Middle-class suicide

By Julian Delasantellis

It's pretty much par for the course for science fiction to tell tales of a bleak and nightmarish future, but even so, Ridley Scott's 1982 movie Blade Runner, from the Philip K Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? really piled it on with the dystopian delights.

Set in the year 2019, in a Los Angeles with a population of 100 million (10 times its current population), the movie shows what happens when a society allows its middle class to wither and die. Here, Los Angeles has been rent into two socioeconomic classes with almost no regular contact - a small, far-off wealthy class growing ever fatter and happier on the backs of its slave labor android workforce mining the natural resources of the outer planets, and a vast, polyglot lower class, speaking a bastardized English composed of parts of all the languages of the immigrant communities competing with each other for what few of society's crumbs are available to them. All this is happening amidst a grossly polluted urban landscape where toxic rain regularly falls on the unfortunates.