Humanities 254: Modern Cities (McCole)

Viewing Questions: Ridley Scott, “Blade Runner” (1982)

1. Think back to the imagery of “Metropolis,” the 1920s film about the dystopian future of the city that we saw at the beginning of the course. Have we come full circle? What has changed? Think about the images of the city (including how space is organized) and about themes.


2. In City of Quartz, Mike Davis discusses “film noir” and the what he calls the noir critique of the Los Angeles myth. What elements of film noir do you find here?


3. In his chapter on “Fortress L.A.,” Davis asserts that already “we live in ‘fortress cities’ brutally divided between ‘fortified cells’ of affluent society and ‘places of terror’ where the police battle the criminalized poor.” He also observes that “Hollywood’s pop apocalypses and pulp science fiction have been more realistic, and politically perceptive” than contemporary urban theory at representing things like “the militarization of city life so grimly visible at the street level” (Davis, City of Quartz, 223-224). How might “Blade Runner” be read as a critique of the Los Angeles of the present?


4. How does the theme of race figure in the film?


5. At a certain point, the film turns its attention to memory as a crucial theme. In Baudelaire’s poem “The Swan,” cities are places of exile but the experience of exile can be countered by memory (and perhaps overcome, or perhaps not). What has happened to the theme of memory in the city here?

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