“[Blade Runner] does not take place in a spaceship or space station, but in a city, Los Angeles, in the year 2019, a step away from the development of contemporary society. The link between postmodernism and late capitalism is highlighted in the film’s representation of postindustrial decay. The future does not realize an idealized, aseptic technological order, but is seen simply as the development of the present state of the city and of the social order of late capitalism. The city of Blade Runner is not the ultramodern, but the postmodern city. It is not an orderly layout of skyscrapers and ultracomfortable, hypermechanized interiors. Rather, it creates an aesthetic of decay, exposing the dark side of technology, the process of disintegration. Next to the high-tech, its waste. It is into garbage that the characters constantly step, by garbage that Pris awaits J. F. Sebastian. A deserted neighborhood in decay is where Deckard goes to find the peace he needs in order to work. There he finds the usual gang of metropolitan punks exploring the ruins for unexpected marvels. In an abandoned, deteriorating building, J. F. Sebastian lives surrounded by nothing but his mechanical toys. It is a building of once great majesty, now an empty shell left to disintegrate. The rain completes the ambience. It falls persistently, veiling the landscape of the city, further obscuring the neobaroque lighting. It is a corrosive rain which wears things away. The postindustrial decay is an effect of the acceleration of the internal time of process proper to postindustrialism. The system works only if waste is produced. The continuous expulsion of waste is an indexical sign of the well-functioning apparatus: waste represents its production, movement, and development at increasing speed. Postindustrialism recycles; therefore it needs its waste. A postmodern position exposes such logic, producing an aesthetic of recycling. The artistic form exhibits the return of the waste. Consumerism, waste, and recycling meet in fashion, the “wearable art” of late capitalism, a sign of postmodernism. Costumes in Blade Runner are designed according to this logic. The “look” of the replicants Pris and Zhora and of some of the women in the background in the bar and in the street scenes reinforces this aesthetic. Pris, the “basic pleasure model,” is the model of the postindustrial fashion, the height of exhibition and recycling. The postmodern aesthetic of Blade Runner is thus the result of recycling, fusion of levels, discontinuous signifiers, explosion of boundaries, and erosion. The disconnected temporality of the replicants and the pastiche city are all an effect of a postmodern, postindustrial condition: wearing out, waste. There is even a character in the film who is nothing but a literalization of this condition. J. F. Sebastian is twenty-five years old, but his skin is wrinkled and decrepit. His internal process and time are accelerated, and he is wearing out. “Accelerated decrepitude” is how the replicant Pris describes his condition, noting that he and the replicants have something in common. What Pris does not say is that the city suffers from it as well. The psychopathology of J. F. Sebastian, the replicants, and the city is the psychopathology of the everyday postindustrial condition. The increased speed of development and process produces the diminishing of distances, of the space in between, of distinction. Time and tempo are reduced to climax, after which there is retirement. Things cease to function and life is over even if it has not ended. The postindustrial city is a city in ruins. In Blade Runner, the visions of postindustrial decay are set in an inclusive, hybrid architectural design. The city is called Los Angeles, but it is an L.A. that looks very much like New York, Hong Kong, or Tokyo. We are not presented with a real geography, but an imaginary one: a synthesis of mental architectures, of topoi. Quoting from different real cities, postcards, advertising, movies, the text makes a point about the city of postindustrialism. It is a polyvalent, interchangeable structure, the product of geographical displacements and condensations. Blade Runner’s space of narration bears, superimposed, different and previous orders of time and space. It incorporates them, exhibiting their transformations and deterioration. It is a place of vast immigration, from countries of overpopulation and poverty. While immigrants crowd the city, the indigenous petite bourgeoisie moves to the suburbs or to the “off-world” as the case may be. Abandoned buildings and neighborhoods in decay adjoin highly populated, crowded old areas, themselves set next to new, high-tech business districts. The film is populated by eclectic crowds of faceless people, Oriental merchants, punks, Hari Krishnas. Even the language is pastiche: “city speech” is a “mish-mash of Japanese, Spanish, German, what have you.” The city is a large market; an intrigue of underground networks pervades all relations. The explosive Orient dominates, the Orient of yesterday incorporating the Orient of today. Overlooking the city is the “Japanese simulacrum,” the huge advertisement which alternates a seductive Japanese face and a Coca Cola sign. In the postindustrial city the explosion of urbanization, melting the futuristic high-tech look into an intercultural scenario, recreates the third world inside the first. One travels almost without moving, for the Orient occupies the next block. The Los Angeles of Blade Runner is China(in)town. The pertinence and uniqueness of architecture to specific places, cultures, and times has been lost in postmodernism. The metropolis of Blade Runner quotes not only from different spatial structures but from temporal ones as well. The syntactic rules are broken down in postmodernism and replaced by a parataxis, a regulated aesthetic of lists. The connections are not made at random, but ruled by a different logic. It is the logic of pastiche, which allows and promotes quotations of a synchronic and diachronic order. “The resultant hybrid balances and reconciles opposed meanings… . This inclusive architecture absorbs con- flicting codes in an attempt to create (what Robert Venturi calls) ‘the difficult whole’. … It can include ugliness, decay, banality, austerity… . In general terms it can be described as radical eclecticism or adhocism. Various parts, styles or sub-systems are used to create a new synthesis.” In Blade Runner recollections and quotations from the past are subcodes of a new synthesis. Roman and Greek columns provide a retro mise-en-scene for the city. Signs of classical Oriental mythology recur. Chinese dragons are revisited in neon lighting. A strong Egyptian element pervades the decor. The Tyrell corporation overlooks what resemble the Egyptian pyramids in a full sunset. The interior of the office is not high-tech, but rather a pop Egyptian extravaganza, to which the choreography of movement and makeup of Zhora adds exoticism. Elevators might have video screens, but they are made of stone. The walls of Deckard’s apartment are reminiscent of an ancient Mayan palace. Pastiche, as an aesthetic of quotation, incorporates dead styles; it attempts a recollection of the past, of memory, and of history. The result of this architectural pastiche is an excess of scenography. Every relation in the narrative space produces an exhibitionism rather than an aesthetics of the visual. The excess of violence is such an exhibitionism. The iconography of death as well is scenographic. The “scene” of death becomes a sort of “obscenity,” the site of total, transparent visibility. The fight and death of Pris are rendered as a performance. Zhora dies breaking through a window in slow motion. The decor, the choreography of movement and editing, the neobaroque cinematography emphasize visual virtuosity. It has been said that scenography is the domain of postmodern architecture. Paolo Portoghesi claims that “Postmodern in architecture can be generally read as the re-emerging of the archetypes and the reintegrations of the architectual conventions and thus as the premise for the creation of an architecture of communication, an architecture of the visual, for a culture of the visual.””
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Giuliana Bruno, “Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner”
okay, yes, sure, this is good, she is the best writer, but doesn’t this seem kind of…obvious, to you? isn’t this kind of “how the speculative works”? like, alright, Jameson, yes this is an ok application, maybe. I think “pastiche” is not the best way to address how memory/futures work in science fiction but if you’re out to employ Jameson you’re out to employ Jameson. I like that she doesn’t rely on public memorial type-theory to talk about memory embodied by/embedded in/performed by architecture. I would have because that would have been the easy way to do it, so I have a lot to learn from her.
I’m here to talk about built/environment, but I especially included all her stuff about “vast immigration” “large market” “intercultural” “third world inside the first” “China(in)town” to be read in light of stuff I wrote before about Bruno’s occasional disregard for global/colonial movement in her framing [screening] of movement across urban spaces. I am also thinking about the chapters in Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts (because when am I not), “Imagining Los Angeles in the Production of Multiculturalism” and “Decolonization, Displacement, and Disidentification: Writing and the Question of History.”
whatever, whatever, what do you think about Babe 2: Pig in the City