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Blade Runner’s humanism: Cinema and representation

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Contemporary Political Theory Aims and scope

Abstract

Many have pointed to Blade Runner’s humanization of its ‘replicants’ as a compelling statement against exploitation and domination. I argue, however, that the film has another kind of agenda: a Rousseauvian concern about the dangers of representation, about confusing the imitation with the real and confusing the consumption of images with political action. Rather than humanizing the other, Blade Runner’s central concern is to humanize our own social and political relationships, which are in danger of falling into the same trap Rousseau outlined in his Letter to D’Alembert. To do so, we must learn to appreciate the difference between mutual surveillance and mutual regard. To live freely in any regime, we must understand the dangers of representation, even if, in a large state, we must continue to make use of it.

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Notes

  1. There is an enormous literature on Blade Runner and it has certainly touched on this idea, although not from the particular perspective of this article. Some of the works I have found most helpful are Marder, 1991; Mulhall, 1994; Shetley and Ferguson, 2001.

  2. The original storyboards depict the eye as that of the blade runner Holden, looking out on the city as he waits for his interview subject to arrive. But director Ridley Scott has said that he purposefully de-personalized the eye so that it is unclear to whom it belongs. This prompted speculation that it belonged to any number of characters (Kolb, 1991). Or see the actual storyboards at www.ridleyville.com/#/FX%20Storyboards.

  3. Marder’s (1991) intelligent analysis makes this interrogation the ‘primal scene’ of the film, one that is repeated, in some sense, over and over – but this neglects the characterless shots of the city and the eye that precede it. Thus, she makes the human/replicant binary into the film’s primary structure rather than the human/representation binary that, in fact, comes prior logically and in the order of the film itself.

  4. The reading of Blade Runner as an exemplar of postmodernism was given an influential early exposition by Giuliana Bruno, who is explicit in applying Fredric Jameson’s theories and terminology to the film (Bruno, 1987).

  5. Accounts of the production indicate that the different views of the Deckard character were there from the beginning. The authors of the screenplay, in line with the book, always took Deckard to be human, as did actor Harrison Ford, who felt that the audience would not relate to his character as a non-human. Whether Scott was originally certain that Deckard was a replicant or only wanted to leave the audience in doubt is not clear. In any case, the producers of the original film removed the ambiguity that Scott wanted to create (Deckard’s unicorn daydream). When Scott got control of the film for the subsequent releases, he reintroduced the cut footage and became more vocal about insisting that Deckard clearly was a replicant and always had been (see Turan, 1992; Sammon, 1996).

  6. The ‘international’ version of 1982 differs only from the US release in having a few seconds of additional violence – this became the original VHS version (and thus the best-known version in the period between 1982 and 1992). The workprint was unfinished and has many minor differences from the original release. The ‘director’s cut’ restores some lost footage and disposes of most of the voice-over as well as the closing shots of Deckard and Rachel escaping the city. The final cut has the same basic structure as the director’s cut but includes some reshot and re-edited material that ‘fixes’ various continuity and editing problems in the earlier versions.

  7. ‘Rachael’ originally means ‘ewe’ in Hebrew. The name ‘Roy Baty’ is probably derived from Robot (Ro-Bot=Roy Baty), though others have speculated that it means, for example, ‘crazy king’.

  8. Dick himself hated some early versions of the script but was apparently won over by some working footage of the movie he was shown. He died months before the film’s release and never saw a full cut (see Rickman, 1991).

  9. An early reviewer actually pointed out that, since Roy himself seems particularly fearless, the line in this context does not make much sense (Blank, 1982, p. A14).

  10. This is how Deckard first describes them, both in the book and the movie. Film: ‘Replicants are like any other machine. They’re either a benefit or a hazard. If they’re a benefit, it’s not my problem’. Book: ‘A humanoid robot is like any other machine; it can fluctuate between being a benefit and a hazard very rapidly. As a benefit it’s not our problem’ (Dick, 1996 [1968], p. 40).

  11. I am not saying, of course, that the experience of encountering subjectivity is or could be the only pleasure of cinema. However, I would claim that it is the principal one as evidenced by the dearth of commercial films that lack relatable central characters. I do not have space here to consider the case of television but I think my point could be reinforced from that perspective: although there is much more non-narrative television than film, most of it contains a different kind of encounter of subjectivity.

  12. See Urbinati (2006) and Landemore (2008). I thank Lisa Disch for calling my attention to the issues discussed in the preceding paragraphs.

  13. In addition to Mulhall (1994) and Norris (2013), see Desser (1997), as well as essays by Marilyn Gwaltney and Aaron Barlow in the same volume (Alessio, 2005; Barringer, 1997).

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Acknowledgements

I thank the editors and anonymous referees of this journal for perceptive criticisms that have greatly improved this essay. I also want to thank Davide Panagia, Giulia Sissa and Lisa Disch for extremely helpful comments on earlier versions. Thanks also to the students with whom I have watched Blade Runner in various classes for tolerating my increasingly strange musings about it.

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Dienstag, J. Blade Runner’s humanism: Cinema and representation. Contemp Polit Theory 14, 101–119 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2014.13

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