Mario Gandelsonas’ Scene: X The Development of the X-Urban City
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

Both in opposition to, and in conjunction with the suburban, the “new urbanity” of what Gandalsonas calls the “x-urban” landscape (178) is one in which our understanding of the urban-suburban duality has broken down. Beyond the spaces in which we live and work, Gandalsonas’ Scene: X points to our use of screens to mediate space as symptomatic of post-suburban life, including the confusion between watching, and being watched.

This relationship between screen and living condition –the notion that the TV series Cops is symptomatic of the suburban decay– raises further question of viewership for Blade Runner narrative. Gandelsonas suggests “Cops” provides a window via which x-urbanites may view the suburban condition (180), it would seem our position as viewer to Blade Runner is even farther removed than the x-urban. This is entirely appropriate, considering that as Gandelsonas notes the x-urban view is international (180), our view from the “x-x-urban” may well be interplanetary.
While the science fiction genre is filled with space exploration, Blade Runner is entirely terrestrial. Scott’s presentation of the Los Angeles of 2019 is one in which even the notional lines that Gandelsonas suggests divide urban, suburban, and x-urban development (181) have apparently collapsed. In place of horizontally spacial delineation, the near-future Los Angeles of Blade Runner is literally stratified; The decaying urban core sits at ground-level, and the sprawl continues vertically, with the x-urban manifesting as completely contained live-work high-rises. For example, the Tyrell Corporation building in which we see office, production, and living space for employees (including Tyrell) is so massive that it’s most easily approached from the air. Effective transit, as Gandelsonas points out as the means by which the police create walls of surveillance to enclose suburbia (181), has made a transition from ground-based automobile to the airborne “spinner”. The police patrol the mid-level suburban sprawl from the air, and the classically urban ground-level is left to rot.

We might even approach the J.F. Sebastian character in Blade Runner as representative of an iconic gentrifying force (178). Based on his employment with the Tyrell Corporation, and his relationship with Tyrell himself (as evident by their game of long-distance chess), we can assume Sebastian is quite wealthy. Since he’s been prohibited from leaving earth for an off-world colony due to a medical condition, he instead prefers to live and work in a loft-like, ground-level urban building that provides the space he requires to construct his robotic “friends”.

Using Scene: X to inform our viewing of Blade Runner is made more convincing by the fact that the camera never ventures to a “x-x-urban” extra-planetary locale. If we were to assume that the drama unfolding in Blade Runner is indeed akin to “Cops”, we’d be viewing from a luxurious off-world colonies.