Metropolis to Blade Runner

R:.. C', i"'IpHc c'
Race, Space and Class:
The Politics of the SF Film from
Metropolis to Blade Runner
David Desser
The sC'i,nce fiction film provides an interesting site for political analysis
that, with 'some notable exceptions, as a genre it tends to be relatively free
of politics, This does not mean that the science fiction film is ideologically
neutral, free of ideology-no
work of art is free of ideology and certainly no
work produced in an industrial-entertainment
context may be said to be
ideologically free. Rather, a distinction is being drawn here between an overt
political message or component, and the typically covert play of ideology in
a film text. And this lack of an overt political level may be said to stem precisely
from the very industrial-entertainment
context from which science fiction films
are drawn. For we should recognize that until very recently in the history of
the cinema, the science fiction film rarely came from the ranks of independent
filmmakers. SF's usual heavy reliance on "hardware," the realm of special effects
and spectacle, mitigated against the low-budget feature. Thus in dealing with
science fiction we are dealing with an industrial genre par excellence.
Since the primary purpose behind any industrial product is to turn a profit,
it comes as no surprise that SF films have tended, as much as any genre, to
try and appeal to the "lowest common denominator"
in audiences. Thus it
behooved film producers to shy away from controversy, which is to say, politics
of any but the most general, inarguable sort. This fact makes science fiction
films a particularly valuable tool for cultural analysis-the
themes and techniques
of such films in any given era may be held as an index of the dominant political
and ideological concerns of the culture. Analyses of the American 1950s, for
instance, have found SF a veritable motherlode of primary texts, while analyses
of the period 1977-1984 in the U.S. have already turned to science fiction for
III
cultural clues.!
There are dangers, however, in so easily ascribing a film's politics to a
particular cultural agenda, a danger, even, of ascribing an entire cycle of films
to such forces. One risks denying to an individual text any integrity-integrity
of an artistic or political sort. (There are other dangers, as well, such as the
possibility of a text or a group of texts becoming a site of an oppositional stance,
such as the "cult film" phenomenon, or the short-lived Hollywood Renaissance
of 1967-72, not to mention the various New Wave movements in France, Great
Britain, Japan, and West Germany.)
no
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'('hI" 1:l('k of politics heing the rule in SF, the presence o[ politics becomes
NiKllifi("allt; the presence. of an overtly questioning
politics, a politics of
("OIl(!"()v<;rsy,
becomes doubly significant. As a site of analysis to examine the
IIpP(;tH'ance of political themes and motifs in SF, Blade Runner is a privileged
'("Xl. There is no denying its status as a science fiction film, its origins in an
illdusu-ial-entertainment
context, the pressure, given a $20 million-plus budget,
to appeal to l.cd. demographics, and its appearance as part of a general cycle
of SF films (post-Star Wars.) Thus the use of a number of overtly political elements
makes the film both a paradigm case and an anomaly.
One can isolate three primary political motifs which Blade Runner utilizes:
race, space, and class. To stress: these are overt political motifs, for Blade Runner
also has much to offer in the area of ideological analysis which will be the
province of other essays in the present book. Race is defined here in the traditional
sense of differing races within the species homo sapiens; but also in the science
fiction con~ext of a different race, a different species, in this instance homo
replicant (perhaps). Space is defined in the physical sense, which in Blade Runner
is structured around the opposition High/Low. In tracing the spatial mode in
science fiction, we will also see this motif structured around an equivalent binary
pair Inside/Outside. The third motif, class, is used in the Marxist sense in terms
of a particular group and its relation to the means of production. This motif
will also find an equivalent appearance in films in terms of the relation to
power (which in Marxist terms is a function of the relationship to the means
of production, in any case).
In Blade Runner, race is structured into the film in both the traditional
and the science fictional aspects of the issue. This futuristic Los Angeles is densely
populated by a swarming mass of humanity, with a noticeable majority of
Orientals, Latinos (the neon lights of a downtown Spanish-language
movie
theatre flash prominently near J.F. Sebastian's apartment), and a smattering of
Mediterranean types. The streets are also filled with a variety of midgets, punks
and decadent revelers (the latter among the few Caucasians). In fact, the sight
of a white person is rare enough (at least at street level) for the replicant, Pris,
to ask Sebastian why he hasn't emigrated off-world. He replies that he is
unqualified, genetically deficient, a victim of the "Methuselah syndrome" which
accelerates aging. The majority of whites have evidently abandoned the Earth
and left the "inferior" races to inhabit the dying planet.
The question of racism appears also in the form of severe discrimination
against replicants, whose difference from humanity stems initially from the fact
that they are the product of genetic engineering, manufactured human beings.
The replicants are not robots, they are human in every way save not having
been born of the union of man and woman. The society which created them
for virtual slave labor in the off-worlds has outlawed their presence on Earth.
It is never explained why they are outlawed on Earth, in the film or in Philip
K. Dick's source novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? We can only
conclude that they are outlawed because they are different-a
strategy with
numerous precedents in Mankind's tragic history of racial, religious, and ethnic
discrimination.
Among their supposed differences is the replicants' lack of
emotions, and here we find an important science-fiction motif. Carlos Clarens:
"The ultimate horror in science fiction is neither death nor destruction but
Racc, SVacc anti CJas!)
dehlllll:lloi1 ..,d<)II, a state in which ... the individual is depriv(;d PI' Illdividual
feelings, free will, and moral judgment" ("Political" 56). We will have occasion
to return to this specific dimension of difference, to the political implications
of emotional lack and its consequent
"dehumanization."
For the moment,
however, we are posed the question of difference, of different origins and different
characteristics, relating to race.
The issue of race is conflated with the issue of class; we see that most of
the workers who run the city (the very few we actually see) live among the
teeming masses. Only the fortunate few, the wealthy and powerful, can escape
life on the surface. And the difference between the elite and the masses is visually
dramatized by the spatia'fopposition
High/Low. Here, the concept of the upper
class is literalized. Eldon Tyrell, wealthy head of the Tyrell Corp., lives high
above the city in a huge pyramid-a
motif nicely demonstrated by the sequence
in which Roy Batty forces Sebastian to take him to see Tyrell. Even the hero,
Rio\ Deckard, the blade runner of the title, lives some ninety-two stories above
the c~ty. The police, representatives of power and authority, spend most of their
time in hovercrafts looking down on the city.
The racial difference of the replicants is also conflated with their class
associations; when they arrive on Earth, in Los Angeles, their first instinct is'
to live among the masses on the city's streets. Leon takes a room on the second
floor of a rundown hotel. Zhora works in a strip joint in Chinatown. Pris moves
in with Sebastian while Roy Batty moves freely through the streets. Thus the
replicants are clearly associated with the lower classes, their presence nearly
undetectable. Only the police, the purveyors of the neo-Nazi mentality of the
future, desire their elimination. That the replicants are explicitly perceived by
the police as inferior is made clear by the racial epithet with which they are
characterized by Capt. Bryant. He calls them "skin jobs," which Deckard tells
us is like calling black people "niggers." Thus the specifically racist dimension
is made apparent verbally as the specific class dimension is made apparent visually.
It is part of the brilliance of Blade Runner that the motifs of race, space
and class are so clearly linked and so overtly politicized. Of course, Blade Runner
is not sui generis, either as a science fiction film or as a political science fiction
film. In the remainder of this essay, we may trace the motifs of race, space and
class as they have appeared in the history of the genre before returning to make
some final remarks on the significance of their appearance in Blade Runner.
And the place to begin any discussion of the political use of science fiction
is with Metropolis, which Douglas Menville has rightly called "the first great
achievement of the SF cinema" (32).
The influence of Metropolis on the history of screen science fiction is almost
incalculable. Menville asserts that "the atmosphere and visual style of this film
were to influence the concept of virtually every filmic portrayal of the future
for many years to come" (Menville 33). As one of the towering achievements
of the Golden Age of the German cinema, Metropolis lent intellectual
respectability to screen SF and started a trend (or a series of cycles) of big-budget
science-fiction films. And although today, critics and historians concentrate on
the fabulous architectonics of the film and decry the naive, simplistic pol i t ic~,
it is the very "intrusion" of politics into the genre that accounts for th(' 1'I1111'M
hi8tol'i.cal significance.
I H)
'1'10(' 1)(ll'I'owillgs of made Runner from Metropolis are profound. Philip
St rick, in one of the first reviews to appear, recognized this when he claimed
that the city in the film" ... is the best thing that's happened to megalopolis
movies since Fritz Lang" (172), Strick does not extend the parallels beyond this
observation, but even this alone is notable. Lang's city, like the one created
by Ridley Scott and company for Blade Runner, is characterized by its
extraordinary expansiveness upward. Lang's characteristic shot in Metropolis
to demonstrate this is the sight of airplanes flying through the canyons created
by the skyscrapers. Blade Runner utilizes the same type of shot when we frequently
see the police hovercrafts navigating the cityscapes.
This space in Metropolis is also significantly politicized. The city dwellers
who live above ground are contrasted to, and in conflict with, those who dwell
beneath the streets. This dialectic above/below corresponds to the difference in
class. The/workers
labor below, the upper classes enjoy themselves above. It
i_sLang's notion that the class conflict can be resolved, but only by a mediator,
and only by a mediator with inspiration. The mediator turns out to be a member
of the upper class; the source of the inspiration stems from a member of the
lower class. Lang likens the mediation to that between mind and hand, guided
by the heart-the
mind is the supercapitalist, the Lord of Metropolis; the hand,
the foreman of the workers; and the heart, the son of the master of Metropolis,
who is in love with a woman of the lower depths. Unfortunately,
there is no
notion of just what form this mediation will take. Will the workers share control
of the means of production, or will they merely be given higher pay, better
working conditions and some time off? The essentially sentimental conclusion
of Metropolis is further complicated by the figure of the mad scientist/magician,
Rotwang. He is crucial to the plot, but not to the politics of the film. His
death seems to pave the way toward the mediation between capitalists and
proletariat, but are we to conclude thereby that the capitalists of the world are
somehow being misled by scientists and technocrats? Unlikely, Thus in reworking
some of the visual and political strategies of Metropolis, Blade Runner is careful
to merge the figure of the capitalist with the mad scientist, creating one potent
image: Tyrell.
Blade Runner also borrows from Metropolis the idea of the "robot." In
both films the concept of the doppelganger is present, the dark side, our own
Other. Fear of the replicants,is thus related to the fear of the unconscious (the
typical explanation put forth for the prevalence of the doppelganger motif in
the German Expressionist
cinema [Kracauer 61-128]). In Metropolis, the
doppelganger is overtly linked to the problem of sexuality, specifically female
sexuality. The robot created by Rotwang is the evil double of Maria, and represents
the dark side, the other side, of female sexuality. The human Maria, the real
one, is associated with children, with virginity, and she inspires her fellow workers,
not to mention the hero, with love. But the sight of the robot Maria literally
causes the hero to faint at the very force of her libido. The evil Maria, the sexualized
one, incites the capitalists to frenzied lust when she dances in the Yoshiwara
lub; and turll('d loose in the subterranean world, she incites the workers to
violencC', This dnilhHlll\' of Maria is a deaf index of male fears of female sexuality,
(I 1'\'1 H'oduct ion dl til(' IIl1iwl'sa(
ambivalcllt ~lrcbC'tYf>c of Woman: Virj:tin/Whor(',~
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114
Race, Space and Class
Retrofitting Blade Runner
While the film version of Blade Runner plays down this aspect of the
doppelganger,
Dick's novel displays it clearly: in the book, Pris and Rachael
look exactly alike. Even in the film, the replicant women reveal male fears of
women's sexuality. While Rachael is the healing woman who saves Deckard's
life, Zhora (a stripper) uses her sexuality to catch Deckard off guard and almost
kill him; Pris tries to strangle him between her thighs. An essentially ambivalent,
even contradictory, image of women is thus apparent in both films. Ambivalence
and contradictions characterize most fears: the Other is often held to be both
inferior and superior (as in Whore/Madonna).
So, too, with the image of the
replicants in Blade Runrf~T: their superior strength and intelligence is mitigated
by their alleged inferiority, their lack of emotions.
Metropolis inaugurates the tradition of urban dystopias in the cinema. This
tradition is carried forward, to an extent, by the misguided science-fiction musical,
Just Imagine, in 1930. The mythos of the Hollywood musical is utterly
incompatible with the tr,adition of dystopic fiction and the film alternates between
\ a vision of a dehumanizing
future and a standard "boy gets girl" musical.
Thematically, the film looks forward to George Lucas' chase-thriller THX 1138
in its use of letters and numbers for names, as the main plot of this film (set
in New York in 1980) concerns the efforts of J21 to win the heart of LNI8.
Visually, Just Imagine is indebted to Metropolis. John Brosnan describes the
film as "lavish and very expensive" and goes on to state:
The huge model set of New York is really the film's most interesting
inspired
by Metropolis
cost a quarter of a million
250 storeys high ... (40)
but much
more elaborate
than
dollars to build and contained
aspect. Obviously
the city in the German
miniature
film, it
skyscrapers supposedly
must account for the pyramid headquarters of the Tyrell Corp. in Blade
Runner which is, according to production notes, some 700 storeys high!
There is another facet of Just Imagine worth remarking on in terms of
Blade Runner. One of the gags in the 1930 film is that all the cars in the city
of the future have Jewish-sounding
names, a subtle pro-Jewish attack on the
then-notorious
anti-Semitism of auto-magnate Henry Ford. In Blade Runner,
the characters of Philip K. Dick's novel have had their names transformed, from
Eldon Rosen to Eldon Tyrell, and J.R. Isidore to J.R. Sebastian. The change
from Rosen to Tyrell, according to director Ridley Scott, was "just a matter
of us preferring Tyrell" ("Directing" 299). This wonderfully disingenuous answer
clearly avoids the fact that the name changes were doubtless intended to deSemiticize the characters-certainly
not a bad idea,
Inflation
In the history of the science fiction film, the politics of space and race next
appear in that most Hollywood of all Hollywood epics, King Kong (1932). This
story of a giant ape on the rampage in New York may be a mythic reworking
of the struggle between nature and culture, but it is also, among other things,
a thinly veiled allegory on race relations, with the ape representing i\o:n('rican
blacks. And although the Freudian imagery is laughably obviolls. ill('I'(' is
lI{'v<:rtheless something' to he ~aid concerning middle-class /'(':OI'N II/ Ml'kllloill
11I:"dfl"st ill Ihis fillll; til(' f('lil of /I1:l('ks is oflell the fe;11' of sex,:1 IIII1i1II'11
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Kill1; Kong'~ allr:l('t iOIl til and pursuit of the white heroine is a projection of
white middle-class male (ears of blacks, and the racist notion that black men
inappropriately
desire white women. Representing blacks by a giant ape renders
black sexuality as animal-like and in so doing, renders blacks as animals; that
is, it dehumanizes them, makes them other than human.3
Fear of the Other typically manifests itself in terms of sexuality-we
have
already noted ambivalent attitudes toward women expressed in these terms, and
King Kong (along with numerous other texts) testifies to fear of blacks in these
terms. We can also see issues of class similarly translated into questions of sex
in a film like Dirty Dancing (1987) in which the workers at the middle-class
hotel are portrayed in overtly sexualized terms in their introduction
through
the eyes of the heroine.4 In Blade Runner, the replicants represent a fusion of
these sexualized others, of race, class and gender. The replicants' association
with people of color, with the masses at street level, and with frightful sexuality,
Implicate the dehumanization
process necessary at the political level to call forth
the possibility of genocide. Another piece of the genocidal process, another aspect
of dehumanization,
can be seen in the next important politicized SF film.
Things to Come (1936) continues the politicization of urban SF, while it
also introduces the vexing question of human emotion that concerns Dick's source
novel and the film, Blade Runner. Things to Come holds perhaps more value
as a historiGll text than it does as a contemporary
entertainment
(unlike
Metropolis). The presence of H.G. Wells on the production credits lent intellectual
status to the film, while the film itself wants to present a utopic vision of the
future in contrast to the virtually ubiquitous dystopias of cinematic science fiction.
In Wells' future cosmology, the human race will be saved by benevolent despots,
technocrats all, who have rationally determined Mankind's appropriate course
of action,
Things to Come is divided into three parts. The first is a vision of the
next world war, quite prescient in terms of the destructive powers unleashed
by aerial warfare, although a bit pessimistic about the length of the conflict
and the cultural devastation it brings (perhaps not so pessimistic in terms of
the destruction of· specific cultures, like European Jewry). The second part
concerns the rebuilding of civilization amidst the reversion of world culture to
warring tribes. The tribal leaders (exemplified by the character of Boss) are forced
to end the warfare by technocrats who control superior technology, exemplified
by advanced aircraft.
The underlying world view of Things to Come is a valorization
of the idea
that the capitalist ruling-class system is the true, natural order. For here the
technocrats' control of superior technology is a variation on the control of the
means of productipn. Moreover, in this futuristic society, the province of the
third section of the film, non-productive citizens are denigrated by an ideology
derived clearly from Plato's Republic. In the mythic struggle (literalized in the
(ilm) between technology and art, Wells aligns himself clearly on the side of
Ihe technocrats.
Art stands for the emotional, non-rational side of humanity,
:0 side all but abolished
in this technocratic utopia. Rationality, the film asserts,
w(llold "overcome Ihr ~nlbby, emotional and aggressive beast that dwells within"
(1II'ONI!:l"
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film~ which d('('I'y Ihl' f:li I111'1'of
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Blade Runner
to solve human problems, Things to Come optimistically
looks forward to scientific triumph in the future.
In implicitly positing
Mankind's
tendencies toward irrationalism
and
emotionalism as the cause of war, Things to Come very much reveals the Victorianera white middle-class male ideology, in which we may detect the fear of emotions.
Thus the need for scientific rationalism, for repression, for, as it were, the Freudian
world view of Civilization and Its Discontents. This fear of emotions recalls
the vision underlying the German Expressionist cinema and the motif of the
doppelganger
apparent
in Metropolis. We can see revealed, in films like
Metropolis and Things to Come, a conflation of fears of emotion with fears
of sexuality. (It is unclear, perhaps, whether the fear of sexuality is the fear
of loss of control, or th0fear of loss of control is the fear of sexuality.) We
can point to the ways in which the colonialist/imperialist
powers of Europe
characterized native peoples of Africa, Asia and Native Americans in terms of
their animal-like qualities, bestial sexuality and child-like behaviors-all
of.which
had the ideological and political consequence of dehumanizing the subjects.s
HI'i<;nce and technology
Of course, contrary.to the vision of human essence and salvation put forth
in Things to Come, most science fiction films implicate the fear of the loss
of emotion, ClareI~s' "ultimate horror in science fiction." This fear drives the
plots of many SF (ilms of the 1950s, for instance. Perhaps the most significant
of these is Don Siegel's low-budget, special-effects-less cult classic, Invasion of
the Body Snatchers (1956).6 The film is structured around the fear of being replaced
by emotionless automatons, known in the film as "pod people." An aspect of
the plot not frequently mentioned in the literature on the film is the fact that
the pod people proselytize for their way of life. The pod people are the ultimate
conformists, but through conformity to the community comes peace and harmony.
Love may be abolished, but so, they claim, are aggression and hostility, jealousy
and bitterness. This motif, carried forward in films as different as Francois
Truffaut's adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 and Stanl~y Kubrick's adaptation of
A Clockwork Orange, is also played out in a transformed manner in Blade Runner.
Replicants, like pod people, do not have emotions, or so it is alleged. But the
allegations turn out to be false in the case of the replicants. The message in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is that to be genuinely human is to be emotional;
the message in Blade Runner is that to be emotional is to be genuinely human.
The next appearance of the spatial structuring begun in Metropolis appears
in another adaptation of an H.G. Wells story, George Pal's successful rendering
of The Time Machine in 1960. Again the structure revolves around the dialectic
above/below, but this time it is the underground dwellers who control the means
of production, and hence society, while the surface dwellers are the victims of
these futuristic capitalists. The fierce Morlocks live beneath the Earth's surface,
while the gentle, placid Eloi cavort above them in childlike fashion. The question
of difference is nicely addressed by the film, on one level, in that the physical
disparity between Morlock and Eloi allows the former to mistreat the latter.
On the other hand, the bestiality of the Morlocks allows the film to destroy
them without so much as a backward glance (so to speak). In fact, we might
see in this film an allegory of white fears of the third world, as the apelike
Morlocks, with their exaggerated "Negroid" features, literally prey upon the
stereotypically blond, fair-skinned Aryan types.
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011 tlot' ot h~:r'balJd, tlo.cfiJrn call be vi.ewed GISan allegory of the raIJ<oci.oLlsnes~
of ,;:.opitalism. The Morlocks, the owners of the means of production below the
surface, literally enslave and devour the Eloi, just as capitalism is said to devour
its workers. The Eloi may even be said to be lumpenproletariat in that they
independently
produce neither goods nor knowledge, However, under the
leadership of the Victorian-era scientist (needless to say a white male technocrat
on the model of Things to Come) the Eloi defeat the Morlocks and the film
retreats' from its allegorical reading. That we never know to what end the newly
liberated Eloi will put their freedom, what products they will make, what
ideological
structures
will be erected, is typical of a film with an ambiguous
message.
A minor, virtually unknown
British SF thriller made in 1963 looks forward
quite cogently
to the concept of humanity defined in terms of emotionalism.
Unearthly Stranger concerns a man who discovers that his wife is an alien, one
of many who have infiltrated the Earth with the intention of conquering it.
The wife is ordered by her alien superiors to kill the man, but she cannot, having
fallen in love with him. Thus, "her emotional involvement with a human destroys
her ability to survive undetected on Earth, and one of the film's most indelible
images 'is of her tears leaving corrosive tracks down her cheeks as she admits
the truth to her husband" (Brosnan 155). Again we see that emotions are the
most salient characteristic
of humanity,
and the preservation
or discovery of
emotions saves the world.
The tradition.of urban dystopias was carried on in an interesting,
if typically
manner by Jean-Luc Godard in Alphaville (1965). Like Blade
Runner, A lphaville combines elements of science fiction with film noir/ detective
stories. Here, the hero, Lemmy Caution, is right out of the Hammett-Chandler
idiosyncratic,
tradition,
computer
his antagonist, however, not a conspiracy of gangsters but a superwhich runs this vaguely futuristic city (which looks suspiciously like
present-day Paris). The computer suppresses political opposition through mindcontrol and, when that fails, through murder. Again, it is emotion which
counterbalances
the ultra-rationalism
of the computer and brings about its
destruction. There is, as in Blade Runner, a romantic subplot which connects
with the larger plot; in fact, the prizing of love is the primary emotion used
to short out the computer's
circuits. Of course, this brief analysis reduces
Alphaville to a message derived from its plot-always
a danger in discussing
a film by Godard, as the plot is the least important aspect of the film. Yet,
with roots in film noir and science fiction, at least Alphaville has a plot which
can be discussed.
Godard's contemporary in the French New Wave, Francois Truffaut, turned
to the urban dystopia tradition for source material in adapting Ray Bradbury's
Fahrenheit 451 in ~966; both film and novel are among the genuine classics
of the SF genre. The city, per se, is not a part of the film's essential structure
except insofar as the city is shown to be a cold, lifeless, alienating environment.
The row houses of the average citizenry, the antiseptic schools and offices, all
create an atmosphere
of killing conformity,
forced sameness, as if the pod people
in Invasion of the Body Snatchers had been successful in their quest.
IIX
R(;jl'ol'ljjjng
Racc, Space anti
Blade Runner
'fhe film is structured around the struggle between emotions allcl rationalism,
life vs. lifelessness. The hero is initially linked with the totalitarian forces of
conformity; like Rick Deckard in Blade Runner, a law-enforcer of immoral laws.
The hero sees the light, in typical movie fashion, when he falls in love with
a woman who represents the forces of freedom and emotionalism.7 The pod
people in this film have their spokesperson in the form of the fire-chief who
explains that books (which are illegal) just fill people with ideas and alternatives
which only make them unhappy or angry-antisocial
feelings which must be
suppressed. The availability of mood-altering
drugs and the omnipresence of
giant TV screens are the primary modes of such suppression. This aspect of
Fahrenheit 451 is parall'eled in Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
by the mood-organ
referred to in the book's opening paragraphs
and an
omnipresent television show hosted by Buster Friendly. Although these parallels
to Fahrenheit 451 are played down somewhat in Blade Runner, we might note
in passing the giant TV screens which continually advertise for emigration offworld and the fact that drugs and other diversions appear to be plentiful, while
there seem to be no books anywhere. We may fairly conclude that the citizenry
of this dystopic future are similarly encouraged to repress political sentiments
in favor of more immediate gratifications (whereas most of the white people
have, in fact, left this world entirely). Truffaut's homage to the world of literature
in the sentimental conclusion of Fahrenheit 451 hardly seems a viable political
strategy, but it is an affecting, emotional piece of film work.
An aspect of Blade Runner mentioned briefly in the opening sections of
this essay is the clear overcrowdedness of the city. While the issue of overpopulation
is never overtly stated as a political problem, implicit in the film's vision is
the idea of population control. We note again that white people have abandoned
the Earth to the teeming masses of Orientals, Latinos, etc. Two SF films of
the 1970s dealt with overcrowding as a political issue. Interestingly enough,
both films situate themselves in a world desperately overcrowded, yet side with
the liberal-humanist
ideology of freedom of choice which includes especially
the freedom to reproduce.s Z.P.G. (1971-the letters stand for Zero Population
Growth) tells the story of a world in which overpopulation
has caused severe
air pollution. A yellow smog covers the city and people wear face masks to
filter out the dirt. In this crowded world, all births have been banned. One
couple (played by Oliver Reed and Geraldine Chaplin) disobey this law and
are sentenced to die. They manage to trick the authorities, and the film ends
as "Reed and family journey by rubber raft down a huge sewer to freedom"
(Brosnan 201). The question of potential irresponsibility
of bringing a child
into such a world is never posed, is suppressed in favor of the inalienable right
of freedom of choice.
The same liberal, anti-totalitarian
ideology pervades Soylent Green (1973).
Set in the New York of 2022, the film details the hopeless overcrowding of the
city and the desperate shortage of food and other vital resources, such as housing.9
In this future world, suicide is encouraged to alleviate the overpopulation.
Charlton Heston, playing a policeman of the future, discovers, wil.h the aid
of all old friend, that the primary foodstuff of the culture is made by )lI'OC'C'MNillg'
the bodies of the suicides. Till' hiA' plot revelation: "Soylcnt (;1'(,(,11 iN pl'lIpl('/"
"'10('
fillll llius relies (III thc' illll":lillc'd
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agaillst
l·tlll"llliill~1I1
III
ClaHN
II!)
make its point abvllt j.\ClV('"l1llcntalconspiracies and corruption. That such an
alLernative to mass Sl<Irvation may be preferable is never broached, nor is any
other type of solution posed to the obvious, serious problem which exists. In
a sense, the message is to choose population control now or else the alternatives
are indeed grim.
As an interesting aside, we may note a Jewish presence in the film, reminding
as of Just Imagine. Edward G. Robinson portrays Sol Roth, the old friend of
the policeman.
Amid all the changes
although
no mention
green distributed
of the new era, Sol is an old-fashioned
of religion
man, a Jewish
survivor,
is actually made. It is Sol who discovers that the soy lent
by the government
is really dead bodies and thus the Jew becomes the
bearer of the truth. (Erens 364)
/
The Jew is the perfect icon of liberal-humanist
ideology, given the near-extinction
of the Jewish people by totalitarian forces.
Z.P.G, and Soylent Green deserve perhaps footnotes in the history of SF
cinema. Two films made in 1971, however, definitely deserve entire chapters.
Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange remains
one of the definitive statements in science fiction on the problem of human
free will and the question of genuine humanness. The film, situated in the very
near future, in i. recognizably contemporary urban setting, poses the problem
of the essence of humanity in a very powerful way: Is it better to be a vicious
rapist and thug than a mind-controlled, forcibly pacific near-vegetable? The issue
takes on increasing relevance for our time because the mind-controlling, behaviormodifying techniques are already present.
We might briefly compare this film to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
In Ken Kesey's once highly popular novel (adapted into a successful film by
Milos Forman in 1975), the eventually lobotomized victim of a totalitarian
institution is clearly a good guy-a likeable non-conformist in the true American
grain, whereas in Burgess' and Kubrick's vision, the "hero" is an utterly unlikable
punk. According to the film, even this monster is to be preferred to a "clockwork
orange," a rigidly controlled, unthinking
organic being. That Kubrick's film
may fairly be said to have helped inspire the iconography of the British and
American punk phenomena,
and that the film is a cult favorite on college
campuses in the U.S., is a testament to the timeliness of the issues raised. How
far are adult liberal-humanists
willing to let youthful freedom of expression
go before turning to a Ludovico technique?!O
The corrupt totalitarianism
of the government in A Clockwork Orange is
demonstrated not only by the cynical manipulation
of the hero, Alex, but also
by the urban environment
in which most of the population
lives. A clear
predecessor to Blade Runner, this city has deteriorated to a shocking degree.
The streets and hallways are dangerous no-mans land, with garishly costumed
thugs lurking around any and every corner. Safety is to be found, if at all, behind
securely locked doors above street level, or away from the city entirely. The film's
sl'tting may be said 1.0 be an index of the system of control which allows such
:111ellvironment to ('XiNt-~1 fair assessment of governmental bureaucracies which
l
Rclt'ullHiHi!
have allowed
parts
Itl" C', Hpa( C' IIllcl ( ;1\1
Blade l{unnc'T
of today's
cities
to become
nightmares
of pOV{'I'ty :\lld
degradation.
Taking an opposite tack to the question of mind-control and environment.aI
symbolism is George Lucas' THX 1138. Here the focus is on a futuristic society
in which rigid controls have already been established and it is up to the hero
to try and break free of them. The deteriorating environment of A Clockwork
Orange has been replaced by a scrupulously sterile and antiseptic location, as
if perhaps the technocrats favored by H.G. Wells in Things to Come had succeeded
in realizing their vision in this futuristic society. Nevertheless, the setting is
similarly an index of the system. What we soon learn is that if the environment
is sterile, so are the citizens; if everything about the surroundings is completely
controlled, so is everyghe who lives within them. Individual assertion, a little
disorder, is required to topple this system.
The spatial patterning of above/below, which we have frequently seen before,
is here transformed into inside/outside,
The totalitarian computers which seem
to run this futuristic culture maintain that the citizens must live inside a protective
shell, that outside the shell there is nothing but desolate waste. The concept
of a shell, literalized on the spatial level, is symbolized on the social level. The
citizens are completely cut off from genuine emotions. They are kept in a shell
of unresponsiveness by drugs and computer monitoring, True names have been
replaced by letters and numbers; conformity is insured by physical resemblance:
All the inhabitants have shaved heads and wear stark white uniforms, stressing
the idea, of course, of uniformity. The culture has attempted to repress differences
of class, race, and sex. T\us to assert difference is to make the first step toward
rebellion-an
essentially conservative political ideology, no surprise coming from
the future creator of Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark.!!
Lucas' interest in technology, which would assert itself (ad nauseam) in
the Star Wars trilogy, shows forth here in his creation of robot-police. Nancy
Schwartz notes that:
These law enforcers are in many ways more animate than the shaven-headed, white clad
body of citizens whose stern but benevolent guides and safeguards they are. The identifiable
qualities which are supposed to mark the point where metal diverges from mind and
£lesh are distorted and invalidated. Man replaced by machine is less frightening than Man
dehumanized to a level at which machines seem more lively. (Amelio 66)
Precisely-but
Lucas fails to note this irony, except to call for a return to emotions
via a return to freedom. Lucas is more concerned with creating the environment
and staging the escape from it (the film's origins as a 16mm student film produced
at USC are clear at this level) than with explicating the reasons behind the
creation of the society in the first place.
John Carpenter's underrated Escape from New York (1981) is an interesting
tangent to the tradition of urban dystopias in the SF cinema. This futuristic
vision of Manhattan island turned into a maximum security prison may be said
to be, among other things, a humorous comment on typical middle-American
middle-class perceptions of New York City today. Those who found the use
of Isaac Hayes to portray the leader of the criminal clique which rules the
deteriorated city to be racist fail to place the film within this satirical mode.
ILl
illlplidtly
mlNt'H til<' iHNli(' of )llllllllhltli'Ht
Vti, I'chabilit:ltioll,
here
a 8Y8tc,nill whit'h (,J'i'!lifWIS arc simply abandoned by society, literally
<1I1I!1pt'd into an environmcnt
in which there is no hope for escape, parole, or
pllI'dl)n, and in which their criminal skills will, in fact, stand them in good
teat!. How far, the film asks, will we allow our government to go in order
to protect and isolate us from undesirable confrontations
with people who are
IHttside society'S accepted norms? Carpenter's self-conscious use of genre (SF and
Westerns) also allows us to pick up deliberate echoes of A Clockwork Orange
'I'll(' fillll
t'llviNiollillg
in this deceptively elegant action thriller.
These then are the films which may be said to be among the primary
precursors to Blade Runner, which we may now claim as the culmination
of
the tradition of urban-dystopic
political SF cinema. In what ways does Blade
Runner significantly add to the politics of these films? An interesting comment
from John Brosnan, whose opinionated survey of SF films was valuable in writing
this essay, Boints to an answer to this question. As a final note to his book,
Urosnan complains:
Practically none of the present concerns of written SF are being reflected in SF cinema.
l3iology, for instance-in particular the subject of genetic engineering-is a major source
of inspiration at the moment for SF writers, yet very few films have exploited this topical
scientific development. (Brosnan 290)
Of course, we ~ight answer Brosnan by noting, as we did at the start of this
essay, that science fiction films tend to shy away from topicality, as it is often
controversial. Moreover, topicality has a way of dating a film and SF is a genre
particularly vulnerable to that problem. But we might better answer Brosnan
by pointing to Blade Runner, which seems as if it were made precisely to answer
Brosnan's complaint.
In terms of the politics of race, space, gender, and class, Blade Runner
demonstrates
the continuing
significance of these problems in light of the
potential creation of new biological beings. The film also brings to light the
current trend of inner city life, with its huge discrepancies between rich and
poor and the absence of working- and middle-classes. The future portrayed in
Blade Runner is a frightening one not because it may happen, but because it
is already happening. And while the film does not naively call for a mediation
between opposed racial and class enemies, or a mere prizing of emotionalism
over technocratic totalitarianism,
it does not seem to offer a clear solution, either.
But that is the problem with political problems-they
are not so easily solved.
It is a tribute to Blade Runner that it even brings them up.
Notes
'The following quote from Dannis Peary is typical of the perceived relation between
SF and cultural concerns: "Though seldom consciously, these narratives ... cannot help
but convey political attitudes, and in so doing they reveal many underlying assumptions
of American culture." "Political Attitudes in American Science Fiction Films" in Hal
in the Classroom:. Science Fiction Films. Ralph J. Amelio, ed. (Dayton, OR: Pflaum,
1974), p. 50.
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