In this trailer from 1982, for the film noir, dystopian future, science fiction classic, Blade Runner, we see the familiar face of Harrison Ford, and hear his exposition...
Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear
"A blade runner's job is to hunt down replicants, manufactured humans you can't tell from the real thing."
He goes on to say that he's searching for " six people in a city of 106 million." It's a good introduction in a movie about the far off, distant future.
About a month ago, I woke up about 4 am, with an idea for a writing project in my head. I woke up in a parking lot, just over the hill from Hollywood, California, where I usually sleep as a homeless man. I've been a writer for 34 years now, and I've learned how my creative process works pretty well, so waking up early in the morning with an idea is not unusual. Part of the idea involved going back to my childhood and teenage era, and looking at futuristic TV shows and movies we saw then, to see how they envisioned the future.
I got on YouTube, and watched trailers for about 20 well known movies, from the classic 1927 Metropolis, all the way up to the Hunger Games trailer from 2012. I wanted to see how these movies, mostly from the 20th century, envisioned our future, and compare those futures with the weird world we actually live in today.
A lot of my current ideas that I want to write about, are about our collective future, the period we're heading into right now, and what's going to happen in the next 5-10-20 years. To give my ideas a context, I wanted to re-visit the futuristic ideas of my childhood, made in that era before computers, cell phones, the internet, and so many other technologies, entered our everyday lives. It was an incredibly low tech era by today's standards.
Going through all those movie trailers, I saw a couple of main themes. One theme was a future with an all powerful, authoritarian state, using massive surveillance and massive pressure towards conformity, to control the population. George Orwell's 1984 exemplifies that theme.
Security camera bubble, so common now, we don't even consciously notice them, subway train car, L.A., 2019. Photo by Steve Emig
The other main theme, and the one I actually remembered seeing more as a kid, was the "post apocalyptic, wander the desert and fight crazy people" theme. That idea was almost expected by the time I was in high school in the early 1980's. We half-believed that there would actually be a nuclear holocaust, and some of us would survive and wander the aftermath looking for other people... and food.
I remember sitting around the living room of my best friend's house, in Boise, Idaho, when a commercial, it might have been for Mad Max II: Road Warrior, came on TV. One of my friends joked, "Man, I hope the apocalypse happens soon, because if it doesn't, we're going to all have to go get real jobs." We all laughed, and mused about how cool it would be to wander around the ruins of a destroyed civilization, looking for the other few survivors. In 1982, that lifestyle was far more appealing than the future we all faced, 40 years at a miserable office or factory job.
Industrial age urban jungle area, Shockhoe Bottom district in Richmond, Virginia, searching for its place in today's transition growing Information Age, 2019. Photo by Steve Emig
As I went back and watched the Blade Runner trailer a second time, I noticed something I missed at first. The trailer starts with a silent title, "Los Angeles - November 2019." I thought, "Oh shit, I'm now living in "the future" of my high school self." All of my generation, Generation X, is. We are now living in the future era we dreamed about in high school. We are now in the future imagined in movies like Blade Runner.
The craziest thing is that I was a high school kid in Boise, Idaho, dreaming about becoming a wildlife biologist in 1982, when Blade Runner came out. Today I'm writing this in an actual paper notebook, in a McDonald's, in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California, on November 26th, 2019. I'm in Los Angeles county. The actual city of L.A. is just over the line of small mountains behind me. By some weird quirk of fate, I'm in the setting, in the exact time, the makers of Blade Runner were trying to imagine.
There are no replicants. I don't have a flying car, nobody I know does. Blade Runner, and all those dystopian futuristic movies of my youth, got "the future" almost completely wrong. And yet, right now, "the future" of my high school self, is far different, far more amazing, and far worse, than everyone imagined. Well, almost everyone.
"2019 is only a few years away, meaning Blade Runner will likely go down as another sci-fi film that failed to accurately predict the future."
-"Top Ten Futuristic Movie Cities," WatchMojo.com, in 2015
(Blade Runner's L.A. ranked #1 on the list, BTW)
The real new skyscrapers going up in downtown Los Angeles, juxtaposed with a bible verse on the side of a homeless shelter, late 2019, the exact time the 1982 movie Blade Runner was imagining. Photo by Steve Emig
Written by Steve Emig (aka The White Bear)
The opinions above are mine, and are not officially endorsed by anyone in the videos shared, or anyone whose work I mention.
Blogger's note- 8/26/2023- I have not changed any of the wording in any of these posts, not even the typos I originally missed. "Dystopia" makes a lot more sense to more people now that we have seen 3 1/2 years of chaos. You can read more of my thoughts on my Substack:
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