Movie Reviews
Blade Runner: Simulation and the Human Condition
Russell Corry
The Los angeles of 2019 represented in Blade runner (1982) is a postmodern nightmare. The visual representation adopts a film noir style, connoting that characters live in a doomed world where morality and social stability are absent. I Blade Runner, the idea of humanity has been violated by infiltration of technology into physical being in the form of replicants. The film explores the integration of simulacra into society and the moral and ethical implications of loss of indentity. The human need of an identity is equated with the possessionn of a past. Without a past, replicants cannot prove they exist, and therefore cannot establish their humanity. The use of photography by investigators in the film is essential in establishing a person's identity because photographs assert the existence of a being at a moment in history. In this way Blade Runner explores what it means to be human.
Blade Runner portrays los Angeles as a dark, postindustrial world where the ultramodern aesthetic has succombed to the decay and waste of industrial progress. Bruno (1978, p. 64) suggests that:
"The continuous expulsion of waste is an idexical sign of the well-functioning apparatus: waste represents its productions, movement, and development at increasing speed. The postmodern aesthetic of Blade Runner is thus the result of recycling, fusion of levels, discontinuous signifiers, explosion of boundaries, and erosion"
Society makes great technological strides, and as a resutl, the world and culture degreades into a dystopia. The realisation of the culture's terrible mistakes creates a desire to revisit the past. The architecture represented in Blade runner supports this notion; the citizens of Los Angeles incorporate a pastiche aesthetic to reclaim memories and ideaologies of the past. Lacey (2000, p. 195) suggests that, "recollections and quotations of the past are sub-codes of a new synthesis." Signifiers of the past are recycled in the future: Roman columns, Egyptioan decor and mythical oriental representations are evident throughout the film in a peverse but meaningful way. Without recognition of the past there is no future. While the postmodern aesthetic suggests progress it also connotes defilement. In Blade Runner this defilement is represented as the dependence on machinery. According to Doll and Faller (1986, p. 6), "A tenet of science fiction holds that a technologically advanced society fears this dependence on machines and subsequent loss of control because it represents dehumanization." In Blade runner dehumanization is embodied in the replicants, and their goal to simulate "real" humans and integrate into society
Perfect simulation of human behaviour and emotion is the replicants' primary goal. However, their controlled existence limits their potentioal to develop attributes of humanity such as identity, memory and sexuality. Their predetermined existence denies them a future by denying them a past. Without any foreseeable future, you cannot define a past moment and therefore cannot identify yourself in a period of history. Jameson (cited in Bruno 1987. p. 70) writes:
The shizophrenic does not have our experience of temporal continuity but is condemned to live ain a perpetual present with which the varous moments of his or her past have little connection and for which there is no concievable future on the horizon.
The replicants' temporal reality is an effect of the postmodern condition; the continuous expulsion of waste signifies the well-functioning apparatus. However, the continuous expulsion of artificial life questions human morality, paticularly I as that life has emotional awareness.
