I come from a family of cinephiles: we watch and collect a
broad range of genres but Science Fiction is King. Starting with going to the movies to see “Star
Wars” and “The Wizard of Oz”, our movie education took off with the VCR. We rented everything we could get our hands
on: “Buck Rogers”, “Battlestar Galactica” and “Flash Gordon”. Television re-entered our lives after a
six-year hiatus and with it a show called “Star Trek”. The future was brightly coloured, exciting
and groovily optimistic. Humans would form a utopian society that
peacefully explored the galaxy seeking friendship.
The cultural zeitgeist of late 20th century
America was one of unease; general and persistent unease. It was a time of extreme paranoia about
nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The
national narrative of the “melting pot” that had room for everybody, as long as
the majority was comfortably white, Anglo Saxon and Protestant, was starting to
shift to other races, other ethnicities, other religions. At the expense of local jobs, consumers
couldn’t get enough cheap and cheerful electronics from Asia. Environments in cities like Los Angeles were
infamous for their smoggy skies filled with emissions from cars and industrial
polluters alike. After a promising
start, the space agencies of both the United States and the Soviet Union were
stuck in a rut of up and down from the atmosphere, out and back from the
moon. Humanity wasn’t going anywhere,
anytime soon.
With those intertextual influences, “Blade Runner” (1982)
was a revelation; it depicted a future world that was not a wish-fulfilling
fantasy but one that seemed to be based on fact, precedent and a keen attention
to the detail and direction of the late 20th century. It was Fear made manifest: all the nightmares
were going to come true. Globalisation,
over-reaching corporations, environmental decay, and a police state, even
bigger and badder than it was possible to believe. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a cop in Los
Angeles 2019, skulking about in a labyrinth of gargantuan skyscrapers, multi-cultures
and commercialism. The people speak a hybrid language of Spanish, English
and Japanese. Everything is dirty, it is constantly raining, and the sky
never clears. Everybody is so poor, and only the lucky, the so-called 1%,
are living out of the filth in the Off World colonies or in colossal penthouses.
(Scott, 1982)
(Kempley, 1992) (Hermansson, 2015)
“Blade Runner” is a fully-formed world; no detail of this
future dystopia goes unimagined by Douglas Trumbull and David Dryer on special
effects. Homes for rich and poor,
streets, corporations, advertising on giant screen televisions plastered to the
sides of 400-story buildings, food, clothes and flying cars for this world are
all finely detailed. Semantically and
syntactically, it’s a mix of science fiction and film noir tropes. From science fiction, the megatropolis and
suggestion of Off World colonies, flying cars and Replicants who are “More
Human Than Human”. From Film Noir, the
stock character-types of Hard-Boiled
Detective, Femme Fatale, and Sleazy Boss and props of guns, cigarettes and
blinds. The locations, props and
characters of both genres blend and reinforce the narrative device of a
traditional voice-over with a narrator’s world weary translation of the action
as it progresses from the clash of one pair of opposites to another: rich v.
poor, future dystopia v. nostalgic reverie, human v. Replicant. (Rowley, 2015)
The source text for “Blade Runner”’ is “Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick.
Dick imagines a future where life is under such threat that people are
incapable of producing their own emotions and owning a living animal is a
status symbol. Rick Deckard here spends considerably
less time chasing Replicants for forcible “retirement” and more time trying to
keep up with the Joneses by pretending to own a sheep, which is itself a Replicant. In the early pages of the novel, Deckard and
his wife argue and he considers turning his personal mood-enhancing machine
(created for a population so numb it needs assistance in suppressing or
stimulating it’s emotions) up a few notches so he can win the fight. These non-diegetic details, and many others,
are only lightly touched on by the movie (the Replicant Zohra is tracked down
thanks to the maker’s tags on the scales of her synthetic boa constrictor and
every human we meet seems to be perpetually depressed), but we notice them all
the same in the elaborate tapestry of the film. The textual features that resonated with
Ridley Scott were the Replicants and their struggle to extend life. (East, 2012)
(Boucher, 2010)
One of the pleasures of “Blade Runner” is the long-running
debate, enhanced by the re-releases in 1992 of the “Director’s Cut” and in 2007
“The Final Cut”, is the nature of the intelligent android and Deckard’s true
identity: is he, himself, a Replicant? In
the original film, Gaff (Edward James Olmos) leaves a series of origami animals
behind as each Replicant is “retired”.
At Deckard’s apartment, he leaves a unicorn. Not until “The Director’s Cut” and the
addition of Deckard dreaming about a unicorn do the hermeneutics of his true
nature and relationship to his love interest Rachel (Sean Young) come
clear. How did Gaff know about the
dream? Is Gaff letting Deckard leave
with a Replicant, Rachel, or is Gaff letting Deckard, a Replicant himself,
leave? The Replicants, as created by the Tyrell Corporation
(motto/promise/threat? “More Human Than Human”) have been programmed with the
memories of others in order to enhance their four year life spans. It is a function that was supposed to make
them better slaves to their human masters, but in the case of all living
things, it gave them a desire for more life. After all, how could you accept
death when life has been so full and rich?
And doesn’t memory make, shape, mold the person? This makes the Replicants indistinguishable
from Humans, and they know it. The film
quietly offers the unicorns and a brief flash of Deckard’s eyes, flashing
yellow in the light like the other Replicants, but doesn’t shout about it; it
is left to the viewer to decide. (TheBruce, 2012) (Blade Runner;
The Most Influential Science Fiction Movie of the 1980's, 2007)
Ridley Scott once said, “Why watch a film seven times? Because someone’s done it right and
transported you to its world.”
Word Count 1050
Blade Runner; The Most Influential Science Fiction
Movie of the 1980's. (2007).
Retrieved from www.cinemaddicts.org: http://cinemaddicts.org/blog/2007/11/23/blade-runner-the-most-influential-science-fiction-movie-of-the-1980s/
Boucher, G. (2010, June 6). Ridley Scott: ‘Blade
Runner’ has ‘echoed through pop culture in a very special way’. Retrieved
from Hero Complex: http://herocomplex.latimes.com/uncategorized/ridley-scott-blade-runner/
East, B. (2012, April 29). Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep: by Philip K Dick- review. Retrieved from
www.theguardian.com:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/29/do-androids-dream-electric-dick-review
Hermansson, N. (2015). The World 2019- A Worn Down
Hell. Retrieved from Blade Runner Insight:
http://www.br-insight.com/worn-down-hell
Kempley, R. (1992, September 11). Blade Runner.
Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/bladerunnerrkempley_a0a2e1.htm
Kermode, M. (2015, April 5). Blade Runner: The
Final Cut review- a timeless sci-fi classic. Retrieved from
www.theguardian.com: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/05/blade-runner-final-cut-timeless-sci-fi-classic-review
Rowley, S. (2015). The Least Scary Option.
Retrieved from Blade Runner Insight:
http://www.br-insight.com/least-scary-option
Scott, R. (Director). (1982). Blade Runner
[Motion Picture].
The Least Scary Option. (n.d.). Retrieved from Blade Runner Insight:
www.br-insight.com/least-scary-option
TheBruce. (2012, December 31). Thirty Years Later-
Blade Runner (1982). Retrieved from www.theshadowzone.wordpress.com:
https://theshadowzone.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/thirty-years-later-blade-runner-1982/
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