A Reading of the Utopic/Dystopic Future City in Film, Postmodern Architecture’s Rejection of the Dream
‘Unfortunately, the sclerosis apparent in our cities also reigns in our heads. No one believes anymore that we can build that city on a hill, that gleaming edifice that has fascinated every Utopian Thinker since Plato and St Augustine. Utopian visions have too often turned sour for that sort of thinking to go far. Gloom and pessimism are more common – are Beirut, Sarajevo or even Los Angeles, with its riots and smogs, the only future we can envisage?’
Harvey, Cities of Dreams, 1993:18‘Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.’
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1979:72
‘Tower of Babel Sequence’ from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis 1927.
The art of cinema, as a recent human cultural phenomenon, is one of the more powerful indicators of the zeitgeist. As a representational medium, cinema holds a prized position at the centre of cultural production due to its near universal accessibility by audiences through its undeniable embrace of modernity. It may not be surprising that film often relies upon the bombastic language of what Guy De Debord calls 'The Spectacle' in capturing the attention of the masses. Walter Benjamin's seminal work in cultural studies, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), frames the role of film and modernity succinctly:
By close-up of the nothings around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film on. On the one hand, it extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1935
It is for this reason that depictions of the possible ‘future city’ are such powerful thematic aesthetic attractors in film. Architectural theorist Anthony Vidler argues that cinema not only has an undeniable marked influence on modern architecture, but modern architecture also has a profound influence on cinema, whether through décor, mise en scène or the ability given to break out of its ‘frame’. It is perhaps no surprise then that Vidler elucidates upon this through the words of famed Soviet film director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein, for whom 'Films undoubted ancestor is – architecture'. Following this train of thought, we can see why, within cinema, it is the city that is often chosen as the metaphor for exploring ideas related to modernity.
The image of the city - real or imagined, provides a ready map to understand the details, languages, cultures, forms of production and power structures that shape what it means to be modern. Yet, as with any map, the artifice, in its attempt at static depiction and reproduction of reality, fails to accurately show the breadth of fluidity and immeasurable factors that comprise life in the metropolis. Despite this, although rarely accurately prescient, depictions of the ‘future city’ not only reflect current societal anxieties but also have a profound ability to affect technology, culture, and architecture. They allow for exploring potential alternatives of what may be possible, free from the constraints of practicality and immediate contemporary concerns.
In October 1924, the famed Austrian expressionist filmmaker Fritz Lang found himself in Manhattan, New York, exploring in a very real way the concrete reality of the city. He is fascinated by the emergence of what we now take for granted as the ‘modern city’: glimmering glass towers that seemingly ascend to the heavens. An architecture seemingly impossibly removed from that of the European tradition. Simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the excessive accumulation of what surplus value can produce under Taylorism-driven capitalism, Lang questions the social cost of such production, reflecting upon the social upheavals currently transforming the young bourgeois nation of Germany.
Within Germany, in stark contrast to the United States at the height of the Roaring Twenties, society is immensely fractured. Still reeling from the devastating social and economic realities of The Great War, the polarisation of the nation is palpable. The near advent of a socialist revolution in Berlin and the state of Bavaria resulted in a dismantling of the worker’s movement. However, the leftist cultural groundswell is still strong, particularly emboldened by the complete consolidation of Russia by the Bolsheviks. As the National Socialist German Workers' Party quickly strengthens, the German state is paralysed between two competing but potentially actualised utopias. The first was a socialist state born from the class struggle and armed revolution. The latter was the remaking of the German economy through the rising tide of the Industrialists as facilitated by the United States extending arm of globalism.
In Fritz Lang's seminal Metropolis (1927), one of the very first feature science fiction films and predating much of what we consider ‘modernist architecture’ today. We are confronted with the uchronia of the futuristic year of 2026, which initially seems a utopic city of the future but quickly turns dystopic. The wealthy ruling class lead lives of hedonism suspended high above the ground in glazed skyscrapers amongst clubs and pleasure gardens whose aesthetic echoes a confusing language of art-deco, techno-city and ancient Athens as envisaged through the modernist language of the architecture. Towering buildings dwarf an urbanity of seemingly swarming automobiles and aircraft impossibly traversing across the verticality of the city.
Meanwhile, far below this staggering vertical metropolis lies the worker's city, whose inhabitants are depicted toiling endlessly in shifts to produce the energy that sustains the city at the cost of their own lives. Depicted through an extended montage sequence that overlays the workers' struggle with that of despotic slavery manifest in the biblical image of the Moloch as they feed the ‘Heart Machine’ of the city. Here, Lang explores the frightening dystopia that is true Marx reification, the domination of the embodied work over the living work, of the energy provided to the metropolis over the lives of the workers. The main plot of the film sees the young son of the ruling-class Master of Metropolis, Freder Fredersen, fall in love with Maria, the forbidden spiritual leader of the underclass of workers and subsequently attempt to become the prophesied ‘mediator’ between the ruling class or 'the brain' and the working underclass 'the hands'. The plot becomes further complicated with the introduction of the first automata depicted in the film (a doppelganger of Maria described as perfect: ‘All that is missing is a soul’.) who is utilised by the spurned inventor Rotwang in an attempt to deceive the workers into destroying the city and unknowingly their own children in the lower city in the ensuing revolt. Freder eventually prevails in saving the city as its anointed ‘mediator’ (read: emergent middle-class), but not before the doppelganger automata is revealed as a machine and destroyed by the mob in a Luddite-like frenzy which echoes the paranoia of the looming machine-age and the confusion between human and machine.
The Moloch as 'Heart Machine' Sequence from Fritz Lang's Metropolis 1927
Destruction of 'Heart Machine' Sequence from Fritz Lang's Metropolis 1927
The thinly veiled takeaway message of the film beyond the somewhat naïve yet earnest character-driven ‘Between head and hand, the heart must mediate' is twofold. First, a warning to the working class against the dangers of rebellion, and second, the triumph of the fictional city belongs not to the workers who overcome through unity, but rather to the 'mediators'. Apart from the duality of the potential of the future city and horrors under the surface, the plot of Metropolis is endlessly deep in semiotic and cultural reading, not just for the urbanistic problems presented by the machine-like 'future city' but for the representation of a class struggle that’s only solution is the intervention of the privileged upper class. In playing out the anxieties of a rapidly industrialising urban Germany, the cognitive estrangement fostered so strongly in Metropolis generated a response that would shape architectural practice for decades and echoes even today. Depictions of utopic urbanism enacts what Le Corbusier, amongst other modernists, based their attempts at constructing the 'City of Salvation’.
Much as Metropolis could be seen as attempting to explore and mirror the perceived emergent opportunities and conflicts caused by rampart Fordism and the explosive breakthroughs in technology and modernist urbanity, we can jump forward in cinematic history (and backwards chronologically in fictional timelines) to a vastly different but arguably bleaker vision of the ‘future city’. In what could be considered the spiritual successor of Lang's Metropolis, we have Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Within the ‘future city’ of Blade Runner, we see the devastating effects of the post-industrialist epoch on the city and its inhabitants. Where Metropolis located us in an exaggerated gleaming Manhattan, Blade Runner finds its backdrop in the decaying fictional 2019 Los Angeles via an injection of Tokyo’s electronic aesthetic of neon lights backdropped by ever-present steam, darkness and acidic rain.
Compared to the clean and seemingly ‘rational’ modernist future city found in Metropolis, Los Angeles is pictured as the true postmodern city, steeped in an aesthetic of decay, undergoing the essential self-destruction that post-industrialism unfettered entails. If the Industrial city, as depicted by Metropolis, indefatigably never stops producing, in the post-industrial city, we find a constant need for recycling; therefore, the city requires a never-ending supply of waste. In dystopic 2019, waste is the only way for the squalid urban population to survive. The furnishings of the continuation of the high altar of consumerism manifest, in turn, producing an aesthetic of the recycled, which permeates the entire film. In Blade Runner’s framing of the ‘future city’ as being anchored in post-industrial decay, we see the link between postmodernism and late capitalism connected back to Frederic Jameson’s formation of postmodernism as the dominant cultural logic of late capitalism:
It is in the realm of architecture … that modifications in aesthetic productions are most dramatically visible and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally raised and articulated; it was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism began to emerge.
Fredric Jameson Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Post-Contemporary Interventions, 1991:54
'The Hypermarket' still from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner 1982
This exaggerated cultural logic of late capitalism finds its architectural manifestation in a sprawling ground plane, which is, in fact, a large market of constant consumption. Here, we have the concrete actualisation of Marx’s salient criticism of the market behind everything. The image of the silent but present 'Japanese simulacrum' of a giant advertisement, which alternates between a seductive Japanese face and a Coca-Cola advertisement, is ubiquitous in the film itself. Consider this against David Harvey’s criticism of late capitalism:
The multiple degenerate utopias that now surround us – the shopping malls and the 'bourgeois' commercialised utopias of the suburbs being paradigmatic – do as much to signal the end of history as the collapse of the Berlin Wall ever did. They instantiate rather than critique the idea that 'there is no alternative' save those given by the conjoining of technological fantasies, commodity culture, and endless capital accumulation.
David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 2000:168
The architecture of the post-industrial city that is 2019 Los Angeles comes to embody the dominant principles of late capitalism: fragmentation of time and space, hierarchisation, globalisation, and alienation. The depiction of an urbanity of unimaginable verticality is grounded by a ground plane of densification and crumbling infrastructure. The disturbing cityscape of decrepit ruin that is depicted is only punctuated by the monolithic and sinister Tyrell Corporation ziggurat, an aesthetic pastiche of pop Egyptian scenography.
‘The Pop-Egyptian Architecture of the Tyrell Corporation’ still from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982)
In comparison to Metropolis, which ties the survival of the city directly to the survival and continued subservience of the underclass, in Blade Runner, we are confronted with a future city that is completely fragmented, a city of ruin that plays backdrop to the plot as an extension of the 1980’s backdrop of fear surrounding the future of the sprawling city. The depiction ignores certain realities of Los Angeles's real urban periphery. Instead, it presents a future urbanity of vertical intensification, degradation and racial conflict, which was endemic to then systemic Reaganite fears surrounding multi-culturalism, immigration and ecological collapse during the height of the Cold War. With exception to the exaggerated verticality, flying vehicles and replicants, a pessimist might see this bleak vision as not far off given the tenuous state of affairs in the very non-fictional but difficult-to-believe today.
We are now in a new form of schizophrenia. No more hysteria, no more projective paranoia, but this state of terror proper to the schizophrenic... The schizophrenic can no longer produce the limits of its own being. He is only a pure screen.
Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication 1987:132
In the plot and setting of Blade Runner, we find the perfect analogue for Baudrillard’s theories of simulation and simulacrum, the urban city itself forming the manifestation of the schizophrenic condition. However, this schizophrenic condition of cultural replication and representation seems to fit with Jean Baudrillard’s and Francis Fukuyama’s evolving ideas of utopia at the time. In fact, they go so far as to tell us this: "The United States is Utopia achieved." The obsession with syntax and codification of image as part of the central existential plot of Blade Runner reveals as much about the characters as the urban realm that allows for the suspension of belief such a scenario entails. The comparison to contemporary architecture is tacit; Dutch architectural theorist Roemer van Toorn summarises it well:
As a practising architect, you no longer know where to look. Every innovative move is doomed to failure from the start. The only thing that proves durable is a specialised, mesmerising style. The architectural profession shuts itself up in an aesthetic vacuum. We live in a schizophrenic situation where the dominant reality is concealed behind an extremely visible and ostensibly liberal pseudo-reality. In short, the critical tradition is going through a crisis.
Roemer Van Toorn, Architecture Against Architecture: Radical Criticism within the Society of the Spectacle 1993:3
In the shifting depictions of the future city in utopia/dystopia in science fiction, as exemplified by the inherently modernist Metropolis and postmodern Blade Runner, we see the recurring themes that utopian longing for a better future become the focus of societal fear and dystopic imaginings. The marked shift between the two films regarding architecture is found in depictions of the urban realm. The future city of Metropolis is not inherently wrong. It is made that way through classist division of labour and the perceived threats of technological change. Within Blade Runner, we find the opposite is true; the city is an extension of the effects of late-stage capitalism; it is post-industrialism and the postmodern in decaying concrete form. Postmodern architecture and urbanism have, from their very inception, been framed as anti-utopian. This does not mean indulging in the multiplicities of utopian schemes is verboten, but rather that the postmodern is cast in direct opposition to the modernist approach and program of sweeping progress. Architectural critic Paul Goldberger states the origins of postmodern architecture emerged ‘from the modest, anti-utopian impulse, from a belief in the incremental movement rather than cataclysmic change.’
The difficulty of the Metropolis/Blade Runner analogue is that in reality rather than fiction, the architectural discourse has broadly abandoned utopian thinking in favour of cynical opportunism and irony. Anti-utopian thinking is not new, but it has been emboldened by the rise of the neo-liberal regime and the decline of state socialism as a viable alternative. David Harvey, who has written extensively on the topic, posits that Utopian longing has given way to unemployment, discrimination, despair and alienation in our built environments and imaginations as spatial practitioners. For American architectural theorist M. Christine Boyer, the rejection of utopic ways of thinking leaves only a piecemeal renewal of the façade of urban space. It strengthens the subterfuge of spatial politics at play in the colonisation of the realm of the ubiquitous neoliberal city. For Boyer, the role of Debord’s spectacle is not forgotten in this obfuscation of the public realm:
Suppose the spectator is mired in realistic narrations and offered no utopic visions. What will produce a disposition for social change, an inclination to draw affinities across all the spaces and peoples of the city? What moral authority can be drawn on to challenge the private claims that have distorted the public sphere?
M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments 1994:476
In this way, Boyer criticises the 'Disneyfication' of public space long since fetishised by Baudrillard and other semiologists for utilising simulacrum and embodying their ideas of the hyperreal. American Architect and theorist Michael Sorkin substantiate Boyer's criticisms of postmodern urbanity, arguing that in place of the once so prominent utopic vision for which architecture was imbued, now all that remains that makes it unique is its remarkable absence. What he calls an urban area ‘awash in trumped (often Trumped) up history.’ The most succinct criticism of the postmodern approach to contemporary architecture is being complicit in denying responsibility for the failures of incoherent architectural and urban methodologies. On elucidating the notion of ‘Reproducing the dream-image, but reject[ing] the dream’, Susan Buck-Morss, in her indictment of contemporary postmodern approaches to urbanity and architecture, best surmises:
In this cynical time of the 'end of history', adults know better than to believe in social utopias of any kind – those of production or consumption. Utopian fantasy is quarantined, contained within the boundaries of theme parks and tourist preserves - like some ecologically threatened but nonetheless dangerous zoo animals. When it is allowed any expression - it takes on the look of children's toys, even in the case of sophisticated objects - it is if to prove that utopia social space can no longer be taken seriously; they are commercial ventures, nothing more.
Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West 2000:26
This essay has sought to link the shifting depictions of modernity and the ‘future city’ in the seminal science fiction films of Fritz Lang’s modernist Metropolis (1927) and Ridley Scott’s inherently postmodern Blade Runner (1982) as a way of understanding the postmodern rejection of utopian ideals prevalent in the contemporary architectural discipline. The essay considers that the outright rejection by contemporary architecture to genuinely engage with utopic ideas of the ‘future city’ and ‘utopic urbanity’ leads to an architecture compromised and complicit with a neoliberal post-industrialised hegemony.
Through the engagement and lens of cultural theory as applied to architecture and its depiction in film and Debord’s notion of ‘The Spectacle’, the essay has sought to reveal prevailing flaws in the fragmented and pastiche language found within the notion of ‘incremental change’. Revealing the reliance on irony, insincerity and semiotic coding as a mask that hides more significant political and economic disruption of public space. The essay finds the current inability to envision a progressive utopic ‘future city’ either in fictional dreaming or concrete reality by the architectural discourse.
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