Blade Runner - Watching it "then" and now
I remember watching "Blade Runner" when it came out and not really "getting it". I saw it again seven years later in college and it quickly became one of those films that I not only got, but couldn't get enough of and I found myself a goddess among my cyberpunk friends and BBS-mates when I got my hands on a bootleg copy of the director's cut in 1992 which we watched at a party in a fervor of geekiness and the knowledge that we were somehow cooler than everyone else who thought it was just a film about a guy who hunted robots and then fell in love with one. I'm pretty sure my ex-husband figured he had "scored" in some small way when he managed to put that old bootlegged tape in one of his boxes as we parted ways.
What strikes me now, having recently watched it again, is the L.A. noir element that shines through in Ridley Scott's dark cinematic style. On the surface, it is a Chandleresque tale of a burnt out cop "just doing his job". This is the layer of the film that is the guy hunting down illegal robot-beings gone rogue. On a deeper level, the protagonist Deckard, is not so different from his prey. He is trying to come to terms with his very being and asking himself those essential questions about what life is and what life is about. The fact that he finds more kinship with the replicant Rachel, and finds redemption in falling for, then saving her, with the knowledge that she is "special" shows that the general view of "living" has always hinged really on being human, but the replicants he hunts are just as, if not more so, human in their character than many of the film's other human characters. They are..."more human than human" as the Tyrell Corp says. The replicants are searching for their beginning in order to understand who and what they are and they're engaged in that ever-human battle for survival in a dark, cruel world. They are orphans of the unbridled growth in technology that led to their development as electronic slaves, without any moral consideration for them as sentient beings.The idea that being alive and "human" is dependent on having authentic emotions, not the ones Rachel experiences based on her artificial memories, begs us to consider how we, as a society, have shut away our emotions and separate ourselves. The dark psychological overtone of the film, supported by the changes in setting and the use of different genres of music and the image of Deckard and Rachel escaping into the clean, pure mountains, signifies a hope for redemption in all of us.
The novel on which the film was based, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" really pushes the idea that humans have become too dependent on technology and looks at the way that technology has shaped our society and our beliefs. In my class the other day, my students were talking about SL and digital communication and were discussing whether children today will have appropriate social skills because they spend so much time interacting artifically rather than F2F. This makes me think of the film and the book and how emotion is the last thing that separates humans from replicants when the replicants are superior in every other way. Watching the film again and thinking about the book (need to reread it again), brings to mind the debates today about cloning and stem-cell research not to mention how dependent we've become on computers for everything, unquestioningly.
What strikes me now, having recently watched it again, is the L.A. noir element that shines through in Ridley Scott's dark cinematic style. On the surface, it is a Chandleresque tale of a burnt out cop "just doing his job". This is the layer of the film that is the guy hunting down illegal robot-beings gone rogue. On a deeper level, the protagonist Deckard, is not so different from his prey. He is trying to come to terms with his very being and asking himself those essential questions about what life is and what life is about. The fact that he finds more kinship with the replicant Rachel, and finds redemption in falling for, then saving her, with the knowledge that she is "special" shows that the general view of "living" has always hinged really on being human, but the replicants he hunts are just as, if not more so, human in their character than many of the film's other human characters. They are..."more human than human" as the Tyrell Corp says. The replicants are searching for their beginning in order to understand who and what they are and they're engaged in that ever-human battle for survival in a dark, cruel world. They are orphans of the unbridled growth in technology that led to their development as electronic slaves, without any moral consideration for them as sentient beings.The idea that being alive and "human" is dependent on having authentic emotions, not the ones Rachel experiences based on her artificial memories, begs us to consider how we, as a society, have shut away our emotions and separate ourselves. The dark psychological overtone of the film, supported by the changes in setting and the use of different genres of music and the image of Deckard and Rachel escaping into the clean, pure mountains, signifies a hope for redemption in all of us.
The novel on which the film was based, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" really pushes the idea that humans have become too dependent on technology and looks at the way that technology has shaped our society and our beliefs. In my class the other day, my students were talking about SL and digital communication and were discussing whether children today will have appropriate social skills because they spend so much time interacting artifically rather than F2F. This makes me think of the film and the book and how emotion is the last thing that separates humans from replicants when the replicants are superior in every other way. Watching the film again and thinking about the book (need to reread it again), brings to mind the debates today about cloning and stem-cell research not to mention how dependent we've become on computers for everything, unquestioningly.
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