Cyberpunk Ain’t Dead
Evolutions and Implications of Architectural Aesthetics in Science Fiction Cinema
Futurist aesthetics occupy a unique slice of real estate in the collective western cultural consciousness. Science fiction in particular is intrinsically tied to our conceptions of the future: our most daring dreams for the societies we might inhabit, as well as those we most fear the possibility of living in, possess a certain visual character. The medium of film is distinctive for its vivid manifestations of the way that the clothes, cars, hairstyles, and buildings of potential futures might look. The conception of the latter, the structure of speculative cities and science fiction settlements, rarely takes on a cohesively developed character in the minds of the general public; when one considers science fiction, future worlds, they think more often of space travel, advanced technology, robots, light sabers… When one does consider buildings, the identity of a future city, the default is the vision of what has come to be known as cyberpunk. Existing as a unique architectural manifestation of the economic reverberations of the 1980s, as well as a reflection of a unique Orientalism that would emerge in the years following, cyberpunk represents an ethos of capitalist excess that retains poignancy in science fiction film to this day.
Writer Lawrence Person describes the supersaturated nature of cyberpunk in his essay Notes Towards a Postcyberpunk Manifesto: “Cyberpunk realized that the old SF [science fiction] stricture of ‘alter only one thing and see what happens’ was hopelessly outdated, a doctrine rendered irrelevant by the furious pace of late 20th century technological change. The future isn't ‘just one damn thing after another,’ it's every damn thing all at the same time.” This description of the holistic integration of technology into the chaos of modern life manifests particularly in the architectural settings of cyberpunk worlds in film. While the cyberpunk “movement,” as much as it might possibly be considered one, has its origins in the works of science fiction master William Gibson, the work that most cemented the aesthetic in the minds of ordinary people was most certainly Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner. Cyberpunk architecture in the cinematic canon, represented clearly in Blade Runner’s set design, draws on the glass-pane facades and anonymized corporate towers of Late Modernism and distorts them into landscapes for dystopian narratives (Fig 1.)
Figure 1: Still from Blade Runner, Ridley Scott, 1982
Cyberpunk cities are sleek and high-tech at a glance, riddled with neon advertisements and towering skyscrapers, yet are also implicitly corrupted by the very consumerist system that manifests their appearance. The built environment of cyberpunk is not entirely crumbling and hellish like the traditional notion of such a dystopian typology might be; rather, it is glitzy and consumerist but gritty around the edges, and all the more nefarious for it. Theorist Kate Wagner asserts that the unique architectural aesthetic of cyberpunk is a product of the time of its initial conception; the 1980s had “one foot in the architecture of High Tech (e.g. the Pompidou Center) and one foot in Postmodernism (e.g. Portland Building; Memphis Milano).” Cyberpunk exists as a bastardization of both, illustrating the poisonous potential of the unfeeling nature of these systems of architectural thought. Cyberpunk cities are the natural conclusion of the acceleration of early 1980s capitalist excess: corrupted technology making the rich richer, the government more corrupt, and pushing the masses to society’s uglier, inherent underbelly of the high-tech metropolis.
In her 1985 essay A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway remarks on the intrinsic tension between the realm of technology and that of the human, the organic: “Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile… People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. Cyborgs are ether, quintessence.” The underlying truth of cyberpunk is that the realm of the cyborg, of an ultra high-tech aesthetic manifested architecturally, will always be corrupted by the inconvenient fleshy opaqueness of humanity. With towering skyscrapers of plate glass and neon lights comes the greed of those humans who inhabit them, and under the 1980s-inspired capitalist system of cyberpunk (one whose repercussions we also live in our own reality) those inhabitants cannot exist without casting out others to the margins.
Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City has long been a source of inspiration to the cyberpunk aesthetic. At its densest point in the late 1980s, the city was home to 35,000 people living in 300 unregulated, interconnected high rise buildings. Many families lived in units that were 70 square feet or less, all constructed without enforced building codes or input from architects. As Hong Kong’s industrial prowess grew, so did the rising skyline. By the 1970s, the Kowloon Walled City had grown into a massive inner world of brothels, restaurants, family-run businesses, small factories, homes, and criminal activity, all so densely packed that in some buildings it was impossible to open a window without scraping against a neighbor (Fig 2.) This extreme urbanism, as well as the triad activity and crime associated with it, came to represent a distinct characteristic of cyberpunk in the minds of directors like Mamoru Oshii and Katsuhiro Otomo. Although Kowloon Walled City was demolished by the government in 1994, this Hong Kong-influenced aesthetic of cyberpunk would come to have cultural reverberations throughout media for decades to come.
Figure 2: An aerial view of Kowloon Walled City in 1989, shortly following the Hong Kong government’s announcement of the plan to demolish it. Ian Lambot, 1989.
More dated science fiction versions of the future drew from different architectural canons. Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis is a vertically stratified vision of the “Babylon on the Hudson,” a fabric of perfect specimens of the early skyscraper era resting atop the industrial machine that powers the gleaming city with human blood and sweat (Fig 3.) The environs of speculative fiction certainly draw influence from the architectural realities of their contemporary settings; in order to envision a physical reality we cannot definitely know, we turn to what most seems like the cutting edge of our current era. As the skyscrapers of Louis Sullivan and his colleagues rose in cities across America, transforming the urban landscape forever, the future in Fritz Lang’s eyes inevitably included these structures taken to their logical conclusion, sprawling out across an entire city, forming canyon-like streets for the drama to play out in his corrupted dystopia-in-disguise.
Figure 3: Metropolis’s titular glance into speculative city of the future, Fritz Lang, 1927.
It seems obvious that as much as contemporary architecture influences futurist fiction, contemporary politics do tenfold. At cyberpunk’s advent, corporate excess blossomed under Reaganism as well as in the seemingly ever-expanding asset price bubble of Japan. In 1991, looking back on the conditions of the decade, Bill Clinton declared that the Reagan-Bush administration had “exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.” Throughout the 1980s, the rich continued to get richer under Reagan’s tax cuts and relaxed regulations on corporations, while middle class wages stagnated and the poverty rate rose. Meanwhile, as the US dollar depreciated against the Japanese Yen and Japan entered an unprecedented period of economic development, Japanese banks began handing out loans at previously unseen rates. Finally, in December 1990, the bubble burst: land values dropped rapidly and the stock market went into a downward spiral. As the 1980s concluded and their repercussions rippled throughout the global economy, the pitfalls of this unmitigated capitalist system were manifesting in science fiction as well as in reality.
Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 anime film Ghost in the Shell, post Japanese bubble-bursting, represents a crystallized version of the corruption of Japanese architectural excess; the illuminated skyscrapers and neon signs of the city are contrasted with decay in more intimate scenes. The reality of Oshii’s Tokyo lies in the grime of the ordinary, the architecture of modern progress tainted by the conditions of poverty and the corruption of everyday lives. Interestingly, the 2017 American remake of the film by Dreamworks Pictures eschews some of this grit for a more unified glitz of sleek hologram advertisements, still dark in color palette but more polished, with glowing lights and shiny black glass (Fig 4.) It is likely that some of this difference is due to the subconscious fetishization of East Asian urbanism in the “Western” imagination; the obsession with the neon signs of Tokyo and Hong Kong are perhaps a contemporary mirror of the Japonisme of the late 19th century. This affinity for colorful adornment in “exotic” colors and patterns manifests often in Western film; the foreign texts of these neon advertisements serve as pure ornament to further the impression of a glamorous, high-tech city. While the architectural convention of cyberpunk dystopia remains somewhat rooted in reality in the Western gaze, the finishes become much more extravagant, exotic, and foreign.
Figure 4(a): The Tokyo of the original 1995 Ghost in the Shell, Mamoru Oshii, 1995.
Figure 4(b): The Tokyo of the 2017 Ghost in the Shell American remake, Rupert Sanders, 2017.
Anne Anlin Cheng asserts in her essay Ornamentalism that the implication of the Oriental aesthetic in the fetishizing Western view is “that material consumption promises cultural possession; that there is no room in the Orientalist imagination for national, ethnic, or historical specificities.” This sort of overarching view of a general “Asian-ness”, manifesting architecturally as well as personally, has been co-opted and generically applied across a wide range of science fiction media to suggest technological advancement, capitalist bloat, and a general corrupt futurism.
It is perhaps this very Orientalism that has given cyberpunk such lasting power, even in the 21st century imagination. While the architecture of the future may have once been imagined through alien forms and impossible geometries, this sort of dramatic, speculative architecture has become more tangibly realized in our own cities with the works of Zaha Hadid and similar architects. In cyberpunk, the Western imagination draws on that which is physically distant rather than temporally distant, that which is exotic rather than that which is fantastical, in order to evoke an impression of the future. Additionally, even as the original Blade Runner’s referential Asian-ness points to a sort of vague, “cool” Japanese culture without including Asian actors, it references the subtle American fear of encroaching globalism from Japan’s emerging economy.
In recent years, some science fiction films have begun distancing themselves from the cyberpunk architectural aesthetic. Even as films like Her and Ex Machina are sited in the sleek contemporary architecture we have come to expect from the 2010s, the nefariousness of their themes is not neatly so rooted in their settings. Her production designer KK Barrett remarked that while the world that was created in the film is an idyllic and optimistic portrayal of a future Los Angeles, “it’s just that the character is still unhappy in love. It’s not the environment’s fault.” (Fig 5.) However, in the majority of film from the past decade, when an environment or city itself is portrayed as “evil,” it falls back on the cyberpunk aesthetic.
Figure 5: Her’s more utopian vision of a future Los Angeles is juxtaposed against the turmoil of its lead character. Spike Jonze, 2013.
The reason why cyberpunk has remained as a sort of default dystopian urban aesthetic in film lies perhaps in the continued political implications of 1980s architecture. The economic policies of Reagan, as well as the financial reverberations of Japan’s economic collapse, have retained a lasting, pertinent societal impact in the daily lives and tangible economic conditions of millions to this day. The corporate skyscrapers erected during this time still stand as subtle monuments to the nefariousness of corporations, occupying a distinct default aesthetic in the minds of the general public. A cursory glance at the top posts of the online Reddit forum r/evilbuildings reveals image after image of imposing corporate headquarters, lit up often times in neon red or blue against a night sky; clearly, as much as an attribute like “good” or “evil” can be ascribed to an anonymous structure, something about late modernist corporatism neatly fulfills the “evil” role in the mind of internet users.
While the urban landscape presented in Metropolis is very much of its time, as is that of Blade Runner, evil environments seem to have stagnated in science fiction. As we are still economically reckoning with the implications of the 1980s, so are we architecturally. In a 1982 interview, Ridley Scott asserted that Blade Runner’s urban setting “depicts a road we're heading down now – class separation, the growing gulf between rich and poor, the population explosion – and it offers no solutions.” Indeed, it seems that the outlook of cyberpunk is one that is holistically grim; it is a caricature of the dangers of technology, the most cold and unfeeling aspects of our built environment taken to their logical extremes. Even as films like the 2017 Ghost in the Shell have appropriated cyberpunk past all semblance of original meaning, riddled with kitschy self-referential Orientalism all the while casting a white woman in its lead role, the core ethos of cyberpunk remains a fascinating anti-capitalist ethos on a potential future. This is a future we have been unable to stop imagining since 1982, even as the originally speculative 2019 setting of Blade Runner is no longer ahead of us, but rather behind.
Works Cited
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Emerson, Sarah. “Cyberpunk Cities Fetishize Asian Culture But Have No Asians.” Vice, 10 Oct. 2017, www.vice.com/en_us/article/mb7yqx/cyberpunk-cities-fetishize-asian-culture-but-have-no-asians-blade-runner.
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Rosen, Daniel. “A Futuristic View: Utopian and Dystopian Urban Landscapes in Film.” Blueprint, Presented by CBRE, 23 Feb. 2018, blueprint.cbre.com/a-futuristic-view-utopian-and-dystopian-urban-landscapes-in-film/.
Wagner, Kate. “The Architecture of Evil: Dystopian Megacorps in Speculative Fiction Films.” 99% Invisible, 2 December 2016, 99percentinvisible.org/article/architecture-evil-dystopian-megacorps-speculative-fiction/.
Walker-Emig, Paul. “Neon and Corporate Dystopias: Why Does Cyberpunk Refuse to Move on?” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 16 Oct. 2018, www.theguardian.com/games/2018/oct/16/neon-corporate-dystopias-why-does-cyberpunk-refuse-move-on.
