ABSTRACT
To grasp its secret, you should not begin with the city and move inwards towards the screen; you should begin with the screen and move outwards towards the city.
(Baudrillard cited in Friedberg 2002)
In the final chapter of Ecology of Fear (1998), which maps and dissects the paranoid imaginary central to Southern California, urban sociologist Mike Davis offers an incisive critique of the iconic film Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). A decade and a half following Blade Runner’s release, Davis makes a strong case for the surprisingly ‘unprescient’ nature of the film’s dystopic vision of a future Los Angeles. In particular, the vertical/horizontal architectural forms that structure the integrated urban and social spaces of the film are, for him, simply ‘another edition of the core modernist fantasy of the future metropolis [. . .] ville radieuse or Gotham City [. . .] [a] monster Manhattan’ (1998: 361).1 As he succinctly puts it, ‘Blade Runner is not so much the future of the city as the ghost of past imaginations’ (1998: 361). For Davis, the dystopic cityscape imagined by the film is marked by a curious failure to recognize the particularities of Los Angeles’ unique urban and architectural form which, for him, is perhaps better characterized by the low-rise, suburban dystopias found, for instance, in Octavia Butler’s LA-based science fiction writing.2
