The ultimate relevance of Blade Runner lies in its doubled, complex understanding of what it must mean to be human, not only at the end of the twentieth century, but throughout it. Slavoj Žižek refers to ‘the eternal gnawing doubt over whether I am truly human or just an android – it is these very undecided, intermediate states which make me human’.102 The urban environment becomes the place to become human or in-human. In Simmel’s writing, a conflict exists in the metropolis between the human defined as a mere object of economic relations and the human as a unique and independent being. ‘It is the function of the metropolis to make a place for the conflict,’ he wrote.103
Perhaps Blade Runner only works as an effective extension of Simmel’s thesis because of a postmodern nostalgia for a lost image of urban complexity: even congestion and alienation could be preferred to the disappearance of real public space and human bodies. But I suspect that Simmel’s argument continues to be relevant because cities, at least images and stories of cities, continue to represent the human position within a still-increasingly technologised, commodified world. City films and urban science fictions like Blade Runner ‘make a place’ in which to test the tensions, and play out the contradictions, of concentrated cities, spectacular societies and the continuing struggle to exist in the bright dark spaces of the metropolis.