Sorkin

Michael Sorkin’s article on Disneyland relates to Blade Runner in many ways.

 

1.)   Disneyland and the off-world colonies seem to be the epitome of a utopian environment. I say this, because of Walt Disney’s views on what his ‘perfect city’ should look like.

 

‘Disneyland will be something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts, and a showplace of beauty and magic. It will be filled with the accomplishments, the joys, the hopes of the world we live in. And it will remind us and show us how to make those wonders part of our lives (Sorkin 336).’

 

‘…the fairs also became models, adopted visionary urbanism as an aspect of their agendas, both offering themselves as models of urban organization and providing, within their pavilions, panoramic visions of even more advanced cities to come (Sorkin 338).’

 

In Blade Runner, the city seems like such a dirty dystopia. You’re either wealthy high class living in lavish penthouses or you’re ‘little people’ on the streets, statically existing. The ideal spot to be is on the off-world colonies where life is care-free, crime-free, and problem-free. Just like Disneyland. The search for a utopian city or way of life has been around for centuries. Humans are always on this search, for a better and safe way to live. Sorkin even referenced this search in his article. Starting in Europe, people migrated to America, in search of these ‘utopian cities’, ex: Shakers, Quakers, Mormons, etc. this migration relates to the off-world colonies in blade runner, and people wanting to live on them, and Disney’s goal of creating such a place.

 

2.)   The Replicants in Blade Runner are like the Disneyland workers.

‘…but - perhaps in part because a man in a mouse costume is a more genial image of

Dehumanization than a prole in chains - this "servant space" (Sorkin 351).’

Disney workers are like the Replicants by becoming this fake character, and doing work in an environment that portrays reality but is incredibly ‘make-believe’. The workers wear costumes and gain this plastic like appearance and are forced to smile the entire time they are in the public eye. Their name no longer means anything to anyone, nor their memories or hopes and dreams. Once inside the Disneyland walls, they become Cinderella, Snow White, or Goofy. Your are unable to tell if a Replicant is human or robot because they don an equal human appearance. The Replicants are forced to do some sort of work on the off-world colonies, while the Disneyland workers are controlled by the ever watching eye from within.

 

 

3.)   Disneyland in relation to the Tyrell Corporation

Disneyland is the Tyrell Corporation. It has complete control over everything within. It has its own money, which is equivalent to the dollar, but you must exchange anyway. Disney even envisioned having total control over policing, surveillance, regulations, taxing, and governing. He created these characters that children idolize with the ultimate little girl’s goal that every beauty has a prince charming. With Disney leading the way, everyone would be equal; communism at its finest.

‘…offering the fecund communism of abundance and leisure, a true technocratic postindustrial utopia (Sorkin 347).’

Disneyland and the city in Blade Runner both feed into Mcdonaldization, globalization, and techno$haft. Both places want their environments to run efficiently, with predictability, control, calculability. Globalization and techno$haft is shown in the Ridley Scott’s views of a city controlled by advertisements, and extensive technology. The movie was made to look like the entire planet earth had turned into a dystopia, not just the city of Los Angeles. You can see globalization in Disneyland by being able to visit different countries, without ever having to really go there. Within those walls, you can be here, there, and everywhere. 

Technoschaft connections-

            -Globalization is what technoschaft is all about, being connected across the world examples of this in the movie include ‘city speak’ a mixture of Japanese, german, Spanish and other languages, showing that global connections can help shape the future of the Earth

            -Globalization also involves higher up people in companies investing back in the companies and trading within the companies, this can be seen in the movie when the CEO of the Tyrell Corp is sitting in bed trading stocks.

McDonaldization-Harrigan

Probably the biggest connection between Hannigan's "Future City" and Ridley Scott's BladeRunner would be the McDonaldization process. This is most evident with the Tyrell Corporation. It is easy to tell that the corporation basically runs the future version of L.A.  While Hannigan talks about how our society is becoming "McDonalized," in Blade Runner, this process becomes reality when the corporation actually does have control over everything.
     Another part of the McDonaldization process that really shows through in the movie is its operation model of efficiency. Efficiency is shown the least just because you would think the city in Blade Runner would be cleaner, with all of the technology coming in, but efficiency is still seen in the fact that humans have moved off-world once the Earth began failing. The city is also more efficient with the use of "city-speak," which makes it more efficient to communicate easily and quickly. Efficiency is also demonstrated with the "high-tech" photo enhancer that is used. Other examples would be  key card access, police control, talking crosswalks, fast moving vehicles, hover cars in air and cars on ground, and voice activation software.  

It is easy to see control through looking at the police force in the movie and the Tyrell Corporation.  The police seem to always have a presence in the city. Another example would be all of the giant billboards, advertisements, and physical presence of product everywhere throughout the city, which continually is convincing the citizens to spend their money in certain areas.Surveillance is also a huge part of the control of the citizens: the Tyrell corporation can see every part of the city at all times.  

     A smaller comparison could be seen when Hannigan discusses Richard Branson and his Virgin Company.  Branson's status within Britian reached an almost God-like elevation, like the one that Mr. Tyrell had in the movie.

Simulacra is the main idea of the movie. We can see the fake masquerading as the real in the ideas of the replicants and the animals, which look exactly like real people but are in fact robots. The off-world colonies are made to seem like a "better" Earth. The city of L.A. is in fact a simulacra, because it is similar to the current city, but exaggerated technologically and made to look darker and dirtier.

The main difference between the idea of McDonaldization and Ridley Scott's idea of the future in BladeRunner is the contrast between a utopian environment with a dystopia. Harrigan states 

"Why, then, has the McDonald's model been so successful? Ritzer contends that what is really on offer is the possibility of fun" (Harrigan 82,83).

The image of the city in BladeRunner is extremely negative, and portrayed as a McDonaldized dystopia. However, McDonaldization supposedly happens in order to create a more fun, happy, successful urban space.

Mike Davis & Ridley Scott

Ridley Scott, in collaboration with "visual futurist" Syd Mead, offered a pastiche of imaginary landscapes that Scott himself has conceded to be "overkill."

- Davis is pointing out that although Blade Runner portrays a possible view of the future it is still a movie. And to make a movie one must have a plot, characters and setting. So Ridley Scott along with a team of writers and producers created a dystopia only because that fit the plot of the movie he wanted to create.

- When creating a setting Scott looked to existing cities for inspiration and chose to ignore the positive things that exist in current cities and overemphasize the negative ones in order to create a bleak and dark future because that's what the movie called for.

> This is opposite of the idea of a utopian Disney World described by Sorkin, which uses the process of McDonaldization but emphasizes every aspect of the city positively.

This notion of overkill holds more significance after realizing that Scott took ideas that already exist and blew them out of proportion.

- Apartment complexes: Federally subsidized housing projects currently exist in places like Chicago and New York and all over the world. These projects are large, cheap buildings built in order to deal with housing shortages. These places were designed to be inhabited by poor families and funding for renovation and repairs is hard to come by so they easily fall into disarray.  

>The apartment buildings in Blade Runner could easily fit these descriptions; note that most of Earth's population lives on off-world colonies, so the large empty building J.F. Sebastian lives in all by himself could be the remains of federally built housing, built to combat rising populations, that became abandoned after the off-world colonies became the place to be.

- City Dwellers: Davis points out that an ordinance was put in to place in Los Angeles that restricted homeless people to sleeping in a 50 foot square block area of skid row. The problem was that people didn't want to see any homeless people because it was apparently unsightly. This was not done to create a safe place for the homeless to be or for the betterment of one group or another. 

>Blade Runner takes this concept to the extreme, Scott makes it appear as if earth itself is some kind of containment area. There are those with power and money that live lavishly (Tyrell Company), but the mob on the street is always portrayed as dirty and poor. It would appear that the middle class population, those that could afford it and passed a physical, have now populated off-world colonies. This ensures that on these colonies no one would ever have to encounter a poor person, or someone who didn't meet certain criteria allowing them to be there. This is a perfect example of a controlling force within the futuristic society.