Blade Runner: Forget it Deckard, it’s Chinatown

Blade Runner: Forget it Deckard, it’s Chinatown

As the dystopian film genre goes, Blade Runner is a film that has much to say about the human condition and 1980’s society.  Not only that, but a post-modernist tone is given to the film remnant of noir films including John Huston’s Maltese Falcon and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown.  These three combined attributes have gained Blade Runner not only critical acclaim but cult status. 

            Blade Runner asks the question who is more human, the replicants or actual humans?  It seems as antagonist (I use this term very cautiously) and replicant Roy Batty’s sacrifice at the end of the film, his feelings as love Pris’ dies and his own mortality shown throughout the movie, answers the question.  Roy is particularly juxtaposed by his creator Tyrell.  Tyrell, the corporate official, offers up emotional vacancy in contrast to the emotional and regretful Roy.  These two characters were particularly interesting to me as Tyrell is vengeful enough to kill his own creation in Roy, where Roy just wants to fight against his own mortality and live a free life, which ironically seems freer than any other character in the film.  The freedom is represented quite often in the film by the theme of sight.  Sight is demonstrated throughout the film as Tyrell uses glasses, or technology to see the world.  Pris who spray paints her eyes to give the appearance of blindness, while Roy has clear sight.  In a climax of the film, Roy breaks Tyrell’s glasses and gouges his eyes out, rendering him useless and killing him.  Fulfilling the wrath the creation has on the creator for creating a mortal being.  A large part of the film engages humanity and what it means to be human, and the protagonist Deckard provides ambiguity as to if he is indeed a replicant or not, which engages the middle ground of Roy and Tyrell reinforcing the films theme of “who knows?”  As important the theme and cultural message is to the film, another important idea was in play in the depiction of dystopian Los Angeles in the year 2019.

            1980’s culture whether it be because of Reagan economics or the crack-cocaine era, a large gap in economic and social class was found in the rest of the country, but particularly in Los Angeles.  Through Blade Runner Ridley Scott honestly and brutally depicts the current state of L.A. and sees it through an even more urbanized and socially imbalanced society as the city is separated in to a ghetto and a more lavish lifestyle up in skyscrapers.  As Norman Kline suggests in his article Building Blade Runner, he offers that the ghetto closely resembles old forties structures, while skyscrapers are built right on top of the old buildings (Scott makes this decision with a societal theme in mind but also with post-modern aspects at play).  He chooses Chinatown specifically because of the American people’s fear of Asian imperialism and the fear and possibility of not being the only super power in the world.  Directionally, it is as if the upper class is directly looking down at the lower classes and the old way of life.  Also interestingly as Kline points out in his article many city planners vocally fantasized about making Los Angeles similar to the bladerunner city.  Ironically this dystopian city features acid rain, non-existent nature surroundings, classist and economically separated culture and an environment where humans are no longer human.  It may seem as though as a society we are moving away from the bladerunner city, but perhaps we actually are not.  Ridley Scott as a director made various decisions in order to follow the post-modern movement of the time by paying homage to past noir films and earlier cinema.

            Throughout Blade Runner I noticed quite a few small references from movies such as Chinatown, Metropolis, 2001: A Space Odyssey while following the overall noir genre.  While watching Blade Runner I noticed that the Tyrell Company looked similar to the workhouse in Fritz Lang’s German expressionist film Metropolis.  Since I could recognize the similarities the first time I watched Blade Runner I was able to infer how I would later be introduced to the Tyrell Corporation.  Chinatown for me was quite obvious how the hard-boiled independent detective had to solve a crime and hunt down an individual in order to find out information.  I also found that the lower ghetto was indeed patterned on Chinatown, while the skyscrapers were built on top also was fairly symbolic.  I was also taken back to John Huston’s classic Maltese Falcon which by many is considered the essential noir film.  It includes a hard-boiled detective trying to figure out a crime while a crime and femme-fatale stands in the way of his case (Huston also had an important role in Chinatown that would cause film buffs an immediate association).  So in the spirit of post-modern movement Scott chose to reconnect with the film noir genre in order to give the genre new strength.                    

            Blade Runner deemed by many to be one of the most important American films ever made, not only makes questions morality and the state of current human condition but also as to future and dystopian possibilities.  As a post-modern film it along with its predecessor Chinatown nearly single-handedly revived the genre to inspire other more contemporary films such as The Dark Knight, Sin City and Memento many of which Norman Kline gives as example. Where this film can certainly ask more questions than answer, it asks the audience to question the emotional and immoral state in which we move towards the future and what we as a society can do about it.