In 1952, science fiction writer Clifford Simak published City, a loosely-related collection of short stories unified by their location in a metropolis that – over thousands of narrative years – radically changes its shape, its functions and its citizenry. This episodic and millennial history of urban transformation is framed by its narration as a ‘bedtime story’ – told by a golden robot to a pack of articulate young dogs gathered around a blazing hearth, wondering if it is really true that once, and very long ago, the nearby city (and the world) was populated by animate, two-legged beings called ‘humans’.1
Like most of the cities in science fiction literature and film, Simak’s city with its fabulous transformations over time is clearly a city of the imagination. Owing no necessary allegiance to representational verisimilitude, such a metropolis serves as a hypnogogic site where the anxieties, desires and fetishes of a culture’s waking world and dream world converge and are resolved into a substantial and systemic architecture. This imaginary architecture – particularly as it is concretely hallucinated in American science fiction film images – is more than mere background. Indeed, the science fiction film city’s spatial articulations provide the literal premisses for the possibilities and trajectory of narrative action – inscribing, describing and circumscribing an extrapolative or speculative urban world and giving that fantasised world a significant and visibly signifying shape and temporal dimension. That is, enjoying particular representational freedom as a genre of the fantastic, the science fiction film concretely ‘real-ises’ the imaginary and the speculative in the visible spectacle of a concrete image. Thus, it could be argued that because it offers us the most explicitly poetic figuration of the literal grounds of contemporary urban existence, the science fiction city and its concrete realisation in US cinema also offers the most appropriate representational grounds for a phenomenological history of the spatial and temporal transformation of the city as it has been culturally experienced from the 1950s (when the American science fiction film first emerged as a genre) to the present (in which the genre enjoys unprecedented popularity). Indeed, although not as radical in its transformations as Simak’s City (nor as long-lived), the imaginary city of the American science fiction film from the 1950s to the 1990s offers us a historically qualified and qualifying site that might be explored as both literal ground and metaphoric figure of the transformation of contemporary urban experience and its narratives in that period now associated with ‘postmodernism’.2 This, then, is a historical trajectory – one we pick up at a generic moment that marks the failure of modernism’s aspirations in images that speak of urban destruction and emptiness and that leads to more contemporary moments marked by urban exhaustion, postmodern exhilaration, and millennial vertigo.
The following analysis of the cityscapes in American science fiction film refuses the perspective of classical urbanism, which looks at the city as an ‘object’ distinct from the subjects who inhabit it. My project is best summed up as a desire to ‘let ‘the city’ emerge, in the complex and shifting fashion proper to it, as a specific power to affect both people and materials – a power that modifies the relations between them’.3 Thus I wish to describe the nature of this affective power as it appears historically in a dominant set of poetic science fiction film images, and then to thematise these images as they emerge from and co-constitute a phenomenology of urban experience. That is, these historically shifting urban images express a lived structure of meanings and affects experienced by the embodied social subjects who inhabited, endured and dreamed them.
Given this historical as well as phenomenological project, it might seem strange to begin by focusing on a series of ‘detached’ images – images of the science fiction city described and given importance ‘out of context’ and not in relation to the specific texts and narratives in which they play a major or minor part. However, as Gaston Bachelard tells us in The Poetics of Space, the poetic image ‘has touched the depths before it stirs the surface’, and by its very novelty it ‘sets in motion the entire linguistic mechanism’.4 Thus the poetic image can be seen as constitutive of its narrative context. It generates, coalesces, condenses, embodies, ‘troubles’ and transforms the more elaborated text of which it is ultimately a part, and is itself open to transformation as it performs the semiotic and affective work of adjusting the systems of representation and narrative and the demands of the psyche and culture to each other.5 The following ‘detached’ images of the American science fiction film city, then, are not to be seen as ahistorical or absolute and essential. They are not really taken ‘out of context’, abstracted from the ‘text’. Rather, it could be said that their poetic reverberations generate and configure not only the discretion of their individual texts, but also a larger historical narrative – one that generally dramatises the transformational character of the American city and its shifting affective significance for us. It is that larger narrative which is of ultimate concern here. To configure that larger narrative, however, we must first grasp its figures and treat each of them phenomenologically – as Bachelard says, ‘not as an object and even less as the substitute for an object’, but rather in ‘its specific reality’.6 That is, prior to narrativising the poetic image, we should be receptive to its reverberations within us, to its compelling originality – under-stood not only as immediately significant but also as strangely familiar. Indeed, the poetic image is an image that we have already deeply lived but never before imaginatively projected.
As mentioned previously, the American science fiction film emerges as a genre with a marked corpus only in the 1950s. Yet to appreciate the poetic significance of this postwar and postmodern genre’s various spatial and temporal transformations of the city from the 1950s to the present, we need briefly to evoke an image of the city as it was figured in American film fantasies before the 1950s. This fantasised city, one must remark, reverberates quite differently from the city figured as ‘contemporary’ in the popular genres of the musical or gangster films of the 1930s or in the urban melodramas and films noirs of the 1940s.
First, there is Just Imagine (1930), a bizarre wedding of science fiction futurism and musical comedy. Set in 1980, the film shows New York City as a high rise of skyscrapers intricately connected by a network of aerial thoroughfares and bridges. Here, one sees no base and pedestrian street level. The hero and heroine stop their little one-seater planes and hover in mid-air to rendezvous – the city around them busy with traffic that, however quotidian, is nonetheless emphatically and literally ‘uplifted’. Although this rather loony film posits a repressive – if café – society, its concrete imagination reverberates as soaring aspiration. Indeed, finding its poetic source in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), whose futuristic bi-level city was inspired by Bauhaus architecture and the German director’s 1924 visit to New York, Just Imagine is selective in what it borrows. It does not visualise a New York whose architecture is as oppressive as it is also liberating and beautiful – a cityscape that, for Lang, also evoked confusion, exploitation and ‘living in perpetual anxiety’.7 Ignoring the baseness of Lang’s lower city, and drawing only upon Metropolis’s most affirmative modernist architecture, the New York of Just Imagine seems – to quote Lang in a moment of positive description – ‘a vertical veil, shimmering, almost weightless’.8 In sum, Just Imagine’s New York poetically reverberates only with the vertical power, vast size and ethereal delicacy of Lang’s upper city.
Three other fantastic images of the city dominate the 1930s, but they do not appear in science fiction films (although one is frequently associated with the genre). Each is so strong as to have gained lasting iconic status – and, indeed, one was explicitly acknowledged by the filmmaker as the generative force informing the narrative. Meriam C. Cooper, co-director of King Kong (1933), claims that his ‘first idea was of the giant ape on top of a building battling a fleet of planes’.9 In the image, the fifty-foot-tall great ape ‘towers’ over Manhattan, momentarily triumphant and forever poetically transcendent atop what once could be called ‘New York’s tallest phallus’, the Empire State Building – officially opened on 1 May 1931, only two years before the film’s release.10 Despite Kong’s fall and death on the street below the world’s then tallest building, it is this ascendant image that we remember – Kong’s anarchic and ‘primitive’ natural presence surrealistically at ease (as well as at odds) with Western culture’s most modern and ‘civilised’ architectural presence by virtue of their shared transcendent scope, the imaginative monumentality and aspiration they so differently (but yet so similarly) embody.
The two other major fantasy images of the city in 1930s films neither signify aspiration towards the future (as in Just Imagine) nor celebrate transcendence in the present (as in King Kong). Instead, their utopian impulses represent the city as eternal ideal. Both cities are visualised in aspiring architecture and explicitly located in transcendent space – for one film, in the highest reaches of the Himalayas, and for the other, ‘somewhere over the rainbow’. In each, however, the temporal nature of the ‘eternal’ is encoded differently. The Shangri-la of the aptly-titled Lost Horizon (1937) seems a mirage of aspiration, shimmering in an eternal nostalgia that has nothing to do with modernity – either present or future. This idealised and lofty city signifies a utopian reach always in excess of modern man’s venal grasp, an eternal ideal always already ephemeral and lost. However, appearing in the same year as the microcosmic, utopian and modern city that was the 1939 New York World’s Fair (marked by the idealist geometry of the Trylon and the Perisphere) was the emerald city of The Wizard of Oz. Given to our sight for the first time, Oz is set off in the distance, framed by a foreground field of poppies (the stuff of dreams). Standing as both eternal and modern, it is aspiring, atemporal, ethereal, and yet evergreen and contemporary, its softened skyscrapers giving the lie to the term since they have no sharp rectilinear edges and, belonging to the sky, have no need to assault it.
The dominant theme of these few fantastic images of the city stands apart from more contemporaneous, realist and ‘grounded’ visualisations of urban life in the 1930s. With the exception of Shangri-la (its perpetual evocation of loss prescient about the ‘down’ side of modernity, aspiration and urbanism), they concretely construct ‘modernity’ in an architecture of ‘aspiration’ that has commerce with the ‘transcendent’. These images emphasise the vertical, lofty and aerial quality of the city rather than its pedestrian and base horizontality. Indeed, equating ‘height’ with the active reach of human aspiration, the ‘loftiness’ of the city stands concretely as its most aesthetically significant social value. Here, cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan is apposite:
The vertical versus the horizontal dimension? … common response is to see them symbolically as the antithesis between transcendence and immanence, between the ideal of the disembodied consciousness (a skyward spirituality) and the ideal of earthbound identification. Vertical elements … evoke a sense of striving, a defiance of gravity, while the horizontal elements call to mind acceptance and rest.11
As we shall see in science fiction films of the 1970s and 1980s, however, horizontal elements can call to mind less positive modes of passive being: resignation, stasis, asphyxiation and death – as well as more active modes of being: expansion, dispersion and play.
Traditionally, America’s spatial mythology has privileged the non-urban and has been, indeed, anti-urban (the paradise of the New World symbolically located in the garden, the West, the frontier, the wilderness, and now – after Steven Spielberg – on the lawns of suburbia). Nonetheless, as we have seen in these few images from the 1930s, the fantasy of the imaginary city constitutes it in a positive image of highness and fullness, envisions it as the site of human aspiration – its vertical projection pointing towards spiritual transcendence and, perhaps, a better and fuller (that is, a materially expanded and more ‘civilised’) future. In an extremely popularised and ‘softened’ way, then, the positive image of the 1930s city has its roots in the earlier urban and technological visions of Futurism and Modernism.
Given that social events in the 1940s were not conducive to continuing this utopian fantasy of the city, it is not surprising that, but for the nightmarish and labyrinthine ‘low’ life hyperbolically figured in the urban introspections of film noir, most film images of the city during this period are neither extrapolative nor speculative. We must move into the 1950s for our next set of explicitly fantastic urban images. It is during this decade marked by nuclear fear and Cold War tensions, by a growing dependence upon electronic technology, by the emergence of new global information and communications systems, and by increasing consumerism and suburbanism, that the American science fiction film coal-esces as a recognised genre that, more often than not, poeticises the city through what Susan Sontag has called the ‘imagination of disaster’.12 Two poetically powerful images reverberate through the 1950s – each spectacularly and concretely articulating a loss of faith in previous utopian and futurist visions of the modern city as the architectural and transcendent embodiment of human aspiration. Although quite differently, both address the failure of concrete verticality and ‘highness’ spiritually to sustain and uplift modern existence. And, as aspiration and ‘highness’ are lost or neutralised, so too is the sense of a future.
The first image is an angry, destructive one, and it appears in a great many films of the period – clearly generating its simple and repetitive narratives as a ritual context in which it serves as centre. The elements of the image are all the same, although their specific articulations may change. The mise-en-scène is urban and given to our sight in long shot. The city in this image is identifiable: New York, Washington DC, San Francisco. Culturally symbolic and discrete architectural features like the Statue of Liberty, the Coney Island rollercoaster, the Washington Monument and the Golden Gate Bridge place and ‘name’ the urban scene and give it a specificity that makes its imminent destruction seem an immediate, contemporaneous event. Into this scene comes a destructive force which may take any of three forms: an apocalyptic natural force like a tidal wave or comet; a primal Beast or Creature; or a technologically superior alien war machine. In each instance, however, the result is the same – the razing of the city and, most particularly, the bringing low of those monuments that stand as symbols of modern civilisation’s aspiration and pride. In When Worlds Collide (1951), New York is inundated by a tidal wave and its buildings topple; in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), an atomically-awakened prehistoric creature stomps cars and fleeing people, smashes the New York skyline, and tangles with the Coney Island rollercoaster as it mindlessly seeks its ancient breeding ground; in Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956), the sleek and quick alien craft of technologically superior extraterrestrials castrate the Washington Monument and bring the nation’s capitol low.
It might seem that the affective power of this image is similar to that of primal Kong atop the Empire State Building swatting planes as if they were flies. Yet fascination with the poetry of destruction is not quite what the image of Kong is about: rather, it touches us deeply with the visible – if brief – resolution of a monumental social and psychic desire, of both the building and Kong’s impossibly epic aspirations. The 1950s science fiction image I am describing here is not about resolution, but about dissolution. Its poetic reverberations have nothing to do with aspiration and ascendancy and everything to do with, as Sontag puts it, ‘the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself’.13 Thus the failure of modern and urban civilisation and its aspirations is poetically represented in appropriately monumental images which constitute an ‘aesthetics of destruction’ whose peculiar beauty is found in ‘wreaking havoc, making a mess’.14 The city’s aspiring verticality, its lofty architecture, its positive ‘highness’ that thrusts civilisation towards transcendence and the future is – through privileged special effects – debased and brought low, in a mise-en-scène that is bustling with contemporary activity and traffic and emphatically temporalised as ‘now’.
The second image of the failure of the aspiring city is equally powerful, yet quite different – retaining the city’s highness, but temporising its value as ‘past’. Here, the city’s lofty architecture is not destroyed; rather, the originally positive and transcendent value of architectural ‘highness’ becomes dominated by the negative and nihilistic value of ‘emptiness’. Highness thus remains an ideal value but now has little to do with human beings. As Philip Strick reminds us: ‘Science fiction writers like Simak, Bradbury and Kuttner, with varying degrees of irony, have frequently recognised … the ideal city contains no citizens whatever.’15 Again, the basic elements of this poetic response to concrete human aspiration remain the same across a variety of science fiction elaborations. In Five (1951), we see two characters enter New York City – an empty concrete canyon whose walls are skyscrapers, whose floor is punctuated by static and forlorn automobiles distraughtly angled: nothing moves but the car in which they slowly ride, and a skeleton stares out at them from a window. In On the Beach (1959), trying to find the source of a signal from a radioactively-dead USA, submarine crewmen wander about an empty San Francisco. And in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), the image of deadly stillness and emptiness overwhelms one with a sense of irrevocable loss as a single character roams through New York, into a vacant Times Square, down an abandoned Wall Street, around an aseptic United Nations building. Cars eternally stalled on a bridge, newspaper blowing down a city street caught up in some ill-begotten wind, street lights and neon blinking on and off in a mockery of animate existence – this is the iconography of emptiness and stillness that marks the American cinematic imagination of the post-holocaust city in the 1950s until the mid 1970s. And this imagination is nostalgic – always already fixed on an irrecoverable past rather than on a future that has not yet occurred.
One of the elements of our lived experience of the modern city is its immediate vitality: its present-tense and up-to-the-minute activity, its busyness, its people and traffic always in motion. To see the city empty and still emphasises its concrete ‘loftiness’, but also temporally codes the value of such architectural aspiration as ‘past’. Marking the death of the city as an actively functional structure, skyscrapers in these films stand as monumental gravestones. Although this image of urban emptiness lingers on into the 1980s – in films like Dawn of the Dead (1979) and Night of the Comet (1984) – it appears less as this nostalgic response to the city’s original loftiness and the failure of its aspiration than as a positive opportunity to dramatise the ultimate consumer fantasy of having a shopping mall all to oneself (barring a few extremist shoppers in the form of ghouls and mutants).
The destruction of the city and its symbolic architecture and the city as empty graveyard – these two powerful poetic responses to the failure of the city’s aspiration (and to the failure of ‘modern’ civilisation) mourn the out-moded value of loftiness, the ineffectual outcome of aspiration; but they still hold aspiration as a positive value and offer no alternative to its failure. Things get even worse in the 1960s and most of the 1970s. If the utopian vision of the imaginary city emphasises concrete loftiness and spiritual fullness as positive values, then 1950s science fiction film kept at least one of these values operative – even if only in a literal way. That is, in those films where the city’s architecture is destroyed and brought low, its literal fullness is asserted in busy human activity and an emphasis on the ‘masses’ (whether they are screaming beneath the behemoth’s scaly feet or ‘cooperating’ with the ‘authorities’). And in those films in which the city’s utopian plenitude is challenged by its literal emptiness, at least its concrete loftiness remains. However, from the late 1960s to 1977 (the year that marks the release of both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars), the science fiction city poeticised neither highness nor fullness as positive values. Rather, both were imagined negatively – and turned in on themselves to become lowering oppressiveness and overcrowdedness. Indeed, if the utopian science fiction city is perceived as aspiring, then the science fiction city during this period is dystopian and perceived as asphyxiating.
Pointing to the despair of a country involved in both domestic and international contestation, Joan Dean describes the science fiction films of the late 1960s and most of the 1970s as articulating a ‘diminishing fear of nuclear apocalypse’ and ‘a growing concern with domestic, terrestrial issues – most of which are related to totalitarian government control of people’s lives or over-population, food shortages, pollution, and ecology’. Indeed, the ‘single theme’ that ‘dominated the science fiction imagination between 1970 and 1977 was over-population and its concomitant problems of food shortage and old age’.16 The image of the city that generates science fiction film narratives of this period emerges most forcefully in Soylent Green (1973), which visualises a New York City that no longer aspires but suffocates and expires. Emphasis is not on the height of buildings but on their baseness. Verticality is no longer significant – and the city’s horizontal dimension stresses its limitations, not its openness. In 2022, New York is not seen in its positive fullness. Rather, it is impossibly overcrowded: its population is forty million. People overflow the streets and most live and huddle in dark masses and clots on the sidewalks, in the alleys, and stairwells of buildings that all look like slum tenements. Their whispering and overlapping cries and coughs and sobs sound like the sighing of some desolate wind. This New York City has no monumental centre, no moral centre. Indeed, it is all corrupted and base, all suddenly innercity. The mise-en-scène is dark, claustrophobic, polluted and dirty; as Robert Cumbow points out, in ‘its crumbling buildings and rotting cars were the beginnings of … junkyard futurism’.17 But this is a futurist image that imagines no future. This New York is literally a concentration camp, and the temporality its constraining spaces construct cannot stretch and stream forward, has nothing to do with positive notions of spatial progression or expansion. All is decay and entropy. In the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, the science fiction city has no positive values to sustain it – and so it falls down and apart. Indeed, many of the period’s films – from Planet of the Apes (1968) to Logan’s Run (1978) – imagine cities such as New York and Washington DC in a fantasy of ‘the body in pieces’, monuments and buildings now fragments strewn on an abandoned landscape on a radically altered planet. The aspiring city, once the centre and architectural symbol of civilisation, has fallen in ruins, is no longer functional, no longer the centre of civilised human activity.
By the 1980s, the idealised and lofty science fiction city is imagined as completely decentred and marginalised. The citizens of dominant bourgeois culture are either ‘offworld’ in outer space or in the suburbs.18 In 1977, with Star Wars and Close Encounters, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg provided the mainstream and nostalgic routes by which to Escape From New York – the entire city in that 1981 film imagined literally as a prison. Star Wars and Close Encounters rally a cinematic exodus from the constraints, pollution and crime of the failed city – and those who leave are all those upstanding and economically franchised folks who believed (and rightly so) that the ‘Force’ was with them, or (wrongly so) that ‘when you wish upon a star, it makes no difference who you are’. What results from this mass bourgeois abandonment of the city, however, is a peculiar and hallucinatory screen liberation for those ‘others’ left behind. They are the dregs of bourgeois society: punks, winos, crazies, gays, druggies, Blacks, Latinos, new Asians, the homeless, the hipsters, the poor – in sum, everyone previously marginalised and disenfranchised in bourgeois urban culture. Let loose and left to their own devices in a city which now has no centre and no constraints, which has been ‘junked’ rather than urbanly ‘renewed’, this newly dominant and diverse population energises and reformulates the negative and nihilistic urban values of the 1960s and 1970s as sublimely positive. In a complete reversal, the imaginary science fiction city’s lowness, baseness, horizontality; its over-crowdedness, over-populatedness and over-stuffedness, are celebrated and aestheticised. That is, the old imaginary and centred science fiction metropolis is totally resigned to its ruination, its displacement to its own edges, its concrete transformation from city as centre to city as inner, from aspiring city to city dump. But this total and concrete resignation to the city’s debasement results in a positive symbolic re-signing. The junkyard, the dump, the trashy edges of town are culturally reinscribed as a novel and exotic urban space that eroticises and fetishises material culture, that is valued for its marvellously unselective acquisitive power, its expansive capacity to accumulate, consume and contain ‘things’, anything, and its existential status as irrefutable testimony to the success of material production. The omnipresence of waste serves as a sign that the digestive tract of advanced capital’s body politic must still be working, indeed working ‘overtime’ and at full capacity. The city is thus re-energised – finding both a new function and a new aesthetic. It is imagined explicitly as the most monumental and concrete consumer and, with its unselective juxtapositions and conservation of material artefacts, as the most eclectic ‘pop’ collector. Fredric Jameson writes of this re-signed city:
The exhilaration of these new surfaces is … paradoxical in that their essential content – the city itself – has deteriorated or disintegrated to a degree surely still inconceivable in the early years of the twentieth century … How urban squalor can be a delight to the eyes, when expressed in commodification, and how an unparalleled quantum leap in the alienation of daily life in the city can now be experienced in the form of a strange new hallucinatory exhilaration – these are some of the questions that confront us.19
Within the context of this new urban exoticism and its erotics of commodification and consumerism, two new images of the science fiction city emerge. And, given that the postmodernist city is experienced as having no centre – being all centre or decentred, dispersing its activities in every direction – it is hardly surprising that the site of both of them is Los Angeles. The first and most aestheticised comes, of course, from Blade Runner (1982). Its Los Angeles of 2019 is a crowded and polyglot megalopolis filled with a multinational and mar-ginal populace, additive architecture, sensuous ‘clutter’, and highly atmospheric pollution. This is a city experienced less as base and degraded than as dense, complex and heterogeneous: it stimulates and exhausts the eyes, for there is always – literally – more to see. (Indeed, the eye is a crucial narrative motif.) This imaginary Los Angeles is concretely constructed from ‘layers of texture’:
visual information is imparted in every square inch of screen. Details proliferate. The umbrellas carried by extras have lighted tips because the streets are so murky. The television monitors that have replaced traffic signals provide deliberately poor pictures. Skyscrapers are built on top of existing structures – and are shown … in their hundreds of stories.20
Despite the skyscrapers, the visual experience of this Los Angeles has little to do with verticality and lofty aspiration. Rather, the trajectory of our attention tends to stay grounded – fascinated by the city’s retrofitted transformation of its ruins, its ‘spaces and objects whose original purpose has been lost, due not to obsolescence but rather to an overinvestment brought about by constant recycling’.21 It is not surprising that industrial pipes and ducts figure prominently in the mise-en-scène (as they would even more explicitly in 1985’s Brazil). This Los Angeles is literally exhausted – generating that strange blend of hysteria and euphoria that comes with utter fatigue.
The emphasis of the second science fiction image of Los Angeles is less on design than on random, discontinuous and dispersed movement. It seems no accident that the company that made Repo Man (1984) refers to itself as Edge City Productions. The Los Angeles of Blade Runner is decentred by being all centre, whereas the Los Angeles of Repo Man is centred by being all margin. The Los Angeles of Blade Runner unifies its outmoded and vastly disparate material signifiers into new ‘retrofitted’ and eroticised architectural forms, whereas the Edge City of Repo Man celebrates convulsive spatial discontinuities in a constantly moving culture: its mise-en-scène is not cluttered, merely littered (occasional newspapers, strange people, garbage, drunks, dead derelicts and abandoned sofas punctuating otherwise empty and unwalked streets). Indeed, in Repo Man the city is perceived as a set of discrete and unconnected spatial rather than architectural fragments – framed by the windscreen of a moving car that, in this city of repossessions, is always changing hands and drivers and points of view.
This is the city in a schizophrenic representation – ‘reduced to an experience of pure material Signifiers … of a series of pure and unrelated presents in time’.22 The city does not cohere, has no causal logic to unify it. Discussing Los Angeles as the ‘automobile city’, Yi-Fu Tuan points out: ‘Driving on a freeway can be disorienting. A sign, for example, may direct one to the far left lane for an objective that is clearly visible to the right.’23 But repo men find sublime pleasure in these discontinuities, automotively ‘troping’ the city’s streets and freeways – that is, rhetorically swerving from expected trajectories to create new relations of meaning, or, as the film’s philosopher Miller would say, new ‘lattices of coincidence’. The Los Angeles of Repo Man is a city whose spatiality is not bound by architecture but rather by trajectories of movement which, no matter how seemingly random, will – like the freeway system – eventually intersect. Thus, no matter how they disperse themselves, repo men, vicious LA punks, a nuclear physicist, a pair of car thieves, and a Chevy Malibu with a trunk full of extraterrestrial weaponry keep meeting up again. Whereas in Blade Runner the pastiche of new and old genres, recycled aesthetic styles, and eclectic material objects constituted Los Angeles’ temporal mode as literal and increasingly collective present, Repo Man’s Edge City is temporally encoded as an eternally recurrent present.
Thus the science fiction city of the 1980s, while not mourning the failed aspirations of its past, was not really capable of envisioning its future but, rather, was euphorically lost in erotic play with its material present. The imaginary Los Angeles of Blade Runner and Repo Man, the New York of Liquid Sky (1983), only dream their complete reversal of bourgeois utopian values, only hallucinate their liberation from the bourgeoisie who have gone off to live in Spielberg films or gone Back to the Future (1985). These cities, in visible fact, eroticise consumption and fetishise material culture in scenographic paeans to advanced capitalism. And, while these cities celebrate their counter-cultural funkiness, their heterogeneity, horizontality and cultural levelling, their alienated terrestrials and terrestrialised aliens whose differences supposedly make no difference in this dispersed and marginalised culture (1984’s Moscow on the Hudson and Brother from Another Planet are, after all, the same movie), they function as virtual ghettoes – or, wishing upon that bourgeois star, effectively efface those differences that do make a difference who you are. Positing, on the one hand, a new and liberating model of the city and, on the other, buying back into its failed model by merely reversing (rather than altering) its terms and values, the imaginary postmodernist science fiction film city of the 1980s is truly a city on the edge, offering us a hallucinatory future we might want to visit, but a present in which – unless we just happen to be bourgeois cinemagoers and ‘slumming’ – we would not want to live.
Indeed, if the urban mise-en-scène of the 1980s science fiction film is both intensified and compacted as all ‘inner’ city, and diffused and dispersed as all ‘marginal’ city, future urban experience would hardly appear to accommodate normative ‘middle class’ life at all. Thus, looking at the 1990s, we might ask whether (and, if so, in what manner) the bourgeois cinematic imagination has effected some form of ‘urban renewal’? What can the imagination construct in or beyond a city ‘on the edge’? In the last decade of the twentieth century, the cinematic response to these questions has been cities imagined spatially (and tonally) in an urban experience of going ‘over the top’ or plunging ‘over the edge’. That is, although manifest in two quite different modes, the current science fiction film city has been figured as groundless, lacking both logically secure and spatially stable premisses for its – and our – existence. This is a city virtually ‘bottomed out’ and literally fathomless: its in-habitants suffer from giddiness or vertigo and, rootless, they ‘free fall’ in both space and time.
One contemporary mode of imagining this groundless or bottomed-out city is so cinematically reflexive as to be comic or ‘safe’ – and thus without much consequence or poetic resonance. This mode returns us in a fashion to 1950s science fiction: to the image of the city brought low, its identifiable architecture destroyed by catastrophic ‘natural’ disaster or ‘alien’ attack. Nevertheless, while Independence Day and Mars Attacks! (both 1996), Godzilla, Deep Impact and Armageddon (all 1998) draw upon older science fiction movie tropes, they seem themselves temporally rootless and spatially disaffected.
In Independence Day, alien flying saucers blow up the White House and the Empire State Building, visibly reducing the USA’s major cities to rubble. Nonetheless, while there is panic in the streets, there is no Cold War fear and anxiety here to inform and historically ground it – merely cinematic nostalgia and the imperatives of the latest special effects. And, while one might want to link the urban destruction in Independence Day and the films that follow it with recent and explosive acts of urban terrorism in New York and Oklahoma City, there seems to be no human affect or real consequence attached to it. The cities in these films appear to have little meaning; they seem hardly to matter at all. As Roger Ebert notes of Independence Day: ‘The news comes that New York, Washington and Los Angeles have been destroyed, and is there grief? Anguish? … Not a bit.’24 Indeed, in the comedy Mars Attacks!, manic Martians decimate not only Washington but also Las Vegas in what is less an apocalypse than a wacky celebration. In Godzilla, taking on the functions of nearly every 1950s city-stomping giant reptile or insect, Godzilla tromps Manhattan – but lacks the affect generated by Atomic Age anxieties about nuclear annihilation, mutation, and a return to the world as ‘primal sink’. And, in both Deep Impact and Armageddon, in which meteors and asteroids threaten Earth and tidal waves and flames engulf the urban cityscape, the cultural stakes seem remarkably low. What these films have in common (besides a penchant for de-capitating the Art-Deco Chrysler Building) is an astonishing – and itself historical – lack of care. Their cities, however familiar, are not ‘grounded’ or substantial: they seem to exist only for destruction. Reviewing Mars Attacks!, Jonathan Rosenbaum might well be sum-marising this mode of urban imagination when he writes of a
postmodernist free fall through the iconography of 1950s and 1960s science fiction in relation to the present: a singular sense of giddy displacement that clearly locates the movie in the 1990s, but a 1990s largely made up of images and clichés from previous decades that are subtly turned against themselves, made into a form of camp, affectionately mocked, yet still revered as if they had a particular purchase on the truth.25
There is, however, a second and more affectively engaged mode of imagining the science fiction city in the 1990s. This urban imagination borrows heavily from the film noir roots and urban mise-en-scène of Blade Runner, but its poetic resonance is less eroticised and much bleaker; and, in at least one of its latest expressions, Dark City (1998), the entire narrative explicitly foregrounds and visually concretises the rootless, vertiginous and insecure sense that the city is groundless in both time and place. The cinematic experience of this city is not of the free fall or giddy displacement of going ‘over the top’, of campy exaggeration or nostalgic pastiche. No longer merely ‘on the edge’, this urban imagery takes us literally ‘over the edge’. The city’s inhabitants (if, indeed, they still can be called such) are increasingly dislocated in space – and, dislocated, their very identities shift and become displaced and ungrounded. Thus, it is not coincidental that this mode of urban science fiction film is as concerned with time and memory as it is with space and place. Its correlations between the ungrounding of urban space and the ungrounding of identity begin with Blade Runner and are followed by The Terminator (1984), Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and more recently by Strange Days (1995) and Twelve Monkeys (1996). In these films, we see the city of the future as what Roger Ebert has succinctly described as ‘a grunge pit’.26 The word ‘pit’ here is telling.
Increasingly, urban science fiction space seems not only grungy but also bottomless and, in various ways, unfathomable. In the mid-twenty-third-century New York of The Fifth Element (1997), for example, the protagonist is literally located in mid-air: he is a cab driver in a vehicle vulnerable from above and below (the heroine, leaping from a building whose top and bottom recede into invisibility, falls through the roof into his back seat; later, he is chased by vehicles beneath him). Radically different from the ordered urban airways envisioned by both Metropolis and Just Imagine, this city is a dizzying and densely layered labyrinth of architecture and motion: it has neither skyscrapers (there is no visible sky as such) nor ground. This is a city that seems to have no boundaries and yet, at the same time, is peculiarly hermetic.27
These unstable, boundless, and yet hermetic qualities become the very stuff of narrative in the aptly named Dark City. Through the use of digital morphing and warping, the very ground of urban and cinematic space and time is destabilised by digital effects and the effects of the digital. Both literally and metaphorically, the city’s premisses no longer hold. Dark City is some perpetually nocturnal and hermetic metropolis that combines the urban visions of German Expressionism, Edward Hopper and film noir; and its human inhabitants never seem to know where they are, where they are going, or how to get anywhere. The film’s alien ‘Strangers’ are responsible: they literally and metaphorically keep both the city and its inhabitants ‘in the dark’. Furthermore each midnight, through a communal act of will, they literally warp, expand, shrink, and shift buildings and streets to transform the entire cityscape architecturally and spatially – which is nonetheless bounded as a finite and hermetic world. Correctively, in secret experiments, the Strangers also literally remember and relocate the memories of the city’s inhabitants. There is nothing in this city, then, that holds or is stable – except for a recurrent, if also suspect, postcard-like image of a ‘perfect’ (and decidedly non-urban) seaside town.
Ultimately, Shell Beach in Dark City is a postcard construction of the protagonist’s wish and will – as unstable and hermetic as the city he escapes. It is at this point that the contemporary science fiction film departs from the unfathomable and ungrounded experience of urban life. But where cinematically does it go? Most recently, it has fled – in full awareness of its own desires and devices – to the allied genre of fantasy where variations on the Edenic small-town alternative to the groundless city only ‘appear’ more hospitable to human existence. In recent paranoid fantasies such as The Truman Show or Pleasantville (both 1998), the small town offers no satisfactory escape from science fiction’s urban nightmares. Indeed, it offers merely a sunnier imagination of inhospitable space – replacing the science fiction film city’s incoherence with an utterly scripted order, and containing its dizzying boundlessness in the small and hermetic frame of a television set.
Notes