Why is Blade Runner Postmodern?
Blade Runner is set in a dystopian future, the film has a post apocalyptic sense straight away, with no sun, neon-lit streets and a cold, dark LA. Blade Runner has several features which would allow us to consider it post modern.
Blade Runner is said to have a postmodern aesthetic, which mixes textual references and images together, the film noir voice-over is juxtaposed with the futuristic styles and images in the film, Los Angeles is shown in the future, and is a pastiche of our ideas of the West and East in this possible future.
Baudrillard’s theory of ‘simulation and simulacra’ is also shown through the replicants in the film, who are ‘copies without originals’ and this then makes the distinction between the human and the machine unclear, which makes us as audience wonder whether humanity can be manufactured, which are the same questions asked by the postmodern philosophers about the hyperreal.
There is also a variety of styles in the clothing and set design on the film, the film-noir styles, which is shown through Rachel and Deckard, are mixed with punk, sixties fashion and the language in the street is a mix of Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and German and a good scene to back this up is when Deckard is chasing Zhara ( the women backstage with the snake), the streets are filled with a diverse mix of punk rockers, people in uniforms and oriental headgear and there are glimpses of an advertisement for Budweiser, reminding us as audience of consumerism, which can show an example of intertextuality.
Blade Runner is also about the compression of time and space, as we are never sure if the main character Deckard, whose job is to destroy the replicants, is human himself or not. Deckard is with a dying replicant in the final scene who delivers the line, “All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain”, and this shows that we are forced to confront the way in which the ‘modern’ world is constructed through binary opposites (human/machine) and it places ‘real-world’ concerns in a fantasy setting.
The film quotes from different film genres throughout, as in terms of the films visuals, it quotes from ‘Metropolis’, ‘New York Skyline’ and links and makes references to science fiction comics and documentaries. These are juxtaposed against the Egyptian-like pyramids, neon-lit Chinese decorations and palaces, meaning that history and time and the difference between the two has been thrown into confusing, and there isn’t a line between them anymore, they have become one.
This sense of confusion is shown through the characters too, who struggle to find a place to call home in the city, there is no sense of comfort and the film is constantly on edge. Deckard feels this when he looks out across the city, a confusion that he feels at the issue of being a human, or possibly a replicant.
The films technophobic elements highlight the fear that techinology and science have come too much of an influence on the world, and are controlling the people and their lives so much that there are now human replicants existing.
Overall, I believe that Blade Runner is a great example of a postmodern text, with its images and sumbols and overall context, its clear to see the reference to postmodernism.
