Duygu Yorgancolu 20070554 Blade Runner as a Critique for Post-Modernism

I believe that Blade Runner which had been an influencial film of the 1980's by Ridley Scott, heralded the coming of a new dystopia which was ideologically ambivalent and philosophically disturbing, decribed the world that that we nowadays live in: the new post-modern world. Drawing the lines between "what is human" and "what is not", the film poses us an important question about the nature of the human being and also questions the relationships between the original and the copy. The replicants that are replicating "real" humans became "more human than human" and it had been totally impossible to trace where the dissolution and the fragmentation happens with the earlier notion of the human being. Frederic Jameson in his Post Modernism the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) defines the way to postmodernism and the erosion of meaning in five important core points which are: the weakening of historicity, the dissolution between "high" and "low" culture, new alien technology, whole new type of emotional intensity and depthlessness which is the unification of theory and culture under the simulacrum. I believe all this categorization holds in this film presents us the modern mythical apocalypse. Blade Runner depicts the 21st century city, and it has been portrayed as the city of fire and smoke, being corrupted and polluted by the technology. The city is soaked by unceasing rain and bolds of lightening which like any mythical setting which gives us the dark atmosphere that the city is doomed and forsaken by the Gods and left to the hands of humans which ruined it. The new world, and the "modern" human race seeks an escape from this enviroment of caos and catastrophe and find sollution in the occupation and colonization of new planets, to literally design a new life for the modern human. The Nexus 6 replicants which are androids that are designed to live for four years under the service of humans, are sent to the planets to work and construct the new life of the new human race. The film begins with the return of four (Phris, Zhora, Leon and Roy) replicants to

the earth, in goal of finding their creators which is the Tyrell Corporation and demand their rights for more life. On the other hand a new type of police which are called "blade runner"(represented as Rick Deckard) designed to retire these rebellious replicants. This plot is totally depicts the world of capitalism where the irrational and the schizophrenic becomes normal and starts functioning as normal. The human race destroyed the world and is now has imperial interests towards other planets and makes slave androids for its own pursuits. This is a world where everything becomes commodified and including the values and characters that are considered "humanly". The logic of technology lies in the destruction of the human capital and it emposes an ideology of consumerism that only entails to form abusive relationships with objets as owning them, exploiting them and being done with them. The satisfactions of the modern world are transitory and the desires are covetous, being easily fulfilled because finally in capitalism there are infinate amount of combination of things you can choose. The dominant theme in the film also artuculates on this subject, the fact that this industrialist city needs waste to continue its functioning, its core happens to be recycling. Therefore the main theme of the film is also the worn-outness, the waste and the decay that the tecnology brings. One example is Sebastian having deep wrinkles in his face only in the age of twenty five, or the costumes had also been selected to underline this theme of recycling. One other point would be the "weakening of historicity" in postmodernism that we also see in the enviroment of the Blade Runner. The only thing that these replicants lack is history, they have emotions and they look and talk like humans. But they lack a past, for this reason they are doomed to die. What does it mean for them not to have history? They are amnesiac beings of the present tense and they are totally physical. So they could serve humans, but they could never be equal to humans, that is also one of the reasons they rebel. They would never be capable of having culture. Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida stated that one's relation with his/her own history is hysterical, everytime you remember or see a trace, you have to recognise your history as other and be excluded from it : "History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it-and in order to look at it we must be excluded from it. . . . That is what the time when my mother was alive

before me is- History. No anamnesis could ever make me glimpse this time starting from myselfwhereas, contemplating a photograph in which she is hugging me, a child, against her, I can waken in myself the rumpled softness of her crepe de chine and the perfume of her rice powder. " Therefore I can not think how pathological it would be to not to have a history. On the other hand we could say that the history is not present and does not signfy anything besides just being a trace and an evidence of life, but for the replicants it is more because it means recognition and affirmation of their existence. This analysis really fits into the reality of the post-modern which constitutes itself from abandoning the past and all the grand narratives. The film shows us the alternative reality of the simulacrum, but it also states that would not be perfect because it would always be in search of its original. This sound like a foundational histories of all nations to me, Turks have a foundational legend that suppose that they come from the wolves and they are the powerful race. In this case replicants are seeking this kind of a story, of their "creation".The replicants rebel like Spartacus, but they also want to change their inferior position by gaining knowledge about their past. Eventhough the past does't exist, they wan't to know because it also bring them a certain power position. That is also why before he died Roy was deliriously repeating these words: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...Attack ships on fire off the shores of Orion...I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost...like tears in rain. " He wanted to live more, but relating to his own history and origin, placing himself in time and space. Finally, I think that this film has been a strong critique of the dominant ideology of the era which is postmodernism, and Ryley Scott also questioned all the importance that we ascribed to the progress, the rationality and the values of the enlightenment which lies to be a deception.