“All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain” – Roy Batty, Replicant Extraordinaire
The future portends neon, glass, and constant rain! Puddles glittering with the sultry, pigmented shadows of floodlit urban life. Impersonal skyscrapers cutting an authoritative, yet hollow, form against the moody skies. It is an opaque cityscape of perpetual midnight.
Smoke fire and smog suggest a world where corporations pollute with impunity, lending the sky a bleak and hopeless tint. If it weren’t for these constant visuals of the aether, Los Angeles strikes us as a dark, subterranean metropolis, such as would be found on the shores of the river Styx. The Tyrell Corporation rises in the frame like a postmodern pyramid. The technocratic scions of the regime are the pharaohs of this dystopian desert.
Refracted light implies some sort of duplicitous duality in everyday life. The reflections from the constant floodlights suggest that we are not looking at the world as it is, but rather as a simulacrum of forms, representative at best.
Visual cues of commerce abound but the frenzied joys of consumer culture have been largely snuffed out. Floodlights give us the impression of the banality of relentless surveillance and the intrusion of advertisements that never free us from their grasp.
A sense of isolation abounds, as it does in any oversize metropolis, and the self becomes segmented and infused with a perpetual ennui. Everything is impersonal and alien, even the microgeographies of debauchery and hedonism.
My favorite scenes show aging buildings, cast against the noir streetscapes. It brings to mind a Neoclassical European city in futuristic decay, the blighted grandeur the more potent when contrasted with the insular modernity of the surrounding skyscrapers.
Let’s look at some spine-tingling film stills of a distant, not-so-distant urban world!
