BLADE RUNNER WAS A PRODUCT deeply of its time, but
its singularity has sustained our attraction far beyond that moment. Much of
the avalanche of commentary the film provoked in the decade of its release is
increasingly irrelevant to its status now and longer term. Few viewers today
will be preoccupied with how vividly it supposedly maps out the “unmappable”
shape of the de-centered city or, now that the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union
itself have vanished, how acutely it delineates the contours of late capitalism
in the bipolar days of the cold war. Likewise, the movie’s retrospective links
to the now hopelessly elastic category of film noir and its anticipations of
cyberpunk are no longer essential screens through which to view it. Blade
Runner’s fate may be more analogous to the trajectory of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
(1927), which has transcended the extravagant surfaces of its originary moment. In that film, too, the protagonist
observes, explores, and attempts to read an indecipherable urban field of experience
on a quest to distinguish a real human being from a mechanical simulation of
one.
In his 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick portrayed a thoroughly reified social world
dominated by inanimate things and machines. Dick’s remarkable account of the
petty ruin of individual experience and hope through the spread of “a peculiar
and malign abstractness” became something quite different in Ridley Scott’s Blade
Runner. In the early Reagan-Thatcher era, the novel was remade into a
world-weary celebration of the petrifying universe that Dick found so
deadening. Few films achieve Blade Runner’s lyric fatalism: It makes
emotionally credible the bleak threshold at which the technological products of
global corporations become the objects of our love, our longings. The affecting
moment when Rick (Harrison Ford) tells the android Rachael (Sean Young) to say
“Kiss me” is a haunting evocation of a much broader subjective capitulation to
the imperatives of technique and instrumental rationality, as if affirming with
listless resignation: “Who cares what she is?” This sublimation of otherness is
the indifferent ‘80s resolution of the alienation that, in Dick’s novels of the
late ‘60s and early ‘70s, led to psychosis and self-destruction.
Of course the replicants in Blade Runner,
especially the Rutger Hauer character, Roy Batty, might seem to perpetuate the
longtime habit of allegorizing robots and androids by reading their poignantly
humanlike behavior as a cautionary index of how machinelike we have become. But
the terms for such a reading don’t effectively exist in Blade Runner.
What the film did with considerable novelty was to imagine the promiscuous
space in which machines and humans were equally rootless—disposable parts of
the same derelict systems. And both, outside of any binary categories, are
various patchworks of memories real and false, of media effects, quasi
emotions, and sensory experiences manufactured and programmed externally. Did
Jonathan Crary
is professor of art history at