Why we’re stuck in a Blade Runner future that’s forty years old

My forthcoming book discusses the dominance of dystopian visions of the future, which is hardly surprising given the multiple, overlapping environmental, economic, and political crises we face. In the book, I use nine classic sci-fi movies to discuss various aspects of the coming dystopia, starting with… Blade Runner (1982).

We have to start in Blade Runner, because that’s where today’s visions of the future really started – and as I discuss in the book, effectively ended. There’s a thousand (and many more) analyses of the film, but the obvious fact, hidden in plain sight, is that Blade Runner persists because its future remains our most likely future, and our present.

Blade Runner vividly depicts a future of urban decay and under-investment, over-population, corporate domination, commodification, and alienation. The lack of flying cars in our own time isn’t the point. Described by director Ridley Scott as “Hong Kong on a very bad day”, the film depicts a future Los Angles of soaring inequality, environmental degradation, pollution, urban sprawl, absent government, and (literally) dehumanizing technological progress.

It’s the distillation of all dystopias – the reason it still feels relevant, even if (or perhaps because) it might now be too late to act as a warning. It tells us what it’s always told us, and most importantly, points towards why we didn’t listen, why we didn’t try to change the future it warned us about.

So the more fundamental question, and the central theme of my book, is why we didn’t (and perhaps still don’t) feel we can change these things, which is really a political question – and also the outcome of a particular political project. But for more on that, you’ll have to read the book…

Come With Me If You Want To Live: The Future as Foretold in Classic Sci-Fi Films, is out in November from Lexington Books. You can read more about it here.