Blade Runner

Why is Blade Runner postmodern?

Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner is highly postmodern in all aspects. It has a combined genre of science fiction and film noir. The films 2019 future setting makes the sci-fi aspect clear from the outset. The transformation of Los Angeles in the dystopian city with it is with flying cars and towering sky scrapers is evident with parts of Fritz Langs ‘Metropolis’. Which is intertextuality and pastiche as the Scott is mimicking that of another artists work. Jean Baudrillard's theory of hyper reality is in play here creating post modernism with the altering of any possibly reality specific to present time.

Through the use of mise-en-scene and cinematography the director was able to foreshadow events as well as to portray the dark and rather morbid aspects this future hyper reality holds. The opening scene starts out by panning slowly over the dark and foggy city with fire being shot up into the air. The use of light, in this scene, helps to set the feeling for the entire movie. The city is dark and foggy like the Nexus characters in the way there is no emotion shown at all.

A key feature that makes this movie highly postmodern is the portrayal of technology. Although set in the future we as an audience are presented with a mix of old and future technology. In the scene where Decard is inspecting the photo he is using an old television however it is all voice operated and the technology blowing up the photo is ahead of that available at the time of the tv.

Http://philosophynow.org/issues/58/the_death_of_postmodernism_and_beyond

Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a general and wide-ranging term which is applied to many disciplines, including literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific or objective efforts to explain reality. In essence, it is based on the position that reality is not mirrored in human understanding of it, but is rather constructed as the mind tries to understand its own personal reality. Postmodernism is therefore skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, arguing that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal.^{[citation needed]}