1 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 285.
2 See, for example, ‘About 5,750 Words’, in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press, 1977), pp. 39–49, and Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press, 1984).
3 See, for example, ‘Narrative Space’, in Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), p. 44.
4 Brooks Landon, The Aesthetics of Ambivalence: Rethinking Science Fiction in the Age of Electronic (Re)Production (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), p. 94.
5 ‘Ridley Scott, Director of Alien, Creates Another Science Fiction Masterwork, Blade Runner’, publicity release, p. 2.
6 Paul Sammon, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 73.
7 This is brilliantly discussed by Annette Michelson in ‘Bodies in Space: Film as “Carnal Knowledge”’, Artforum vol. 7 no. 6 (1969), pp. 54–63.
8 Oliver Sacks, ‘To See and Not See’, in An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), p. 114.
9 Ibid., p. 136 (his emphasis, followed by my emphasis).
10 Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in Donald N. Levine (ed.), On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 325.
11 Ibid., pp. 334–5.
12 Ibid., pp. 330, 334.
13 Ibid., p. 328.
14 Sammon, Future Noir, p. 59.
15 These figures are from Sammon, Future Noir; Kenneth Turan reported in the Los Angeles Times Magazine (13 September 1992) that each partner put in $8.5 million.
16 See Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), Chapter 5.
17 Blade Runner production notes, p. 5.
18 Syd Mead, OBLAGON: Concepts of Syd Mead (Japanese publication, imported by Oblagon Inc., Los Angeles, 1985), p. 12.
19 Herb A. Lightman and Richard Patterson, ‘Blade Runner: Production Design and Photography’, American Cinematographer vol. 63 no. 7 (1982), pp. 717–18; Sammon, Future Noir, p. 77.
20 Sammon, Future Noir, p. 79.
21 This is discussed by Yuricich’s assistant, Rocco Gioffre, in Sammon, Future Noir, p. 257.
22 This remark is made in an interview with Don Shay presented on the Criterion laser disk of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
23 For more on Trumbull’s effects, see my ‘The Artificial Infinite: On Special Effects and the Sublime’, in Lynne Cook and Peter Wollen (eds), Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), pp. 254–89.
24 See Sammon, Future Noir, pp. 226, 264–5.
25 Ibid., pp. 230, 235.
26 ‘The Futuristic Cars of Blade Runner’, publicity release, p. 1; Mead, OBLAGON, p. 102; Herb A. Lightman, ‘Blade Runner: Special Photographic Effects’, American Cinematographer vol. 63 no. 7 (1982), p. 726.
27 As on Citizen Kane, all the sets on Blade Runner had ceilings.
28 Lightman and Patterson, ‘Production Design’.
29 Ibid., p. 723.
30 Paul Sammon cites an associate of Scott’s on this point in Future Noir, p. 206.
31 Pauline Kael, ‘Baby, the Rain Must Fall’, The New Yorker, 12 July 1982, p. 85.
32 Janet Maslin, New York Times,
25 June 1982; Gene Siskel, Chicago Tribune, 25 June 1982.
33 Sammon, Future Noir, pp. 316, 318.
34 Ibid., p. 322.
35 Sobchack’s Screening Space, 2nd edn (New York: Ungar Press, 1987) provides a particularly useful mapping of Blade Runner’s post-modern attributes.
36 Sammon, Future Noir, p. 368.
37 While some of the film’s visual designs are evidently stolen from Horizons, the utopian manifesto by industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, the city of the future actually anticipates his Futurama pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
38 Raoul Vaneigem, ‘Basic Banalities’, trans. by Ken Knabb, in Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), p. 128.
39 J.G. Ballard, ‘The Concentration City’, in The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978), pp. 1–20.
40 Moebius has extensive connections to science fiction cinema: he has collaborated with film-makers Dan O’Bannon, scriptwriter of Dark Star (1974) and Alien (1979), and Alexander Jodorowsky. In addition, Moebius contributed costume designs to Alien, Tron (1982) and The Abyss (1990).
41 Fredric Jameson, ‘Progress vs. Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?’, Science Fiction Studies vol. 9 no. 2 (1982), p. 152.
42 See my Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction
(Durham, NC: Duke University, 1993).
43 William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, ‘From “Great Town” to “Nonplace Urban Realm”: Reading the Modern City’, in Sharpe and Wallock (eds), Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art and Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 11.
44 See Melvin M. Webber, ‘The Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm’, in Webber et al. (eds), Explorations into Urban Structure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), pp. 79–153.
45 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 142.
46 See Vermeer’s A Lady at the Virginal with a Gentleman (The Music Lesson) (1662– 4) and Jan van Eyck’s Madonna with Canon van der Paele (1436). Relevant Hopper paintings would include Eleven AM (1926), Hotel Room (1931), Room in New York (1932) and Office at Night (1940).
47 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 419n.
48 Bruce Sterling, ‘Preface’, in Bruce Sterling (ed.), Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (New York: Arbor House, 1986), p. xi.
49 The phrase is Syd Mead’s (Lightman and Patterson, ‘Production Design’, p. 687), the comparisons are mine.
50 Fredric Jameson, ‘On Chandler’, in Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe
(eds), The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 131.
51 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (New York: Monacelli Press, 1994), p. 123.
52 Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), p. 452.
53 Ibid., p. 453.
54 Koolhaas, Delirious New York, p. 33.
55 Ibid., p. 62.
56 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 191.
57 Sammon, Future Noir, p. 249.
58 Sunrise was written by Carl Mayer, photographed by Karl Struss and Charles Rosher and directed by F.W. Murnau, all of whom deserve mention.
59 Leo Charney, ‘In a Moment: Film and the Philosophy of Modernity’, in Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (eds), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 292.
60 Ibid.
61 James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking Books, 1987), p. 98.
62 Douglas, Terrible Honesty, p. 448.
63 Cited in Dietrich Neumann, ‘Before and After Metropolis: Film and Architecture in Search of the Modern City’, in Dietrich Neumann (ed.), Film Architecture: From Metropolis to Blade Runner (New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1996), p. 34.
64 See J.P. Telotte, Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), Chapter 2.
65 Sammon, Future Noir, p. 75.
66 Ibid., p. 97.
67 Steve Carper, ‘Subverting the Disaffected City: Cityscape in Blade Runner’, in Judith B. Kernan (ed.), Retrofitting Blade Runner (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991), p. 186.
68 Sammon, Future Noir, p. 111.
69 Michael Webb, ‘“Like Today, Only More So”: The Credible Dystopia of Blade Runner’, in Neumann (ed.), Film Architecture, p. 44.
70 Sterling, ‘Preface’, p. xi.
71 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), §29 [n.p.].
72 Ibid., §30.
73 From a 1976 author’s note to ‘Colony’, reprinted in The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, vol. 1 (New York: Carol Publishing, 1987), p. 404.
74 Cited in Sammon, Future Noir, p. 16.
75 Ibid., p. 285.
76 Norman Spinrad, ‘The Transmogrification of Philip K. Dick’, in Science Fiction in the Real World (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), p. 210.
77 Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, p. 326.
78 Ibid., p. 330.
79 Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, p. 143.
80 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 152.
81 Ibid., p. 180.
82 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. xxiii.
83 Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, p. 150.
84 Sammon, Future Noir, p. 376.
85 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 81. Cited in Kaja Silverman, ‘Back to the Future’, Camera Obscura no. 27 (1991), p. 14. Silverman notes that it is has become a commonplace to refer to Barthes in discussions of Blade Runner.
86 Cited in Oliver Sacks, ‘The Landscape of His Dreams’, in Anthropologist on Mars, p. 175.
87 Oliver Sacks, ‘The Lost Mariner’, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), p. 41.
88 Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), pp. 4–5. Sammon, Future Noir, p. 364.
89 This clever clue was spotted by Dietrich Neumann, an architectural historian, in Film Architecture, p. 152.
90 Noël Carroll, ‘Interpreting Citizen Kane’, Persistence of Vision no. 7 (1989).
91 Sammon, Future Noir, p. 133.
92 Ibid., p. 364.
93 Slavoj Žižek, ‘I or He or It (the Thing) Which Thinks’, in Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 9–44.
94 Žižek makes an identical point about virtual reality: ‘true the computer-generated “virtual reality” is a semblance, it does foreclose the Real; but what we experience as the “true, hard, external reality” is based upon exactly the same exclusion. The ultimate lesson of “virtual reality” is the virtualization of the very “true” reality: by the mirage of “virtual reality,” the “true” reality itself is posited as a semblance of itself, as a pure symbolic edifice.’ Ibid., p. 44.
95 Ibid., p. 41.
96 Ibid., p. 15.
97 Sammon, Future Noir, p. 178.
98 Koolhaas, Delirious New York, p. 130.
99 See the draft dated 24 July 1980, p. 100. Reprinted by Script City in Hollywood, CA.
100 Richard Dyer, ‘Judy Garland and Gay Men’, in Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 141–94.
101 Like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Roy Batty is ‘a phoney’, but he’s ‘a real phoney’.
102 Žižek, ‘I or He or It’, p. 41.
103 Simmel, ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’, p. 339.