A Postmodern Look at "Blade Runner"
Written by Gauntgirl, copyright 2001
Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner is an illustration of postmodern concerns on many levels. Most compelling, however, are the discourses around identity, humanity, and reality – the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ of our existence. For the purposes of this essay, I will focus my postmodern discussion of Blade Runner around the denotative and connotative signs that challenge the essentialisms of identity and humanity when analyzed through the discourses of the ‘cyborg myth’, gender construction, hyperreality and the simulacrum, and grand narratives (or ideology ). Indeed, Blade Runner combines all of these discourses in order to challenge dominant ideas of personal and human identity while exploring where the notions of identity are heading.
In her essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto”, Donna Haraway describes a humanity that is half computer. This theory has an obvious application with the replicants in Blade Runner. The replicants seem human in every way except for the fact that they are manufactured. Although we never see wires or computer chips, it is implied that the replicants are computers/machines in human form: they are programmed (to perform tasks that mere humans are incapable of), they have artificial intelligence that allows them to learn within their programming, and they are created as tools specifically to make some aspect of human life easier (a slave of sorts). But it is problematic to think of them as mere machines since they are almost indistinguishable from a ‘genuine’ human, and after all, aren’t the characteristics I described above just as applicable for the genuine human. We are programmed by ideology (i.e. family values, religious morals, politics…), what we do and think is informed by this programming. We are also capable of learning within our ideological programming, to question and examine. And we are all tools in some manner; i.e. to family, politics, the church, or the media. The conundrums facing replicant existence are equally relevant for human concerns. So the question arises, what is it that makes someone genuinely human? Haraway’s cyborg myth challenges the notion that there are any qualities that are essentially human. In other words, there are no factors that can be accurately used to judge the authenticity of a human life. In Blade Runner there is an attempt to classify humanity in terms of emotional response and authentic memories. What is human has been reduced to appropriate pupil dilation and blush (signals of authentic emotion). The concept that humanness can be tested by these factors, however, becomes problematic. The obvious issue is that this test is too limited. After all, how would you test someone by these factors if they are blind or if they suffer from an emotional disorder, for example. Clearly there are many cases that one can imagine where such a specific test would be rendered useless thus compromising its validity. Such a test can only separate those who exist outside the dominant model, constructing the ‘Other’. In the hodgepodge culture of Blade Runner, the Other is classified as other than human. As the Other, replicants are stripped of freedom or identity and are reduced to being slaves. Their situation is a direct parallel to the treatment of maginalized groups throughout Western history. In this manner Blade Runner is a parable that reminds us of the harmful consequences associated with modernist attempts to unify identity.
The world of Blade Runner is ‘hyperreal’. The levels of the city are like different areas of an amusement park and the people are the costumed characters. The heightened fantasy of consumerism complete with living machines is like a simulacrum, a copy that is more ‘real’ than the real. For example, Tyrell describes his Nexus-6 androids as being ‘more human than human’, in other words they represent the ‘human’ to such an extent that the human becomes replaced. This is most apparent in the way the replicants are constructed through gender. Rachel, for example, fits the image of the hyperfemale. She is beautiful, graceful, intelligent, soft spoken, sensual without being slutty, passive, submissive… she embodies all the qualities of the ideal female as seen through contemporary media. Pris and Roy could be comparatively described through dominant gender ideals. Despite the fact that they exist, in essence, outside the realities of gender, they are exemplary of the ideal that is constantly being sold to us through the media. Their effect on the ‘natural’ humans is such that we are in awe. For Decker, there is little significance to the fact that Rachel is not human, just a machine, he becomes infatuated with her none the less. For J.F. Sabastion, Pris and Roy are pure perfection. The beauty, grace, and power of replicants are so seductive for him that he surrounds himself with them – the ‘do it yourself’ perfect friend. The replicants are more human than human because to be truly human is to be flawed, and to be more than human is perfection.
In questioning the nature of human identity through the cyborg myth, simulacrum, and gender construction, Blade Runner is also challenging grand narratives. The grant narrative at the forefront of this scrutiny is that of the Judeo-Christian myth of the human soul. For thousands of years, the dominant belief was that all humans are united by the idea that we are all created in God’s image and that we all carry a little piece of God within us, our soul. In Blade Runner, ‘life’ is being created by Man in his own image, and if God is no longer necessary for the creation of life then neither is the soul. This fact causes Decker to doubt his humanity. After all, how can he (or any of us for that matter) be certain that we are authentically human when our memories (the essence of who we are and why we are that way) can be false constructions? How do we know what’s real? What’s truth? In the same manner, any narrative of origins must be disputed because origins have been reduced to an abstraction and truths are mere fabrications. In Blade Runner, beginnings and endings converge. As the existence of life on Earth is threatened (most animal species are extinct and humans are fleeing for off world colonies), the replicants are looking to Earth as a new beginning, for a new life. In the true sense of the apocalypse, where one existence ends a new one begins, thus rewriting myths of origin.
Postmodern identity as portrayed in Blade Runner is uncertain if non-existent. The pursuit of an authentic human dissolves as identities are constructed and fractured by ideology, gender and copies. The factors that separate replicants from ‘natural’ humans are the same factors that in turn make them inseparable (make them more human). Ultimately, identity concepts are mere selling points in a capitalistic/consumer driven society, where the hyperreal copy surpasses the original .
BibliographyPowell, Jim. Postmodernism For Beginners. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, 1998
Strinati, Dominic. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1995
