Pre-production artwork by Syd Mead
Science Fiction in the City
Blade Runner reminds us that cinema, science fiction and modern urbanism were interwoven products of the same industrial revolution. The city as a monumental form has been mapped and remapped in science fiction, as both utopia and dystopia. While utopian aspirations were focused on agrarianism, the city was pictured as a negative space. In the late-nineteenth century, beginning with Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), the urban utopia gained prominence, perhaps reaching its apotheosis in the visual science fiction of the 1920s, including the superb cinematic cities of Metropolis (which has its utopian side) in 1926 and Just Imagine (1930), and in the pulp magazine artwork of Frank R. Paul, who painted fabulous rococo images of new vehicles and engines for a living.
Pre-production artwork by Syd Mead
The economic slump of the 1930s produced more pragmatic utopias, dreams of technology as well as centralised planning. Things to Come (1936), directed by William Cameron Menzies from a script by H.G. Wells, featured the prototypical rationalist city of gleaming white. In the film, civilisation falls in a massive world war, only to rise again with Wells’s technocratic elite, The Brotherhood of Efficiency. The ‘Everytown’ that they build on the ruins of the old is a machine-produced perfection, untouched by human hands. Streamlined and monumental, Everytown circa 2036 unintentionally diminished and overwhelmed the mere mortals within its walls.37
Artwork for Metropolis
The alienation and dis-ease of American culture in the 1950s, coupled with the postwar white flight from urban centres, yielded science fiction cities that were claustrophobic and isolating, outsized monadic structures sealed off from their surroundings. In Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel (1954) Earth’s population lives underground, and Foundation (1951) introduces a planet-sized metropolis devoid of natural forms: these aspects recur in Blade Runner.
In more recent years, a different image of the city emerged, first distinguished by its boundlessness. The new city became both micro and macrocosm: imploded yet still monumental, insistent upon its status as a ‘total space’. But urban space had also become non-physical: it was constituted less by buildings and highways than by invisibly penetrating net works of satellites and terminals. Geography was losing its relevance in the face of the topographies of electronic culture: Raoul Vaneigem wrote in 1963: ‘We are living in a space and time that are out of joint, deprived of any reference point or coordinate.’38 The new urban image was somehow both totalising and beyond the power of vision. Science fiction proved adept at imagining this slippery spatiality: J.G. Ballard’s early story, ‘The Concentration City’ (1957),39 presented an urban terrain defined by an infinity of space, a multiplicity of surfaces: the city circled back upon itself in a closed feedback loop. The city-state had become the cybernetic state.
A similar unbounded urbanism became popular in science fiction comics of the 1970s and 80s, including Britain’s Judge Dredd and Italy’s Ranxerox. In the pages of Heavy Metal, Moebius ( Jean Giraud) created influential images of concentrated cities that filled the frame with level upon level of urban sprawl. In ‘The Long Tomorrow’, the city lay below the planet’s surface, a chaos of intersecting lines and layers. Nothing ordered this littered and cluttered morass of high and low technologies, this city without top, without bottom, without limits. The only constant was the view that revealed everything in a single glance; a view both panoramic and kaleidoscopic.40 Blade Runner’s future Los Angeles quoted the crowded urbanism of Moebius. Street level was like the underworld, the underside of the gleaming perspectives of Things to Come.
Frozen domesticity in Things to Come
Science fiction depends upon an impossible, totalising gaze: according to Fredric Jameson it functions through spatial description more than narrative action. This privileged vision of space, common to Asimov, Moebius, Blade Runner and beyond, exemplifies the totalising gaze of science fiction. Jameson has argued that in the detective fiction of Raymond Chandler the plot focuses our superficial attention ‘in such a way that the intolerable space of Southern California can enter the eye laterally, with its intensity undiminished’.41 What he calls a ‘lateral perceptual renewal’ is, I think, extended in science fiction, a genre grounded in the new ‘intolerable spaces’ produced by advanced technology. Again and again the narrative permits an encounter with complex spaces that then become susceptible to comprehension, intervention and control.
The shift from the expansionist and visible machineries of the industrial age to the invisible technologies of the information age created a representational crisis for the genre. The purpose of much science fiction in the 1980s, especially cyberpunk, was to construct a new position from which humans could interface with the global, yet hidden, realm of data circulation; a new identity to occupy the emerging electronic realm. I call this new position terminal identity, which refers both to the end of the traditional subject and the emergence of a new subjectivity constructed at the computer station or television screen.42
Cyberspace is the term used to refer to the ‘space’ constituted by information technologies, whether presented as an actual physical space (Tron) or a metaphorical sense of space, like an extended, immersive computer interface (Neuromancer). The concept took on value just as the topos of the traditional city had been superseded. A ‘new conception of the urban’ had arisen that was ‘no longer synonymous with locale’,43 but was defined by the invisible circulation of information permitted by telecommunications technologies.
Science fiction had long been involved in a conceptual and phenomenological ‘writing’ of new urban spaces, so if the ‘nonplace urban realm’44 was invisible, then ‘cyberspace’ would render it visible, legible and spatial. Spatial and kinetic: the experience of cyberspace always emphasised motion. Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that ‘to conceive space, it is in the first place necessary that we should have been thrust into it by our body’.45 Cyberspace only becomes ‘real’ space in William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) when the hero ‘jacks in’ to it. As a concept, cyberspace recreated the possibility of spatial exploration, and so helped to create an engagement with the global data system.
In Blade Runner, urban space moves toward the condition of cyberspace, and this is especially clear when Deckard electronically inspects one of Leon’s photos. This, first of all, transforms the status of the object. The frozen stillness of the photograph, its inactivity and emptiness, brings Hopper’s alienated urban interiors to mind, but the setting also strongly resembles something by Vermeer. A sharp light illuminates the scene from the left side of the image, and a convex mirror plays with light, reflection and surface in ways that again recall Vermeer or van Eyck. Just as this scene’s reflection on the status of the cinematic image locates hidden details in the depth of the mirror, so did both Vermeer and van Eyck include obscure painted reflections of themselves in their canvasses.46 There is, indeed, a story to be read there. By electronically enhancing the photo with his computer, the surface of the image is penetrated. This inert object, a mere trace of the past, becomes multidimensional and is suddenly possessed of the present-tense modality of cinema. Deckard issues commands like a film director (‘Track right… . Now pull back …’) and the frozen moment of the photograph is granted a new temporality. A grid is overlaid on this field and measured co-ordinates regulate and guide the detective’s movement across the terrain of externalised memory. The classic scene of searching a room for clues is now played out on a terminal. The screen, that frontier separating electronic and physical realities, becomes perme able; the space behind it, tangible. The sequence anticipates the narratives of Tron and Neuromancer, in which humans are more physically inserted into cyberspace. The sequence, with its fantasied control of the projected image, is a most hypnotic meditation on cinematic power.
The Dark City
The dark and crowded space of cyberspace as introduced and described in Neuromancer was punctuated by neon forms and corporate structures, and the aesthetic of Blade Runner demonstrates that it had obvious precursors. In cyberspace the density of the central, inner, city became an analogy for the dispersed matrices of information circulation and overload, while cyberspace itself presented an urbanism stripped to its kinetic and monumental essentials. Cyberspace exaggerated the disorienting vertigo of the city, but it also summoned a powerful controlling gaze. Critics of cyberpunk tended to emphasise its dystopian cityscapes, missing the dialectic between the two modes of mutually informing existence, urban and electronic. Urban space and cyberspace each enabled an understanding and negotiation of the other.
Cyberpunk streets
Blade Runner may have lacked a context when it was first released, which might explain why so few critics recognised its power, but the film’s heavy metal vision strongly influenced the emerging form of cyberpunk. The genre even begins to look like an attempt to grapple with the issues raised – or focused – by the film. These issues were also isolated, the same year, in Fredric Jameson’s first essay on postmodernism (the next, more extended attempt appeared two years later, in 1984, virtually coinciding with the appearance of Neuromancer). Jameson wrote that cyberpunk is ‘henceforth, for many of us, the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself’.47 His comment reveals a salient truth: science fiction had, in many ways, prefigured the dominant issues of postmodern culture.
Cyberpunk provided the image of the future in the 1980s. The real advent of the science fiction subgenre happened with the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984, but it was anticipated by at least three films from 1982 that had a formative impact upon the cyberpunk ethos and aesthetic: Videodrome, with its hallucinatory mass-media guignol; Tron, most of which took place in a cyberspace avant la lettre; and Blade Runner, with its urban density and romantic alienation. Gibson has made no secret of Blade Runner’s impact on his work.
Unlike most science fiction with a strong emphasis on technology, cyberpunk presented its worlds from street level: a view from below. Bruce Sterling, a cyberpunk author, editor and polemicist, wrote that times had changed ‘since the comfortable era of Hugo Gernsback, when Science was safely enshrined – and confined – in an ivory tower. The careless technophilia of those days belongs to a vanished, sluggish era, when authority still had a comfortable margin of control.’48 The subgenre rejected Wellsian fantasies of rational planning in favour of a lived science fiction set among the outlaws and hackers of the demimonde. ‘The street finds its own uses for things,’ went one of its most famous credos, while another anarchically proclaimed, ‘Information wants to be free.’ Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic rents the memory chips implanted in his head to gangsters needing secret data storage space – again, this is light-years from the streamlined visions of progress in earlier science fiction.
Cyberpunk, like the film noir from which it partly derived, was defined as much by its tone and attitude as by its icons and narrative structures. Its high-tech urban settings were congested and confusing, yet also exhilarating. Communications and information media defined its future, and information density defined its style. Blade Runner’s cyberpunk urbanism exaggerates the presence of the mass media, evoking sensations of unreality and pervasive spectacle: advertising ‘blimps’ cruise above the buildings, touting the virtues of the off-world colonies, and gigantic vid-screens dominate the landscape with images of pill-popping geishas. Mead wanted the pervasive Asian graphics to contribute to the overall visual density without being easily comprehensible – creating a ‘pure visual composite’ like the experience of Japan for Roland Barthes in Empire of Signs (1970) or the narrator of Chris Marker’s film Sans Soleil (1983).49
Blade Runner and related works owe much to the alienated spaces of Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald. Motifs are shared by both genres: the tension between social order and disorder; narratives centred on perception and spatial exploration; and, most significantly, an emphasis on decentred, threatening urban spaces. Blade Runner is exemplary on all points. The replicants pose a threat to social order by raising questions about the status of being. Deckard, the technologically enhanced detective/perceiver, sees, reads and explores an unsettled, chaotic environment. And in the film’s intricate urbanism, the iconographies of science fiction and noir overlap.
The city in Blade Runner, with its rain-slicked Los Angeles streets, faux-forties fashions, private-eye plot and world-weary narration, derives plenty from noir. This is a dark city of mean streets, moral ambiguities and an air of irresolution. Blade Runner’s Los Angeles exemplifies the failure of the rational city envisioned by urban planners and science fiction creators, and it also recalls, by implication, the air of masculine crisis that undergirded film noir – witness Deckard’s struggle to retain, or regain, his humanity. If the metropolis in noir was a dystopian purgatory, then in Blade Runner, with its flame-belching towers, it has become an almost literal inferno.
Cyberpunk’s world was divided into heavily corporatised spaces of control (the state served a minimal role: does representative government still exist in Blade Runner’s future?) and the marginalised figures who served as the genre’s romantic, post-alienated protagonists. Many cyberpunk narratives sent their ‘heroes’ – who were more likely to be motivated by self-interest than revolutionary ideals – on incursions against the corporate strongholds of power. As with noir, the story’s settings mixed decadent sleaze with decadent opulence, drawing a narrative web of complex and cynical social interactions.
Making eyes
Jameson wrote that Chandler’s narratives reflected an American desire for people to overcome their separation from one another: the detective served as an agent of connection. ‘And this separation is projected out onto space itself: no matter how crowded the street in question, the various solitudes never really merge into a collective experience, there is always distance between them.’50 In Blade Runner, this separation extends into the distance between the human and the non-human, the organic and the technological, the natural and the cultural.
The link between noir and cyberpunk was neither superficial nor coincidental, but was connected to those ‘intolerable spaces’, once urban and now cyber. The task of narrating urban alienation and separation now fell to the hybrid of crime fiction and science fiction that was cyberpunk.
J. F. Sebastian
Retrofitting can serve as a useful – and convenient – metaphor for Blade Runner as a whole. In the film, a noir narrative is retrofitted onto science fictional speculations about human definition and development. In other cyberpunk, noir was mapped onto the invisible spaces of electronic culture. Retrofitting could even be a metaphor for science fiction in general, since familiar characters and narratives ground its extrapolations. If the genre often combines speculation with an uncanny resistance to change, this can be understood as an unavoidable part of its retrofitted nature.
As a literary movement, cyberpunk ended almost as soon as it began, but its impact continues to be felt across a range of media and cultural phenomena. Its techno-surreal strategies permanently altered the representation of electronic technology. Ultimately, ‘cyberpunk’ became a subcultural label, referring now to hackers, electronic musicians, ravers and anyone else who professed to employ high technology (or its image) from the margins of society.
The Bright City
Despite the darkness that pervades it, it is worth considering the utopian face of this city; for although this is a hell where we would never want to live, it is also, as repeat viewers of the film can attest, a hell of a nice place to visit.
What if the success of the city as an environment was not a function of its rational efficiency? What if the value of the metropolis derived from its status as an irrational space? Rem Koolhaas has written of New York as a delirious space masquerading behind a rational façade of gridded streets and high technology. The modern city is so vast and complex that it eludes representation and exists beyond easy understanding. It is a site of impossible congestion, an endless multiplication of floors, buildings, blocks. Every skyscraper is a city within a city, every floor organised by its own potentially ‘unprecedented combinations’ in which all of history and human experience was available for reference and plunder. The unified functionalism of the modernist city was only an organising myth, according to Koolhaas, and indeed it existed more in fictions like Things to Come than it ever would, could, or perhaps should in Manhattan.
The real vocabulary of New York’s architecture was anticipated by the bright city of Coney Island, which existed as a kind of experimental laboratory for Manhattan’s future; its towers and spires were preparation for the skyscrapers of the next decades. Coney Island offered the fluidity of a permanent carnival: shape-shifting, displacement and informality were the rules of disorder (none of this was encouraged by the guardians of propriety, who preferred a more subdued seaside park).
For Koolhaas, Coney provided the key to decoding New York City’s latent, pervasive irrationalism, its poetic vocabulary. I think that it fell to cinema to inherit and extend what he called the ‘metaphoric planning’ of the city that had originated with the amusement park. Cinema combined spatiotemporal solidity with metamorphic fluidity. It also documented and even liberated the ephemerality latent in the urban field. Cinema could represent and rethink the city without quantifying it; it emphasised congestion and lived experience.
Blade Runner is a crowded film about a crowded city, but in the irrational city, congestion is no problem: ‘Not for a moment does the theorist intend to relieve congestion; his true ambition is to escalate it to such intensity that it generates – as in a quantum leap – a completely new condition, where congestion becomes mysteriously positive.’51 Urban planners Raymond Hood and Harvey Wiley Corbett believed that ‘people swarm to the city because they like congestion’.52 Congestion provided the wealth of experience that Simmel valued so highly, and which only some could find overwhelming. Hood ‘saw New York – its people and buildings crowded into every which way on an irregular non-gridlike grid, constantly shoved into instant closeups and surprising long-shot vistas – as an unending exercise in shifting perspectives as stimulation’.53 The language here suggests that the city had already become its own image: amusement parks and picture shows – from Manhatta (1921) and Man with a Movie Camera (1929) to Blade Runner – gave order to all the ‘shifting perspectives’ while indulging their kaleidoscopic variety.
Koolhaas noted that Coney Island offered an intensification, rather than a suspension, of urban pressure.54 Its fantastic architecture became ‘the arrangement of the technological apparatus that compensates for the loss of physical reality’,55 and the cinema accomplishes something similar: if Manhattan insisted on the superficial order of gridded streets and regular blocks, then cinema, armed with montage and mobility, could cut across it. The sailors of On the Town (1949), to take a musical example, are hardly restricted by New York’s topography; the rhythm of ‘New York, New York’ produces a new ‘creative geography’, liberating and joyous. And the camera can, as it does in Psycho (1960), wander up the sides of buildings, enter through chance windows and strip the city bare of its orderly façade. There are, after all, eight million stories in the naked city …
Panoramic Perception, Fractal Geographies
Blade Runner’s incessant movement through urban space is closely aligned with what historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch dubbed ‘panoramic perception’. With the rise of railway travel in the nineteenth century, vision was put in motion. The replacement of horsedrawn coach by speeding train transformed travellers into spectators, separated from the world by velocity, closed compartments and a sheet of glass. Attention had to shift from proximate objects to distant panoramas. Commodification was as important as speed: ‘The customer was kept in motion; he traveled through the department store as a train passenger traveled through the landscape.’56 Goods and citizens both circulated through the city; they were displayed and objectified. There was anxiety, too, about the inexorable grasp of merchant capitalism, as well as the train-traveller’s sense of hurtling out of control in a speeding projectile. Withdrawal into numbed alienation provided some psychological protection: this perceptual mode was founded on separation, abundance, anxiety and alienation.
The equally complex pleasures of cinema, with its own emphasis on objects and movement, extended panoramic perception. Blade Runner offers an urban experience of inexhaustible fluidity, endless passage and infinite perceptibility – a utopian vision, so to speak, as distinct from a vision of utopia. A beautiful and technically impressive sequence appears early in the film, during Deckard’s flight in the police spinner. The panoramic shot of the city, seen through the windscreen from behind Gaff and Deckard, combined thirty-five separate elements. Twenty miniature buildings were matched to projected Syd Mead artwork and overlaid with multiple layers of travelling mattes, miniature vehicles of varying scales and motion-controlled camerawork.57
Pris
The viewer is presented with two distinct spaces in this shot. The first is the superbly detailed urban space that dominates the film, visible outside the spinner. The panorama is augmented by the second space, constituted by the data screens of the cockpit, which reveals the existence of an ‘invisible’ traffic corridor. An order exists to the movements of the city, even if that order is not always evident to the unaided eye. The shot, with all of its composited elements and brilliant synchronisation of views, permits a totalising gaze of impossible clarity. The viewer is given a privileged tour of a futurity that is richly layered, bewildering but still familiar. The total effect is one of scopic pleasure: the viewer sees and deduces how (and that) the future works.
For me, the sequence recalls the trolley ride in Sunrise (1927), perhaps the most profound expression of panoramic perception in the history of the cinema.58 After nearly strangling his wife, the man begs for forgiveness, but in terror and grief she runs from lakeshore to woods, boarding an improbable city-bound trolley. He follows, and as they stand at the front of the moving car the world beyond the windows slides laterally past them (and us). They seem fixed and centred in space, while the world itself has become unmoored. The sequence speaks, with impossible eloquence, of separation and disconnection, even as this most literal of tracking shots links rural and urban spaces in a fluid continuum. Despite its evident solidity, the world takes on a hallucinatory mutability. Our attention is divided between their unspeaking trauma and the complexly shifting space beyond the windows; we are divided between alienation and exploration.
Some of the poignance comes from the inescapable sense of loss built into the very aesthetic of the shot. Whatever comes into view will just as surely be removed, to be replaced, and replaced again. Absence and distance structure the image. Leo Charney has located variations on this absence as fundamental to the fascination that cinema exerted on such philosophers and theorists as Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin and Jean Epstein. Characteristically, ‘cinema transformed the hollow present into a new form of experience, as the vacated present opened space for the viewer’s activity. Experience arose in – was defined by and in – the space vacated by the present’s movement away from itself.’59 In Sunrise, the movement of the world past the fixed frame of the camera becomes a metaphor for cinematic experience, in which plenitude and loss coexist in an unresolved dance of marked but unfulfilled desires.
Compare this to that expansive hovercraft flight in Blade Runner. Again the world slides past the window, but now we luxuriate without reservation in the revelation of urban immensity and complexity. Special effects sequences are often about revelation rather than absence – they evoke presence. A further moment’s reflection, though, demonstrates that Blade Runner, with its retrofitted future built on the debris of the past – a past which is our present – does insist on a sense of absence and separation not dissimilar to Sunrise. This is consistent with the thematic emphasis on the passing of human centrality. Does memory remain the residue of something now absent, or is it only a simulation, a false presence? Charney notes that ‘if the present disappears, and thereby hollows out presence, this shift also hollows out the subject who constructs that presence’. Interestingly enough, the modernist, human, subject is hollow, while replicants, with their implanted memories and false photographs, are permitted a luxurious illusion of wholeness.60
Blade Runner’s exploration of urban existence continues through its transformations of scale and perspective. The monumental headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation, for example (which owes something to British science fiction illustrators Angus McKie and Chris Foss), is vast beyond normal human experience, and in fact the human form is almost always missing from these intricate visions. The limitless complexity of the film suggests some precepts of chaos theory, which holds that chaotic systems are not random but complex, non-linear systems produced through massively repeated, simple operations. New dimensions lie between the dimensions of traditional mathematics: fractal dimensions. The natural order is distinguished by intricate and infinite fragmentation and by similarities across different scales – fractal forms such as coastlines or cloud patterns reveal equal complexity at any magnification, so ‘a fractal is a way of seeing infinity’.61
Blade Runner reveals the city itself to be a complex, self-similar space – a fractal environment. The panoramic camera panned across the spaces of the city, but the fractal camera also tracks through endless levels of scale. The film begins with an extreme long shot of Los Angeles that encompasses its undifferentiated industrial overgrowth in one panoramic view. The next shot offers a fiery smokestack punctuating the diabolical space, which is then reflected in a disembodied eye. The camera penetrates the space, moving for ward to locate the gigantic Tyrell corporate headquarters (note its microchip design – another similarity across scale). After a violent interlude with Leon and a blade runner, the camera finds Deckard by submerging to street level where there are advertising blimps, neon signs, ‘trafficators’, futuristic attire and glowing umbrella handles. A streetside vendor uses an electron microscope, and now the drama becomes molecular. Later, Deckard’s electronic inspection of a photograph transforms its visual field, and the two-dimensional space of the photograph becomes the more three-dimensional space of cinema. Infinite complexity structures urban reality; Blade Runner defines the city as fractal geography.
Deckard and Rachael
The Return of the Modernist City
The polyglot architecture of Blade Runner’s future urbanism challenges the dream of a rational, centrally planned city. This city is dispersed, boundless, heterogeneous. The only monument is run by a techno-corporation, rather than a benign technocracy. The white cities of Things to Come and the 1893 World’s Fair, and the Futurama of the 1939 fair, have been replaced by a city of darkness, night, chaos and delirium.
The final battle between Deckard and Batty takes place at the Bradbury Building, designed by George Wyman in 1893 and inspired by the technocratic rational vision of Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward. In Blade Runner, the Bradbury Building is an empty space of burst pipes, decay and deterioration, its space made hallucinatory by the searchlights that constantly sweep past its windows.
The rejection of the modernist ethos of centralised control has led nearly every critic to link Blade Runner to the spatiality of post-modernism: a decentred, ahistorical pastiche. Depth disappears in postmodern aesthetics, and with it goes history, psychology and individuality: what remains is a cacophony of signs. Nothing can any longer distinguish between sign and referent, simulation and original – and anyway, there is no longer any reason to make the distinction.
Death in the streets
Nevertheless it might be pertinent to regard Blade Runner as a more deeply modernist city film. Its citation of earlier urban forms does not seem to be the ahistorical pastiche that defined postmodern architecture and art, but represents, rather, a more deeply historicised restatement of fundamental modernist ideas of the city. Critics, myself included, have tended to see the film’s disparate buildings as the mark of a postmodern sensibility, but heterogeneity and urban chaos are nothing new, after all. Cities of the modern period were as heterogeneous as they could make themselves (it was also unavoidable unless the old city was razed, as in Things to Come). Ann Douglas, referring to Manhattan architecture in the 1920s, writes:
If the skyscrapers represented, as some said, Babel, the implications weren’t all bad. Babel was a cacophony of different languages; so were the skyscrapers … [New York’s] new architecture made itself the host for motifs and styles from widely diverse cultures, present and past. Zigzag designs from American Indian culture and angular geometric patterns from ancient Babylon and Assyria and Africa contradicted and supplemented Gothic towers, gargoyles, and Art Deco ornamentation. Writing about The Skyscraper in 1981, Paul Goldberger calls it ‘the art of grafting … historical forms onto modern frames’.62
The rational, planned city of efficient circulation and an International Style, perhaps epitomised by the designs of Le Corbusier, belonged to another modernism entirely. That modernism is indeed rejected by Blade Runner, while the modernist experience of the city described by Simmel, Benjamin and Kracauer – disordered, heterogeneous, street-level – is revisited and renewed. The camera glides through this futuristic urban space in ways that recall nothing so much as the cinema of the late 1920s and early 30s: the ‘city symphonies’, as well as work by Busby Berkeley (42nd Street, 1933), F. W. Murnau (Sunrise, The Last Laugh, 1924), Paul Fejös (Lonesome, 1928; Broadway, 1929) and Fritz Lang (Metropolis). The city has existed in cinema as a place of delirious chaos, alienation, resistance and even improbable liberation. This city once again finds eloquent voice in Blade Runner.
Gotham City
‘Gotham City’ was one of Ridley Scott’s original titles for Blade Runner, which suggests that we might need to rethink the significance of the film’s Los Angeles setting. It has become a commonplace to note the transition from New York to Los Angeles as a site of utopian/dystopian projection, which is supposedly indicative of the shift from a modernist to a postmodernist aesthetic. The towering, and brand new, Empire State Building that King Kong climbed has been replaced by the boundless, retrofitted sprawl of Blade Runner. In John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981), everybody wants out of the maximum security detention centre that Manhattan has become, while in Escape from LA (1996), folks are pretty content – ‘I looove LA,’ Pam Grier’s transsexual character enthuses, among the ruins.
But Blade Runner is arguably as fundamentally a New York film as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Lang was inspired by New York’s burgeoning skyline, the familiar tale goes, while on a 1924 tour promoting Die Niebelungen. His description evoked the city in all its kaleidoscopic glory: ‘There are flashes of red and blue and gleaming white, screaming green … streets full of moving, turning, spiraling lights, and high above the cars and elevated trains, skyscrapers appear in blue and gold, white and purple, and still higher above there are advertisements surpassing the stars with their light.’63 Wow! Lang double-exposed his photographs to capture Broadway’s kinetic lights. This might account for the continual seductiveness of Metropolis and its urban vision – the city remains a glittering toy, a place of endless possibilities despite the regimented, claustrophobic workers’ city hidden below ground. In fact, J.P. Telotte has suggested that Metropolis is partly a meditation on the seductiveness of technology (in the forms of the robot Maria, the city itself and the film’s own opulent effects).64
But all of this is equally true of Blade Runner; despite its ostensible and determining Los Angeles setting, it’s possible to see the film as a return to the modernist urbanism exemplified by New York. ‘The city we present is overkill. But I always get the impression of New York as being overkill,’ Ridley Scott has said. ‘You go into New York on a bad day and you look around and you feel this place is going to grind to a halt any minute.’65 Syd Mead ‘had the Manhattan skyline in mind while creating his original preproduction designs’, and Scott wanted the Chrysler Building, a superb art deco icon, to figure prominently.66 One critic noted the disparity between Blade Runner’s Los Angeles and the real one: Scott accomplished ‘what generations of city planners have failed to do in reality: he has give Los Angeles a downtown. Horizontal LA has vanished into vertical New York.’67
And, to close the cinematic circle, special effects supervisor David Dryer has said, ‘Someday I want to take shots from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and shots from Blade Runner and run them back to back. Because there’s an awful lot of Metropolis in Blade Runner.’ He added: ‘I was even using stills from Metropolis when I was lining up Blade Runner’s miniature building shots.’68 Affinities between Metropolis and Blade Runner are almost too numerous to mention, and the resemblance runs deep – Blade Runner doesn’t just refer back to the earlier film, but to the very issues that dominated it.
Both films present the built, urban environment as a total space. Nature only appears in Metropolis in the form of roof gardens for the very wealthy. Similarly, Blade Runner presents a heavy trade in artificial animals, and in the original novel, apartment rooftops offer grazing areas for the surviving animals (or their synthetic replacements) – major status symbols. Both films establish a high/low dichotomy with the wealthy literally occupying the upper strata of society, while the workers struggle below. This industrial-era division of labour was announced in The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, with its distant future of leisure-loving humans and their subhuman slaves, the Morlocks.
The cities in Metropolis and Blade Runner are massive, but each is punctuated by a monumental building – the Stadtkrone Tower and the Tyrell Building, respectively. The tower in Metropolis is modelled on Brueghel’s 1563 rendering of the Tower of Babel; the corporate headquarters of the later film quotes Mayan pyramids. In Metropolis we view the tower from below its apex, as its four points radiate control over the city, but in one of Erich Kettelhut’s beautiful production drawings we look down on it from almost directly above, prefiguring Blade Runner’s gorgeous hovercraft approach to police headquarters (Ridley Scott had often arrived in Manhattan by helicopter, landing on the Pan Am Building).69
Metropolis was produced in the midst of an urban renaissance, and in the 1920s New York skyscrapers with their relatively unadorned vertical thrust epitomised twentieth-century urbanism and capital accumulation. The gaze of the urban citizen was granted a kind of ‘upward mobility’. Blade Runner recreates this gaze, but as a nostalgic return, not to the city as a centred and controlled environment, but to the city as a cinematic environment, an industrial space poeticised and narrated by the camera.