The Clock and the Whip (Fritz Lang)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You built a city
on a soundstage
in Berlin
out of cardboard
and mirrors
and forced perspective
and the city
had the warm
shellac smell
of a lie
told so precisely
it became
the only
honest architecture
the century
produced.

[Verse 2]
The city
had two halves.
The top half
was beautiful people
walking
on beautiful bridges.
The bottom half
was workers
feeding a machine
that looked like a mouth
because the thalamus
of an audience member
watching a mouth
eat a worker
will route
the signal
straight through
the limbic system
without stopping
at the part
that asks
*is this a metaphor*
and you
were counting
on that.

[Chorus]
Your wife
wrote the script.
Your wife
was the better Nazi.
Goebbels
offered you
the German film industry
on a plate
in thirty-three
and the plate
had the cold
porcelain weight
of a dining invitation
from a man
whose dining room
smells
like the century
is about to
curdle
and you left Berlin
that night
with one suitcase
because the suitcase
did not have
a swastika on it
and the plate did.

[Outro]
You made film noir
in Los Angeles
because the shadows
in LA
fell
the same way
the shadows
in the machine room
had fallen
and every
science fiction city
built since
is renting
an apartment
in the building
you designed
out of cardboard
and a riding crop
and the good sense
to leave
when the dining room
started to smell
like that.

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