,” but rather, “we need to beware of a future that bends this way.” And he was right. The mechanizations that were meant, as Wells says, to liberate us didn’t entirely. We’re no longer marching shoulder to shoulder to the caves to work mechanically, but half of us go to low paid jobs that are not somehow more human than what he depicted. An Amazon or Uber driver may not look like a fleshy cog in an oversized machine but he or she might certainly feel that way.
Lang was sitting us down as children and telling us a fable and the fable had a moral: in the future we need to take care lest we the humans are reduced to machinery and the machinery sublimated to human. And Lang was prescient because, 100 years later, that is what we’ve found.