This month, the world gets to celebrate a strange milestone. We are officially living in the age of Blade Runner, which is set during this month of this year. Blade Runner is a milestone of science fiction as well as being a deeply cynical film about our future prospects. Los Angeles is a permanent night, choked with smog, with corporate advertisements towering over dirty, city blocks packed with desperate people. The glitz and glamour of Hollywood are complete absent. Propaganda blares from an overhead zeppelin: “A new life awaits you in the Off-World Colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!” Few take the bait, as they know better than to believe in a better world. It’ll just be more of the same, or worse.
The actual city of Los Angeles in 2019, long a smog-choked automobile nightmare, is suffering from an additional air quality threat: smoke from the nearly-contained Getty Wildfire. Capitalism innovates; not only do Los Angelians have to deal with sucking down car exhaust, they also get to inhale climate change directly. New Delhi in India is being suffocated under smog also, in images seemingly lifted straight from Ridley Scott’s dark vision of the future. (Air pollution is a major contributor to the fifth highest cause of death in India: lower respiratory infections.)
We were promised a future free from this dire cautionary tale. What we got was the dystopia of Blade Runner: polluted cityscapes, near breakdown of all social services, intense alienation, and corporate domination, but no flying cars or space colonies. What a shitty deal.
Top: Blade Runner, November 2019
Bottom: New Delhi, November 2019
Credit: Warner Bros/Getty Images
Blade Runner is one of the few films that has thankfully succeeded to be remembered correctly. Unlike divisive films such as Apocalypse Now, Robocop, or Fight Club, people tend to view Blade Runner with an accurate lens: a serious, grim meditation on the nature of humanity in a hopeless future ravaged by capitalism.
I hear a curious phrase these days: “eternal recurrence”. Most visibly, the hosts of Chapo Trap House have stated that stagnant cycles of culture/politics will and must repeat because of human nature or capitalist society’s inability to imagine something new. Whether or not they are intentionally connecting it with the Nietzschian idea is going to depend if Felix read a quote from Thus Spake Zaruthustra on the side of a protein powder container. (Just some playful ribbing on Biederman. It’s probably in a Metal Gear Solid game.) Their use of the phrase correctly encapsulates a feeling of a culture unable to imagine the future. Even Blade Runner imagines a future in which the power of the Coca-Cola brand can withstand near-total ecological collapse.
If we live in an age of eternal recurrence; history does not repeat itself, it just gets dumber. Blade Runner posits a global political failure to stop its own environmental destruction, the giant neon billboards might as well be Wanted signs for who caused it. Governments seem to be nonexistent, with only the state violence of the police impotently keeping order. What this film and its excellent sequel represent is the visual depiction of entropy and cultural decay that the capitalist world makes inevitable.
Top: Blade Runner, 2049
Bottom: North Hollywood, yesterday
Credit: Warner Bros/CNN
But here we are, in the year and month of Blade Runner, only 2 years after its much delayed sequel. Followups of millenials’ childhood properties are becoming notorious these days, with Twin Peaks, Gilmore Girls, Star Wars, and live action remakes of Disney’s golden age animations. Even the most Marxist music of the last decade, vaporwave, is a recontextualization of what once was. The idea of eternal recurrence is not limited to corporate entertainment, but also politics. Too many people’s brains seemed locked in 2016 or 1992 or even 1982, unable to move on, pointlessly repeating the same fights, the same complaints, same memes; a record on repeat. I’m in a smoky room, scanning the photographs with my overly complicated voice-activated machine, but I don’t discover anything, just more of the same. More of the same, but worse, less real, more manufactured. A Replicant of the future: almost human but not quite, lifespans with built-in planned obsolescence.
It’s 1997 all over again: we just had a Men In Black movie, Rage Against The Machine is back, there’s protests in Hong Kong, Final Fantasy VII is about to come out, and the President is a vile sexual predator about to be impeached. It’s every year and no year all rolled into one: a type of stasis in which we live in the future and the past. The capitalist mode of production makes any visualization of a future beyond itself impossible, and since capital seeks the most profit in the shortest period, a long term vision of the world is not undesired, it is impossible to conceptualize. Too many antagonistic to capitalism look backward to victories achieved in the past and protection of what has been won, rather than proposing a bold new vision where capitalism is no more.
We do, in fact, live in the future, a fantastical time of immense knowledge and no ideas. Yet somehow everything is stupider, more broken. Instead of flying cars, we get auto-driving cars that can’t figure out rain. Instead of Eldon Tyrell making superhuman androids, we get Elon Musk digging a stupid tunnel for one car and calling a child rescuer a pedo. Instead of the Voight-Kampff test, we get Siri asking if you’re depressed.
All culture seems to have already been invented. All politics operate on a pendulum of cyclical resentment. Silicon Valley reinvents and monetizes the concept of the bus, houseguests, and giving someone a ride.
Top: Blade Runner, November 2019
Bottom: New Delhi, November 2019
Credit: Warner Bros, CC image
America in 2019 shares a powerful visual metaphor with the film: nothing in Blade Runner has been created to be simply beautiful in its own right. Its striking art design is because it is so wonderfully ugly. It’s a grimy, unpleasant film. Art and aesthetics are completely absent in a landscape that has been completely instrumentalized for the delivery of consumer goods. Blade Runner’s art design, along with most American architecture, is blocky, industrial, designed for the most efficient flow of consumers in and out of commodity businesses. Nothing seems to function very well. The only art that is rewarded in the system is corporate art or advertising, scientifically designed to entice a purchase.
The deadness and silence of Blade Runner is really our own. If anything, it is a mocking reflection of the future that happened, not the future it depicts. A giant face takes a lozenge, but instead of a monolithic billboard glimpsed from a spinner, we just scroll by on Instagram. The Replicants of the story are us: burnt-out virtual slaves eager to meet the makers of our fates so we can pop their eyes out.
We live in a constant state of anxiety, on the edge of poverty, of annihilation, and no one seems to be in control, but absolute control is there. We’re living in the age of Blade Runner, where everything is amazing and boring all at once. We are all waiting to be blown away by some drunk corporate assassin in a dirty, smog-filled alleyway. Or perhaps if we catch their eye, we will be whisked away, but most likely not. Our lives, like the film, will end ambiguously, the elevator doors slamming shut on an uncertain future.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.