Is techno-noir our new reality?

The hellscape movies I can’t stop thinking about

Mar 16, 2025

The city is glittering and techno-sleek on the surface, but beneath the gilded façade, it is crumbling. The skyscrapers serve as platforms for huge telescreens advertising favored corporate brands. Down at street level, people move furtively, warily, as if never quite sure of their next step. It is always raining. It is always night.

It is 21^st-century Los Angeles, as envisioned in the 1982 movie Blade Runner, an adaptation of the late-sixties novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by the sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick.

Both film and book project a nightmare vision: a future of all-powerful corporations run by power-mad egotists, massive environmental degradation, ruthless social stratification, and humanoid beings – “replicants” – created and powered by AI technology.

The movie has endured as a cult classic, so much so that it’s been reprised several times in various forms. Along with other works – some decades old, some current – it serves as a warning of a world that may be coming to life before our eyes today in the ascendance of Donald Trump and his coterie of tech oligarchs.

In Blade Runner, the Tyrell Corporation has created replicants to serve as slaves for the privileged humans who are allowed to escape a ruined Earth for “off-world” colonies. The CEO/inventor, Eldon Tyrell, has created a highly advanced version, the Nexus-6, so lifelike that it requires administration of a sophisticated psychological test to reveal that it is not human. And there the trouble really begins, because the Nexus-6 replicants have sufficient consciousness to be aware of their enslaved status – and to rebel against it.

Dystopian worlds ruled by omnipotent corporations have been on my mind lately … for some reason. In another example of the genre, the 1975 movie Rollerball, megabusinesses also dominate the world. They have created supercomputers to vacuum up all written knowledge and rewrite it – or distort it– to suit their interests. To distract people from their impotence, the companies have created a bloodsport called rollerball, played before frenzied spectators in arenas and vast global television audiences. The players are mostly expendable and interchangeable, reinforcing the corporate ethos of a conformist society where individualism is ruthlessly suppressed. When one especially talented player tries to challenge this premise, the oligarchs plot his demise.

Both films contain eerily prescient elements. The sport in Rollerball is more than a little reminiscent of pro football (which I readily confess is one of my guilty pleasures). The ever-present police cruisers in Blade Runner resemble the Tesla cybertruck – deliberately so, as Elon Musk has said the movie vehicle served as a design model. (In retrospect, considering the context, this might have been an early indication of where Musk was heading politically.) And Musk has mused about creating a “self-sustaining civilization” of humans on Mars, as a hedge against what we are doing to the Earth.

More broadly, both movies envision a world run by corporate oligarchs, unfettered by government regulation and free to manipulate advanced technologies to serve their own narrow interests, regardless of the consequences for the rest of us.

If the terms “innie” and “outie” have now popped into your mind, you can sense where I’m going next. The hit TV series Severance takes things several steps further. Here, the dominant corporation, Lumon, has infused itself with a quasi-religious aura, creating a cult-like army of true believers. It is harnessing nascent computer technology for a secret, self-serving purpose. And when the grunt work required to further this purpose leads, inevitably, to alienation and ennui, it devises a high-tech “solution” – literally severing each person into an innie who knows nothing but the drudgery and soullessness of repetitive work and an outie who enjoys all the fruits of life outside the office.

The common element in all these scenarios is the absence of any control on corporate power, which allows corporations to thrive and metastasize at everyone else’s expense. And it is the promise of relief from irksome public regulation that is central to Trump’s appeal to the tech barons who have flocked around him.

Musk, of course, has leveraged himself into an unprecedented position of authority – including the opportunity to display his cinematic cybertruck and other Teslas on the White House driveway – but he is only the most visible specimen. There is Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who has publicly proclaimed that he switched his support to Trump last year solely because the Biden administration insisted on regulating two businesses he wished to profit from, AI and cryptocurrency. There is Peter Thiel, another Valley billionaire, who bankrolled the start of JD Vance’s political career, and has argued that freedom and democracy are incompatible.

And there is the gallery of techno-billionaires – Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos – who were put on such ostentatious display at Trump’s inaugural. Many had a history of supporting Democrats, but no longer. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat said they reminded him of “defeated generals paraded in a Roman triumph.” The image that came to my mind was slightly different; ornaments in a trophy case.

The deal they are striking with the new regime might be called neo-Faustian – a devil’s bargain for the Trump era. They are swapping their souls not for knowledge and power, as in the original legend, but for a much narrower purpose: to preserve and enlarge their privileged position. They understand all too well their vulnerability to the whims and caprice of a budding autocrat. They also understand the opportunities for greater engorgement that Trump can make available through insider deals, regulatory immunity and low (or no) taxation.

This, of course, is also how the autocrat expands his own sway, by leveraging his grip on the oligarchs to serve his needs and interests. They cough up vast amounts of money to finance his political and personal interests, use their powerful media platforms to promote him, and provide validation for him with their fellow masters of the universe. It’s a well-trodden trail that other autocrats, most notably Vladimir Putin, have blazed.

For the rest of us, there is also a bargain being offered, but its terms are very different. Our end of the arrangement is to remain silent and passive, to accept without complaint the new order being erected on the ruins of our old system of decentralized power, to avert our gaze while those who do protest receive the rough edge of the law – or to look, and feel a twisted pleasure as they are turned into an example. What we are to get in return, however, is much less clear, because the ruler and his oligarchs are concerned entirely with their own interests.

So things work out very pleasantly for those in the inner circle. They do not work out so well for everyone else — an outcome the noirish movies and books foretell.

In Blade Runner, the marriage of corporate ascendance and technological ambition produces only carnage and sorrow. Creator and creation are both among the casualties, cynicism becomes the default mindset, and anyone who exhibits empathy or even accepts others at face value is an easy mark for the predators.

Rollerball’s rebellious hero “wins” the final contest, but his prize is nothing more than a tenuous survival amid a steadily rising body count around him. The corporate villain who plotted his demise is annoyed that he is still alive, but the structure of corporate power is not even dented.

At Lumon, the holy grail of severance technology is supposedly better work-life balance and escape from psychic trauma. In reality, it delivers alienation, resentment, betrayal, and heartbreak.

While these works offer a warning, they do not provide much in the way of hope, of a path out of the nightmare. So, perhaps, it is time to write a new version of the story, as much by our actions as by our words.

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