Blade Runner: A Post Modern Example

Visiting a film site for Ridley Scott's 1982 Blade Runner reminded me of what post-modernism exemplified; the media-saturated world where the line between reality and media was ostensibly blurred. Where human, replicants, real and manufactured are virtually indistinguishable. Replicants themselves are pastiche; replicating humans, yet being synthetic. Los Angeles in the future is bleak and decayed, a vision devoid of hope. Truth and facts are temporal and subjective. It's a world where science, technology and progress has all but failed society and allowed for the future to be nothing but a polluted, over-crowded industrial dystopia where the rich escape off-world. The future does not realize an idealized. aseptic technological order. The way that postmodernism reflects society's feelings of alienation, insecurity and uncertainties regarding identity, history, progress and truth are displayed starkly in this world composed of a patchwork of styles and fads, with no past or future to mark or solidify its history, and no present to hold on to. It's a society of spectacle and visuals, devoid of any depth. A society replete with identity crisis; the city itself doesn't have an identity (it looks like Hong Kong, Tokyo or New York; it could be anyplace), and replicants don't do either. They have no past to speak of, and a future where only death approaches.

Blade Runner contains post-modern aesthetics as well, showing a hybridity in cultures, clothes, and everything in between.  Even the language is pastiche: "city speech" is a "mishmash of Japanese, Spanish, German, what have you." The postmodern aesthetic of Blade Runner is thus the result of recycling, fusion of levels, discontinuous signifiers, explosion of boundaries, and erosion. The walls of Deckard's apartment are reminiscent of an ancient Mayan palace. Pastiche, as an aesthetic, incorporates dead styles; it attempts to recover past history. The Tyrell corp building resembles Egyptian pyramids, rather than a high-tech modern building. It's bicolage.

The narrative itself (whether emotions are programmed or humanity manufactured, and what separates human and machine when the line is so unclear) is postmodern. Postmodern philosophers like Jean Baudrillard ask the same questions about the hyperreal, and dealing with a world ripe with imagery over the individual. Pastiche and the exhibitionism of the visual celebrate the dominance of portrayal and the replacement of the portrayed in the era of postindustrialism. The postindustrial society is the "society of the spectacle," living in the "ecstasy of communication." Addressing this aspect of postmodernism, Jean Baudrillard speaks of a twist in the relationship between the real and its reproduction. "The real is not what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced . . . the hyperreal . . . which is entirely in simulation." In the narrative space of Blade Runner "All of Los Angeles . . . is of the order of hyperreal and simulation."

The narrative "invention" of the replicants is almost a literalization of Baubrillard's theory of postmodernism as the age of simulacra and simulation.

Blade Runner, as a film, utilizes visual media and quotes from all sorts of sources, be it Pulp Fiction, Chinatown-like neon streets or Greek, Roman and Mayan architecture, time, history, high/low culture and the relationships and differences between them are in a state of confusion.

There is, at all times, a pervading sense of dark irony and self-awareness that reminds us of the current, post-modern era of cynicism.