The Unreal City of T.S. Eliot Essays

The Unreal City of T.S. Eliot Essays The Unreal City of T.S. Eliot Essay The Unreal City of T.S. Eliot Essay A parallel can be drawn between T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land’s bleak landscape and pessimistic view of society’s future, and the modernist films of the German Expressionism film movement in the early 1920s. Films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine, 1920), The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, 1924) and Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) will be the basis for this comparison to Eliot’s text. The pessimism pervading a post-WWI society, especially in the urban sphere, will be examined, along with demonstrating how all of these texts display a tendency towards experimentation in form, often with the intention of expressing a deeper psychological meaning. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land displays anxieties surrounding the pointlessness, or directionlessness, of the modern human being. He sees society as a collection lost children, falling to conformity and abandoning their culture. In section I, when he conjures up notions of crowds with ‘each man [having] fixed his eyes before his feet’, (Eliot l. 66) the comparison to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is abundantly clear. In the below figure, one can clearly see the how Lang and Eliot had similar anxieties surrounding the growing tendency towards conformity in the modern era. In section II, this language becomes even stronger with Eliot questioning the direction the members of his society are taking: â€Å"What shall I do now? What shall I do?What shall we do tomorrow? What shall we ever do?† (ll. 131-134), he questions â€Å"Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?† (l.126), and concludes that everyone is so brainless that they are merely playing a game and ‘waiting for a knock upon the door’ (l.138). This idea of a society so mindless that individuals collectively have no brain to question the system, and walk willingly into the end of their unfulfilled lives, is exactly the same idea Lang was illustrating in perhaps the most famous scene in Metropolis. The scene in qu