Recently I came across a movie, which turned out to be a sci-fi, cyberpunk classic. I am actually a little ashamed to say that I have only just come across this movie, since it really is a classic. The movie I am talking about is Blade Runner. A movie that basically opened the cyberpunk genre to cinema and has since influenced a number of movies. What caught my eye, though, is that the Blade Runner Los Angeles of the future is depicted as a multilingual city, even having its own slang, called “city-speak”.
For those of you, who don't know what cyberpunk is here comes a short introduction:
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction. The difference to "conventional" sci-fi, is the overall dystopian atmosphere. The world is depicted as a place where pessimism and violence prevail. Rooted in the 1980s, cyberpunk and reflects the rising critique on commercialization and urbanization of the time. Hollinger describes cyberpunk as follows “cyberpunk can be read as one symptom of the postmodern condition of genre science fiction. While science fiction frequently problemizes the oppositions between the natural and the artificial, the human and the machine, it generally sustains them in such a way that the human remains securely ensconced in its privileged place in the centre of things. Cyberpunk, however, is about the breakdown of these oppositions.” (Hollinger 1990:30).
The general atmosphere of cyberpunk movies is exactly what I like, and Blade Runner manages to evoke a deep feeling of nostalgia. I highly recommend it to everyone, who, like me, loves to dwell in this mood.
Let’s talk about the multilingualism depicted in Blade Runner. To be fair, multilingualism is not one of the main topics of the movie. Nonetheless, it caught my eye and I started to think about it. Nearly none of the sci-fi movies that take us into the future, deal with language and how language will evolve in the future. Even though, those movies display so-called megacities - melting pots of cultures. Of course, language per se is rarely the main topic of a movie, especially Hollywood movies have a long history of “linguistically appropriating and anglicizing the world’s historical and literary heritage”. (Días-Cintas 2011:217) This is why I was even more surprised when I saw that the characters in the multicultural Los Angeles of Blade Runner actually speak different languages and even created a whole new language (city-speak), which is a mixture of Hungarian, Korean, Japanese, German and French. Suggesting that megacities of the future might as well develop such slangs, where multiple languages melt together.
Intrigued by this thought I went on and watched some more cyberpunk movies, that are set in megacities of the future. However, I was disappointed as none of them discussed the probable multilingualism and multiculturalism in the megacities. Seems like Blade Runner is one of a kind. One more reason to love the movie!
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