IS ANTAGONISM OUR NATURAL STATE?
In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), the postmodern aesthetic interred in the narrative, set design, dialogue, special effects, and literary sources have been explored by various theorists. This postmodernist stance is invariably in dialogue with Fredric Jameson’s influential essay, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” In this treatise, he historicizes postmodernism in a specific economic and industrial period which heavily determines its character. Jameson creates a dialectical space to discuss postmodernism by using Ernest Mandel’s Marxist theories of capitalist expansion. In the first period, starting in the 1840’s, we begin using steam power. This stage is ultimately congruent with the beginnings of realist thought as explored through mechanical reproduction of the photograph. The second stage, marked by the emergence of electric power, and the condensation of disparate business ventures into conglomerates, starts in the 1890’s. Herein also lies the first flowering of modernist philosophy. Finally, the third stage starting in the 1950’s, which we are still living out, is the postindustrial—a consumer society developed in the penumbra of the atomic age. It is in this phase that we have the widest break with cultural precedents in graphic arts, literature, cinema, architecture, and music.
How do we define a new cultural moment which actively splinters its forebears and resists continuity in the classical sense? Jameson attempts this by explicating clear constituent tropes in the typical postmodernist work. The first is a depthlessness onto which originary cultural elements have been projected or duplicated ad infinitum. This is explicit in advertising and the work of Andy Warhol in particular. The second is the de-emphasis of linearity as embodied by “pastiche” and the “schizophrenic” state of mind. The continuum of daily existence has devolved into a puzzle of atemporal shards. The third is the growing awareness that the world is no longer graspable by the solitary human mind. We are living in an era when the sublime is our only riposte to an ever-increasing lack of information because there is just too much to assimilate. For Jameson this tripartite formulation is the epitome of postmodernism. Those film scholars who have taken up the challenge to apply these ideas to the medium have often found an iconic example in Blade Runner. I will concentrate exclusively on the theoretical work of Scott Bukatman, Giuliana Bruno, and Vivian Sobchack. They all focus on different aspects of Jameson’s postmodernity thesis, using his seminal essay for their own intellectual ends. While they all manage to bring out subtle nuances of his theory on application to the film, Jameson’s unaltered formulations are remarkably durable.
Blade Runner is set in a future Los Angeles (by way of Tokyo and New York) where rampant pollution and nuclear fallout has forced most of the population off-world. Those left on Earth are either too poor to afford transport or are so genetically inferior that they are forced to remain for fear they contaminate the colonists. In order to facilitate the exploration and terra-forming initiatives of off-world colonies, synthetic humans have been grown to perform the demanding work. They also provide comfort to soldiers and citizens, and protect “human” interests in space overall. These humanoid replicants have been engineered with a four-year life span. For some replicants this is an intolerable fact which causes them to rebel against their makers. For this, they are hunted down and “retired” to spare humanity.
In Scott Bukatman’s “Blade Runner and Fractal Geography” we see a recurrent fascination with Jameson’s notion of spatial deflation. “But there are some other significant differences between the high-modernist and the postmodernist moment…The first and most evident is the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense…” (Jameson, 9). During the high modern phase there was a new play of surfaces in a fetishistic mode. Surfaces connoted commodity and fabricated desire. Thus, they were growing resistant to the emotional attachment of a subject and suggested a “waning of affect.” As we devolved more and more into living through filmic, architectural and graphic facsimiles of nature, we became alienated from our surroundings. Postmodernism has completely fractured our relationship to the image so that we now live in a world composed of fragments in synchronicity. Humans have lost the diachronic impulse which fosters education and life experience. The televisual landscape and the internet are expressions of this new age. Bukatman uses the precept of depthlessness as a framing device but diverges from there. He locates a hidden profundity in the media saturated screen, Deckard’s Esper machine, and in the eye itself.
Bukatman opens up the spatial contours of the film and moves beyond Jameson’s flatness to Mandelbrot’s fractalness. The fractal describes a phenomenon in which subdivided parts of a geometric shape are identical to the whole, implying an endless depth of form and structure. “The new monument is no longer the substantial spatiality of the building, but the depthless surface of the screen” (Bukatman, 132). These screens project the relics of a mass-mediated culture in the forms of smiling Japanese women popping pills, enticements to “Enjoy Coca-Cola,” or vaguely Stalinist entreaties to “begin again” on an off-world colony. Bukatman’s claim is that these projected light shows have replaced the solidity of the building as a cultural marker. In that transposition the flat image has taken on the qualities of the constructed space, creating depth where there ostensibly is none. Though they lack physicality, the advertisements mimic the psychological nadirs of the human subject. They serve a stabilizing function in this society, sustaining its mores and rhythms. The transformation from ephemera to crux is empirically analyzed by the Esper machine.
Deckard uses the Esper to examine a photo found at Leon’s apartment in an attempt to determine the whereabouts of the fugitive replicants. “Through Deckard’s instructions the ‘depthless surface of the screen’ is probed, tested, and finally entered. The screen, that frontier separating terminal and physical realties, is rendered permeable, and the space behind it becomes tangible and controllable” (Bukatman, 136). Like an analogue to our own memory, the machine scans images, focuses in on important details, and comes to important realizations. This new memory machine which Bukatman constructs has the power of linking the existential to the mnemonic. In an odd way, which Bukatman doesn’t acknowledge, this machine is capable of confirming the humanity of a synthetic being. Its dialectical opposite is the Voight-Kampff machine which takes humanity, in the form of empathy, away from the replicant and reasserts the superficiality of being. The fear is palpable on Bryant’s face as Deckard openly wonders whether the machine will work on the Nexus 6. If it doesn’t, where will the new ontological line in the sand be drawn? Both these mechanical contraptions work through the exigencies of the eye.
The eye is probably the most important trope in Blade Runner. A close-up of an eye is one of the first images in the film. It reflects the Hades-like Los Angeles that we are about to enter. As stated briefly before, the eye is also a vital part of the Voight-Kampff testing procedure which reads unknown gradations in ocular activity (jargonized by Tyrell as “capillary dilation of the blush response, fluctuation of the pupil, involuntary dilation of the iris”). Moreover, it is Roy Batty’s declaration of “If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes” to Chew at EyeWorks and his eloquent final speech detailing those visions that, I argue, ensure his humanity. For Bukatman the eye is the tool by which we scrutinize the world, from the unquantifiable grandeur of the Tyrell building to the serial number on an artificial snake scale seen through a microscope. He labels the various permutations of this space, the cinematic—an impression with allegiances to Jean Epstein’s photogenie. The unceasing dimensional shifts in the film compel the spectator to fully invest him/herself in the image. We are brought back to the positivist rationale for photography in the nineteenth century, which rightly claimed that this new apparatus would allow us to see the world in ways we never considered before.
Even though Bukatman’s fractal system goes a long way towards tying together many of the visual set pieces in the film, I would note a few exceptions. Bukatman does not parse out the representational depth in the replicants themselves. Let’s look at a character like Rachel, who symbolizes the ultimate stage of replicant evolution. She is made in humankind’s image, endowed with human memories and emotions, and does not know herself to be anything but human. Yet in this consumer society, she is not a person, but a product. “More human than human is our motto.” This advertising slogan, blurted by Tyrell, leads us down a rabbit hole of paradoxes. If she is more like us than ourselves, shouldn’t she be afforded the same rights as us if not more? If we take this logic to its full extension aren’t her memories then more real, her body more substantial, her life more valuable than our own. By denying these replicants their right to life, by virtue of their enslavement and finite life spans, we are punishing our better selves to absolve our own guilt over their creation. They become utter manifestations of that repressed guilt that come back to destroy us.
Moreover, Bukatman ignores the obvious two-dimensionality of the ever-present neon signs and the read-outs in the flying spinner cars that substantiate Jameson’s original observations. Their flatness contravenes his scalar analysis of the world and introduces a sense of stasis. The constant repetition of the neon dragon’s flicking tongue offers no escape from the suffocating diegesis. We are trapped, as is Deckard, in a world of surfaces. There is a constant interplay between the horizontal flatness of the Tyrell building or the sprawling street scenes, and the vertical depth of a world without a tangible top or bottom. The endless repositioning of the fractal perspective is contested, as the narrative simultaneously ensnares us on the rain-slicked streets, confines us in the spinner’s bubble, or abandons us in the labyrinthine spaces of the Bradbury building. Finally, there is superficiality in structure itself. The world of the film is retro-fitted, meaning that new architecture has literally been built on top of the old. The future is solely on the surface. The characters’ clothing, mode of address, and mannerisms also seem to be bred from film noir conventions of the past, with a thin veneer of futurity applied to situate them in this new world.
Giuliana Bruno explores these past/future dichotomies in her essay, “Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner.” She employs Jameson’s exploration of pastiche and schizophrenia to ground her arguments. Jameson discusses in detail the postmodernist reliance on pastiche to create new artistic forms out of an amalgamation of prior historical moments. The new is regularly a copy of an original, but since the old forms are growing increasingly obscure, the simulacrum results. The simulacrum is a postmodernist entity which cannot be distinguished from the original because the original no longer exists. Bruno allies these ideas with the postindustrialist ethic in which the capital momentum has shifted towards reproduction. “The disconnected temporality of the replicants and the pastiche city are all an effect of a postmodern, postindustrial condition: wearing out, waste” (Bruno, 65). The remnants of the consumer society are everywhere in the form of this detritus. Hence, an aesthetics of recycling exists in the world of the film to reclaim some of the past and create new models. Those include the retro-fitted buildings, the new ethnic combinations forged through proximity, the strange sounds of cityspeak, the Egyptian lines and interiors of the Tyrell building, the Mayan motifs in Deckard’s apartment, and the distended Roman columns of the Bradbury building. “Pastiche, as an aesthetic of quotation, incorporates dead styles; it attempts a recollection of the past, of memory, and of history” (Bruno, 67). Pastiche also enters the interior life of the replicants. This is most obvious with Rachel whose memories are a combination of other people’s. For the criminal replicants, who know what they are, piles of photographs serve as referents to some time in the past, some moment where they existed before the present. This tenuous duration through image allows them to retain a semblance of personality and individuality, like the naturally-bred humans that they are trying so desperately to mimic.
The replicants are trying to avoid the symptoms of schizophrenia. Jameson defines this psychosis through Lacan as “a breakdown in the signifying chain, that is, the interlocking syntagmatic series of signifiers which constitutes an utterance or a meaning” (Jameson, 26). This linguistic order of signifiers allows a human to describe his/her temporality and know it to be true. The replicants have a curtailed lifespan, so their syntagmatic links are frayed as they have not developed naturally. They are unable to avoid the psychic stasis of the schizophrenic; they only have access to life as a series of presents. Roy Batty is denied a past on visits to Chew, J.F. Sebastian and Tyrell and is subsequently deprived of a future because he refuses to submit to language. He uses violence to communicate his needs like a child acting out for neglectful parents. Bruno emphatically concludes, “The schizophrenic temporality of the replicants is a resistance to enter the social order, to function according to its modes. As outsiders to the order of language, replicants have to be eliminated” (Bruno, 70).
Bruno also extends the Lacanian analysis by placing the replicants in the world of the Imaginary. They are still trying to distinguish the nature of the image staring back at them in the mirror stage. Moreover, their desire, characteristic of the Imaginary, is to be human but this is impossible. Ensuing is a profound sense of loss that causes a mental rupture from which the replicants can’t recover. The replicants will never attain the balance which the later Symbolic order provides. The Symbolic is just outside their grasp since they have no way of perfecting language without a history. Therefore the laws of man, based upon the acquisition of that language, have no place in their world. The replicants have been given the bodies of adults, but their emotional capacity remains infantile. They are only slightly advanced beyond the Real where all their needs were provided for possibly in a lab or hatching facility. In conclusion, Bruno reveals a phenomenological link between mother, history, and photography in the narrative. All these tropes are manifestations of the past, especially childhood—an elusive concept to a being born as an adult. Both Leon and Rachel (the only two replicants to take and fail the Voight-Kampff test) succumb to their synthetic nature when confronted with the apparition of mother—Leon through a question about his history and Rachel by way of a living photograph. Mother, in the Lacanian sense, represents home, nurture, and morality. The replicants are excluded from these realms.
Bruno is thorough in her re-appropriation of Jameson. Nevertheless, she does abandon some of his more salient points. She never discusses “nostalgia” as a motivation for pastiche. The mere design of the replicants harks back to a time when humans were not hobbled by the effluence and conflicts of the industrial age. The technological acuity of humans in 2019 may be more advanced, but they have grown more frail as they depend on the replicants to do all the heavy lifting, literally. There is also a nostalgia inherent in the film noir aesthetics of the film. Rick Deckard is simply a modern equivalent of Humphrey Bogart’s rumpled detectives and Rachel is a stand-in for every femme-fatale that ever misled a private eye on celluloid. Jameson’s “intertextuality” also bestows the characters with more emotional depth to the point where we can align ourselves with Deckard’s motives even if he barely speaks. The original audience for the film would have been well aware of Harrison Ford’s previous roles. The confident egotists of Star Wars (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) are a stark contrast to Deckard’s brooding anxiety.
One more missed linkage involves the syntagmatic parameters. Bruno references the indigenous cityspeak in relation to pastiche, but it must also be related to schizophrenia as a clearly established language system itself. For the viewer the signified and the signifier are indeterminate. We are told that the vernacular is spoken by other inhabitants of the city. However, as an imaginary language created by Edward James Olmos just for the film, we have no way of deciphering it. Yet, cityspeak functions as a bridge in the narrative between the motives of the police department and those of Gaff as related to Deckard. Consequently, we enter into a schizophrenic relationship with these authority figures and have no sense of their history as it relates to this unfamiliar world. We do not know why they have decided to “retire” replicants instead of deactivate or reprogram them. Nor do we know why they have chosen Deckard for this mission. Moreover, Gaff’s origami figures remain enigmas since we have no language to decipher them. The inability to comprehend constitutes Jameson’s final boundary between art and postmodernity.
Jameson names this unperceivable network the sublime. Using prior definitions by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the nexus of this idea revolves around a conceptualization of the divine, but that is only one application. There is an unbridled dread and incredulity which invades the human mind when confronted with a deity, a universe, a planet, or any infinitely branched system which we cannot comprehend. Jameson finds the ideal literary representation of sublimity in the cyberpunk expulsions of William Gibson. The intangible bytes which surf through cyberspace exist in a world that the human psyche can’t quite control. This capitulation to electronic signals leads to paranoia, as subjectivity is eradicated. Ironically, Blade Runner preceded and influenced this cyberpunk movement.
Vivian Sobchack in her final chapter, “Postfuturism,” from Screening Space outlines the shape of the unfathomable. Blade Runner is again one paradigm used to fill this metaphorical space. We are surrounded by electronic flotsam, the discernible vestiges of the sublime. This constant reminder of another existence beyond physicality has transformed humanity. Sobchack believes that our mediated insertion into cyberspace “…has recast human being into a myriad of visible and active simulacra” (Sobchack, 229). These simulacra are not bound to the indexical and can exist autonomously from us in a world where our bodies can’t travel. Hence, in a culture where humans can now be alienated from themselves, the alien or the other no longer signifies the same fear it once did. We are the aliens; The replicants are us.
In Blade Runner, the spectator and the protagonist are constantly re-orienting themselves in order to come to terms with this infinitely dense sensorium. As is common with the human psyche, the narrative displaces society’s confusion onto an “evil other.” This is usually codified as a huge corporation with the ability to control the invisible networks of information that we can barely discern. “This is space that finds its most explicit figuration in the impossible towering beauty of Blade Runner’s Tyrell Corporation Building—an awesome megastructure whose intricate façade also resembles a microchip” (Sobchack, 234). Tyrell has been able to synthesize a crushing amount of bio-engineering technology to recreate humankind. In the intertextual world of the science-fiction film, such a mastery of the sublime is always deemed unnatural (partially by its perceived impossibility) and can only have negative consequences. We are not meant to conquer the sublime. If we do, then aren’t we technically gods? That hyperconsciousness would render culture pointless. Luckily, in our world culture is still viable, even if remarkably mutated. Postmodern logic can accommodate the sublime into our way of life.
Now culture can only be glimpsed at random intervals. This incomprehension is literalized in Blade Runner due to what Sobchack calls an “inflation of space,” a theory functionally identical to Jameson’s “hyperspace.” This inflation is identified by an “excess scenography” which crowds the mise-en-scéne. The fabricated space brings the spectator into contact with the sublime. Space is anthropomorphized, and like a collector classifies, gathers, preserves, and displays objects. “Trash and waste, pollution and decay, are visualized as curious and beautiful, postmodern sensibility finding aesthetic pleasure and sublimity in the accumulations and transformative decay of the cityscape…” (Sobchack, 263-64). Ne’er-do-wells scavenge for trash on the grimy streets, even claiming Deckard’s car as a site for scavenge. Pris hides in a pile of garbage to attract J.F. Sebastian. Zhora runs through a chaotic gauntlet of costumes, cars, umbrellas, and finally glass. This inflation though has it consequences in the diegesis. Primary among those is a “deflation of temporal value.” Time no longer flows in a rational manner that presupposes history, language, and causal forces. Blade Runner though is ambivalent about this shift towards spatial representation. It is apparent that time is still regarded highly by the inclusion of the replicant’s four year life span in the story, interspersed shots of Batty’s hand seizing up to that deadline, and his eloquent speech on the rooftop which references his memories as “…lost in time like tears in rain…” Nonetheless, the spatial dominance in contemporary science fiction augurs a new postmodern cinematic language.
I would add one vital element to Sobchack’s inflation thesis. The cascading, ominous tones of Vangelis’s score imply a world outside the normal flow of melody and tempo. The music almost never stops, constantly adding expansive layers of melancholy and awe. In addition, Sobchack does not engage Jameson’s mention of “derealization” in her argument. It is a fleeting sense that reality is as artificial as modern forms of art. In Blade Runner this doubt is prevalent. Rachel asks Deckard early in the film whether he’s ever retired a human by mistake. There is also the contentious matter as to whether the protagonist we have been identifying with throughout the film is human or another replicant. This question enlivens Jameson’s conception of the “terrifying” and the “exhilarating” as we contemplate an answer. If Deckard is a replicant, the dissolution of boundaries theorized by the film would be complete; Homosapiens will have come to an end brought on by our own hubris.
Jameson ends his essay with a hypothesis. He believes that the only way for us to interact with the sublime in the future will be to develop an “aesthetic of cognitive mapping.” This diagrammatic overlay would “enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole” (Jameson, 51). This system would reclaim subjectivity from the fragmenting impulses of depthlessness, pastiche, schizophrenia, and sublimity. It would create a political dynamic capable of integrating personal ideology and global awareness, all through technology. At the end of her essay, Sobchack glances over “cognitive mapping” and offers Born in Flames (1982) as an idealized example of mapping put into practical use. I offer Blade Runner as a counterexample. Aren’t the replicant’s brains the beginning of this advanced cultural logic? Once they are allowed to temporally transcend, their engineered brains will be able to surpass ours. The part of their minds that is constructed will be able to hold yottabytes of information, and the part that mimics our own will have the time to craft an individualized ideology. Replicants are the perfect solution to the postmodernity crisis. They are immune to the vicissitudes of cultural logic. They will succeed despite our impotence, at least on film.
The replicants are searching for empathy and memory in a city inscribed with memory on its walls in thick layers of dirt. Conversely, humans exist in a constant state of amnesia as the highways of the mind only extend in one direction. The past recedes as we feverishly search for the novel. The social theorists discussed in my essay are also searching—grappling with the nature of the simulacrum. They are digging for clues in Jameson’s intricate composition. Postmodernity, however, offers few answers. Instead, its fluid borders generate an unending cavalcade of suppositions. Blade Runner is a film about the choices we make. It is invested in our contemporary moment. What still counts as human, whether at the embryonic dawn or the “accelerated decrepitude” of dusk? Is reminiscence really a part of lived experience or more a function of the imagination? What is that elemental spark that allows us to abstract ourselves and engage in reveries of divergent realities and theories? Can this ember ever be duplicated? How do we shelter emotional veracity from an increasingly coded world? Do we really want to know the answers?
Works Cited
Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York:
Verso, 2002.
Bruno, Giuliana. Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts. Cambridge: The MIT
Press, 2007.
Bruno, Giuliana. “Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner.” October, Vol. 41
(Summer 1987), pp. 61-74.
Bukatman, Scott. Blade Runner. London: British Film Institute, 1997.
Bukatman, Scott. “Blade Runner and Fractal Geography.” Terminal Identity. Durham,
Duke University Press, 1993, pp. 130-137.
Jameson, Fredric. “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism
Debate.” New German Critique, No. 33, Modernity and Postmodernity (Autumn
1984), pp. 53-65.
Jameson, Fredric, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Postmodernism, or, The
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991, pp. 1-54.
Sobchack, Vivian. “Postfuturism.” Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film.
New York: The Ungar Publishing Company, 1987, pp. 223-305.
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