The contemporary city has become a fluid terrain of multiple
lines of flight, as well as a shifting zone of intensities and forces, marked
by signs and indicators pointing to all possible directions and transits, very
much like an airport. Now even more and more, our airports themselves look like
cities, with banks, office "complexes," churches, shopping malls,
restaurants, bars, special TV broadcast channels, "parks," and
walkways.
The cosmopolis is "overexposed" in the sense that
Paul Virilio has talked about: If at this point we can even say that this city
still occupies a piece of space, a geographical position, it certainly no
longer corresponds to the old distinction of city and rural or to the
distinction between downtown and suburb. The digital convergence of
telecommunications and computer technology (the so-called new technologies) in
the "city without limits" has dissolved the very distinction of
city-suburb-rural, eroding the boundaries of the city. Constructed space now
exists in an electronic topology, and old distinctions between public and
private and habitation and circulation have been displaced by an overexposure
that erases the extension of space and the duration of time.
The representation of the contemporary cosmopolis is no
longer determined by the spatial grid of streets and avenues: At this point the
city is determined by technological "space-time," with its networks,
its electronic highway systems where the interface of human-machine replaces
the facades of buildings and the surfaces of the ground on which they stand.
Before the advent of new technologies, life in the city was determined by the
circadian alternations of day and night. Now however, since we not only open
the blinds but also turn on our television and computer monitors, daylight
itself has been changed. An artificial electronic day, whose only calendar is
based on the telecommuting of information (pace knowledge) that bears no
relationship whatever to real time, is now added to the solar day of astronomy
and the night of electric power. In other words, there is now a distinction
between "present time" (on the screen of the monitor) and "real
time," which I discussed in the Introduction with the example of my
Brooklyn broker friend.
The city without limits as the contemporary desert, haunted
and invaded by transnational (or postnational) nomads, has also become a
teletopia where the duration of time and the extension of space have been
superseded by the absolute speed of the time of capital; that is, on one
register, the city has now become virtual space subsumed by the time of
capital: the city transformed into the desert overexposed to time-light of
speed.
I mentioned that technology and capital produced the digital
city. I also already indicated, if somewhat obliquely, that visual machines
preside over this digital city. Now if cinema, in its strictest sense, erases
the conventional duration of time and the extension of space, then at this
beginning of the twenty-first century, we definitely live everyday nomadic
cinematic lives tied to the screens of our various monitors. In fact, we might as
well be the replicants (complete with memory implants: pace screen memories) in
Ridley Scott's 1982 film Bladerunner: that is, we are pieces enslaved by
the machine of Capital in a vast technological terrain of time-light.
Now I would like to describe these visual machines in the
digital Los Angeles of Ridley Scott's Bladerunner.
Ridley Scott's 1982 film failed at the box-office but a few
years after its release became a cult-film not only in the film world but also
among a certain generation of city slickers who grew up in cyberspace. The film
became cultic among high-tech cognoscenti for reasons that I hope will be clear
in the next few pages. But for now: the most effective science-fiction films
are those that mix elements of the familiar with the unfamiliar, and in the
case of Bladerunner, its Los Angeles was all too familiar and yet we saw
in that film disturbing ingredients of our human future. I have chosen to
analyze this film because its half-ruin half-high-tech cosmopolitan,
multicultural, techno-saturated, and diasporic Los Angeles discloses one
direction that the machines of capital and technology might take us.
Blade runner opens with a panoramic scene, with a wide-angled, birds-eye
shot of a vast high-tech megalopolis, suffused with hazes and beams of
artificial light and huge monitors broadcasting giant commercials.
The film articulates a world in which monitors are an
omnipresent and hegemonic part of life. (Throughout the rest of this chapter,
the term "monitor"--I'm assuming its interactive function and
agency--underscores the complete fusion of computer, television, and
telecommunications technology currently in process with, for instance, web-TV,
media broadcast workstations, and new-media online news-wires. Indeed, this
fusion is currently being used by the new-media industry, and will be available
for consumers when corporate heads get together and merge their resources—as
Time-Warner, AOL, and CNN did two years ago)
Monitors frame the protagonist, Deckard-Harrison Ford, when
we first see him, and they line the streets like lamps. Their glowing screens
illuminate every interior of the movie. The film's semiotic maze engages a
complex imagery of eyes and screens. Bladerunner poses Los Angeles as
the quintessential postcontemporary city and presents a pastiche (and a
fracturing) of temporality in its architectural elements. The opening shot of
the film is a panorama of a chiaroscuroed city. The city is a silhouette of
skyscrapers and points of light against gray clouds. Smoke stacks shoot out
flame, and lightning and explosions and spinners punctuate the horizon. A huge
eye appears next, filling the entire screen and reflecting the cityscape.
Another shot of the city shows a pyramid at the base of a column of light, and
then the same nameless eye.
The eye returns our gaze and also mirrors our gaze. It shows
us the reflections of the city that were, a moment ago, reflections of the
movie screen in our own eyes. Shortly after, the opening scene, Leon's
interrogation, is replayed for us three times as Deckard-Ford uses it in his
investigation. Screens are reflected within the larger screen, the film itself,
and Deckard-Ford watches with us what we have already seen. This scene explains
the presence of a camera during the opening scene, integrating it into the
narrative.
All the film's main characters are nomads: Deckard-Ford, the
Blade Runner (whom the film suggests might be a replicant); Zora-Joanna
Cassidy; Pris-Daryll Hannah; Leon; Roy-Rutger Hauer--four replicants who
escaped from the Off-World and are now nomads on Earth; and Rachel-Sean
Young--Tyrell's replicant almost-human showcase. Vision in the film is part of
the system of Capital. Cinema and its precursors extended the field of the
visible and turned visual experience into commodity. In Bladerunner Capital
constructs a visual regime that enslaves everyone. Neon lights and commercials
dominate the Los Angeles of the film, a dystopic teletopia where Capital and
technology constitute a Janus-Like conglomerate.
Corporations have figured out how eyes work and mass-produce
them. Chew, the eye-maker, wears a crazy goggle contraption to do his work.
People on the streets wear glasses with flashing lights, and Roy teases J.F.
Sebastian with a pair of glass eyes. The replicants seem to hold vision sacred.
In a grisly act of revenge, Roy seeks out Tyrell in his apartment and bursts
his eyeballs with his thumbs. And in one of the powerful moments of the film,
Roy, near death, describes the myriad wonders he has seen: "I have seen things that you humans wouldn't believe. Attack ships
on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I have seen C-beams glitter in the dark near
Tennhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in the
rain."
Two main visual machines frame the film: The Voight-Kampff
machine that appears in the opening scene with Leon and Holden and is later
used to discover that Rachel-Sean Young is a replicant. This machine is a very
advanced form of lie detector that measures contractions of the iris muscle,
and is used primarily by Blade Runners to determine if a suspect is truly human
by measuring the degree of his empathetic response through carefully worded
questions and statements. The investigator poses questions about various
hypothetical situations, and as the subject responds the investigator watches a
screen that shows the subject's eye, as well as two smaller screens and
numerous readouts.
The Voight-Kampff machine is a menacing allegory of the way
we see. It reduces the eye to a purely physical object, to be comprehended
completely by science and examined for what it can reveal about one's thoughts.
The Esper is the other main visual machine, which Deckard-Ford uses in his room
to mobilize Leon's photograph the same way the cinema mobilizes images into
what Deleuze called time-movement. The Esper dissects the photograph for
Deckard's investigation. He inserts it into a slot, and it appears on a screen
within a grid. With voice commands, he proceeds to dissect it, zooming in on
one section, moving over, revealing details ever more minuscule. In fact the
navigational screen of the machine also resembles a video game come to life,
consisting of a diagram of the landscape with superimposed grids.
Grids are a function of visual technology, a mapping of the
space inside the frame onto itself. In Bladerunner, reality is
compartmentalized and looked at through a screen of horizontal and vertical
lines (which are likewise implied by the borders of monitors). The grid
concretizes visual machines. Ridley Scott created a particularly memorable
image in the blimp monitor that hovers over Los Angeles. At one point the blimp
is seen through the grid that is the lattice of the expansive skylight of J.F.
Sebastian's gloomy loft-apartment in the Bradbury Building. (Interestingly, the
Bradbury Building was built in Los Angeles in 1893, prefigured the modern mall,
and was inspired by a time-travel novel, H.G. Wells's Time-Machine.)
The blimp itself is huge and covered with arrays of flashing
lights. At least two big monitors broadcast commercials for
"Off-World" colonies, displaying the Coca-Cola logo and a geisha girl
who smiles, or eats a cherry, or smokes a cigarette. Bladerunner’s world
of commercials and noise and neon lights extrapolates on our dependency on
monitors. The film articulates a paradox of subjectivity, from the opening eye
to the monstrous blimp to the monitor in Deckard's bathroom. The screens as
well as the eye watch us back, return our gaze. Bladerunner interrogates
visual pleasure and representation, which comes closest to the surface of the
text in the photographs that replicants collect. These photographs are maps of
a true screen, replicas of a reality that once presented itself to someone's
eyes. The monitors invite the same kind of vertigo, presenting a thrill of the
real, or an aesthetics of the hyperreal, a thrill of vertiginous and phony
exactitude.
Vertiginous hyperreal thrills recall another film set in Los
Angeles, this time on the last day of the millennium, Kathryn Bigelow's 1995 Strange
Days, in which the main character, Lenny-Ralph Fiennes, peddles playbacks,
video splicings of the thrilling experiences of other people's lives seen from
the viewpoint of the recorder. The narrative and political spirit of Strange
Days itself were inspired by real events in Los Angeles, the Rodney King
incident captured on amateur video, and the subsequent riots later, both
incidents widely disseminated in digital news media in the US and the world.
We get the picture--Los Angeles is the exemplum of the
digital city: the city that Mike Davis in his City of Quarz describes as
completely constructed from the desert under a political and economic visual
regime; the city without limits as the contemporary desert, haunted and invaded
by transnational nomads and contemporary replicants, has become a teletopia
where the duration of time and the extension of space have been superseded by
the absolute speed of the time of capital; that is, on one register, Los
Angeles has more or less become virtual space subsumed by the time of capital:
the city transformed from and into the desert overexposed to time-light of
speed—where transnational nomads roam. The transnational nomad is most
certainly a byproduct of the machines of capital and technology.
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