In classic film noir, the city of Los Angeles is typically portrayed as a hostile, or at best, cold and indifferent place. The opening scene of 1947’s Possessed shows the protagonist, Louise, wandering lost through the empty streets of real life, downtown LA. The city appears stark and austere, vaguely antagonistic. In 1950’s Sunset Boulevard, the protagonist Joe Gillis is a once successful, now failing screenwriter who cannot sell his scripts, whose friends all refuse to lend him money to help him pay for his car and rent. In spite of his adversity, Joe chooses to remain in LA to try and make it in Hollywood and this eventually leads him to take refuge in the home of the delusional, washed-up actress Norma Desmond, and becomes her “kept man.”
One of the most unflattering visions of LA is shown in the early scenes of 1949’s The Reckless Moment. At the start of the film, a housewife from the sunny, pleasant white bread suburb of Balboa drives alone into the heart of downtown LA to confront a man who intends to blackmail her daughter. As she enters the city (made obvious by signs as well as the LA City Hall on the horizon as she drives) the music turns from upbeat and major to tense and minor. The images go from horizontal, pastoral landscapes to vertical, shadowy cityscapes and the scenes (briefly outdoor but mostly indoor) are filled with shadows.
In his 1982 tech noir, Blade Runner, director Ridley Scott presented a Los Angeles of 2019 expanding the setting of LA to include many more shots and scenes taking place outside, on the streets, than in most classic noir. Scott’s vision of Los Angeles was based on the American zeitgeist of the 1980’s and thus includes, the supersession of corporate power over that of the government, the chaos of crowded public spaces lit with blinding neon signs, the overwhelming force of unavoidable advertisement and Asian cultural influence coming to dominate what was once a very Anglo city.
Many of the scenes of classic noir set in LA takes place indoors but a staple of such film’s outdoor, establishing shots is the famous LA City Hall. Establishing shots of the iconic structure appear in many noir films including White Heat and The Unfaithful, the building can even be easily distinguished at night as shown in Crimewave. The City Hall was usually shown to set up a scene about government officials who kept their offices inside or the Los Angeles Police Department that was located in the building until 1955. Depending on the film, the police could be vile and corrupt or more virtuous and sympathetic but the image of the LA City Hall (the tallest building in the city until 1968) always represented the great power of the government and the rule of law.
In contrast to the establishing shots of the LA City Hall in classic noir are the establishing shots of the massive Tyrell Corporation headquarters in Blade Runner. The headquarters is actually a pair of giant pyramids arranged diagonally to one another like those of Giza in Egypt. The Tyrell headquarters not only appears to be the tallest structure in the city but also the largest in volume by far. The building is shown in an establishing shot in three scenes, first, when Leon Kowalski, a suspected replicant, is given the Voight Kampf test to determine if he is a replicant and second when the protagonist, Richard Deckard comes to conduct the Voight Kampf test on Rachael who comes from a new Nexus 6 series of replicants which are made to be indistinguishable from humans. Finally, the headquarters is shown one last time when replicant Roy Beatty uses Tyrell employee JF Sebastian to visit the CEO, Dr. Tyrell himself whose resides in a penthouse at the top floor of the same building. Whereas in classic noir, the LA City Hall was used to represent the supreme power of the government and the rule of law, in Blade Runner, the Tyrell Headquarters represents the supreme power of the corporations that rule its world.
It is the Tyrell Corporation that manufactures the replicants who pose such a threat to law and order (they are marketed to colonists on other planets, but are outlawed on Earth) and ultimately prove to be superior to replicant-hunter Deckard in combat in the form of Roy Beatty. The supremacy of corporate power over the state reflects the zeitgeist of early 1980’s America where the public was becoming aware of how corporations were amoral entities whose success was vital to the health of the economy. This theme of the danger of corporate corruption and government impotence also featured prominently in another 1980’s science fiction film, Robocop (1987.) One of the most obvious presences of consumer-culture that had changed the LA landscape between the era of classic noir and the early 1980’s when Blade Runner was made was public advertising.
Outdoor shots and scenes are much more frequent in Blade Runner than in classic noir and most of them include signs and advertisements. As popular as television was in the USA in 1958 (considered to be the last year of the classic noir era) it was nowhere as ubiquitous as it had become by 1982 when Blade Runner was released. The video advertisements in Blade Runner aren’t even shown on TV’s in private residences or shop windows but on billboard-sized screens on the sides of drone, advertising blimps and gigantic screens on the side of skyscrapers. One of the advertising blimps can even be seen in two different scenes out of the skylight of JF Sebastian’s apartment building.
More common and much more varied in the film are the bright neon signs that line the streets and are even visible out of the window of Deckard’s apartment. All of the outdoor scenes shot on crowded streets are a kaleidoscope of neon signs. Most notable is a scene where Deckard chases down the replicant Zhora through a crowded city street and eventually shoots her as she runs through and shatters the picture window glass of a department store.
In classic noir set in LA, the nights were much darker and the main sources of light are street lamps as in the opening scene of Double Indemnity (1944.) Ridley Scott created a nighttime Los Angeles of the future that had less dark corners for secrets and evil to hide in and was instead a relentless assault of bright lights and colors where violent confrontations such as those between Deckard and Zhora and later Leon take place in clear view. Even Roy Beatty’s final scene on a rooftop includes a large neon sign for TDK (a manufacturer of recordable audio and VHS cassettes) plainly visible in the background. Just as Scott’s LA is visually dominated by neon signs, advertisements, and massive corporate headquarters, it has also changed from a somewhat distinct, West Coast, American city whose population is of mostly European descent to a city that looks more like it might be in East Asia and whose population is mostly Asian.
Though none of the main characters of the film are Asian, much of the population of 2019 LA is shown to be of Asian descent and the city more closely resembles the Tokyo of 1982 than the Los Angeles of that time. The setting repeatedly features a giant video screen on the side of a skyscraper was showing an ad for Coca-Cola that starring a geisha. Also, several of the bright neon signs in the crowded street signs are in the Chinese and Japanese written languages. In classic noir not only were all main characters almost always white but most of the supporting cast and the vast majority of the extras as well. In Deckard’s first scene he is shown eating at a noodle café and his Asian cook/server translates the “city speak” (said by Deckard’s voice over to be a combination of “Japanese, Spanish, German, what have you.”) spoken to him by another police officer.
In a later scene, replicants Roy Beatty and Leon Kowalski interrogate an eye designer named Chu (James Hong) who is also Asian and speaks with a thick accent. Many of the pedestrian extras in the film’s crowded street scenes are Asian as are the merchants (dressed in traditional style Chinese coats, one of whom smokes a long-stemmed pipe) who examine a reptile scale Deckard finds in Kowalski’s apartment and use an electron microscope to determine its manufacturer.
In the early 1980’s when Blade Runner was made, Japan was beginning to outperform the US internationally in industry and commerce and many people in the United States feared that Japan would oust the US as the world’s economic superpower. Additionally, much of the manufacturing that took place during the era of classic noir had been outsourced and China was one of the main counties where once-American manufacturing had moved. With East Asian aesthetics as well as many Asian people cast as extras and in minor roles, Scott created an LA that was not just unfamiliar because it was the future but because it had come to be dominated by a different culture.
In the world of cinema, a future city complete with soaring skyscrapers, flying cars, and artificial humans predates even the advent of sound as exemplified by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927.) What makes Scott’s LA in Blade Runner provocative is that it used these elements in combination with commentary on corporate power, consumerism, and the shift of cultural influence. Like the classic noir films, Blade Runner takes place in a decaying, corrupt city. The innovation of the film is that it combined the classic formula of the noir crime drama with anxieties about the future from the time it was made to tell a story that was equally about advancing technology and human emotions.