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Darker Cities

Urban Dystopia and Science Fiction Cinema

Monash University, AustraliaAndrew.Milner{at}arts.monash.edu.au

This article makes use of Darko Suvin’s theory of the novum and Raymond Williams’s cultural materialism to analyse three urban-dystopian science fiction films: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Alex Proyas’s Dark City (1998). It argues for the central significance of utopia, dystopia and cinema to SF. It explores the themes of class and gender, the uses of intertextuality, and the representations of the human and the posthuman in these three films. Drawing on Jameson, Baudrillard and others, it argues that the first film exhibits a characteristically modern, the latter two different versions of a characteristically postmodern, ‘structure of feeling’.

Key Words: cinema • cultural materialism • dystopia • postmodernism • science fiction

International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3, 259-279 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/1367877904046303


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