BLADE RUNNER

1. BLADE RUNNER CONTEXT

2. Ronald Reagan • Produced in the early-Reagan era. • Ronald Reagan won the U.S. presidency in 1980. • During the 1980s, Reagan oversaw a sustained economic recovery, soaring profits in the stock market minted millionaires by the thousands, lending the Reagan era a certain gold-rush aura as more people attained spectacular wealth than ever before in American history. Economic and diplomatic successes notwithstanding, Reagan's presidency still had its flaws—a widening gulf between the rich and ordinary working Americans, some serious foreign-policy blunders, and worsening race relations.

3. Contextual influences: • Increased power and influence in Media. • Period of rapid development in science and communication and commercialism. • Rise of Asian involvement with Western nations and increasing concerns about the environment. • Medically it was a time of phenomenal change; from IVF to genetic research to DNA and stem cell research and human transplant. Ethical debates about the medical advancements.

4. There was greater consciousness of the vulnerability of nature in the twentieth century. In 1964 the status of national parks was assured in America through the Wilderness Act which paradoxically also drew attention to the existence of destructive forces of development, pollution, corporate misuse and other environmental enemies. Global corporations became strong influences on an economy but also exploited third world countries.

5. The world of Ridley Scott is both alienating and oddly familiar. The continuity with our contemporary world is overwhelmingly compelling. It like everything we have now only worse. A bleak take on the future, that has extrapolated certain tendencies in the early 80s. The Blade Runner soundtrack was composed by Vangelis for Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner. It is mostly a dark, melodic combination of classical composition and synthesizers which mirrors the futuristic film noir envisioned by Scott.

6. Opening Scene • Eerie and dreamlike. It uses synthesisers combined with classical music which gives the viewer a sense of an old world being replaced with the futuristic. • Lyrical sort of information sickness - “quintessentially modern cocktail of ecstasy and dread”. • Spinner/fire/lightening: threatening – sharp movement towards the camera is confronting and menacing.

7. Evidently • Ridley’s future lingers over flash technologies. • A world of intense paranoia. • Oppressive conformity. • Urban chaos. • Massive ecological degradation. • Eerie depopulation. • Militaristic governmental regulation. • Epistemological (a branch of philosophy that investigates the origin, nature, methods, and limits of human knowledge) slippage.

8. CONTEXT • Near-total environmental degradation. • Marked social dysfunction and isolation. • Rampantly(uncontrolled) unethical corporate and state activities. • The scene of Blade Runner is a perfect metaphor for the sequelae (A condition that is the consequence of a previous disease or injury.) of contemporary cultural conditions of late capitalism.

9. A bleak take on the future, that has extrapolated certain tendencies in the early 80s. • Dark post-apocalyptic world of advanced, unfettered (release from restraint) capitalism; chaotic, high-density urbanisation; and a diminished yet authoritarian government. • Post World War II, Post Cold War and Post Holocaust. • Blade runner is decrepitude (a state of deterioration) and ruination, except for the replicants.

10. Technology has advanced to the point where the creation of bioengineered adult human simulacra – serving both commercial and political purposes. Achieved technological capability to the point where the differences between original has become degraded while the copy has been perfected. • Rick Deckard the jaded ex-gumshoe of film noir. • Phlegmatic: Having an unemotional and calm disposition. • Emotionally detached, lonely, callous. • Lives alone in a tolerably ordered, but under-maintained apartment; he drinks too much resonant of the early 21st century version of the familiar, deeply ambivalent hardboiled noir detective. • Deckard is engaged as much in the discovery of himself as in the investigation of a case. In spite of his tough guy image, self-denying, aggressively outward-looking man of action, the archetype is always engaged in a search for identity a deepening of the sense of self if only through the confirmation that the world is a rotten place and the only person in it can be depended on is oneself.

11. DECKARD • Rick Deckard the jaded ex-gumshoe of film noir. • Phlegmatic: Having an unemotional and calm disposition. • Emotionally detached, lonely, callous. • Lives alone in a tolerably ordered, but under-maintained apartment. He is the early 21st century version of the familiar, deeply ambivalent hardboiled noir detective. • Deckard is engaged as much in the discovery of himself as in the investigation of a case. In spite of his tough guy image, self-denying, aggressively outward-looking man of action, the archetype is always engaged in a search for identity a deepening of the sense.

12. Context • There was greater consciousness of the vulnerability of nature in the twentieth century. • In 1964 the status of national parks was assured in America through the Wilderness Act which paradoxically also drew attention to the existence of destructive forces of development, pollution, corporate misuse and other environmental enemies. • Global corporations became strong influences on an economy but also exploited third world countries.

13. Directed by Ridley Scott and starring Harrison Ford, the film has survived close scrutiny and is considered one of the most effective futuristic cautionary visionary statements of the past fifty years. As a dystopia (dark future) it uses the cinematic techniques of film noir that tends to distance us from the characters and actions.  We become deeply disturbed both emotionally and rationally at what our future could become unless we are prepared to curb our excessive technological advances and our conspicuous consumption of unnecessary goods.