From Judge Dredd to Blade Runner: how cyberpunk conquered 80s America

A new exhibition traces cyberpunk history, from why Los Angeles is the perfect dystopian setting to how the sub-genre has modernised

It’s science-fiction set not in some galaxy far away but here on Earth, in a plausible, not-too-distant future. Society is in a state of upheaval: decay, unrest, violence, perhaps caused – or exacerbated by – technological advancement, venal authorities or malevolent corporations. And it is down to a lone insurgent – a “punk” – to fight back on behalf of humanity and sort out the mess.
These elements – more or less – are at the core of cyberpunk, a mid-20th century publishing genre that exploded in cinema during the 1980s with thrilling, picaresque films such as Blade Runner, Tron and Robocop. Like many of its protagonists, cyberpunk will not die. It continues to feed our deepest anxieties, in iterations from turn-of-the-millennium smash The Matrix to genre-defying modern manifestations, such as 2021’s Afro-sci-fi musical Neptune Frost. 
Now, cyberpunk has come of age as the sole subject of a huge, multimedia exhibition at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in California, which curators say is the first of its kind. The exhibition is the academy’s contribution to the Getty Foundation’s multi-million dollar mega-series of Autumn exhibitions on the theme of science in art, and the cyberpunk show marks new recognition for a sub-genre often overlooked. 
“These stories are universal and that’s what excites us,” says Doris Berger, AMMP’s vice president of curatorial affairs, speaking on the museum’s terrace – itself a vast, futuristic demi-sphere overlooking Los Angeles, the dystopian setting for countless cyberpunk films. “They are not unique to America, there are many reasons to think about our futures, and cyberpunk has been adapted all around the world, from Europe to Africa to Asia.” 
Berger and her co-curators have assembled an entertaining show with an intellectual bent. The centrepiece – inevitably – is a hi-tech immersive experience, a montage with an original script commissioned from filmmaker Alex Rivera, writer and director of Sleep Dealer (2008), a Sundance-award winning sci-fi thriller set in Mexico.
There is an array of artefacts: “matte” paintings of sets, among them works by visual effects artist Syd Dutton, whose images were vital to cinematic worldbuilding in such films as The Running Man (1987) starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. There are costumes, props, design drawings and other objects from films such as Blade Runner and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) starring James Woods and real-life punk Debbie Harry. Berger’s favourite exhibit is a MetaFlesh game pod – a disturbing chunk of latex flesh from Cronenberg’s 1999 thriller, Existenz. “If you’ve ever seen that film It’s a truly disgusting object – we’re really excited to show that,” she says.
“The exhibition marks a moment,” says Jared Shurin, editor of The Big Book of Cyberpunk. UK enthusiasts who can’t make it to LA can catch Shurin introducing his cyberpunk series at the Bristol Film Festival in the city’s planetarium next month, including The Matrix (1999), Tron (1982) and Moon (2009). 
Shurin says it took Blade Runner to elevate a niche genre to a mass audience – Ridley Scott’s 1982 loose adaptation of Philip K Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? starring Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard, a burnt-out LA cop hunting down fugitive automatons. 
“You have all those original themes, a punk entering into tension with the system. But Blade Runner was just gorgeous to look at, drawing on the noir tradition – a wonderful new cyberpunk aesthetic,” he says. “Blade Runner defined cyberpunk and it stayed like that until the Matrix, when suddenly there was a millennial cyberpunk asking questions like what does it mean to be human, and that took the art of film-making another huge leap forward.”
“Atmosphere doesn’t begin to capture what Blade Runner puts on screen,” says novelist Will Wiles, a longtime cyberpunk enthusiast. “Everything feels solid and real. You can smell it. The scene in which Deckard enhances a photograph and manages to look around corners and into impossible angles, is an intoxicating bit of fantasy dream-logic. There’s depth, a hinterland offscreen. And the future it shows feels like it was built on the present. The bones of our world are still there.”
The Los Angeles exhibition points to a few of cyberpunk’s antecedents. Some films as early as [Fritz Lang’s] Metropolis (1927) even have elements of the genre, like modern technology and dystopian systems of labour. 
It pre-existed 1980s cinema in literature, too, from the early novels of Kathy Acker and William Gibson to comics such as 2000 AD, first published in the UK in 1977, featuring Judge Dredd, the pitiless street cop satirising real-life law enforcement. But the exhibition presents cyberpunk as emerging as a clear and distinctive narrative form in 1980s American cinema – an era of technological advances, Reaganist free-market economics and individualism. 
“The Reagan era is a big US moment of friction between politics and real life,” says Berger. “On the one hand, there was an economic boom but on the other, contradiction. There was prosperity for big corporations but ordinary people’s lives didn’t match up.” The lone individual, the outsider triumphing, says Berger, became a vivid theme for America’s cinematic fantasies. 
Blade Runner and Kathryn Bigelow’s noir-ish sci-fi thriller Strange Days (1995) were among many cyberpunk films set in a dystopian Los Angeles, often with its endless freeways reimagined as monstrous, neon-lit superhighways. “It’s partly because the film industry is here, but Los Angeles is also a place that is new – or newer than New York – in terms of possibilities,” says Berger. “We have contradictions, poverty as well as wealth, new technology and big corporations are here. It’s a place with a lot of friction to inspire dystopian thinking.”  
The term cyberpunk was first coined in the same decade – probably. “That’s disputed,” says Berger. “There are several theories, but I think it was in the late 80s or even the early 90s. So you have ten years of these films before they were connected to the name.”
Shruin says the origin of the term doesn’t matter. “There’s a difference between using it first and using it best,” he says. “Bruce Bethke’s [1983] short story, Cyberpunk, is about a kid who’s a hacker. But I think [American sci-fi writer] Bruce Stirling later took it and used it for the movement.”
Film, television and literature have made cyberpunk a powerful force, but more recently its cultural influence has been in gaming, particularly in terms of sheer numbers. “Cyberpunk 2027 is one of the best-selling games of all time. Even Fortnite did a cyberpunk season last year. It’s interesting that a generation, or perhaps two, who have never heard of the books and films are playing those games,” says Shurin. 
In music, Janelle Monáe, an Afro-American gender-fluid singer from Kansas, has taken the aesthetics of Gibson and Stirling and turned them into an immersive, trans-media world in videos, film and particularly on her album Dirty Computer. 
In 21st-century cinemas, cyberpunk is ditching the trenchcoats, endless rain and neon lights. The latest generation of films is lush and immersive in different scenarios, and is concerned with new heroes and new agents of chaos. Afro-musical Neptune Frost, a joint US-Rwandan production, tells the surreal story of romance between a young intersex hacker and a miner battling foreign oppressors from China and Russia in near-future Rwanda. Night Raiders (2021) imagines women stranded in a dystopian North America in 2044, environmentally degraded and ruled over by a military dictatorship. 
“There’s something about these themes,” says Shurin. “I love the fact that it was started by a very small core of straight, white, north-American men and it became globally applicable.” Cyberpunk will change again in our own near-future, because imagining the world to come is a fundamental human trait.  
Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures Through Cinema opens at the Academy Museum Los Angeles on October 6; academymuseum.org
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