ABSTRACT
In his book, City of Quartz1, which first came out in 1990, Mike Davis categorised Blade Runner as noir revival, setting it in the context of an ongoing struggle between utopians and dystopians for control over the representation of Los Angeles. The chapter in which he briefly comments on the film is titled, ‘Sunshine or Noir’, and recounts the contrasting histories of boosterism and its pessimistic alter-ego, the ‘nightmare anti-myth of noir’, which between them shaped Los Angeles’ divided vision of itself.
