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.
No comments:
Post a Comment