Reading Blade Runner

Objectives:
To understand why Blade
Runner is a postmodern text.
 Style
BR is considered to have a
postmodern aesthetic, mixing textual
references and images.
Use of shadows and rain are generic
conventions of film noir but these are
combined with futuristic dystopian
images. This results in a neo-noir
visual style.
 A postmodern city
The Los Angeles of the future is a
pastiche of east, west and the future.
The advertising images in the city

are promoting an off-world colony

suggesting people are leaving the
real world for a more attractive
equivalent.
 Audience Reception
The audience is invited to question the
meaning of humanity in the postmodern
age where distinctions between the
human and machine are unclear.
Can humanity be manufactured and
emotions programmed?
Reality is replaced by the hyperreal where
the boundary between the real and the
imagined is eroded.
 Subject matter
All these moments will be lost in time,
like tears in the rain
 Subject Matter
Is Harrison Ford human or not?
The replicant is young but his body is
ageing.
The film is forcing us to confront the way
the modern world is constructed through
binary oppositions truth/lies,
reality/fiction, human/machine, life/death,
good/bad
The oppositions upon which we base our
sense of truth and reality are exposed.
 Task
Referring to these notes and your
understanding of postmodernity,
argue the case for Blade Runner
being considered a postmodern text.