Science Fiction Cities:

An Alarm For Change

 

 

 

By

Eric W. Swett

Linfield College

SOA 366:Urban Society and Culture

 

 

From its earliest days motion pictures have been used to show audiences what is possible or what might come to be.  These movies are labeled science fiction, inheriting the genre from a literary tradition that is considered to have originated with the works of Jules Vern in nineteenth century France (Magic Dragon Multimedia 1998).  In science fiction literature we are first told about the potential utopia of futuristic cities, but later we are told that there is a great risk of cities becoming the most blighted places on earth, doomed by their own excesses and the technology that made them possible.  In motion pictures we see some utopian visions, but most often cities are portrayed as places of conflict, crime, pollution and the extreme separation of the classes.  What do these images tell us?  How do they represent our fears of the future?  And how do the movie portray these dystopian blemishes of our possible future?

            When looking at cities as portrayed in science fiction we will focus in on two different film.  The first is Metropolis (1926) and the second is Blade Runner (1982).  Each of these movies is seen as an important milestone where science fiction and the film making profession collided and made something different and special.  Both received criticism at the time of their release, but grew to become cult classics, spawning a large, devoted following.  Of prime importance to us is the settings in which they take place; Metropolis is about a fictional city of the future and in Blade Runner we see the director’s vision of Los Angeles in the year 2019.  Through the exploration of these two movies we hope to gain some better understanding of the questions asked earlier.

            Metropolis was the brainchild of German director Fritz Lang.  It is the story of class separation and reconciliation that takes place during the year 2000 in a city of enormous skyscrapers where the wealthy and powerful live, and beneath their utopia slaves the workers; toiling and bleeding endlessly, playing their individual roles in a system that does not care for them and may even despise them.  Through the course of the movie the son of a city leader is shown the grimy truth of what life below the palatial skyscrapers is like.  Meanwhile his father sets a plan in motion to begin replacing the workers with robots. Only the mediating influence of the son keeps the entire system from imploding as he brings the elite and the workers together in harmony.

            While the movie ended with a utopian happy ending, the majority of the movie is centered on conflict.  First the workers struggle against their environment; and endless cavern of darkness and danger, guaranteed to grind down all of them, reducing their lives to little more than slavery. Second, some of the workers struggle within the group to get the other workers to stand up for their rights. Finally, the two classes struggle against one another, the elite trying to keep the workers in their place and the workers struggling against the demands of the elite. And in the backdrop of it all is the city in all of its various forms.

            There are a couple of important things to keep in mind when talking about Metropolis and they help us understand why the film showed the city in the way that it did.  It was created in Germany at the midpoint between World War I and World War II.  Manufacturing was still the king of the economy, but the German economy was in shambles, inflation was out of control and the National Socialist, or Nazi, party was starting to come to prominence.  However, during this time the wealthy lived above much of the destitution that the common German suffered under.  It is still debated today as to whether or not Metropolis was just an elaborate piece of Nazi propaganda, because it was much loved by Hitler and Fritz Lang was even offered a job creating nazi films once Hitler came to prominence.  Keeping all of this in mind, the film still shows us some wonderful images of a dystopian city that might have risen from Germany’s despair.

            When we break out the city of Metropolis into it’s two different sections we see stark differences that not only represent where the director saw cities inhabitants socially evolving to, but we also see in the cityscape a metaphor for life in the industrial age city.  On the one hand we have the power elite: the wealthy industrial capitalist.  He lives above the workers both physically and metaphorically.  His existence, wealth and power are gained at the expense of the people who work for him.  There is little care for the worker, he barely even recognizes him as human.  Disdain for the life of those below him does not allow him to feel compassion for him.  As part of the movie the elite commission the construction of a human like robot.  When the construction is successful the elite are ecstatic, thrilled at their success one even says, “The dream that it might be possible to go a step beyond making machines of men – by making men of machine” (Patalas 1985 p. 161).  Interestingly the first use of the robot by the elite is as a means of angering the workers so that in they may be more easily replaced.

            The second aspect of the city is the area below the majestic skyscrapers.  It is in this land of darkness and backbreaking labor that we find the workers, eking out a pitiful existence by working the machines that provide for the elite.  Life is short beneath the city and it is a common occurrence for workers to meet their end during one of many accidents that occur on a daily basis.  But there is hope. There is a leader/prophet amongst the workers who says that a new day is coming, that a mediator will bring them out of the darkness (Dadoun 1974 p. 135).  The workers plan for revolution, wanting to get out from beneath the city and into the light of day, but ultimately they are not well enough organized to do so.  This lack of organization and their emotional ties to the problem lead them make mistakes of passion; uncontrolled mobs too angry to reason erupt instead of protest.  As an example, when their prophet (who was replaced by the robot) leads them astray they become violent and unreasoning, burning her simulacrum at the stake!  In the workers we see that which the elite fear and what they tell the middle class the workers are like; violent, dirty and wanting what others have. 

            When the two sides come together at the end of the movie there is a sudden and seemingly miraculous sense of understanding between the two sides.  While understanding is nice and certainly less violent, the film does not explore what changes take place following this meeting of elite and worker.  What Metropolis does show us is the separation of the classes within the urban environment of the industrial age, that each class serves a purpose and it suggests that technology gives the elite more control over the workers.  If compared to the world of today we see that our society is even closer to Lang’s image than we might be comfortable with.  The classes are more divided than ever in terms of wealth, the separation is justified by the elite saying they have earned their status and the workers could too some day and technology is allowing for higher productivity despite climbing unemployment.  Metropolis is fiction, but it warns of an extreme we seem to be working towards.

            Nearly 60 years later, in a time when science fiction was going through a resurgence, and the movie Blade Runner entered the scene.  Blade Runner is loosely based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) by Phillip K. Dick.  Ridley Scott’s vision of the future is less complicated than Dick’s portrayal, but he does explore the possible future of a large American city while the story evolves before our eyes.  The movie is set in a time when man has traveled into the stars and has begun to colonize other worlds.  Human looking robots called replicants have been created to perform tasks considered too boring or too dangerous for humans.  The newest generation of replicants is so close to human that they are nearly indistinguishable from the real thing, but they have been built to live for only four years.  After a group of replicants revolts on a distant mining colony all replicants are banned from being on earth.  A special police force, code name Blade Runners, is set up to locate and eliminate any replicants that make it to earth.  The main character of the movie is a former Blade Runner who is brought back into service in order to hunt down a group of military replicants that made their way to earth.

            The futuristic Los Angeles of Blade Runner is a maze of buildings, smothered in a crush of people, and injected with neon and holographic advertisements.  If someone were asked about their impressions of this city and the things they remembered after a single viewing their likely response would be that it was dark, except for the advertising.  Huge billboards of holographic Geisha girls beckon the lowly populace while whale like blimps prowl the skies overhead, offering relocation to paradises found on other worlds ripe for colonizing.  Different signs are written in different languages, with the East Asian languages being the most prominent.  Indeed, the population at street level seems to consist largely of people of Asian ancestry.  The sky is always overcast and it is constantly raining in the lower part of the city.  It is in this urban hell that most of the movie takes places.

            Above the squalor of the streets, actually above the clouds, rest the peaks of skyscrapers, illuminated by the gift of a still discernable sun.  In these high places, detached from the world below live the elite.  The powerful member of government and industry live here, lording above the masses below.  Their surroundings are sterile, clean and expensive; far beyond the reach of the people living below.  We’re only brought to this part of the city briefly in Blade Runner, and then only to question a corporate head as to what the renegade replicants might want with him, but we are shown enough to recognize the same sense of class separation that we saw in Metropolis.  Unseen, but eluded to, is a third area in the movie: the colonies.  Only those who qualify are relocated to the colonies, leaving behind, in the cities, those who are beyond redemption.

            Is this version of Los Angeles’ future inevitable?  Is it possible?  According to an article by Wong Kim Yuen titled “On the Edge of Space: Blade Runner, Ghost In the Shell and Hong Kong’s Cityscape” (2000), the cityscape in Blade Runner and other cities in science fiction are closely modeled after present day Hong Kong.  The future cities with their closely spaced buildings coupled with a large, poor population and an elite class that lives and works in tall towers of metal, glass and concrete certainly share traits with Hong Kong, but Yuen argues that the similarities are more specific than that.  He sites the large electronic billboards, numerous video screens and early concept drawings for Blade Runner as clear examples of why Hong Kong was used as a model.  The only thing missing from the picture of the modern city is the technology found in the movies.  If Ridley Scott is able to take a modern city, modify it slightly and still transform it into a believable futuristic urban setting, who is to say that we are that far from the frightening possibility of our cities evolving to that state?

            In both of these movies we see certain, glaring, similarities.  The division of classes within the city is highly pronounced, the poor are left to their fate and the city becomes more and more a place associated with violence.  When looking at the major cities of today we can see the same things to a lesser degree, and this is what makes the cities of science fiction so disturbing to us despite their fantasy.  Earlier I compared our modern urban environment to that of Metropolis in the year 2000 and found that much of what was shown in the movie can be seen as a metaphor for today’s cities.  If in three-quarters of a century we have gone from fiction to reality, can it be possible for it to happen again?  If we were to look at urban society today and project a possible outcome twenty years from now if no changes were made, would our cities look like the Los Angeles of Blade Runner?  I believe that it is not only possible, but entirely probable.

            If we were to use these movies as a guide, what changes would it be necessary for us to make in order to avoid the dark future of Blade Runner and Metropolis?  The most obvious adjustment would be to narrow the power gap between the workers and the elite of the city.  This would require greater political and economic power for the masses while reducing the economic and political strength of the elite.  The next thing we should do is to find a way to encourage corporate responsibility for its employees and environment over its needs for profit.  By doing this technology may be used to increase productivity without leaving thousands of people without a job.  How do we make these changes?  That is a question best asked and answered in another paper.  For now we can only keep our eyes to the possible future and the consequences of inaction if we should continue along the same path.

Resources

Dadoun, Roger. “Metropolis: Mother City – ‘Mittler’ – Hitler.” Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press; 1991.

Davis, Mike. “Dark Raptures: A Consumer’s Guide to the Destruction of Los Angeles.” Radical Urban Theory (1995). 13 May, 2002 <http://www.rut.com/mdavis/darkraptures.html>.

Dery, Mark. “Downsizing the Future: Beyond Blade Runner with Mike Davis.” Escape Velocity (1996). 13 May, 2002 <http://www.levity.com/markdery/ESCAPE/VELOCITY/author/davis.html>.

Gold, John R. “Under Darkened Skies: The City in Science-Fiction.” Geography v86 i4 (2001): p. 337-345.

Magic Dragon Multimedia. Ultimate Science Fiction Web Guide (1998). 13 May, 2002 <http://www.magicdragon.com/UltimateSF/thisthat.html>.

Patalas, Enno. “Metropolis, Scene 103.” Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press; 1991.

Wooley, Benjamin. “City of the Future.” Sight and Sound v1 i6 (1991): p. 72.

Yuen, Wong Kin. “On the Edge of Spaces: Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell and Hong Kong’s Cityscape.” Science Fiction Studies v27 i1 (2000): p. 1-21.