This document analyzes Blade Runner as a postmodern text that explores postmodern themes and strategies. It discusses how Blade Runner features identity crisis, pastiche, and a hyperreal city of Los Angeles in 2019 that has no clear history or identity. The replicates and Deckard are drawn to Los Angeles's schizophrenic state in search of their own history and place. The film also references pop culture icons from the time period like Pan Am airline and the growing Japanese influence in Los Angeles real estate. Blade Runner employs postmodern techniques by quoting from different film genres, periods, and visual media.

1. Blade runner
Siobhan Arnold

2. Blade runner is an exemplary postmodern
text in the sense that it both represents the
conditions of post modernity and employs
elements of the postmodern condition to
texture its narrative.

4. In its form, content and ideological centre
Blade Runner explores and utilities the
strategies of quotations, recycling,
pastiche, hyper reality and identity crisis.

5. In Blade Runner there is an overarching and
insipid postmodern identity crisis that
seems to touch everything and everyone in
the film. Los Angeles 2019 is in a state of
perpetual crisis. Composed of patchwork
of styles and fads it has no geographical
centre, no ‘original’ past to refer to, no
secure history to be bound to and no
concrete present to allow communities to
foster.

6. In one sense this is why the replicates,
including Deckard, and drawn to its
quarters they share, imitate, and can plug
into its schizophrenic state. But the
relationship correspondence is one born
out of the most despairing search for
wholeness – all anyone (good) really wants
in the film is a place a history, a biography
to call their own.

7. Another reference is to Pan Am, the airline
company that was Scott’s vision of the
future. Ironically this company went bust
and is no longer in existence. Also, in the
1980’s, the Japanese were becoming
increasingly wealthy and buying up land in
the United States, in particular, LA. There
are many references to this in the movie,
as this was Ridley Scott’s vision of the
future.

8. Textually, Bade Runner quotes from different film
genres and film movements/periods, as well as
other forms of visual media and actual historical
periods.
For example it lifts scenes directly out of older
films such as Metropolis (science fiction) and
Mildred Pierce. Also other pop culture references
are used such as the New York skyline, the pulp
fiction of Raymond Charles.