Hollywood Utopia

212 Hollywood Utopia
physically and mentally, or searching for ways to fill the ecological and thus
spiritual, void’ (Leaver 1997).
Animals are also absent from this ecocidal world set in Los Angeles in the year
2019, thereby also severely reducing the human potentiality for symbiotic harmony
with nature in all its diversity. Only the rich can afford to recreate them as pets, like
the symbolically wise old owl which signals Rachael’s grand entrance into Tyrell’s
office. Tyrell has become the technocratic king of this urban nightmare and is able
to escape the squalor, smog and corruption by living high enough in his penthouse
apartment. Everything in the spatial environment, from the architecture to the
animals and even the human agents, is consciously designed for functionality or
pleasure, just like any other commodity endorsed within its (late) capitalist logic.
The broader macro environment is also artificial but to a much lesser extent than
in Dark City. Therefore, in this nightmare of simulation, commodification and
artificiality, it comes as no surprise that not only animals but also humans
themselves have been artificially replicated.
Although Blade Runner is based on Dick’s novel, its points of departure from the
original text are instructive. In the novel, the presence of empathy is what allows
the bounty hunters to distinguish the androids from the humans, with empathy
imagined to be the uniquely human trait. The only sure means of distinguishing a
replicant from a human in Blade Runner is the ‘Voigt-Kampf’ empathy test, which
detects the failure of a replicant pupil to dilate when placed in a hypothetical
situation that normally evokes empathy in a human. 12 What in practice exposes the
replicants in the film, however, is not the lack of empathy so much as the lack of a
past - ‘the lack of memories’ (Landsberg in Featherstone et al. 1995: 182). The
inherent irony of the empathy test is nonetheless clear. Humans can only
determine their difference from the species that they have created (replicants) by
invoking their nostalgic empathy for the (animal) species that they presumably
already destroyed. The first question appears to establish that humanity is affirmed
by concern for animal welfare.
Postmodernist science fiction especially serves to (re)read history through the
future and thereby help construct ecological models of utopia which serve to
symbolically create ethical and philosophical frameworks for the present. Foucault
accurately defines history as ‘one way in which a society recognises and develops a
mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked’ (Foucault 1982: 7).
Photographs in this film and many others like Dark City serve as a metaphoric
shorthand to create such a necessary ‘history’ and ‘visual memory’ for humans,
who require anchorage with a continuous past. Photographs and the representation
of space also provide a spurious historical authenticity for the replicants (Bruno in
Kuhn 1990: 191) unlike, for example, Blow-Up (1966), which problematises the
relationship between signifier and signified (was there a murder in the park?).