Hollywood Utopia

208 Hollywood Utopia
often affirmative values and issues, especially regarding new technology and
nuclear destruction, are raised but purposefully left unresolved. Yet at least such an
airing deposits a trace of a range of ecological discourses, most especially the need
for the West to construct a new, more harmonious composite of human agency, if it
is to positively affect the future environment. Ecological changes within these
blockbusters tend to occur only if the whole of humanity (which can, in Hollywood
terms, be collapsed and serve to disguise the powerful elite who control society) is
finally reconstituted and reprogrammed to promote a sustainable future.
New, more radical and transgressive eco-metaphors and allegories are required if
such a broadband dialogue is to create fruitful ecological understanding for future
generations weaned on the utopian ‘illusion’ of universal human interactivity, aided
by computer technology. While the Terminator series remains locked within the
grand narrative of human survival on our finite planet, focusing on individual
agency and using the Christian myth of self-sacrifice to save the planet, Blade
Runner and the more recent Fifth Element articulate more fully the needs and ways
for (future) humans to adapt and learn from ecological norms through the actions
of cyber-humans. These rejuvenated representational myths of human agency,
together with the potency of the cyborg other, can begin to provide humans with a
template for progressive ecological expression among all life forms.
Blade Runner
Blade Runner effectively signals the mythic pre-modern trajectory of man in the
role of hunter but at the same time the film also represents a double hunt in which
the hunter and the hunted simultaneously stalk each other as prey, instead of
merely regressing to a primitive mode of hunting for survival with a common
enemy, as in The Terminator and Dark City. I will explore how both Blade Runner
and The Fifth Element adapt similar trajectories, focusing in particular on their
potentially liberatory effects for human agency.
Blade Runner provides a super-example of a cybertext which also serves to address
various ecological paradigms. ‘Americans, however conservative, however
traditional, see the future as a place of equality achieved . . . racism is already
understood as an anachronism. Blade Runner mirrors the “future of fears” . . .
where the anxieties of the present have become the material conditions of an
imagined future’ (Norton 1993: 19). In spite of this, the scenography of a LA of the
future attracts and repels in equal measure. This postmodernist spatial disruption
promotes a dystopic vision which counterpoints a wishful fantasy to engage with its
sublime alternative. The highly criticised closure of the first version of the film,
with the cyborg heroes riding into a utopian nirvana, was dismissed by many as a
feel-good Hollywood sell-out and a failure of nerve, within a predominantly