Beyond _Blade Runner_ (was Empire...)

[Justin Schwartz]

Well, I read a lot of stuff that is not worth reading. I like William Gibson 
and the (extremely politically incorrect) Neal Stephenson. Gibson is a fine 
is limited writer, and Stephenson is capable of real brilliance,a lthough he 
has the emotional maturity of a  14 year old techie. Also wonderful and very 
PC is Parge Piercey, whise He She and It hasa  lot of cyberpunk, and whose 
older Women on the Edge of Time was cyberpubk before there was such a think. 
I do not think of Davis as cyberpunk writer as much as a writer who is 
influenced by cyberpunk. What the cyberpunks are "saying" is taht they are 
depicting the world of postmodern transnational capitalism in all its 
nightmarish glory; there is no literature of which I am aware that does it 
better. Of course I am the ultimate PC nightmare myself, a white, male, 
suburban, middle-class suit with a family and a straight, well-paying, 
prestigious job; I am so un-PC that I take the 8.06 to work. --jks
>
>Rob says:
>
>>  >and faces off against Mel's premonitory cyberpunk info-guerilla.
>>
>>Everyone's  been prattling on about cyberpunks as if they've something to
>>say.  What exactly are they saying beyond 'I'm a lonely butch rebel'?
>
>The only cyberpunk author worth reading is Mike Davis (whose only
>shortcoming is that indeed he sounds like a "lonely butch rebel").
>Davis's _City of Quartz_ & _The Ecology of Fear_ are as luridly
>apocalyptic as any alienated suburban white boy want them to be.
>
>Here's a piece on Mike Davis: Adam Shatz, "The American Earthquake:
>Mike Davis and the Politics of Disaster," _Lingua Franca_ 7.7
>(September 1997) at <http://www.linguafranca.com/9709/davis.html>.
>
>And an excerpt from Mike Davis, "Beyond _Blade Runner_," _The Ecology
>of Fear_ (NY: Metropolitan Books, 1998):
>
>*****   Ruminations about the future of Los Angeles now take for
>granted the dark imagery of _Blade Runner_ as a possible, if not
>inevitable, terminal point for the former Land of Sunshine.
>
>Yet for all of _Blade Runner_'s glamor as the reigning star of sci-fi
>dystopias, its vision of the future is strangely anachronistic and
>surprisingly unprescient....Peel away the overlays of Yellow Peril
>(Scott is notoriously addicted, as in his subsequent film _Black
>Rain_, to urban Japan as the face of Hell) and noir (all those
>polished black marble interiors), peel away the high-tech plumbing
>retrofitted to street-level urban decay -- what remains is the same
>vista of urban gigantism and human mutation that Fritz Lang depicted
>in _Metropolis_.
>
>The sinister man-made Everest of the Tyrell Corporation as well as
>the souped-up rocket-squad cars darting around the air space are
>obviously the progeny -- albeit now swaddled in darkness -- of the
>famous city of the bourgeoisie in that 1931 Weimar film....
>
>_Blade Runner_, in other words, remains yet another edition of the
>core modernist fantasy of the future metropolis -- alternately utopia
>or dystopia, _ville radieuse_ or Gotham City -- as monster
>Manhattan....Such imagery might best be called "Wellsian" since as
>early as 1906, in his _Future in America_, H. G. Wells was trying to
>envision the late twentieth century by "enlarging the present" --
>represented by New York -- to create "a sort of gigantesque
>caricature of the existing world, everything swollen up to vast
>proportions and massive beyond measure."
>
>Ridley Scott's caricature may have captured ethnocentric anxieties
>about multiculturalism run amok, but it failed to engage the real Los
>Angeles -- especially the great unbroken plains of aging bungalows,
>stucco apartments, and ranch-style homes -- as it erodes socially and
>physically into the twenty-first century.  In fact, his hypertrophied
>Art Deco Downtown seems little more than a romantic conceit when
>compared to the savage slums actually being born in the city's inner
>belt of decaying postwar suburbs.  _Blade Runner_ is not so much the
>future of the city as the ghost of past imaginations.  (360-361)
>*****
>
>When reality is as dystopian -- decaying postwar suburbs, the great
>unbroken plains of aging bungalows, stucco apartments, and
>ranch-style homes -- as Mike Davis suggests, who needs a cyberpunk
>novel or movie?  The actual American dystopia we live in is not
>spectacular, for it is neither urban nor urbane.  It's suburban &
>sprawling, policed by zoning.
>
>Yoshie

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