Afterword (2016): AfterHuman

When Blade Runner was first released we were very much living in the analogue and (late) industrial age. Today, of course, the world is a digital one and for many people is fully augmented. In a very real sense the prophecies found in the future world of ...

Conclusion: What Does it Mean to be Human?

This chapter points out that the real story of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is about what it means to be human in a world increasingly touched by technological invention and media intervention. It discusses technology in Blade Runner relating to human simulacra, the love of technology by humans, and the spread of media technology into all areas of social life that can make machines out of them. It also discusses how Blade Runner questions the nature of what it is to be human in even more complex ways. The chapter deals with the question on what does it mean to be human, which is bound up with suffering, loss, alienation, existential confusion, and with the unstoppable march of death. It examines how Blade Runner mediates on the postmodern nature of the human condition.

Textual Analysis

This chapter discusses textual analysis as the best way to get to understand how a film produces meaning. It points out how close textual analysis enables the critical reader to get beneath the skin of the film by breaking it down into its main sequences or scenes, which reveal its formal, narrative structures, its pleasures, and its ideological messages. It also talks about close textual analysis that involves the assessment or deconstruction of shot, lighting, setting, performance, sound, editing, plot, and narrative. The chapter focuses on the close textual analysis of an early scene from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, which occurs at approximately 7 minutes into the film that shows Leon's cold-blooded shooting of Holden. It describes Blade Runner's scene that begins with a long, panoramic aerial shot of the futuristic metropolis.

Institutions and Authors

This chapter discusses Ridley Scott's Blade Runner as a textbook case of how the contemporary Hollywood studio system works or rather fails to work properly. It explores Blade Runner as a case study of budgetary problems, falling outs, rows on the shoot, sneak screenings, sackings, final cuts, and director's cuts. It also analyzes how Blade Runner's commercials are privileged over all other artistic and professional considerations where filmmaking is concerned. The chapter mentions The Deer Hunterproducer Michael Deeley, who offered the Blade Runner project to Scott. It recounts how Scott officially signed on to make the Blade Runner on 21 February 1980.