SG1 go undercover Beneath the Surface of a science fiction legend ..
When I was watching Beneath The Surface the first time I saw this episode I went 'NO WAY, they are so **NOT** doing this are they?' Then, having watched the episode in its entirety, and seen the whole thing played out, it was perfectly obvious they were doing exactly what I thought they were. Of course it made a lot of sense too.
It's a trope that turns up a lot in SciFi these days. Star Trek used it twice (once in the Classic Series and once in Voyager), the director of Blade Runner who did it however, used a few more internal themes than Gene Roddenbury did. The film called The Fifth Element used one particular element and Impostor which I watched for a totally different reason (it had an actor from another fandom in it) did a reverse version of the story which made me blink a little. Even my earliest Fandom, British Blake's Seven, used some themes, as far as they could do on their terribly limited BBC budget. Then there was the Musical version that ran for six months in London and apparently there has even been an opera in Italian. I must also not forget the recent Japanese Anime adaptation which I have yet to watch, and the 2006 BBC Radio version which, although it got an award, I turned it off after fifteen minutes as I was so horrified at what they had done with the story.
On the way through its life since 1926 just about every Film Studies student and person at Film School (and Peter DeLuise presumably) has been shown this film too, so its had a big effect. It probably will for a long, long time to come to because it broke such new ground with its ideas.
So, this is something pretty fundamentally influential but what am I talking about? Well, in his Director's Commentary Peter in this DeLuise tells us about how, of course, Beneath the Surface is an homage to the great silent film Metropolis. Now what's all **that** about you ask? Well that is what I am here for. If you don't know, I'll tell you, if you know already play along with me and I might surprise you with a few of the references which are made.
Metropolis is thought of as the first really important Science Fiction film to have been made. When Fritz Lang set out in 1926 to create his masterpiece of silent cinema I am very sure he would not have realised how much of an impact it would have on films for many years to come. At the time it was made it very nearly bankrupted the German film studio and it was deemed to have such a complicated plot it was cut down for American consumption. For years they showed an edited edition that had lost a large part of the plot (they also lost the parts that had been cut out of it) and since then there have been many, many versions trying to restore Metropolis it to its original glory. There have even been any number of musical scores written for orchestras, or with modern music depending on the composer's taste. In the 1980s Gorgio Moroder even coloured the black and white film and gave it a rock soundtrack. This is the version I am most familiar with because it came out about the time I got involved.
As I said the original film was thought lost until they found a definitive copy of it only last summer in 2008. We, the aficionados (and I count myself amongst them) are waiting with baited breath to see what we have actually missed. In 2026 it will be the film’s 100th birthday and that will be a great day. They are also talking about doing a remake, but I hope it can do justice to the history that goes before.
So what is the story of Metropolis? Well, it would be a lot to tell you about here, and many themes so I shall do a quick précis of the main, important, ideas to explain:
(1) In 2026 in a future dystopia the City of Metropolis has two separate classes - the thinkers who live in the city above and those work on the machines below ground.
(2) The man who runs the whole City, the Master of Metropolis, has a son who rebels and goes down to the machine rooms.
(3) There a girl, called Maria, a sort of early-type trade union leader, who the son (predictably) falls in love with. It's the old Romeo and Juliet story. The Master, angry at what she is doing to his son, gets a copy made of her - a robot copy - and sends this down to disrupt the worker's labour organisation. It's the 3 Ds that our Film studies teachers talk about; Danger, Duplication and Duplicity.
(4) It all goes horribly wrong of course (no need to tell that story here) but eventually everything ends up sorted out with the Master talking with the workers and son and girlfriend acting as intermediaries. The tag line is 'Between the minds that think and the hands that work there has to be a mediator: the heart'.
Various people have clips of the film on YouTube but the following excerpt is the most useful for our purposes. Its about five minutes long but I suggest you watch it all because it gives you a good idea of the machine rooms and the city above it. We are also introduced to Freder the son of the Master of Metropolis and see his reaction to what he sees.
Now **my** introduction to Metropolis was in 1989, when, while I was at university, actors I knew working in the West End in London, worked in a stage musical version of the story. It was great fun for everyone involved, including me as a visitor to their theatre, acting out the film in 3D with an amazing set on stage and actors running about and up and down it playing the various characters. I would sit at the stage door watching the cast going about their business, Metropolis actually happening around me, and listening to the show as it was piped round the theatre over the PA system. Sometimes between shows on Matinee days I was even invited to wander the empty stage, to walk amongst the Machines and take part in climbing the set. Everyone from actors to technicians loved doing that and some used to come in early just to climb it before a performance. As the whole thing was as tall as a house, all ladders and valves and metal walkways, you had to be fit to get up and down it. I fell in love with it from the start. In this clip (which I was amazed and excited to see on YouTube) we see my friends was the workers of Metropolis having their meeting with Maria in the machine rooms after their shift.
Here is a picture of our original set, a lovely thing of pipes and cogs and wheels, designed by Jerome Savary and based on a car gearbox...
Now, getting back to the story of Metropolis, as you will realise Beneath the Surface replaces the son and his girlfriend with SG1 and misses out one element of the story - the trope of the Robot impostor. She will turn up later in the Stargate arc; as RepliCarter in Threads in Season Eight. I have already talked about the mad scientist Rotwang who made the robot in the last meta I did for The First Ones. He may get a mention when I meta Threads too as RepliCarter's maker has more than a few similarities with the original Metropolis scientist. What we are left with in Beneath the Surface is SG1 taking the role of the protagonists where the Robot / love story are removed and finding out just about how things run on P3R-118 and how to help free the workers. Let's see how those match up.
So, when I saw Brenna standing on the metal walkway in Beneath the Surface, looking down at the machines in Section 23 I knew exactly what was going on in that episode. Characters had done the same on the set in Metropolis the Musical enough times and although she is not totally Maria of the original story she has elements of her in there.
If you compare our set with the still of the Original film, and what we see of Section 23 in Beneath the Surface, you can see my suspicions. I was wondering if TPTB saw our show or at least saw something, perhaps one of the amateur productions that have run in America and Canada a couple of times since then. They certainly didn't base their studio set on Fritz Lang's Machine Rooms did they? Oddly enough too, in the original film and novelisation it was Machine Room V (I presume the number 5 in roman numerals) where everything happens. In our musical it was Machine Room 22, in Beneath the Surface its Section 23 … I leave you to make your judgement on the scary coincidences.
Here is Jack, and the scene in the office with Administrator Calder with the window behind them looking out upon the city on P3R-118. (BTW even that is a homage to Metropolis as the workers in that story are known by numbers rather than names. George, the one the Master's son befriends, is 11811). I laughed out loud when I saw what was going on out the window behind them …
You will remember the view below from the clip of the original film I showed you earlier in the meta ...
What I do need to point out here too is that in Beneath the Surface the animated scene was probably pretty easy for the effects team to put together. In 1926 it all had to be done by hand, with stop-animation. If you notice HOW MANY TINY CARS there are in this scene … No wonder took so long and it cost so much.
Now to talk more about this scene with Jack and Calder. This location is always important in all the films as the master and his son, or their representatives in certain other films always have their discussion here.
Freder and his father in 1926 …
We also see this as the place the master is at work his centre of power. We also see the different attitude his various incarnations have to the workers. Women may have been to the workforce since 1926 (StarTrek was the first to do that) and we may have made it equal opportunities race wise, and added or taken away children in the story, but their treatment, and the attitude to the man who is in charge, is the same ...
In the silent film the inter-titles, short and to the point as they have to be, the question is asked about 'Where do the hands belong in your scheme?' / 'In the depths where they belong,' comes the response.
The original novel (written by Lang's wife Thea Von Harbou, there are various electronic versions on the web if you are interested) elaborates on this. "I cannot help them," said the brain of Metropolis. "Nobody can help them. They are where they must be. They are what they must be. They are not fitted for anything more or anything different."
In the musical Steven, the son says; 'The people never see daylight, they eat and sleep in the shadow of the machines and they live and die like cattle.' The Master, John Freeman replies thus: 'They don't know any better. They're perfectly happy the way they are. It would be cruel for them to know anything else.'
In Beneath the Surface there are familiar themes and lines. Jack talks about slavery ... and Calder says the workers would never fit in to the society above ground …he even says to Brenna, “They’re happy where they are! That’s what the stamp assures." which to me is practically a direct quote from the musical …
We don't know how the b/w silent film Metropolis inhabitants got into their predicament but in Beneath the Surface is hinted at as being caused by a more ecological reason. Calder tells Jack that their way of life has got them through an ice age and the recent film The Day after Tomorrow uses the moving Gulf Stream as the reason that happened. In 1989 our musical's answer was in a similar vein, John Freeman said; “Earth's resources are exhausted. There is no energy left but human energy. We are elitists and they are workers, that is all there is to know.”
It is noticeable that in Beneath the Surface - an episode in a family show - no-one gets killed. In other versions of Metropolis this is not so. I recognised Teal'c's collapse and the subsequent saving of the inhabitants of Section 23 by all of the rest of SG1 - their act of selflessness -- as a couple of scenes in the film or musical (you can take your pick on this) combined. In the musical version we see the girlfriend of a worker, George, killed in an accident on the machines. Steven later swaps places with him and sends him up to the surface to experience life as privileged Elitist. In the b/w film their huge explosion, where a lot of workers were killed, is, as you saw prefaced by a shot of a gauge going up and up until the system explodes. YOu will realise therefore where TPTB got their idea with that stuff with Tor ... Later in the film Freder rushes in to save Georgi, who is also about to pass out, at one of the machines and takes his place.
It is also interesting that in the film it is The Master Fredersen and Scientist Rotwang who capture Maria the trade union leader to carry her off to be duplicated as a robot. In the musical however this is done by Freeman's henchman Jeremiah. I see this as more Administrator Calder's role in Beneath the Surface (he seems a similar jumped up little toad who enjoys power) and in the musical the henchman had two heavies to help just like Calder's red suited guys with guns ...
As you see I could go on forever with the little subtle things an aficionado could spot but I am going to leave things here. I think I have proved the point I was starting out to make here, and shown how this film has become important, part of how we look at the future in a certain way. Lets finish with a couple of shots, one from the musical, one from Beneath the Surface, of the workers finally able to see the sky.
Cast of Metropolis the Musical, Piccadilly Theatre, London 1989
Beneath the Surface ... pretty similar eh?
The 1926 happy ending - Freder starts negotiations between his father and Grot the foreman of the workers .
"Between the hands that work and the mind that thinks there has to be a mediator - the heart"
It's a trope that turns up a lot in SciFi these days. Star Trek used it twice (once in the Classic Series and once in Voyager), the director of Blade Runner who did it however, used a few more internal themes than Gene Roddenbury did. The film called The Fifth Element used one particular element and Impostor which I watched for a totally different reason (it had an actor from another fandom in it) did a reverse version of the story which made me blink a little. Even my earliest Fandom, British Blake's Seven, used some themes, as far as they could do on their terribly limited BBC budget. Then there was the Musical version that ran for six months in London and apparently there has even been an opera in Italian. I must also not forget the recent Japanese Anime adaptation which I have yet to watch, and the 2006 BBC Radio version which, although it got an award, I turned it off after fifteen minutes as I was so horrified at what they had done with the story.
On the way through its life since 1926 just about every Film Studies student and person at Film School (and Peter DeLuise presumably) has been shown this film too, so its had a big effect. It probably will for a long, long time to come to because it broke such new ground with its ideas.
So, this is something pretty fundamentally influential but what am I talking about? Well, in his Director's Commentary Peter in this DeLuise tells us about how, of course, Beneath the Surface is an homage to the great silent film Metropolis. Now what's all **that** about you ask? Well that is what I am here for. If you don't know, I'll tell you, if you know already play along with me and I might surprise you with a few of the references which are made.
Metropolis is thought of as the first really important Science Fiction film to have been made. When Fritz Lang set out in 1926 to create his masterpiece of silent cinema I am very sure he would not have realised how much of an impact it would have on films for many years to come. At the time it was made it very nearly bankrupted the German film studio and it was deemed to have such a complicated plot it was cut down for American consumption. For years they showed an edited edition that had lost a large part of the plot (they also lost the parts that had been cut out of it) and since then there have been many, many versions trying to restore Metropolis it to its original glory. There have even been any number of musical scores written for orchestras, or with modern music depending on the composer's taste. In the 1980s Gorgio Moroder even coloured the black and white film and gave it a rock soundtrack. This is the version I am most familiar with because it came out about the time I got involved.
As I said the original film was thought lost until they found a definitive copy of it only last summer in 2008. We, the aficionados (and I count myself amongst them) are waiting with baited breath to see what we have actually missed. In 2026 it will be the film’s 100th birthday and that will be a great day. They are also talking about doing a remake, but I hope it can do justice to the history that goes before.
So what is the story of Metropolis? Well, it would be a lot to tell you about here, and many themes so I shall do a quick précis of the main, important, ideas to explain:
(1) In 2026 in a future dystopia the City of Metropolis has two separate classes - the thinkers who live in the city above and those work on the machines below ground.
(2) The man who runs the whole City, the Master of Metropolis, has a son who rebels and goes down to the machine rooms.
(3) There a girl, called Maria, a sort of early-type trade union leader, who the son (predictably) falls in love with. It's the old Romeo and Juliet story. The Master, angry at what she is doing to his son, gets a copy made of her - a robot copy - and sends this down to disrupt the worker's labour organisation. It's the 3 Ds that our Film studies teachers talk about; Danger, Duplication and Duplicity.
(4) It all goes horribly wrong of course (no need to tell that story here) but eventually everything ends up sorted out with the Master talking with the workers and son and girlfriend acting as intermediaries. The tag line is 'Between the minds that think and the hands that work there has to be a mediator: the heart'.
Various people have clips of the film on YouTube but the following excerpt is the most useful for our purposes. Its about five minutes long but I suggest you watch it all because it gives you a good idea of the machine rooms and the city above it. We are also introduced to Freder the son of the Master of Metropolis and see his reaction to what he sees.
Click to viewNow **my** introduction to Metropolis was in 1989, when, while I was at university, actors I knew working in the West End in London, worked in a stage musical version of the story. It was great fun for everyone involved, including me as a visitor to their theatre, acting out the film in 3D with an amazing set on stage and actors running about and up and down it playing the various characters. I would sit at the stage door watching the cast going about their business, Metropolis actually happening around me, and listening to the show as it was piped round the theatre over the PA system. Sometimes between shows on Matinee days I was even invited to wander the empty stage, to walk amongst the Machines and take part in climbing the set. Everyone from actors to technicians loved doing that and some used to come in early just to climb it before a performance. As the whole thing was as tall as a house, all ladders and valves and metal walkways, you had to be fit to get up and down it. I fell in love with it from the start. In this clip (which I was amazed and excited to see on YouTube) we see my friends was the workers of Metropolis having their meeting with Maria in the machine rooms after their shift.
Here is a picture of our original set, a lovely thing of pipes and cogs and wheels, designed by Jerome Savary and based on a car gearbox...
Now, getting back to the story of Metropolis, as you will realise Beneath the Surface replaces the son and his girlfriend with SG1 and misses out one element of the story - the trope of the Robot impostor. She will turn up later in the Stargate arc; as RepliCarter in Threads in Season Eight. I have already talked about the mad scientist Rotwang who made the robot in the last meta I did for The First Ones. He may get a mention when I meta Threads too as RepliCarter's maker has more than a few similarities with the original Metropolis scientist. What we are left with in Beneath the Surface is SG1 taking the role of the protagonists where the Robot / love story are removed and finding out just about how things run on P3R-118 and how to help free the workers. Let's see how those match up.
So, when I saw Brenna standing on the metal walkway in Beneath the Surface, looking down at the machines in Section 23 I knew exactly what was going on in that episode. Characters had done the same on the set in Metropolis the Musical enough times and although she is not totally Maria of the original story she has elements of her in there.
If you compare our set with the still of the Original film, and what we see of Section 23 in Beneath the Surface, you can see my suspicions. I was wondering if TPTB saw our show or at least saw something, perhaps one of the amateur productions that have run in America and Canada a couple of times since then. They certainly didn't base their studio set on Fritz Lang's Machine Rooms did they? Oddly enough too, in the original film and novelisation it was Machine Room V (I presume the number 5 in roman numerals) where everything happens. In our musical it was Machine Room 22, in Beneath the Surface its Section 23 … I leave you to make your judgement on the scary coincidences.
Here is Jack, and the scene in the office with Administrator Calder with the window behind them looking out upon the city on P3R-118. (BTW even that is a homage to Metropolis as the workers in that story are known by numbers rather than names. George, the one the Master's son befriends, is 11811). I laughed out loud when I saw what was going on out the window behind them …
You will remember the view below from the clip of the original film I showed you earlier in the meta ...
What I do need to point out here too is that in Beneath the Surface the animated scene was probably pretty easy for the effects team to put together. In 1926 it all had to be done by hand, with stop-animation. If you notice HOW MANY TINY CARS there are in this scene … No wonder took so long and it cost so much.
Now to talk more about this scene with Jack and Calder. This location is always important in all the films as the master and his son, or their representatives in certain other films always have their discussion here.
Freder and his father in 1926 …
We also see this as the place the master is at work his centre of power. We also see the different attitude his various incarnations have to the workers. Women may have been to the workforce since 1926 (StarTrek was the first to do that) and we may have made it equal opportunities race wise, and added or taken away children in the story, but their treatment, and the attitude to the man who is in charge, is the same ...
In the silent film the inter-titles, short and to the point as they have to be, the question is asked about 'Where do the hands belong in your scheme?' / 'In the depths where they belong,' comes the response.
The original novel (written by Lang's wife Thea Von Harbou, there are various electronic versions on the web if you are interested) elaborates on this. "I cannot help them," said the brain of Metropolis. "Nobody can help them. They are where they must be. They are what they must be. They are not fitted for anything more or anything different."
In the musical Steven, the son says; 'The people never see daylight, they eat and sleep in the shadow of the machines and they live and die like cattle.' The Master, John Freeman replies thus: 'They don't know any better. They're perfectly happy the way they are. It would be cruel for them to know anything else.'
In Beneath the Surface there are familiar themes and lines. Jack talks about slavery ... and Calder says the workers would never fit in to the society above ground …he even says to Brenna, “They’re happy where they are! That’s what the stamp assures." which to me is practically a direct quote from the musical …
We don't know how the b/w silent film Metropolis inhabitants got into their predicament but in Beneath the Surface is hinted at as being caused by a more ecological reason. Calder tells Jack that their way of life has got them through an ice age and the recent film The Day after Tomorrow uses the moving Gulf Stream as the reason that happened. In 1989 our musical's answer was in a similar vein, John Freeman said; “Earth's resources are exhausted. There is no energy left but human energy. We are elitists and they are workers, that is all there is to know.”
It is noticeable that in Beneath the Surface - an episode in a family show - no-one gets killed. In other versions of Metropolis this is not so. I recognised Teal'c's collapse and the subsequent saving of the inhabitants of Section 23 by all of the rest of SG1 - their act of selflessness -- as a couple of scenes in the film or musical (you can take your pick on this) combined. In the musical version we see the girlfriend of a worker, George, killed in an accident on the machines. Steven later swaps places with him and sends him up to the surface to experience life as privileged Elitist. In the b/w film their huge explosion, where a lot of workers were killed, is, as you saw prefaced by a shot of a gauge going up and up until the system explodes. YOu will realise therefore where TPTB got their idea with that stuff with Tor ... Later in the film Freder rushes in to save Georgi, who is also about to pass out, at one of the machines and takes his place.
It is also interesting that in the film it is The Master Fredersen and Scientist Rotwang who capture Maria the trade union leader to carry her off to be duplicated as a robot. In the musical however this is done by Freeman's henchman Jeremiah. I see this as more Administrator Calder's role in Beneath the Surface (he seems a similar jumped up little toad who enjoys power) and in the musical the henchman had two heavies to help just like Calder's red suited guys with guns ...
As you see I could go on forever with the little subtle things an aficionado could spot but I am going to leave things here. I think I have proved the point I was starting out to make here, and shown how this film has become important, part of how we look at the future in a certain way. Lets finish with a couple of shots, one from the musical, one from Beneath the Surface, of the workers finally able to see the sky.
Cast of Metropolis the Musical, Piccadilly Theatre, London 1989
Beneath the Surface ... pretty similar eh?
The 1926 happy ending - Freder starts negotiations between his father and Grot the foreman of the workers .
"Between the hands that work and the mind that thinks there has to be a mediator - the heart"