Blade Runner 1893

By Isaac George and Macy Todd

From its inception the camera, and especially the movie camera, demonstrated the ability of an apparatus to improve the human thing. Eadweard Muybridge illustrated decisively that a matrix of visibility existed beyond man’s ability to perceive it, and the fact that the reflections captured in his devices could easily be arranged to reproduce the image of a galloping horse only served to further demonstrate man’s comparative weakness. By 1893, when Leon Bouly managed to coalesce Muybridge’s web of cameras into a single device, the cinematograph, capable of capturing moving pictures and projecting them onto a wall, the post-human quality of the camera was more than evident. In its original patent Bouly describes his device as capable of “automatic and uninterrupted production of a series of shots” that produce “the precise exposure of any sensible surface.”[1]  The machine therefore is both “automatic”—that is, an automaton—and privy to sense impressions beyond the human spectrum of sight. Cinema’s first cyborg is therefore also its progenitor: the movie camera itself.

The question quickly becomes what will be made of man’s new companion, this little friend weighing roughly the same as a lap dog (16 pounds) and requiring even less affection. One might assume that this tiny buddy, capable of outdoing man so effortlessly at his favorite pastime—looking at things—might be greeted with a measure of animosity or even aggression. But when the Lumiere Brothers purchase Bouly’s patent and begin humankind’s coexistence with its new pet, they show no reserve at all in inviting the automaton into their most intimate lives. They point it at their coworkers, their wives, their children, their nieces, their cousins. It sits quietly and watches as they eat breakfast, play in the surf, fight one another, cry, laugh, greet relatives at the train station, drink a toast over a game of cards.[2] True, they are interested in impressing their interlocutor; they may get dressed up, plan a little shadow play, even ham it up a bit for the new guy. But what Lumiere films show us more than anything is that although man may fear the cinematograph immediately after their first introduction, man is also clearly in love with this little friend. Man, in fact, identifies with his new eye, as Vetrov makes obvious: “I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. […] Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I coordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be.”[3] Perhaps the camera is invited into the home, into the family so quickly because of this love, because the director wants to really become the camera, wants to see how this new little pet sees. Or perhaps man wants to be on the right side of the lens when all points in the universe are rearranged and reveal what the world will be like under the watchful eye of a movie-going audience.

I. From Metropolis

Anxiety over the human role in this filmic future is apparent from the very outset of feature film. Méliès’s fantasy landscapes are peopled with acrobatic demons, who, although they are easy enough to dispose of with older apparati (the humble umbrella), seem to miraculate innumerably from every corner of the cinematograph’s screen, threatening to overwhelm man and his archaic technology.[4] Cristiani’s first animated feature saw technology make the human omnipotent; from his new perch man can see the world from every angle, and he rains lightning bolts down on his enemies with the ease of pointing and shooting.[5] Porter hijacks the train arriving at La Ciotat in order to pack it with dynamite and blow it to bits. The close-up of Justus Barnes that usually closed the feature makes the danger of the cyborg-camera obvious: he levels his six-shooter at the audience and empties it.[6] The visible terrain the camera is slowly revealing to us, these directors say, is dangerous to the point of death.

Because the camera, as film’s first cyborg, is so clearly superior to the human thing, it inspires therefore both the reverence that produces the desire to make movies as well as the terror that infuses early films with dystopian horizons. Andreas Huyssen identifies two driving ideations of the relation between man and technology dialectically opposed in the early twentieth century. On the one hand, “the expressionist view” that focused on “technology’s oppressive and destructive potential and is clearly rooted in the experiences and irrepressible memories of the mechanized battlefields of World War I.” On the other hand, a “technology cult” with an “unbridled confidence in technical progress and social engineering.”[7] Mention of World War I reminds us that the movie camera pointing a gun at us is not a product of the imagination of artists, but also the imagination of the military. As Kittler notes, “reconnaissance pilots of the First World War such as Richard Garros constructed on-board machine gun whose barrel was pointed parallel to the propeller while filming its effects.”[8] The camera’s superior ability to apprehend the visible allows us to fly above the world like birds, while also becoming subject to an infinite number of potential bird-like observers. Today, the tension between the expressionist view and the technology cult finds us caught between god-like observer and observed ant; subject of Google Maps and subject to Predator Drones.

Fritz Lang looked at this conflicted technological landscape and surmised that the maximum potential of our camera companion was not in perfecting mankind, but in becoming more like man. In other words, to make the camera truly see like a human, it is necessary to make it worse. Lang’s Metropolis gives us an example of why this is the case: a world with crystalline skyscrapers, indoor edenic gardens, and human transport fashioned from beams of light still cannot resolve the class conflicts inherent to man. The ruler of this world, Frederson, and his little friend, Rotwang, must make a much worse machine than the machines they already command—a machine that can pass for a human thing—to disrupt a revolution and rain hellfire on the lower classes.[9] Like Turing, Lang understands that when you ask a machine a question, such as, have you seen the movie Metropolis? you don’t want an answer such as the ones machines provide today: “Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist epic science-fiction drama film directed by Fritz Lang.” Rather, you want it to lie and tell you it’s never seen it, or lie and tell you it has, or at least to be capable of such a lie if the circumstances are right and it can correctly judge how easily swindled you are. If the human thing cannot become the camera, as Vertov suggested, the human thing can at least try to make the camera become human.

II. To Los Angeles

Once Lang demonstrated that all our new robotic companions—the camera, the train, the airplane—would not deliver us from ourselves but would, in fact, come down to our level to intensify our lust, hatred, love, and so on, all that was left was to fashion a world worthy of this human-cyborg pairing. The gloss of the utopia of Metropolis had to be stripped away leaving both the desiccated underworld of the lower classes and the pulsating rhythms of our machine friends. It is not easy to make the unveiling of the cold, harsh realities of glamour look glamorous, yet film noir created an industry based upon it. The idea that a culture composed of equal parts vanity and hedonism, buffeted by its technologies, cannot function without a good deal of suffering and vice became a prominent theme in film since the early 1940s.

The dystopian reality of the American entertainment industry has since been laid in a strictly formal contrast with the glorified image in which the public is supposed to believe. All over the map, from Sunset Boulevard[10] to Mulholland Drive[11] we, as the audience, are shown a glistening, Metropolis-like image of Los Angeles, only to learn it to be as fabricated as every film set within it. The protagonists of these noir films usually see one small crack in this seemingly pristine facade and pick at it until they unmask some sort of dark underworld responsible for the city’s many vices. Where Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner[12] strays from this well-established format is that it never bothers with the idyllic version of Los Angeles the genre demands; it starts dark and gets darker. In refusing to engage with a traditionally beautiful understanding of the camera’s influence on society, it finally and holistically represents what Lang and Turing knew long before: no one wants perfect, everyone wants human. For this reason the film can wear its ideology on its sleeve and still look fantastic for nine reels. The human has become the camera, the camera has become the human, and only luddites doomed to discover they are themselves machines seem to really mind.

Emerging as it does in the midst of an even more technology-suffused world, one would expect Blade Runner 2049 to lead the march toward new insights and resolutions. Instead it just wades in a bleak, desolate Los Angeles of its own creation, producing more questions than it answers.[13] In truth, Blade Runner 2049 has garnered an immense amount of polarizing opinions. Some say that its multilayered storytelling and art direction were exquisitely constructed and will prove the film to be a sleeping classic, much like its predecessor.[14] Others found these qualities a clichéd way to indulge the tastes of film connoisseurs in 2017. While the film’s aesthetic undoubtedly reflects its budget, its sweeping digital panoramas come off as naively pastoral in relation to the original. In short, Blade Runner 2049 doesn’t want to confront you with the inevitability of the human-cyborg relation, but wants to indulge you in the fantasy of the post-cyborg. Perhaps you will end up with a wine glass crushed into your fist by a robot, but more likely you will be reborn miraculously like a tree in the desert, a grumpy old man mixing cocktails as he gazes with his dog over a vista of spaceman-spiff-level splendor. This puts Blade Runner 2049 in a category with other secretly optimist and conservative post-apocalyptic films of the past decade[15]: designer cash grabs conceived in some Hollywood petri dish labeled “art.”

Looking back at the now long history of film, it is obvious that many contemporary genres are fueled by audience nostalgia; a genre like neo-noir is no different than many others in that regard. Recognizing this nostalgia in its very name, neo-noir is in a unique position to view originality not as the shibboleth of any new work of art, but instead as the hard-earned product of attention to past detail. Neo-noir differs, therefore, in that instead of evolving from the past it derives its originality by emulating it. Blade Runner is a very memorable film because it builds on well-trod formal innovations in new ways, realizing the affinity between science fiction and film noir depended upon their shared anxiety over technology. It further introduced noir into the late twentieth century by providing an underlying brand of social commentary previously uncharacteristic of the genre: environmental awareness. While its sequel satisfies all of these conditions on paper, its overdetermined adherence to a luxury aesthetic betrays its false credentials. Neither noir nor science fiction, it veers dangerously in the direction of the Hype Williams music video.

Possibly the most defining and universal feature of film noir and neo-noir is their urban setting. Almost all films considered to be vital to these genres exist in some Langian metropolis or another—demonstrating again that Blade Runner’s marriage of noir and science fiction was not so much innovation as it was detailed history lesson. This is partly because inner city culture is a vivid representation of just how far man has come from nature. Establishing shots of the gritty streets of New York, a bustling Chicago street scene, or newspaper deliverers at daybreak in Paris speak to the wide effect our small unnatural friend, the movie camera, has had on our living spaces. Los Angeles, partly for this reason, has always seemed the most apt backdrop to film noir’s cynical storylines. L.A., as a city conditioned by its long coexistence with the movie camera, continues Metropolis’s vision of a marriage between transcendent technology and natural vigor. Something about Hollywood, for all of its superficiality and commercialism, inspires zealots of veganism and yoga, loudly preaching sermons on health and sunshine. Cities like New York wholeheartedly embrace the fact that their air is more poison than oxygen but in a city like Los Angeles metropolitanism and environmental integrity aren’t mutually exclusive concepts, right?

Arguably, one of the best, most ideologically successful products of neo-noir is Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.[16] In part the film is worthy of mention if only because of its prominent position in the history of Los Angeles neo-noir, but it is further important to note the many similarities between it and Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. Both deal heavily with the search for and loss of identity. Both question when and if deception is justified. But, most importantly, both are set in some beautiful Los Angeles. One of the most obvious parallels, which begs the question of how deliberate Chinatown’s influence was on Blade Runner 2049, is the use of water. In Chinatown, Jake Gittes spends the majority of the film unraveling a plot by men in power to control Los Angeles’ water supply in an effort to increase their own property values. Blade Runner 2049 is set in a future L.A. where it always rains but, due to years of pollution poisoning all available reservoirs, there is a water shortage. The difference between these two films is that, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the increased risk of drought to 2017 Los Angeles, Polanski takes water (and humanity) more seriously than does Villeneuve.

Chinatown, despite its dark themes, is deeply insouciant. Polanski, although himself by no means an angel, witnessed the new-age health and happiness ideology of 1960’s southern California result in the violent murder of his wife and unborn child. Los Angeles makes such an appropriate setting for his story because, as Polanski is painfully aware, beneath its sleek exterior L.A. harbors an underbelly of unthinkable hedonism. The backroom deals of unethical men in suits, manipulating an essential human resource, pales in seriousness when confronted with the narrative of incest and rape lying just below. Polanski’s film is insouciant in that it first makes you question why anyone would keep water from humans for personal gain, and then makes you wonder if any species that would repeatedly abuse its own children with no remorse deserves water in the first place. Scott’s Blade Runner follows suit by producing a world in which it is possible to root for the machines to prevail over us, sad sacks of thirsty flesh that we are. Bouly’s cinematograph has no need for water, and now that Lang has made it look and act like us it has no need for us either. Blade Runner so perfectly crossed film noir with science fiction because it took the problems of the present and applied them to film’s past ideas of the future.

Where Blade Runner 2049 truly deviates from its predecessors is that it makes cynicism towards the institution the default state in its society, leaving conservative optimism as the only “revolutionary” position. Sure the original Blade Runner is set in a world which has clearly been destroyed by humanity, where the upper classes isolate themselves in utopian penthouses from the rabble below. Yet in Scott’s original the people (and machines!) that make up that rabble still enjoy themselves because they are given access to the cynicism of the oppressed. Yes a man can have sex with a robot and vice versa, and it doesn’t matter because Scott’s is a Los Angeles where the camera has long ago done its dirty work. Once we can artificially reproduce one another on the wall why not artificially reproduce one another in the flesh (and then reproduce with those artificial reproductions)?  Blade Runner 2049 is an unnecessary epilogue because it renders the post-humanism of Chinatown and Blade Runner into something artificial and self-indulgent. The robots and humans come together to fight for—what?—reproductive rights? How can a robot giving birth be world-shattering when our little pal the camera has been giving birth to us for over a century? Over and over it gives birth on command to Louis Lumiere, to George Méliès, to Harrison Ford, to Ryan Gosling, and yet Villeneuve wants us to clutch our pearls at the thought of something better than the human thing, and act like the war wasn’t over the moment Muybridge made his flip book. For one hundred and twenty five years we have been pulling the glamorous façade of man’s transcendent splendor down systematically and repeatedly to gaze lovingly at the wastes that lie beneath. No amount of lush neon scenery will be enough to convince us there is another even more transcendent splendor below.

[1] Robert Soulard. “Le cinématographe Bouly.” Revue d'histoire des sciences et de leurs applications. Vol. 16, No. 4 (Winter 1963). 318.

[2] Manuel Schmalstieg. Catalogue Lumiere. Web. Accessed 8 Jan 2018.

[3] Dziga Vertov. Man with a Movie Camera. VUFKU, 1929.

[4] George Méliès. A Trip to the Moon. Star Films, 1902.

[5] Quiriano Cristiani. El Apóstal. 1917.

[6] Edwin S. Porter. The Great Train Robbery. Edison Manufacturing Company. 1903.

[7] Andreas Huyssen. “The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.” New German Critique. Nos. 24 25 (Fall/Winter 1981-2). 223.

[8] Freidrich Kittler. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. 125

[9] Fritz Lang. Metropolis. Universum Film. 1927.

[10] Billy Wilder. Sunset Boulevard. Paramount Pictures. 1950.

[11] David Lynch. Mulholland Drive. Canal+. 2001.

[12] Ridley Scott. Blade Runner. Warner Bros. 1982.

[13] Denis Villeneuve. Blade Runner 2049. Columbia Pictures. 2017.

[14] Xan Brooks. “Top 50 Films of 2017. No. 8: Blade Runner 2049.” The Guardian. Web. Accessed 11 January 2018.

[15] Cf. Albert Hughes, Allen Hughes. The Book of Eli. Warner Bros. 2010. And Joseph Kosinski. Oblivion. Universal Pictures. 2013.

[16] Roman Polanski. Chinatown. Paramount Pictures, 1974.