Study Questions: Week Seven

The Distrust of Institutional Authority

Blade Runner (1982)

Dirty Harry (1972)

The genre of science fiction, which its admirers often prefer to describe as "speculative fiction," has traditionally taken contemporary social, political, and philosophical concerns, a culture's hopes and fears, and projected them into a world removed in space or time. The creators of these alternative worlds use them to speculate on the fate of human society should these hopes and fears be fully realized. Consequently, science fiction narratives have almost always fallen into one of two categories: utopian visions of a future in which technology serves a society where moral and social ideals have become the norm; and dystopian visions of a future in which technology has undermined democratic ideals and created a society which is both morally corrupt and intellectually debased. The first category includes such classics as Thomas Moore's Utopia (1515), Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933), and (with some differences) Independence Day. In the second category we can find Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), George Orwell's 1984 (1948), and the films we will be considering in this section of the course: Blade Runner and Robocop. What we want to examine are the ways in which these films comment on the trends in contemporary life.

1. Why is Blade Runner set in Los Angeles rather than in Omaha or Atlanta or (heaven forbid) Baltimore? What does the establishing shot of the city's skyline say about the state of urban America in 2019 and about the promise of technological progress?

2. How does the picture of life on the L.A. streets and the widely used pidgen language "cityspeak" -- composed of Japanese, Spanish, and German call attention to the anxieties aroused by the new global market place, immigration, and a falling standard of living? Why these three languages?

3. In what ways are the Nexus 6 replicants and Murphy (Peter Weller) the robocop similar. How do the characters from both films suggest the threats to human identity posed by a society dominated by huge corporations?

4. The camera in Blade Runner moving slowly up the wall of the gigantic Tyrell Corporation headquarters are used to emphasize the power of the corporations and their relation to the society they dominate. What is that relationship? How it the same relationship reflected in the police inspector warning Deckard, "If you're not a cop, you're little people?

5. If Tyrell (Joseph Turkel) is portrayed as ruthlessly exploitive, how are the "little people" portrayed? Consider Murphy's treatment by Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith) and his gang. Or the styles of life on the streets of Los Angeles.

6. Blade Runner is filled with examples of doubling which comment on the parallels between replicants and human beings, the "little people" and the powerful, between a brutish contemporary reality and an inner world of memory. Think of the climactic battle between Deckard (Harrison Ford) and Batty (Rutger Hauer) in which both have disabled hands; between pairs of lovers Pris (Daryl Hannah) and Batty, Deckard and Rachel (Sean Young), and Sebastian (William Sanderson) and Pris; and between the buildings inhabited by Tyrell and Sebastian. How does this doubling ask viewers to consider what it means to be and to behave as a human being?

7. In what ways might Deckard and Batty be regarded as tools of the Tyrell corporation?

8. In what ways does Rachel exemplify a common theme: the tendency, in modern society, to blur the distinction between humans and machines (remember how frequently the human mind is described as a computer today)?

9. In Blade Runner amemory plays a prominent role. Why are the Nexus Six replicants given memories? What are the nature of these memories? Think of the early sequence where the replicant is interrogated by an OCP doctor? Why does Batty's memory of Pris keep him from killing the crippled Deckard?

10. The mass media is omnipresent in Blade Runner. The garish advertising signs which light the smog-shrouded city of Los Angeles call attention to Sony and other television and filmmaking companies. In what ways does this news program satirize our TV news and corporate advertising?

13. There are two versions of Blade Runner's ending. In one, Deckard and Rachel flee the city to the green world of the Pacific Northwest, and we learn that Rachel has no termination date. In a director's cut, released only on video, the film ends with the couple in Los Angeles and a very uncertain future. How do these endings change the meaning of the film? That is how do they offer different estimates of the prospects of a future America?