Bladerunner

Why Blade Runner is Postmodern

Postmodernism is a reaction to the previous ‘modernism’ beliefs, it is a theory is considered to be broad, vague and ambiguous. It states life is what we make of it, what we experience and life the society wants us to live is fake and perfectionistic. It feels law has been used by those in power to control society and therefore are sceptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, including metanarrative and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person.

The genre of ‘Blade Runner’ is a cross between sci-fi and film noir. This is made evident in the film at the beginning when there is a panoramic aerial shot that shows flying cars in a Metropolis-esque futuristic city, which is covered by thick smog and overcrowded with skyscrapers; this accentuates the image of decaying capitalism in the city’s post-industrial state. Throughout the film there is dim lighting and emphasised shadows, signifying an impression of decay; exposing the dark side of technology and the process of disintegration.

During the film we follow Deckard, a so called ‘Blade Runner’ who’s job is to track down ‘replicants’. A key feature that makes this movie highly postmodern is the portrayal of technology. Although set in the future we as an audience are presented with a mix of old and future technology. In the scene where Deckard is inspecting the photo he is using an old television however it is all voice operated and the technology blowing up the photo is ahead of that available at the time of TV.

One of the most obvious postmodern aspects of the film Blade Runner is that they live in this non-idealistic, hyper-real world; where they have been abandoned as the last remaining people that don’t qualify to move to the new human colonies in outer space, only the rich escape to the ‘off-worlds’. One of the key themes of the film is the ‘blurring’ of differences between the real and the artificial between the humans and the replicants. Meaning that it is no longer possible to be clear about what is means to be human, this is suggested a lot later in the film when the replicant, Roy, saves Decard from falling to his death.

The relationship between the film and postmodernism is not always obvious because the opening weekend of ‘Blade Runner’ (Ridley Scott, 1982) wasn’t very successful. This could suggest that audiences did not want to watch complicated storylines and did not want to pay attention to the mere suggestion that human life may ‘fail’ in the future. Postmodern films attempt to subvert the mainstream conventions of narrative structure, characterisation and destroy the audience’s suspension of disbelief, a prominent example from the film ‘Pulp Fiction’ when Mia Wallace says “Don’t be a…” and a square appears on the screen. Usually, such films break away from typical portrayals of gender, race, class, genre and time with the goal of creating something different from traditional narrative expression.

Furthermore, in the film Blade Runner, the main character Deckard has been purposefully written to appear vague in terms of whether Deckard is himself a replicant or a human. Harrison Ford the actor portrayed him as human but this was not the intention of Ridley Scott when he wrote the book. There are various hints throughout the film such as; when Deckard is asked if he’s ever taken the test and he deliberately avoids the question, and through his lack of emotional availability in the face of danger with someone he apparently loves who has a limited life span, all factors that would regularly depress a human. To create this obscurity, as to who the main character really is, is postmodern in itself. As is the fact that it’s up to the audience to decide based on how they feel the character from the book was portrayed by the most suited actor available at the time of the creation of the film. All these factors play a role which ultimately makes this film postmodern. 

Blade Runner hold[s] up to us, as in a mirror, many of the essential features of the condition of post-modernity

In responding to a statement such as Harvey's, one is faced with the daunting task of entering into and exploring a wide and complex range of discourses that criss-cross, intersect and imbricate themselves, and, in so doing, create the two principle discourse ‘spaces’ known aspostmodernity and postmodernism. Together, as what I would call the Great Postmodern Discourse (GPD), they constitute one of the most significant of contemporary mythologies (Ferguson, 1992). By this it is meant that the GPD has become the symbolic gravitational centre for a large constellation of ideas and beliefs about social history, politics, economics, culture and communication. This overarching set of ideas, in turn, structures our understanding of changes that are taking place around us. Within the GPD, the terms postmodernity (and postmodern) are commonly understood to account for the social, political and economic dimension of these changes, whereas postmodernism (andpostmodernist) are used instead to describe concomitant cultural changes (Lyon, 1994). Although this distinction may serve the demands of analytic convenience, the theoretical and political relationship between the two terms is more one of intricate, dialectical interdependence.

Potentially, therefore, in considering the value ofBlade Runner as a postmodern touchstone or litmus paper, as does Harvey (1989b), one might consider any of three different angles: the extent to which it is (a) a postmodernist text, (b) portraying postmodern conditions, and, (c) reflecting postmodernism. Since Harvey’s comment relates specifically to the film’s portrayal of "the conditions of postmodernity", however, it is the social, economic and political features of the GPD which must obviously be the central focus of the essay. Nevertheless, in the process of determining the extent to which Blade Runner portrays these, reference must necessarily be made to postmodernism, and the notion of the postmodernist text. As it is, I think that Blade Runner does (or is) none of the above: it is not a truly postmodernist text, it does not portray the full scope of postmodernity, and, it fails to reflect the depth and breadth of postmodernism. Therefore, while I do not deny that the film does it indeed portray "some of the essential features of postmodernity", it is not, I suggest, a ‘brilliant’ portrayal.

Harvey (1989b) uses Blade Runner primarily as a means of demonstrating just one of the axial principles around which the notion of postmodernity spins: namely, the putative compression of time and space. There are, in fact, a number of key themes and topics explicitly portrayed by Blade Runner which pertain to the social and economic ‘conditions’ associated with postmodernity by a number of writers, including Harvey. Remembering that these overlap, not only with each other but also with the expression and experience of postmodernist culture, five of the most easily identified postmodern references in Blade Runner are: post-industrialism; spatial relations; time compression; urban decay; and pastiche consumption.

These are by no means the only points of reference between Blade Runner and the so called postmodern condition. (Another very important theme emerges through the film’s portrayal of the central GPD notions ofhyperreality and simulacra.) Neverthe-less, the overlapping and contiguity of the five ‘micro-discourses’ examined here may be depicted as follows, with the shaded area representing part of the co-created discourse space known aspostmodernity:

In bringing together each of these discourses,Blade Runner clearly seeks to present what Byers (1990) calls a "vision of the future that extrapolates contemporary trends to envision their possible consequences (p.39).". However, what all of these micro-discourses have in common is that, together, they present quite a particular attitude towards postmodernity. In fact,Blade Runner offers a not uncommon dystopic projection of the future; its portrayal of an urban environment embodies many contemporary fears and anxieties about the ‘good old days’, as well as the confusing nowadays, and the uncertain days to come. As such, this is not a problem, but it does make for what, I think, is a largely one-dimensional stance on postmodernity. Like McRobbie (1994), therefore, I feel compelled to ask, where is the ‘upbeat’ - the positive face of postmodernity? This, to me, is a clear indication that Blade Runner best expresses an individual (or a group of individuals) rather than a particular time or place or culture. Within the film, there is, I think, a strong sense that the vision of the world being portrayed emerges very much through the combined interpretative efforts of, for example, the director (Ridley Scott), the screen writer (David Peoples), and by the so called ‘visual futurist’(Syd Mead). In this sense,Blade Runner is, at most, a ‘brilliant’ portrayal oftheir attitude to the changing (postmodern) world around them. As Jameson (1985) says,

The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration of it as complacent and corrupt. (quoted in Connor, 1989, p.50)

In just the same way, we are within the socio-economic circumstance of post-modernity and, therefore, equally incapable of responding to it without bias. Put simply, Blade Runner’s being a ‘brilliant portrayal’ of the ‘postmodern condition’ is tantamount to presupposing that postmodernity is all bad. Like writers such as Lyon (1994), McRobbie (1994) and Davis (1990), I do not think that this need be true. In its portrayal, whatBlade Runner fails to acknowledge is the crucial ambivalence inherent in postmodernity and, especially, its cultural counterpart, postmodernism. As a consequence, the film falls in with the doom-and-gloom bell-ringers of the early 1980’s who were, in part, reacting to the excessive optimism of ‘determinist futurology’ (McGuigan, 1992). These futurists had tended to ignore completely the social and geographical isolation of peoples and classes of people (Lyon, 1994) - in other words, they failed to address the darker aspects of their projections. As Davis (1990) makes clear, there have always been proponents and detractors of urban (post)modernity, offering their respective ‘sunshine or noir’ accounts of, in this case, Los Angeles. Nonetheless, the point is that Blade Runner offers no account of this immensely important dialectic - of the debate that currently rages around the perceived political, economic and cultural potential of postmodernity/ism. The GPD in fact hinges on a number of overlapping, key oppositions which make up the two faces of postmodernity/ism. For example:

The ‘Noir’ Face

• resistance
• control & domination
• fragmentation
• centralisation of power
• homogenisation
• hyperreality/unreality
• loss of old communities
• the cynical & sarcastic
• dystopic/apocalyptic visions

The ‘Sunshine’ Face

• empowerment
• democratisation & emancipation
• globalization
• dispersal of power
• pluralization/multiculturalism
• new realities & meanings
• production of new communities
• the playful & ironic
• utopian/‘futuristic’ visions

While there may be a certain ambiguity in the plot of Blade Runner, there is little ambiguity in the film’s attitude. As far as postmodernity is concerned, its view is negative, pessimistic and altogether Stygian. In this sense, it is a portrayal of one ‘take’ on the changing Western world - albeit a trenchant and imaginative one. This is very much in keeping with Ferguson’s (1992) observation of a distinction between ‘normative’ and ‘descriptive’ rhetoric around contemporary mythologies (such as the GPD). In other words, there are perspectives which describe how thingsare, and there are others which prescribe how things should be. In this sense, what Blade Runner appears to do, is highlight a range of postmodern themes which in itself may or may not be done brilliantly, but it then also goes on to judge them. Such a normative (or prescriptive) portrayal of postmodernity cannot really be a ‘brilliant’ portrayal of something that is evidently multifarious, complex and contradictory. Even Jameson (in Kellner, 1995), in his otherwise negative account of postmodern pastiche and ‘schizophrenia’, is prepared to acknowledge that there is both a good face and a bad face to postmodernity - both the progressive and the regressive.

One such example of the way that negative accounts of postmodernity/ism might justifiably be challenged is to be found in the notion of pastiche. In Blade Runner, this is characteristically portrayed (e.g. the rétro architecture and couture) and produced (e.g. its intertextual allusions to film-noir and Blake) as the cannibalistic quotation of the past. However, one might be inclined to ask, what about pastiche as a renovation or revitalisation of the past? Postmodern tastes and attitudes, albeit partially cultivated by consumerist impulses, and certainly influenced by the wily concerns of the marketers, have nonetheless an element of respectability - of cognisant agency - about them. There is also an underlying appreciation of things older than us, an inherent recognition of, and a meaningful comfort to be gained from things (and, therefore, people) that have gone before us. What is more, irrespective of where it is sought, there is likely to be as much sincerity and effort in the postmodern search for identity and meaning as there ever has been. It need not, as Baudrillard (in Connor, 1992) and Jameson (1985) would have us believe, necessarily be a simpleappropriation - the postmodern consumer blindly taking everything for granted and mindlessly devouring the old as new. To argue this, is surely to cast a personal, philosophical (say, Nietzchean or Marxist) judgement on the place and power of human will and agency in the greater scheme of things.

For McRobbie (1994) "the superficial does not necessarily represent a decline into meaninglessness or valuelessness in culture (p.5)", and she points to what Susan Sontag calls ‘knowing audiences’ who are equally capable of absorption in, and detachment from, postmodern pastiche consumerism through their conscious choice of postmodernist forms of irony and parodic modes of expression. In this way, the notion of pastiche can be used to demonstrate the important connection between consumer culture and other more general cultural phenomena (Lyon, 1994) - the interfacing of postmodernity and postmodernism. Crucially, however, it also highlights the potential for meaning and understanding situated within postmodernist (i.e. cultural) discourses and practices. Accordingly, if any counteractive optimism (‘sunshine’?) is to be found in the GPD, one is, I feel, obliged to consider, at the very least, its cultural dimension. So, for all its negative attack on the ‘conditions of postmodernity’, Blade Runner’s perspective is rendered even more narrow by its failure to engage explicitly, and in any depth, with postmodernism. As such, it lacks the cultural ‘spin’ on postmodernity which might otherwise reveal more about what some people are able, and willing, to make of the social, economic and political changes happening around them.

Notwithstanding all this, it might still be argued that the pessimism of Blade Runner is deliberate; that it is indicative of a conscious political stand taken by the film’s makers. Harvey (1989b), for example, specifically praises Blade Runner for what he sees as its ‘radical’ social critique of late (American) capitalism. In this way, an essential part of the meaning of the film is to be found, says Instrell (1992), in Roy’s pointed misquotation of Blake, whereby the ‘angels’ of American democracy and civilisation come to be falling instead of rising as they once did. Its implicit warning is, therefore, the danger of the ‘American Dream’ becoming a capitalist nightmare.

Certainly, there is evidence of a socio-political critique in Blade Runner; much of the film’s comment on postmodernity is based, as was shown above, on the socio-economic impact of flexible accumulation as the basis of advanced capitalism. There are, however, also sufficient indications, I think, that the critique it offers is largely bourgeois. As has already been suggested above, Blade Runner ‘positions’ its audience in presenting a noir vision of postmodernity. More than this, however, the film’s outlook is further restricted to that of a middle-class perspective. Through the ‘privileged’ discourse of Deckard - the jaded voice of the middle-classes - we are, I think, quite clearly encouraged to look up angrily at the powerful corporate giant, and look down disdainfully at the uncomplaining, seething masses below. Playing on a middle class preoccupation with coherence and order, the film also seems deliberately either to offend or appeal to bourgeois aesthetic sensibilities: as examples, the distress of the decaying Bradbury apartment of JF Sebastian; the filth and disorder of street life; right down to the final ‘country retreat’ denouement. It is a view not unlike the one afforded those citizens of the ‘real’ Los Angeles who are able to look down with concern (and fear) from their hillside houses on the poverty and decay of the barrios below. Blade Runner, as a document on LA and its postmodern character, has a veracity appreciated mainly from on high - literally or politically. In this sense, its portrayal is ‘depressingly reactionary’ (Instrell, 1992), offering not much more than what Davis (1992) calls ‘generalized petty-bourgeois resentment’. And so the doom-and-gloom group of social commentators begin to reveal themselves as close second cousins to the neoconservative back-to-basics brigade.

It is, no doubt, for this same reason that Byers (1990), in fact, accuses Blade Runner of "retreat[ing] from the implications of its radical critique into filmic clichés and individualist solutions (p.49)". Instrell (1992) is more specific in his criticisms. He points to a underlying ethnicism in the film through its reflection of white, Anglo-Saxon fears of Western cities becoming overrun by ‘foreigners’. Watching the film, and given its primary interest in portraying the condition of postmodern urban decay, it does, I think, end up being quite hard to distinguish between its various images of decay and degeneration; are we, for example, supposed to feel the same way about the car-jacking dwarfs and the pervasive ‘orientalization’ of the city? Are we being told that these too are symbols of degeneration? McLennan (quoted in McRobbie, 1994) makes no bones about his view on the common lack of a strong social critique in postmodern society; he believes that "the world remains too ravaged by oppression, ignorance and malnutrition for privileged intellectuals to trade in seriousness for the sparkling interplay of language games (p.3).". I wonder if the same might not be said of the makers of Blade Runnerand their slightly self-indulgent preoccupation with, and politically questionable portrayal of, middle-class anxieties around urban decay.

With the so called death of the metanarrative, postmodernism constantly runs the risk of describing and setting up a level of self-consciousness and self-criticism that drains, and ultimately empties, one of any sense of stability in one’s collective identity. It promotes what Lyon (1994) describes as a ‘vertiginous relativity’, and leaves in its wake an ‘abyss of uncertainty’. In doing so, it seems to render political action almost impotent - certainly, furtive. Effectively, we all but talk ourselves out of (political) existence.

Academic debates about postmodernity and postmodernism reproduce the conditions of the postmodern...What follows is a curious amalgam of political oversell in the conjuring of glamorous images of total conceptual revolution and a sort of institutionalized paralysis. (Connor, 1989, p.43)

Not surprisingly, therefore, Connor (1989) notes the emergence of a significant trend in much postmodern theorising towards ‘modern’ solutions to postmodern problems, such as Habermas’ call for a return to principles of reason, justice and democracy in order to secure a socio-political stand within postmodernity. Bauman (in Lyon, 1994), for example, argues that some redemption from the anxiety and uncertainty of postmodernity may be found in identifying not with the consumers (the middle-classes?) but the sufferers, the oppressed, of advanced capitalism. Similarly, Davis (1992) suggests of Los Angeles that "a radical structural analysis of the city can only acquire social force if it is embodied in an alternative experiential vision - in this case, of the huge Los Angeles Third World whose children will be the Los Angeles of the next millennium (p. 87).". If this is the case, one socio-political project(ion) of postmodernity may well be a focus on the very same seething masses that the camera-eye of Blade Runnerlooks over, and which the film, thereby overlooks.

This political oversight by Blade Runner appears all the more ironic, frustrating even, in the sense that its recognition nonetheless lies hidden in the film. By which I mean that there is a way in which Blade Runner might be read for it to be seen to engage indirectly with its middle class anxieties about the urban masses. A motif central to the film is that of the Frankenstein monster turning against and destroying his master-creator. This is found most obviously in Roy’s killing of Dr Tyrell, but appears again in Rachel’s childhood recollection of having seen a nest of spider ‘hatchlings’ eating their mother. What is more, the legend borne by the original film poster quite appropriately proclaims, "Man has made his match...Now it’s his problem". The Frankenstein-like battle between Deckard and replicants has commonly been taken to represent the straightforward struggle of ‘man’ against machine (Instrell, 1992). More interestingly, however, I wonder if it might not also contain an implicit warning to the middle classes of the dangers inherent in their failure to acknowledge, and redress, the implications of the widening gap between rich and poor - the creation of a vast majority underclass. This is the stuff of which serious urban stress is made and to which, maintain writers such as Davis (1992) and Harvey (1989c), the middle classes are responding so myopically by barricading themselves into geographical, economic and cultural enclaves within cities. For example, as Harvey (1989c) warns,

The breakdown of the processes that allow the poor to construct any sort of community of mutual aid is equally dangerous since it entails an increase in individual anomie, alienation, and all of the antagonisms that derive therefrom. (p.273)

It is true, as Harvey (1989b) suggests, that Blade Runner undeniably "hold[s] up to us, as in a mirror, many of the essential features of the condition of postmodernity (p.323).". However, no text has the special privilege of holding up at 180 degrees a mirror on reality - their mirror, like our own, is always at an angle, what we see being reflected always has a slant. Essentially, there is nothing wrong with Blade Runner doing this, but for the fact that it fails to let us know that we are being positioned in this way. Consequently, in spite of fulfilling the postmodernist criteria of intertextuality and double-coding (Eco in McGuigan, 1992), Blade Runner does not also offer the necessary multiple discourses and ‘openness’ of the truly postmodernist text. The audience is kept tightly, and fairly uncritically, within the dominant discourse of Deckard (and Ridley Scott!) and, as such, shown very little of the socio-cultural contradictions and potentialities in postmodern living. So, in addition to offering a one-sided, negative portrayal of postmodernity, and of failing to offer an adequate account of postmodernist responses, Blade Runner also fails as a post-modernist text.

Although, as Appignanesi & Garrett (1995) say, the postmodern outlook is a "snarled cat’s-cradle of dissenting views (p.46)", it is not unusually so. The same type of contradictory tensions have existed at other times of great socio-historical change; most notably, the seventeenth century ‘Baroque’ crisis and fin de siècle turbulence a century ago (Lyon, 1994). For all its limitations and failings, what Blade Runner so successfully offers its audience is the potential for entering into the field of criss-crossing discourses that shape debate around the ‘crisis’ which, under the guise of postmodernity and postmodernism, has emerged in this last quarter of the twentieth century. Perhaps, the real brilliance of the film, therefore, lies in its ability to throw open the debate with such popular appeal - in the form of a text that is not only cerebrally challenging but also emotionally entertaining. Nonetheless, the extent and nature of the Great Postmodern Discourse is broad and complex, encompassing not only what Davis (1992) calls the ‘master dialectic of sunshine or noir’, but which also plays itself out through socio-historic, economic, political and cultural phenomena. Like Ferguson (1992), therefore, I think it not unreasonable to regard with some scepticism a text such as Blade Runner - or certainly Harvey’s (1989b) claims for it - whose perspective on the changing world reflects "ideological overtones...heavy with normative, deterministic implications of historical inevitability (p.87).".