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What's your favorite Cyberpunk visual media?
(lemmy.fmhy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Cyberpunk
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"High tech, low life."
"The street finds its own uses for things."
We all know the quotes and the books. But cyberpunk is more than a neon-soaked, cybernetic aesthetic, or a gritty dystopian science fiction genre. It is a subculture composed of two fundamental ideas: PUNK, and CYBER.
The PUNK: antiauthoritarian, anticapitalist, radical freedom of expression, rejection of tradition, a DIY ethic.
The CYBER: all that, but high-fuckin'-tech, ya feel? From DIYing body mods to using bleeding edge software to subvert corporate interests. It's punk for the 22nd century.
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I like Blade Runner (and 2049) a lot, but I always felt like they put much more emphasis on the 'cyber' part then the 'punk' part.
Not much commentary on socioeconomic issues, or engagement with themes of anti-athoritarianism and anti-capitalism, or the dystopian nature of the world, all of that is just background dressing to a much more standard science fiction exploration of "what it means to be human", which is something I could find better explored in classic golden age science fiction like Isaac Asimov's Robot and Foundation series, like Caves of Steel.
That's why, out of all visual media, it's really Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Robocop that made the genre click for me, believe it nor. It's the former that made me finally go out and get all the cyberpunk literature I could and start reading it. That's probably informed by my queer, anarchist, and punk leanings outside of cyberpunk, you know?
Blade Runner hits those themes, but it pushes the discussion around Replicants, which are stand-ins for The Others in society. Those movies don't hit the POV of street level, which is different than most cyberpunk works.
I was going to say. All the cyberpunk stuff exists in Blade Runner, but because the pov characters are a Cop hunting replicants and the Replicants themselves we only see it in the periphery.
Right, like I said, it exists as a backdrop
But the "What it means to be human" is only a problem because of the corps, and their destruction of everything they touch. If the corps hadn't ruined society, the environment, and designed replicants to be slaves and have short lives, then none of the events of the film would have happened. The entire film is a condemnation of that capitalist mindset of milking everything you can for the most amount of money possible. Why did the corps ruin the environment? Because doing so made money. Why do they use replicants for slave labor? Because doing so is cheaper than having well-compensated or even poorly-compensated workers. Why do replicants die young? Because it prevents them from properly organizing a revolt against their masters.
What do they care if they only live 4 years? Once it's been r&d'd it's cheap to just plop out a new one. The corps' inherent cruelty is the reason the replicants are hiding amongst the populace. It's the reason they lash out against humans. It's the reason that Blade Runners are "necessary" to hunt them down and kill them. IMO it's a very punk movie.
Fair enough, I see your point. But like I said, that's background worldbuilding, instead of being dealt with directly by the narrative.
To be fair to Blade Runner here, I don't think it was really made to be "Cyberpunk". It has some of the themes and inspired a lot of future Cyberpunk work (at the very least aesthetic wise), but the book "Cyberpunk" wasn't published until a year later and "Neuromancer" didn't come out until two years later, so a lot of the themes that we consider Cyberpunk weren't fully realised yet. I guess you could argue it's more proto-Cyberpunk (and a number of other sci-fi from before then), but it's pretty firmly entrenched as Cyberpunk now, and to be honest, I don't really disagree either. Strict definitions for genres are pretty tricky, even more so for foundational work like I'd say Blade Runner was.
People see themes differently. IMO the movie was dripping with socioeconomic commentary: the difference between the beauty of the inside of the archology versus the shitty streets; Pris resorting to prostitution (I'm pretty sure that happened, but I haven't seen the movie in a while); Deckard's shitty living quarters.
I don't know if the dystopian nature of the world needs deeper exploration. It's shown to be awful (at least to red-meat eating Americans from the 1980s). The constant rain/umbrellas seem like a pretty clear nod to acid rain. The crumbling city and infrastructure are pretty apparent. The closing sequence of Deckard escaping to the green wilds seems kind of ham fisted, but it underlines that the system the city represents is awful.
I didn't mention it but yeah Edgerunners hit SO hard and is also one of my favorites. It really showed the people on the outskirts being ground down by the system aspect of the genre. It also helps that it was an absolutely gorgeously made Anime.
Exactly!