It seems like every day I get on the
subway, or go to the movies, I see a promo for some new dystopian
film. And what, really, could be duller at this point. The plucky
band of teenage heroes, the cruel overlord, the pleas to human
freedom that every political group from far left to far right will
find sympathy in.
This isn't to denigrate the “dystopia”
as an artistic trope. It has its place – in some fine novels,
Cormac McCarthy's The Road,
Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things,
and in some fine films, Brazil,
Blade Runner, The
Matrix, Mad Max: Fury
Road and the like. But it has
gotten so overplayed, so transformed into the most banal of cultural
artifacts that the mere mention of a dystopia automatically triggers
my bullshit radar. Compare David Mitchell's novel Cloud
Atlas – a monumental story of
the invisible threads running through history – to the godawful
film version by the Wachowskis, which feels like it was written by a
15 year old that just discovered Buddhism.
Of
course, the notion of the dystopia, particularly in its cyberpunk
forms, has been an essential component of literary and cultural
theory since its 1980s heyday, especially in how these cyberpunk
fictions reflect themselves in our reality, often to the point of
absurdity – Giorgio Agamben's claim in Homo Sacer
that modern life was indistinguishable from Auschwitz is perhaps the
most offensively bourgeois notion I could imagine, and pretty much
anything written by Jean Baudrillard comes off as borderline parody
today. Sure, we don't have flying cars or AI romantic partners, but
in other respects – Snowden, Bezos, facial recognition software –
we are living in a world that would be familiar to Philip K. Dick or
William Gibson.
By the
1990s, with books like Mike Davis' City of Quartz
or Edward Soja's magisterial Postmetropolis,
Los Angeles was being called the postmodern, cyberpunk city par
excellence – after all, this is the city whose economic fortunes
are inextricably entwined with the image industry, a city without
center that arose in the high-capitalist age, and the place where
Rick Deckard and Roy Batty had their final showdown in the rain.
But
recently, attentions have turned more towards East Asia, perhaps best
articulated by Ian Buruma in his essay “AsiaWorld.” Particularly,
the monster cities of China, for which the prototype is Shenzhen
(population, 1980: 30,000, population, 2017: 12.5 million, well-known
as the place where all your shit comes from).
And
it's hard not to accept this notion – walk down Nathan Road in
Kowloon on a rainy night, and tell me you don't feel like chasing a
replicant or two – but I question the singularity of this vision.
When I look at the great cities of East Asia, while I do see a
pattern, even if it takes on myriad forms, all of them distinct, all
still shaped by their own localities.
The
first thing you might think of is the cartoon-scape of Tokyo,
especially as it is in movies like Akira
and Enter the Void.
This is the world of postmodernity at its shiniest and most
superficial level, the geospatial equivalent of cotton candy. This is
a city of English text overlaid on ancient katakana and hiragana,
themselves overlaid on even more ancient kanji, a snow crash of
signifiers, bright neon signs, oddball fragments of traditional East
Asian architecture, sex for sale, particularly in its most
commodified and fetishistic form.
Or you
could draw your attentions to Hong Kong, the interzone that is
neither Chinese nor Western, postcolonial but not national, with its
looming high rises (more than three times as many buildings over 100
meters tall as New York), its migrant workers living in warren-like
housing on the Kowloon side and in the New Territories, its role as a
vital artery in the system of global finance and banking, and in the
dingy hallways of Chungking Mansions, where backpacker guesthouses,
bootleg watches, and its Nepali and Nigerian vendors hustling every
manner of goods you could imagine.
For a
darker perspective, you could look at Phnom Penh, a city of wage
slaves working to produce the goods that even China wants to
outsource, still suffering under the collective post-traumatic stress
disorder in the wake of the Khmer Rouge, with its capitalists
completely indistinguishable from its politicians, its firm-handed
authoritarian rule firmly in the hand of global capital and its local
compradors, its cheap hookers, its armies of begging gangs and
ragpickers.
But
perhaps it is Singapore that most reflects the cinematic vision, at
least, of the cyberpunk city. It is the place that no less an
authority than William Gibson called “Disneyland with the death
penalty, ” and it should be remembered that Germany's current chief
philosophe and noted mustachioed crank Peter Sloterdijk said that if
statues of any political leader of our time will be put up, it will
be Lee Kuan Yew. The reportage of the marriage of Confucian and
Victorian rigidity is nothing new – people have been doing it for
30 years – but as authoritarian capitalism seems to spread over the
world like a dark pall, it seems like too many of us in the rest of
the developed world have accepted the Singaporean worldview part and
parcel. The prioritization of the image of the city over the content,
the embrace of the security state, the reduction of politics to
ritual, the reliance on massive pools of cheap labor while keeping
that cheap labor invisible and damn near stateless, its superficial
claims to the multicultural masking a profoundly regressive racial
dynamic.
Tokyo,
Hong Kong, Phnom Penh, and Singapore, each of them expressing
different modalities of the global city as it occurs in the early
years of the 21st
Century. And yet two of these – Tokyo and Hong Kong – are cities
I utterly adore, despite some of the underlying horror. Repeat for
Bangkok, Seoul, Fukuoka, Penang. It reminds me of that beautiful bit
from Baudelaire's Paris Spleen:
“In
the evening, a bit tired, we wanted to sit down in front of a new
café that formed the corner of a new boulevard, still strewn with
debris and already gloriously displaying its unfinished splendors.
The café was sparkling. The gaslight itself sent forth all the ardor
of a debut and lit with all its force walls blinding in their
whiteness, dazzling sheets of mirrors, the gold of the rods and
cornices, chubby-cheeked page-boys being dragged by dogs on leashes,
laughing ladies with falcons perched on their wrist, nymphs and
goddesses carrying on their heads fruits, pies, and poultry, Hebes
and Ganymedes presenting in out-stretched arms little amphoras filled
with Bavarian cream or bi-colored obelisks of ice cream – all of
history and all of mythology at the service of gluttony.”
So, as
in Baudelaire's Paris, I take the position of the flaneur, the
wanderer, making some attempt to process what I see, to correlate.
Which
brings me around to film representations. What could be duller and
more simplistic than the current cinematic representation of grim
futures. What does it say about us that we would rather consume
fictional dystopias, and express ourselves vicariously through
fictional revolutionaries than actually taking any kind of stance in
a moment of rising authoritarianism? Or postulating a “rebel”
stance by flogging conspiracy theories, faux-leftist stances that
Karl Marx would shake his head at if he were alive today, or any of
the many moronic flavors of adolescent edginess on social media. Or
perhaps even more horrifyingly, presuming that the more populist
flavors of that said authoritarianism are in some way superior to the
more universalized, neoliberal versions, and throwing our lot in with
Putin, Erdogan, Trump, Farage, Le Pen, Shinzo Abe, Duterte, or any of
the other absolute cocksuckers whose supporters think they're
sticking it to the man?
And so
instead, I look to the city around me. The Burmese graffiti and the
stubbed-out green cheroot at the construction site on the corner tell
me far more about the world around us than anything in Hollywood ever
could.
