Blade Runner’s humanism: Cinema and representation

2022

Can human depiction in film teach us about the political repercussions of representation? The question of aesthetic and political representational homology is not new. However, much of the contemporary interest in film among political theorists has been on the medium's material, rather than representative, nature. In justifying his attention to film in Neuropolitics, William E. Connolly describes it as a site for exploring "the relationship between technique, feeling, perception, and thought," and in a recent article in these pages, he emphasises "the discontinuity felt in the experience of affronting the "fountainlike spray of pictures" in film" (pp. 2-3). Both of these descriptions place a strong emphasis on how video visuals are received by the body. They portray a tangible, or ontological, relationship between a physical item (although an atypical one) and a perceiving body and brain, a relationship that is independent of the content on display in principle. Of course, these two instances are merely the political theory tip of a bigger materialist iceberg that has slammed into film studies and culture studies in general.

[sic] - a journal of literature, culture and literary translation, 2014

In this paper I look at the sci-fi film Blade Runner and the ways in which it tackles the question of defining the human and posthuman. The film examines the ability of technology to change our understanding of what is specifically "human" and raises some important bioethical, biopolitical, and epistemological issues pertaining to the accelerating development of technology and its imbrication in the medico-juridical system. I argue that "humanness" in the film is defined through the conceptual and spatial exclusion of replicants, who are not deemed worthy of ethical consideration and are thus not seen as subjects in the proper sense. However, the film ultimately subverts this distinction by showing not only that the other is produced in order to define the self, but also that the self qua human is not as authentic as one might think.

In Blade Runner (1982) the distinction between being-in-itself and being-for-itself is problematized and ambiguated through the enigmatic and ambivalent phenomena of the Replicant, which lies somewhere between the category of man and machine, or subject and object, especially with the development of the Nexus-Six prototype with its capacity to develop more advanced emotional responses than previous generations of replicants. They are programmed by the Tyrell Corporation to ‘be more human than human’(Scott, 1982) as they possess a sentience sufficiently advanced and sophisticated for them to attain a poignant awareness of the circumscribed limits that bind them to a constricted mode of being. This takes the form of secondary and subjugated conditions as slaves to human beings as they perform menial and unpleasant tasks such as mining and prostitution in off-world colonies; as well as four-year mortalities which terminate them at the precise point at which they acquire sufficient experience to develop emotional faculties no different from those of human beings.

Film and Philosophy, 2019

In his essay, "The Replicant: Inside the Dark Future of Blade Runner 2049," Brian Raftery suggests that, "The strongest sci-fi has always used the landscape of the future to help us process our worries about the present…" 1 Similarly, Angelica Jade Bastién writes about Blade Runner 2049, and dystopias in general, that the genre, "should make us uncomfortable...make us question our roles…illuminate and critique current societal problems by reconfiguring them in an exaggerated, but still somewhat plausible context." 2 While this may be a lot to ask of any genre, I believe that the Blade Runner films wrestle with the problems of the present as much as they do with the future. In what follows, I argue that the Blade Runner series, and the criticism of it, serve as a barometer of American culture's continued struggle with ideas regarding biological determinism and social marginalization. The Blade Runner films are a special case, in that Blade Runner's handling of these themes, which made it a favorite with film theorists, has become anathema to many contemporary critics. The effort to address this tension in Blade Runner 2049 reveals the current philosophical discontent surrounding these issues. This essay reviews how Blade Runner addresses the general theme of biological determinism and marginalization, considers contemporary criticism of the film, illustrates Blade Runner 2049's engagement with the same issues, and discusses the subsequent criticism of that engagement.

Abstract A Study of the Impenetration of the Human and the Technological in Science Fiction Film: --Revisiting Blade Runner. Michael A. Unger Sogang University Graduate School of Media Ridley Scott’s prescient science fiction film Blade Runner (1982), thirty-three years after its initial release still marks a significant shift in the cyberpunk aesthetic and thematic changes of the notion of “alien” as “Other” within the science fiction film genre. This close analysis of the film re-examines how it offers a representation of the impenetration of the human and technology within the diegesis of the film through the notion of the “replicant”-- a technologically designed entity that exemplifies this fusion of the human and technology, creating a new subjectivity that collapses the boundaries between the human and machine. This re-reading also examines how the film reflects our relationship with technology in our contemporary, global information age. Key Words: cyborg, Blade Runner, impenetration, cyberpunk, technological l determinism, partial subjectivity,

In this essay I provide a reading of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner that focuses upon the question of the kind of creatures the Replicants are depicted as being, and the meaning that depiction should have for us. I draw upon Stanley Cavell’s account of the problem of other minds to argue that the film’s empathy test is in fact presented as a mode of resisting the acknowledgment of others. And I draw upon Martin Heidegger’s account of authenticity and mortality to argue that this acknowledgment is crucial if one would become human. The film does not so much suggest that Replicants are, as such, human, but rather that humanity is won through the encounter with the inauthentic.

Matthew Flisfeder introduces readers to key concepts in postmodern theory and demonstrates how it can be used for a critical interpretation and analysis of Blade Runner, arguably 'the greatest science fiction film'. By contextualizing the film within the culture of late 20th and early 21st-century capitalism, Flisfeder provides a valuable guide for both students and scholars interested in learning more about one of the most significant, influential, and controversial concepts in film and cultural studies of the past 40 years. The "Film Theory in Practice" series fills a gaping hole in the world of film theory. By marrying the explanation of film theory with interpretation of a film, the volumes provide discrete examples of how film theory can serve as the basis for textual analysis. Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner offers a concise introduction to Postmodernism in jargon-free language and shows how this theory can be deployed to interpret Ridley Scott's cult film Blade Runner.

Science Fiction Film and Television, 2020

This piece, written originally during my postgraduate studies of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Anglo-American University in Prague, focuses on Ridley Scott's 2007 final cut of "Blade Runner", utilizing Deleuzean and Lacanian paradigms to analyze the film in terms of its treatment of the relationship between the Subject and the Symbolic, between the I and the They.