Introduction: On Seeing, Science Fiction and Cities

‘I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye.’

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

‘I want more life, fucker …’

Roy Batty, Blade Runner

‘You Nexus, hah?’ asks the wizened Asian technician at Eye Works. ‘I designed your eyes.’ Roy Batty, the android/replicant, briefly purses his lips in ironic amusement. ‘Well, if only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes.’ Blade Runner is all about vision. Vision somehow both makes and unmakes the self in the film, creating a dynamic between a centred and autonomous subjectivity (eye/I) and the self as a manufactured, commodified object (Eye Works). The city is also known through vision. Vision actively makes the metropolitan world in a sustained encounter with delirious detail, yet because Blade Runner under-determines the lessons of that encounter, it effectively undermines interpretative certitudes. This science fiction adventure of urban perception produces an enhanced self-mastery, but also, at the same time, a dispossession, almost an erasure, of self.

A spinner

Science fiction was always predicated upon continuous, perceptible change; it narrated a world that would become noticeably different over the course of a single lifetime. Those changes were part of the profound philosophical and political shifts of the nineteenth century, but they were most clearly connected to the rapid pace of technological development. The genre has been an essential part of technological culture for over a century. Through the language, iconography and narration of science fiction, the shock of the new is aestheticised and examined. Science fiction constructs a space of accommodation to an intensely technological existence, and this has continued through to the present electronic era.

It has also served as a vehicle for satire, social criticism and aesthetic estrangement. In its most radical aspect, science fiction narrates the dissolution of the most fundamental structures of human existence. By positing a world that behaves differently – whether physically or socially – from this one, our world is denaturalised. Science fiction even denaturalises language by emphasising processes of making meaning. The distance between the language of the text and the reader’s lived experience represents the genre’s ultimate subject. What science fiction offers, in Jameson’s words, is ‘the estrangement and renewal of our own reading present’.1

The brilliance of Blade Runner, like Alien (1979) before it, is located in its visual density. Scott’s ‘layering’ effect produces an inexhaustible complexity, an infinity of surfaces to be encountered and explored, and unlike many contemporary films, Blade Runner refuses to explain itself. Even with the over-explicit narration of the original release, central issues were left un- or under-explained. Where are the ‘off-world colonies’? Who goes there, and for what reason? Why does the city seem simultaneously crowded and empty? When and why were replicants created? When were they outlawed on Earth, and why? How does that ‘Voight-Kampff test’ work? The viewer of Blade Runner is forced to make constant inferences in order to understand the detailed world that the film presents.

This is how science fiction works, when it’s working. Science fiction writer and literary theorist Samuel Delany argues that the distinctiveness of the genre comes from its unique demands on the reader. It demands inferential activity: sentences like ‘The door dilated’ (Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers) or ‘Daddy married, a man this time, and much more happily’ (Thomas Disch, 334) continually, and somewhat subtly, demonstrate the distance between the world of the reader and the world of the story, novel or film. Language alludes to the complexity of the world.2

Science fiction film also uses a complex ‘language’, but represents a special case because of its mainstream positioning and big-budget commodity status. Science fiction novels or comics need to sell only a few thousand copies to recoup their costs, so experimentalism is not discouraged, but the Hollywood blockbuster must find (or forge) a mass audience. Science fiction cinema’s mode of production has committed it to proven, profitable structures, and so it is also more conservative. Yet although the narratives can be reactionary – and they often are – the delirious technological excesses of these films and their spectacular effects may ‘speak’ some other meaning entirely. The most significant ‘meanings’ of science fiction films are often found in their visual organisation and their emphasis on perception and ‘perceptual selves’. Science fiction films continually thrust their spectators into new spaces that are alien and technologically determined. Cinematic movement becomes an essential mode of comprehension: the camera often takes on a subjective, first-person point of view when encountering such strange environments. Films as diverse as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Star Wars (1977) and Blade Runner depend upon their dynamic visual complexity. In other words, they build worlds.

References to eyes abound in Blade Runner – not only are they a part of the mise en scène at Eye Works, but the film’s third shot features a huge disembodied eye that stares unblinkingly at the infernal city spread before it, visible as an impossibly clear reflection. Replicants’ eyes reflect a glowing red when the light hits them just right. Rick Deckard’s replicant-detecting apparatus focuses on a subject’s eye, magnifying it to read empathic responses. Memories, human or replicant, are linked to the recorded vision of photographs. The film was first set in the year 2020, but that was changed to 2019 because ‘2020’ was associated with eye charts. Tyrell, the replicants’ creator, wears glasses with bottle-thick lenses, and Roy gouges out his eyes. Pris’s eyes open with an audible click, like Olympia’s in Tales of Hoffmann (1951). ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,’ Roy declares at the point of dying. This, then, is a drama about vision.

But film is also a drama of vision, as Stephen Heath once noted,3 and science fiction film is more centred on vision than most other genres. Viewscreens abound, along with telescopes, microscopes, scanning devices, X-ray vision and the scan-lined video-vision of robocops and terminators. Brooks Landon has written that the science fiction film produces its sense of wonder precisely from the presentation of new ways of seeing.⁴ Unlike, say, horror or film noir, the genre privileges an aesthetics of presence: it shows us stuff …

Critics and audiences have continued to respond to the detailed vision of the future that Blade Runner offers. Ridley Scott has defined his characteristic method as layering: ‘a kaleidoscopic accumulation of detail … in every corner of the frame’. A film, in his words, ‘is a 700-layer cake’.⁵ The film becomes a total environment that one inhabits in real time. Scott has compared film direction to orchestration, and ‘every incident, every sound, every movement, every colour, every set, prop or actor’ has significance within the ‘performance’ of the film.⁶

Blade Runner, with its sumptuously complex urban landscapes, demands to be actively watched; like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, it emphatically returns its spectators to their own actions of perception and cognition.7 Vision, especially in science fiction cinema, can be a tool of knowledge, but in Blade Runner, the more we see, the more our uncertainty grows. Its world features a profusion of simulations: synthetic animals, giant viewscreens, replicants, memory implants and faked photos are only some of them. Vision is no guarantee of truth, and the film’s complexity encourages us to rethink our assumptions about perception by reminding us that, like memory, vision is more than a given, ‘natural’ process. There is no nature in Blade Runner.

The neurologist Oliver Sacks writes: ‘When we open our eyes each morning, it is upon a world we have spent a lifetime learning to see. We are not given the world: we make our world through incessant experience, categorization, memory, reconnection.’⁸ Science fiction film, along with more experimental forms of cinema, emphasises perception as activity: through these visual experiences, one realises that ‘it is not a world that one perceives or constructs, but one’s own world [that is] linked to a perceptual self, with a will, an orientation, and a style of its own’.⁹ Replicants, forged memories and sumptuous surfaces make Blade Runner a film deeply concerned with the making and unmaking of selves, and with worlds that are no longer given.

Although it is generally regarded as exemplary of post-modernism, Blade Runner can be usefully read against ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, a 1903 essay by Georg Simmel, which drew a complicated portrait of the city as a site of emphatic sensation and kaleidoscopic variety. The ‘swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli’ provoked new mental attitudes in its inhabitants, and this ‘intensification of emotional life’ was neither entirely positive nor unswervingly negative.¹⁰ A commitment to commerce reduced human beings to numbers or quantities, but the city’s size also offered opportunities for exploration and growth, personal as well as economic. While ‘the sphere of life of the small town is, in the main, enclosed within itself’, the inner life of the metropolis ‘extended in a wave-like motion over a broader national or international area’.11 The economic imperatives of the city might ‘hollow out the core of things’ and flatten distinctions between people and objects, but it was an expansive environment: in the city, ‘the individual’s horizon is enlarged’.¹² It was easy to get lost in the metropolis; it was also possible to define oneself anew.

The same picture of the metropolis that Simmel drew in 1903 began to appear in the cinema at about the same time, and with a similar ambivalence. Cinema adroitly captured the city as a place of kaleidoscopic delirium and delight; a place of breakdown and rebirth. Blade Runner, with its probing camera and fine detail, revived this complex visual negotiation of urban space.

The anonymity that Simmel described as an unavoidable correlate of urban life extends in Blade Runner to an uncertainty about anyone’s status as human or object. There could hardly be a better allegory for the quantifying and commodifying of human relations than the replicants – human as manufactured commodity, the subject as a literal object of exchange. But the film’s intricate aesthetic and film noir-ish narrative also illustrated Simmel’s proposition that ‘The relationships and concerns of the typical metropolitan resident are so manifold and complex that … their relationships and activities intertwine with one another into a many-membered organism.’¹³ Blade Runner is, in many ways, the quintessential city film: it presents urbanism as a lived heterogeneity, an ambiguous environment of fluid spaces and identities.

Like the best science fiction stories and city films, Blade Runner incorporates at once the magisterial gaze of the panorama, the sublime obscurity of the phantasmagoria and the shifting fields of the kaleidoscope. Blade Runner’s elaborate mise en scène and probing cameras create a tension that is fundamental to a period of inexorably advancing technological change. The inescapable and immersive city becomes a synecdoche for, and distillation of, all these unsettling technologies that continue to pervade lived experience. The film’s aesthetic and its narrative underpinnings magnify and enhance the admixture of anxiety and delirium inherent to this experience. Its instability induces the epistemological and ontological uncertainties – the crises of knowing and being – that it narrates and theorises. Seeing is everything in Blade Runner, but it guarantees absolutely nothing.