Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

 The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart! If Grot is the hands, or the leader of the hands- (the head of the hands, maybe?), and Joh Freder is the head, and Freder is the heart, then  what, pray tell, is Maria?  Is Maria the nervous system, sending messages, and connecting the other limbs? Is she an angel, denied a human function? I wonder what the other limbs of society are- the genitals, breasts, and feet? What about the eyes and ears? Are the feet like the hands, Grot? Or are the feet the glowing charcoal expressways?  Is "technology" the eyes and ears, like Joh Freder's special camera into Grot , like Irma's special machine in The Balcony? Or are the eyes and ears the sleuth that J. Freder hired to look after his son? Maybe the breasts are the workers who support food productions, the farmers. And really, who else would be the genitals of society except... mothers, the reproductive potential?  I thought it was interesting that the robot was called, generically, the "Machine Man", but it was obviously fashioned in a woman's shape, with a raised pubis, rounded breasts and even the shadows of nipples.

This is the third or fourth time I've seen the film, and I've become fascinated with the image of this robot- the different identities it embodies before it is even given a face and a humanoid persona. It begins as Rotwang's idyllic image of a woman who was "conquered" by another man, and made functional by him. She bore a son and then becomes his lover Maria. Maria is put to use sexually by Rotwang and then Freder, and then Rotwang again.   She passes between states of  statuesque homage to whorish ardour and back again. She only returnes to sanctity once the whore is destroyed in flames.