Or so our good comrade imagines. As chief engineer at the city's radio station Los has lately grown obsessed over a mysterious, indecipherable signal. His more pragmatic colleagues snort when someone posits Martian origin...but what if? Could Aelita be pining for him?
Natasha meanwhile is about the people's business, devotedly working at a checkpoint station where valiant soldiers returning from the republics are processed and essential goods are fairly distributed to the local proletariat. Patriotic pastimes like performing amateur Marxist theater and painting brightly sloganed posters keep everyone mindful of the rewarding job at hand: Build the great communist state.
But all is not well in the godless motherland. The people are somewhat less prosperous than one might hope in the wake of world war and revolution and civil war, and certain members of the former bourgeoisie are apt to remember the good old days. As a temporary measure the party has instituted a New Economic Policy with certain (regrettable) capitalist features intended as a shot in the arm. The loyal are concerned that this ideological compromise could weaken the people's resolve, and rightly so: Those former fat cats are soon up to their old tricks.
A pair of grifters befriend Natasha and acquire some office at the checkpoint. Before long the people's goods become subject to creative accounting, luxury items like chocolate and wine unerringly find their way into fat hands, and what started for Natasha as seemingly innocent perks becomes entry into an underground high society. Admirably she comes to reject such criminal decadence, but not before Los gets the wrong idea: Their marriage strained by time apart while attending to separate spheres of civic duty, she taking new work in a public orphanage and he at the construction of a power plant, Los returns home at one inopportune moment to discover of Natasha's dallyings and in a fit of jealousy and moral outrage shoots his wife dead.
Because Russians love subplots several are required at this juncture to aid now-fugitive Los in getting his ass to Mars. Fortuitously one of Los's colleagues looks exactly like Los with a fake beard and eyeglasses, and double-fortuitously that fellow has recently vanished (courtesy of the nogoodnik grifters — irony!) allowing Los to assume his identity. Hounded by a ridiculous would-be detective (enter light comic relief) who has abandoned "the case of the missing sugar" for more notable quarry, Los undeterred proceeds to hire a crew to set about the clandestine construction of a missile. Among the men is a former soldier whose own marital bliss has been threatened by boredom for lack of war; a comrade must have work to do! The endeavor is a success and, after the workers are pointedly paid for their labor, we are treated to a thrilling liftoff and interplanetary voyage, complete with flaming toy rocket crashing splendidly by zipline into a tabletop mock-up of the red planet. Los et al merrily hop out.
Aelita has been waiting! Such wonders to behold in her kingdom. The prols wear milk crate helmets and the handmaidens erector set bloomers. Art design was not done by Wassily Kandinsky, but you could've fooled me. The Martian sets and costumes are considered exemplary of constructivism, a Soviet art movement contemporary to German expressionism and similar in the use of highly abstract and spare representations. Basically everything is cut and rolled from stiff plastic or aluminum sheeting, like arts and crafts for severe kindergartners. This served the people's common agenda, I'm told.
But wouldntyaknowit: The Martian laborers are being exploited by the hegemonical elite. Such is the prols' state of woeful alienation that when overpopulation begins to concern the moneyed Elders a novel solution is enacted by way of this priceless intertitle:
So, by the decree of the Elders one-third of the life force will be stored in refrigerators.The meaning of "life force" in a Marxist parable should be clear; witness a queue of catatonic workers slid down ramps in a loading facility and unceremoniously rolled into heaps. Upon Los's arrival revolution must be less than a reel away. Aelita readily joins to the cause — happily it seems the Queen is merely a figurehead and not party to the oppressive authority exercised by those dastardly Elders! With her backing Los pronounces:
Follow our examples, Comrades! Unite into a family of workers in a Martian Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.They do, and the yoke is lifted. But what's this!? Of a sudden Aelita seizes control of the army, turning back the tide of the people and setting herself up as a true dictator over all Mars. Los bemoans that Aelita has betrayed the revolution, just as did Natasha!
He grapples Aelita/Natasha in a death embrace, and we realize that it was All A Dream. Los comes to in Moscow, rushing home to find his dear Natasha alive and well (he shot at her but missed, you see). Oh, and that mysterious radio signal? Turns out it was just a publicity stunt — a veiled advertisement for car tires. A crummy commercial? Son of a bitch! Issue the moral of the story: Get your head out of the clouds and keep your feet on the ground, Bastian.
I wonder how effective this message was in 1924, given that the fantastical adventures on Mars as depicted are really fun and cool. It's like what Truffaut said about the impossibility of making an anti-war war movie.
A final note on Aelita and Metropolis (1927). It would be instructive to teach these two films together, to better draw out subtle distinctions in the prevailing Weimar and Soviet theories on art, science and class struggle. Viewed through the Queen's lens the significance of Metropolis's famous epigram is clearer.
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