POSTMODERNISM Blade Runner

Postmodernism in Film• Postmodernist film attempts to articulate postmodernism (its ideas

and themes and methods) through the medium of film. • Postmodernist film attempts to subvert the

mainstream conventions of narrative structure, characterization and destroys the audience's suspension of disbelief. Typically, such films also break down the cultural divide between high and low art and often upend typical portrayals of gender, race, class, genre, and time with the goal of creating something different from traditional narrative expression.

• Postmodern films may play like a collage of tropes and stereotypes, and may mix different forms of media (such as animated sequences) and could integrate an element of melodrama played as camp.

Postmodern-Blade Runner• Blade Runner is an exemplary

postmodern text in the sense that it both represents the conditions of post modernity and employs elements of the postmodern condition to texture its narrative.

• In its form, content and ideological centre Blade Runner explores and utilities the strategies of quotation, recycling, pastiche, hyper reality and identity crisis.

Postmodern-Blade Runner• In Blade Runner there is an overraching and

insipd postmodern identity crisis that seems to touch everything and everyone in the film. Los Angeles 2019 is in a state of perpetual crisis.

• Textually, Blade Runner quotes from different film genres and film movements/periods. ▫For example it lifts scenes directly out of other films

such as Metropolis (science fiction) and Mildred Pierce (film noir). Also other pop culture references are used such as the New York skyline, the pulp fiction of Raymond Charles.

Baudrillard states that:• “Another film often citied as ‘postmodern’ is

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), in which science, technology and progress are all questioned and shown in some way to have ‘failed’. The world in Blade Runner is polluted by industry and overcrowding; only the rich escape to the ‘off-worlds’. One of the key themes of the film is the ‘blurring’ of the difference between the real and the artificial, between the human and the replicants. Increasingly it is no longer possible to be clear about what it means to be ‘human’”.

Not postmodern? •Nick Lacey argues that director Ridley Scott

decided to shy away from a postmodern view of the world as Blade Runner was “a production of mainstream cinema only films with an independent sensibility are able to fully represent the disturbing post human this is because the ideals of romantic love are central to patriarchal society’s needs” (Lacey 2005). He believes that the film “fails” to represent the postmodern view of the human condition.

Not postmodern? • It exposes the audience to only the ‘bad’ of the

upper class, Blade Runner eliminates any chance for “multiple discourses and openness of the truly postmodern text”.

• While Blade Runner does succeed in presenting an idea of the “future that extrapolates contemporary trends” in order to picture their possible outcomes, Blade Runner seem to be only presenting a certain attitude towards postmodernity.