the inside/outside distinction

My entries have been getting too long lately; for the sake of anyone who might be reading, I'll try to be quicker.

We spoke today of Blade Runner, the SF ecumenopolis (the total city, planet-wide), the view of a future without nature (what's nature?). Within the BR urban mise-en-scene we have a city gone wild, though; as a few pointed out, the scenes are rendered as if deep sea footage; in one scene, Deckard's car rests in the sediment of the city floor while a police cruiser floats down, challenges him, then rises slowly out of the scene blowing steam down like jets of bubbles.


Lights from the Tyrell building shine columns of brightness through the smog, as if underwater. This is supposed to be the human world, but then a band of feral humans appear, homo monstrous little people in weird mechanized clothing, logos-less Wild Men gibbering, clambering onto Deckard's car and fighting over the scrap of machinery they tear off. They're backlit, blacked out; we see their silhouettes, some flashing lights where one's face should be.


Mike Davis's Planet of Slums comes to mind here; the global city going to seed, reverting back to wilderness at its rotten heart. The poet John Haines contends in an interview that "Cities to me are part of the forest, in an absolute sense," gesturing to the apocalyptic futures in which famine, or climate change, or meteors, or viruses, or the eventual snuffing out of the sun will reassert the primacy of dynamics ordained before humanity over the constructed human world. In the SF scenarios we've seen so far, though— or, for example, in the only Neil Stephenson I've read so far, the generic thriller Zodiac —it's natural dynamics tipped into motion by human intervention (an intervention itself stemming from a biological imperative?); this complicates things a little, though the result is the same.

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As for Orientalism and other excluded regions, see Africa not left behind in Halo 3, and Eastern Europe as the major theater in Half-Life 2.


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The images here are the work of Craig Mullins, some of them concept work for Hollywood film. His portfolio, a growing steam- and cyberpunk iconography, mixes in these commercial productions in all their "guys with guns" obviousness besides classical nudes and portraits. His medium of choice is Adobe Photoshop, conceived not as a means of initial sketching, but as a software of cut-up, reproduction and alteration. Scruitiny is disorienting; one becomes aware of an almost pixelar, or digital quality: behind the arresting initial image, the brush strokes are crazily rudimentary, like something done with MacPaint. Cue the relevant implications.