Blade Runner’s Hong Kong (Or, How to Read Those Dull Academic Papers)

It’s so frustrating to run across an academic paper about your favorite comic or movie or TV show. Academics always say one or two smart things and then spend the rest of a 20-page paper gabbling about incomprehensible theories we ordinary people don’t have time for.

It’s kind of cute, really. I picture a tenure-seeking associate professor of film or cultural studies (like the authors of 90% of these papers) tapping away on her trusty laptop — until she’s brought up short! She realizes she’s gone three whole paragraphs without citing Baudrillard or Lacan or… or… Marx, fergodsake, and she’s in danger of coming off like some kind of degraded, non-scholarly fan or something! TIME TO GET THEORY’D UP!!

For a normal person, the only way to read one of these articles is according to this rule: If a paragraph has a lot of scholarly references, skip it.

Take this neat paper I found about how Blade Runner and other movies with a grunge-tech vibe (Ghost in the Shell, Johnny Mnemonic, Akira, Hackers) all used one particular area of Hong Kong as their template. What makes a scruffy Asian urban neighborhood more “futuristic” than a scruffy American urban neighborhood? Good question.

Want the answer? Here’s what to do.

Read paragraphs 9-13. (Paragraph 9 is between the first two pix and starts: “Perhaps because of its recent reabsorption by China.”) Here the author talks about how Hong Kong encapsulates many of the themes of these movies, and how there’s one Hong Kong district that looks exactly like Blade Runner. (Or start on paragraph 8 to read about why the Blade Runner cityscape is so cool.) Every time a sentence contains a quote, skip that sentence — except in paragraphs 11 and 13. 11, which starts with “The questions remain,” has a worthwhile quote about the cool, if poorly expressed, idea that a big city has a “radical eclecticism or ad hoc-ism.” In paragraph 13 (starts “Apparently no parody…”) the quotes are hellish, but the stuff about levels is thought-provoking. (The vertical levels were the neatest things about the Blade Runner cityscape, IMHO.) So those quotes are worth a quick squint on your way through.

So much for Blade Runner. Jump down to the Ghost in the Shell section, which starts right after the photo of a nighttime park full of tiny lights. Do this:

1. Skip the first paragraph, which begins, “4. I now turn to Ghost in the Shell.”
2. Read the next two (starting with “So we are back to our initial question”), which mostly quote a book about the movie written by non-academics.
3. Skip the paragraph that starts: “Water imagery is…”
4. Read the next one, which starts: “The Analysis emphasizes…” It has more about making the movie and another quote from the (non-academic) book.

The concluding paragraph is kind of charming in its haplessness. Here the author tries to sum up what he’s been trying to say. Alas, only about 10% of the paper says anything coherent about its ostensible subject. The rest is just intellectual ass-covering. As if dimly aware of this, the author splurts out a little pile of Foucault quotes for his final words.

And that’s it. The stuff I’ve pointed to is still pretty dense, but if you feel a pull toward the future worlds of Blade Runner et al, the Hong Kong influence is fun to think about. Happy reading!

See also: –Academic presentations at Comic-Con are silly; –Don’t study popcult in college (in the comments section)

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