Hollywood Utopia

a massive advertising campaign that even promises personal slaves, or androids, for
those choosing to migrate to Mars. The potent link between capitalist exploitation
and global ecological pollution pervades the narrative. In the background of the
mise-en-scène exaggerating human insignificance, huge postmodern gothic
buildings scream out excessive advertisements hailing them both to consume and
escape the ecocidal decay. The most dominant advertisement appears throughout
the film on a dedicated floating airship, like the romantic post card of ‘Shell Beach’
in Dark City discussed earlier. It entices its inhabitants to escape this ecodical
corruption and decay for a utopian customised Disneyesque ‘off world’ holiday.
Such advertisements affirm that there is a more harmonious environment for
humans to inhabit, even colonise, which in turn serves to over-dramatise the
pervasive dystopic noirish mise-en-scène of the film for both its trapped inhabitants
and, by extension, its audience. This excessively visualised tale of what happens if
rampant capitalist consumption continues at its current pace into the future
remains a continuous theme running through such films. As Wood puts it:
It is important that the novel’s explanation of the state of the world (the nuclear
war is withheld from the film) lays the blame on capitalism directly. The society we
see is our own writ large, its present excesses carried to their logical extremes:
power and money controlled by even fewer, in even larger monopolies; worse
poverty, squalor, degradation; racial oppression; a polluted planet, from which
those who can, emigrate to other worlds (in Belton et al. 1996: 213).
Ridley Scott presents a world in which humanity (at least those with the power) has
committed the ultimate environmental crime, ‘ecocide’ - the destruction of
‘normal’ ecological systems. While not explicitly revealed, it is clear that ecocide
has resulted from global warfare and the ultra-utilitarianism and exploitation of
late capitalist production techniques. Such ecocide, like that foretold by the
Terminator series, has caused a sense of spiritual loss as well as the more obvious
physical manifestations mentioned above. This is embodied in the ex-cop who, like
many Cold War, film noir protagonists, begins the narrative waiting for a job to
come by and announces in an opening voice over: ‘They don’t advertise for killers
in advertisements.’ He later affirms that he quit ‘blade-running’ because he had a
‘bellyful of killing’. Again, like many noir protagonists, he is seeking some more
ethical form of employment but is eventually enticed back into his profession by an
unscrupulous, even racist police chief. Deckard, however, accepts and justifies his
decision to reactivate his terminator role by explaining how he would ‘rather kill
than be a victim’.
The resulting physical and spiritual vacuum reverberates through the film and the
attempt to fill this hole is, according to Tama Leaver, a central tension for Deckard,
searching for his own ‘golden land of opportunity and adventure, be that escaping,
5 Postmodern Science Fiction 211