Like tears in the rain' - Blade Runner as a postmodern cinema classic
1. ‘Like tears in the rain’ – Blade Runner as postmodern cinema L.O: To compile a case study on the text.
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3. Introduction Blade Runner is a film which did not do terribly well at the box office when first released, but since the original release in 1982 it has become a huge critical success – a cult now heralded as a classic piece of dystopian science fiction. Blade runner is subject of a wealth of books and websites. Most importantly to us, Blade Runner is very often discussed as a postmodern film. It ticks all our boxes because the film can be viewed as postmodern in style, in its reception and in its subject matter.
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5. Style Blade Runner is said to have a post modern aesthetic, mixing textual references and images. The film noir voice over of the original release is juxtaposed with the futuristic, dystopian images (time is manipulates as a 1950’s film convention is displaced into the future), but at the same time the shadows and the constant rain fit with the film noir style resulting in a neo-noir visual style and thematic range. The city depicted is Los Angeles in the future. In itself is a pastiche of our ideas of the east, the west and the future. The images we see give us a mise-en-scene of decay and decline, of things coming to an end for humanity as we know it, and the story is to do with ‘replicants’ (people who feel human but are synthetic) striving for an extension of their life span.
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7. Reception The questions that the film posesare to do with the meaning of humanity in the postmodern age, when the distinction between the human and the machine is unclear. Can emotions be programmed? Can humanity be manufactured? These are the same questions asked by the post modern philosophers about the hyper real and how we cope with a world where the image over rides the individual. The LA of BR has been discussed as a vision of the post modern city – huge advertising images promoting an off world colony and the idea that everyone who can has fled the ‘real world’ for a more attractive virtual equivalent.
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9. Subject Matter The film is about time and our lack of it. One of the replicants is a young man, but his body is aging. We are never sure whether the main character, played by Harrison Ford, is a human or not- this remained an enigma, more so in the directors cut. A dying replicant in the final scene delivers the line, ‘all these moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain, and as in most post-modern films we are forced to confront the way in which the ‘modern’ world is constructed through a set of binary oppositions – truth/lies, reality/fiction, human/machine, life/death, good/bad. One reading of dealing with BR is that it deals with racism – the extermination of replicants. Like all SCI-FI, therefore, it places ‘real-world’ concerns in a fantasy setting. The postmodern reading of the film focuses more on the way that the classic oppositions that have defined our philosophy are undermined, or at least exposed as vulnerable.
