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3. American Anxiety and the Oriental City
- University of Minnesota Press
- Chapter
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Blade Runner opens in the year 2019 with a bird’s-eye view of nighttime Los Angeles, belching fire and glittering neon. A surveillance car whooshes out from the darkness, then plunges back into the city toward a golden pyramidshaped ziggurat. A huge unblinking eye is superimposed on the façade of the building before the camera takes the viewer into one of its rooms. Holden (Morgan Paull), a middle-aged bureaucrat, languidly smokes a cigarette as he administers a Voigt-Kampf test, similar to a polygraph, to Leon (Brion James), a nervous, wide-eyed sanitation worker. When Leon asks him questions about the test, Holden tells him the scenarios he has been using are hypothetical, designed merely to elicit an emotional response in the subject. Leon grows more agitated, responding with shorter, jerkier answers until he is asked to describe his mother, at which point he shoots his interrogator from under the table. The camera cuts to the large digital face of a coyly smiling geisha before it sweeps down into the streets to settle on Deckard (Harrison Ford), a haggard, middle-aged man in a trench coat reading a newspaper in the rain. 51 3 American Anxiety and the Oriental City By 1990, Frank Gehry’s architecture is praised in a mainstream review as “post-apocalyptic,” having a “Blade Runner inventiveness.” The term “Blade Runner” is also applied to police tactics—Operation Hammer, the gang “sweeps” of 1991, and the watchful waiting (promotional campaign by LAPD) after the Rodney King beating. And, most of all, by 1994, it is applied to the widening gulf in real-estate values—“Blade Runner neighborhoods”—the middle-class panic about crime that is helping to spin many poor communities in Los Angeles further into the problems that this fantasy suggests. One myth builds another. —Norman Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory With its compelling juxtaposition of film noir elements, the artificial human, and lush, techno-oriental imagery, this evocative opening of Blade Runner provides an unforgettable vision of the near future that continues to resonate in popular culture. Since its release in theaters over twenty years ago to an underwhelming response, British director Ridley Scott’s second attempt at the science-fiction film genre has become a Hollywood staple and a cult classic, not just among science-fiction fans but among many members of the North American intelligentsia as well. The film has spawned a huge following: a recent search for web sites offering Blade Runner material returned 4.5 million hits.1 Meanwhile, the look of Blade Runner continues to be reproduced in a wide range of media, including cinema, fiction, animation , video games, advertisements, and comics. Much like the cyberpunk style it helped to spawn, the depiction of urban dystopia in Blade Runner has become clichéd—so thoroughly embedded in the American popular consciousness that it is hard to remember when and how we could have 52 • AMERICAN ANXIETY AND THE ORIENTAL CITY Harrison Ford in Blade Runner (1982). Rick Deckard reads a newspaper before ducking into the sushi bar. [3.94.77.30] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:03 GMT) experienced the future otherwise. Future noir or tech noir settings have characterized most science-fiction films from the 1980s to the present, including the Terminator series (1984, 1991, 2003), Strange Days (1995), Judge Dredd (1995), Dark City (1998), eXistenZ (1999), and the Matrix series (1999, 2003), among many others. At the same time, Ridley Scott’s vision of Los Angeles has managed to seep into the real world, as Norman Klein’s observations in the epigraph make clear. The film depicts in exaggerated form contemporary problems that plague postindustrial cities, including increasing levels of pollution, overpopulation, media saturation, racism, and classism. In this sense, it can be argued that Blade Runner, like much science fiction, has proven eerily prescient, blurring the lines between cinematic fantasy and sociopolitical reality. What is forgotten in this narrative of science fiction turned fact, however, is how these stories also reflect and refract the prevailing attitudes of the social, political, and historical contexts in which they are told. To understand the impact of cultural texts like Blade Runner, then, we must identify the ideologies at work in these texts and examine how they are reproduced , repudiated, and negotiated, not only through primary narratives that focus on plot and character development but also through secondary narratives that evoke the texture, tone, and spaces of...