Summary
After Fredersen leaves, Freder reaches for a piece of paper on his side table, a note from Rotwang for his father. The scene shifts and we see a large party, thrown by Rotwang to display his new robotic invention. Men in tuxedos stand around talking, while nearby, a large bowl-like structure, surrounded by scantily clad black men, opens up and reveals the robot Maria, who emerges in a dramatic costume and dances for the men, who watch in awe.
A nurse tends to Freder, when suddenly Fredersen's assistant comes into the room to see him. When Freder wakes up, he hallucinates that the assistant is the monk from the church earlier, portending the apocalypse. Images of Freder staring up at the imagined pulpit are interpolated with images of the Maria robot dancing for the room full of lascivious gentleman, gyrating seductively for their benefit. We then see the passage from the Bible about the whore of Babylon, which Freder heard earlier. The illustration looks exactly like the robotic version of Maria, and we suddenly see her striking a pose in a statue, surrounded by serpents, a performative version of the story.
"For her, all seven deadly sins!" reads a supertitle, and we see the skeleton from the church coming to life. It begins to play a bone as if it were a flute, which brings the statues of the seven sins to life. The men crowd around the tableau of Maria and we see the skeleton wielding its large weapon, a grim reaper, saying, "Death descends upon the whole city!"
An intertitle says "End of Intermezzo." We see Freder awaking in an armchair and looking down at the book in his hand, "The Revelation of St. John." Suddenly Josaphat comes in and tells Freder that he is wearing a disguise to elude the assistant, whom he refers to as the Thin Man. He then tells Freder that the Thin Man is making life in the workers' city risky.
In Fredersen's office, the Thin Man tells Fredersen that "the only thing keeping the workers in check is their expectation of getting the 'mediator' promised to them."
Back in Freder's room, Josaphat tells Freder all about Maria's dance, and the fact that her seductive ways ruined many of the men's lives. We see a man engaged in a duel and another one picking up a gun to shoot himself. "The Eternal Gardens lie abandoned, but night after night in Yoshiwara..." says Josaphat, and we see the group of men gathering to see Maria dance on a different night, breaking into jealous fights over her. Josaphat refers to robot Maria as the woman "at whose feet all sins are heaped" and tells Freder that her name is Maria.
Freder is startled to hear this and frets about the fact that the pure Maria from the workers' city has so debased herself. Referring to himself as "the mediator," Freder resolves to go to the workers that night and intercept robot Maria's plot.
In his office, Fredersen tells the Thin Man, "Whatever happens tonight: it is my express order to let the workers do as they will..." The scene shifts and we see Rotwang at his home with the actual Maria, telling her that Fredersen is planning to let the workers use force, so that he is justified in using force against them. Maria weeps in agony at this news, as Rotwang tells her that while she spoke of peace, the workers are now being incited to violence, saying, "She will destroy their belief in a mediator!"
We see the robotic Maria speaking to the crowds of workers in the workers' city, telling them that while she has always promoted peace, they ought to fight now, since their mediator has not come. Meanwhile, Rotwang tells Maria, "But I have tricked Joh Fredersen! Your double does not obey his will—only mine!"
As robot Maria riles the men up more and more, Freder enters the chamber. She yells at them, "Let the machines starve, you fools! Let them die! Kill them—the machines!" and the men cheer. Suddenly Freder speaks up, saying, "YOU ARE NOT MARIA!" insisting that Maria would never speak so violently. One of the workers recognizes him as Fredersen's son and rallies the other workers to kill him. Freder fights back as they charge him, and manages to fend them off as one of the workers urges them all to fight back and "kill the machines!"
A supertitle tells us what happens in some lost footage from the film. As Rotwang brags to Maria about his plot, Joh Fredersen is eavesdropping outside his window, breaks into the attic, overcomes him, and frees the real Maria.
We see Josaphat and Freder standing over Georgy, the worker, who was stabbed in the chaos; Georgy dies in their arms.
The scene shifts and we see Maria escaping from Rotwang's dwelling. As crowds of angry workers assemble around robot Maria, she echoes her rallying cry, "Death to machines!" and they follow her through the doors to the factory, where they urge workers to abandon the machines running the city. When the man running the Heart Machine sees a sign for danger, he closes a large set of doors to protect the machine from infiltrators.
Fredersen calls the man operating the Heart Machine and instructs him to open the gates, but the latter insists that "if the Heart Machine is destroyed the entire machine district will end up in ruins!" When Fredersen insists, the operator opens the gates and the workers, led by robot Maria, stream into the machine. The operator tries to reason with them, insisting that if they destroy the machine, the district will be flooded, but they attack him as Maria turns off the Heart Machine.
The district begins to flood and mechanisms begin to fail, just as the real Maria is entering the workers' district. Elevators collapse and water begins streaming in. Maria sees a group of children who have been abandoned in the midst of the revolution and tries to pull a lever to stop the flooding as the children run towards her. The children crowd around a platform on which Maria is standing as she tries to reverse the damage being done.
Meanwhile, in his office, Fredersen is alarmed when the electricity goes out in the area surrounding him. The Thin Man runs in and informs him that Freder is in the workers' city, and Fredersen is deeply disturbed by this news.
Analysis
Fredersen's intended revenge on the workers' class is particularly malevolent, in that it takes the leader of their revolution, Maria, and repurposes her into an oppressive force. While the actual Maria represents a bright beacon of hope and humanism for the working classes of Metropolis, the promise of reclaiming agency, her robotic twin, as conceived by Fredersen, is the image of the perfect "tool," a completely compliant and endlessly oppress-able object that might be used to further the industrial and capitalistic aims of his city.
The revelation of this robotic version of Maria at the party thrown by Rotwang and Fredersen is a visually outrageous display even by contemporary standards, in spite of the film having been made in 1927. At a white tie event attended exclusively by men, she emerges from a bowl in a shimmering spacey gown, with a dramatic headdress atop her head. It is a kind of artificial "Birth of Venus" as the woman emerges from the bowl, a beautiful ex machina sent both to justify the causes of the upper class and to erotically titillate its male power brokers. We see a flash of the men's desirous faces as the beautiful robot begins to dance under dramatic lighting before them. The camera moves between their faces contorted into grotesque expressions of overwhelmed desire, her face as she writhes seductively, and Freder's hallucinations from his sick bed.
The robotic version of Maria, the scantily clad seductress, is conflated with the story the priest told earlier about the whore of Babylon, a Bible story that warns of the dangers of blasphemy and sin. After we see the montage of the men watching robot Maria dance, we see an illustrated passage from the Bible story, an image of the whore of Babylon dressed almost identically to the dancing robot, and a number of dark serpents crowding around her, meant to represent the ogling men at the party. The film blurs the lines between the ancient and the futuristic, between invention and sin, between mortal, robot, and god.
The twist is, of course, that while Fredersen believes that Rotwang's creation is helping to uphold and strengthen his society, Rotwang is actually orchestrating its demise. A skeletal grim reaper heralds a wave of death that is descending upon the city in the wake of robot Maria's arrival. Her siren's call is a kind of death trap, and she urges the impressionable workers to help her dismantle the entire system that keeps the city running, which only leads to death and destruction rather than salvation.
