Murderers Among Us

Fritz Lang’s M clearly captures the kind of German mindset that would eventually lead to the power of the Nazis and with almost disturbing foresight, seems to portray a glimpse of Germany’s future. The first introduction of this idea is early in the film when the men who are reading about the recent murder suddenly start accusing someone of being the murderer. The film then provides numerous other examples of people immediately singling out individuals for even the slightest suspicious action. This paranoid suspicion seems to show the German people to be capable of blaming anyone for being the one who threatened their peace the instant any opportunity presented itself. The fact that the murderer is even labeled with a white “M” on his back which marks him as being different from any other person also seems to mirror the clear differentiating of an enemy for everyone to direct their hate toward. Despite all of the forces massing against the murderer, he himself seems like a prediction of things to come. He is a seemingly typical (though, similar to Rath in The Blue Angel, very childlike) middle class man, but he turns out to be a monster, externally forced on by some internal malicious will to kill innocent children. Beckert is the very cause of all the fear and distrust that circulates among the people, but this internal fear that the people have seems to externally push them down a dangerous path of suspicion and distrust.

Also, in taking all action possible to find the killer, the police go so far as to, in a very totalitarian action, threaten the privacy of both criminals and innocents as they sweep public places. The orderly formation of the police as they perform this search also brings to mind images of marching military troops and appears oddly reminiscent of images of marching Nazis. Ultimately, the paranoia of the police only feeds into the fear and paranoia that exists in the already uneasy people.

On a slightly off topic side note, here is a link to a youtube video showing some of the missing footage from Metropolis that was discovered in Argentina. Anyone who watched the Kino DVD that described the missing scenes might notice that at about 1:44 in the video it shows the missing scene where the worker Freder trades places with goes to Yoshiwara to squander all of his money.