‘The City’ is an iconic and constantly recurring theme in Science Fiction (SF) cinema. Huge, sprawling mega-cities are the dominant settings for many SF films. As author John R. Gold points out in his essay Under Darkened Skies: The City in Science Fiction Film, the city of the future is often as much part of the action as the actors themselves. The city can also be viewed as a symbol of man’s separation from nature, and a metaphor for the spiritual death of society.

The film Soylent Green certainly exemplifies the deeply embedded ideology in SF cinema that humanity can look forward to a bleak, austere future ravaged by environmental degradation and rampant overpopulation.

Gold envisions a brooding, dystopian outlook for the urban environment of tomorrow. Soylent Green presents us with a future plagued by overpopulation, inequality and environmental decay from which there is apparently no escape.

Janet Straiger’s Future Noir: Contemporary Representations of Visionary Cities focuses on the physical and psychological composition of The City as portrayed in SF cinema and how in many ways the vertical, angular, high rise, high-tech settings subconsciously replicate our rigid, antiquated and hypocritical Judeo-Christian morality. This is juxtaposed with the deeply-rooted fears and anxieties of contemporary society, along with and everything that that implies.

The utopian city we aspire to in the future is generally pictured as consisting of gigantic, gleaming spires and other phallic symbols. The ruling class lives at the very top of the food chain in high rise luxury while the rest of humanity is left to fend for themselves in the dirty, chaotic streets below. It is a purely Darwinian vision.

Straiger identifies some of the characteristics that constitute the city of the future – symmetry, order, clarity – as they specifically relate to the SF genre along with several other aspects of the ‘future noir’ aesthetic. They are dark, brooding and nearly unfathomable.

Cities on the Edge of Time: The Urban Science Fiction Film by Vivian Sobchack compares and contrasts the various competing architectural visions related to the urban environment in SF cinema. These films expose the false appearance of options in a choice-less social order. The utilitarian aspects of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier’s works add substance to this vision. They symbolize power and control. The monstrous, impersonal edifices serve to alienate humanity in “the décor of tomorrow’s hell.”

Urbanization and technology were initially perceived as positive developments among the movie-going public, as portrayed in early films of the genre like Things to Come and Fritz Lang’s iconic Metropolis, and this narrative was reinforced by a generally optimistic public opinion. In Lang’s famous film, the future city and its attendant technology is viewed as transcendent and uplifting.

Sobchack describes the imaginary vision of our urbanized future as a positive place which evokes a sense of “striving, a defiance of gravity, while the horizontal elements call to mind acceptance and rest.” This is a demonstrably more benign version of The City from those of the later post-modern era, like Soylent Green, Blade Runner, Escape from New York, or 1984. The mega-cities depicted in later SF films of the genre tend to highlight the claustrophobic, oppressive nature of the big city and the emptiness and inherent isolation of the overwhelming and inescapable – theoretically – urban sprawl.

Under Darkened Skies provides still further context to some of the ways in which The City is portrayed in SF. Gold argues that in many cinematic SF texts, The City itself could be considered one of the main characters in the film – not simply the backdrop for the action. The City plays an active, critical role in the plot.

Interestingly, Gold notes that these futuristic cityscapes in SF cinema are as much a product of budgetary constraints as artistic vision; at least they used to be before the advent of CGI. Location shooting was still in its infancy before the advent of computer technology and elaborate, hand-painted sets were cumbersome and expensive to produce. What was portrayed on screen was often a compromise between art and the economics of film production.

Another important motif related to the urban environment of SF cinema is the need to escape from the “corrupting embrace” of The City. Cities are looked upon as “arenas of evil and repression” … “clammy and claustrophobic.”

The antithesis of the heartless, imposing metropolis of SF cinema is of course the natural world. Escaping from the de-humanizing conditions of The City to the proverbial “forbidden zone” of nature is a constantly recurring theme. The city of the future is utterly hierarchical and entropic. ‘Back to nature’ seems to be the underlying message in a lot of ‘future noir’ cinema. Humanity has strayed too far from our natural state.

THE CITY is a glowing reminder of how far we have fallen.

[Repost from 2015]