Neo-Noir discussion continued with Bladerunner - savior narratives thwarted

Next discussion group: November 16 8:30 am PST

We had a great discussion today, and the next meeting will be November 16, 2024 at 8:30 am. I may put up some readings, but we I’m in the middle of final revisions and I’m a little preoccupied, so we can be more casual.

I forgot to include a number of points I wanted to make about Professional Managerial Class savior ideology and how it doesn’t work as politics for working class renewal. These two Neo Noirs really deal with the allegorical working class hero, who is powerless at the end to save the women they love, or expose the corruption they have discovered. The cynicism of the hard bitten detective protagonist is similar in town to the cynicism we hear from working class Americans who think that the political system can do nothing for them. They’re not wrong, but their cynicism or dark knowledge as Scott K. pointed is not dark enough — at least in the case of Chinatown.

In both Chinatown and Bladerunner, the protagonist exists between blue and white collar worlds — retired upwardly mobile policemen who were once detectives, but left the force disgusted or traumatized.

At the end of both these films, we should be more terrified of the corruption and deception they are working to unravel and more unsure of any savior narcissism and the violent solutions they engender. Roman Polanski was able to make an epic tragedy about the birth of modern Los Angeles. Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner achieves something else and we can talk about it next time: it is also interesting that the film is also set in Los Angeles. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the Philip K. Dick novella upon which the film is based, the city where the events are set is San Francisco.

The problem with the Denis de Villeneuve sequel to Bladerunner is that he doesn’t understand the genre hybridization that Ridley Scott engineered between Science Fiction and Film Noir.

I have found that the PMC activist is much more interested in distant conflicts where they can play the savior role. I think we need to convince people in a political group that we should organize for achievable goals that build on worker power, which some times means ousting a bad leader. But the long term goals should always be working toward a concrete redistribution of resources and power from the top down, which is why the issue of Israel/Palestine should always be framed in the larger picture of the abuse of power of administrations on US campuses and the hollowing out of American working class lifeworlds and the abandonment of domestic programs for the prosecution of an Imperial war of conquest in the Middle East.