Review of Scott Bukatman´s. Blade Runner

BFI Modern Classics Series. Indiana UP

 

Use as background  information for a review of Blade Runner

 

In the first place, Bukatman declines the inherently losing gambit of trying to argue that Blade Runner is a "classic," opting instead to contend that the film does a number of interesting things and to connect those aspects to larger issues in sf, sf film, film, and the culture at large. Indeed, Bukatman returns again and again not to Blade Runner's classical status, but to its status as a site of "delirious" effects and affect. When we remember that delirium is defined as a "temporary state of mental confusion and clouded consciousness," a state of uncontrolled excitement or emotion "characterized by anxiety, disorientation, hallucinations, delusions," the singular appropriateness of this word choice becomes clear. The delirious technological excesses of special effects in sf films in general and in Blade Runner in particular, the delirious nature of urban space as constructed in Blade Runner and other city films, the delirious refiguration of urban space to cyberspace, and the delirious questioning of distinctions between the real and the artificial, the human and the inhuman, are all recurrent concerns in Bukatman's superb discussion of this exhilarating and perplexing film.

Blade Runner is a film "all about vision," Bukatman argues, quickly establishing that his concern is equally with vision as a theme within the film's semblance and with vision as we watch the film. Accordingly, this drama about vision is also a drama of vision and takes its place in a genre of science-fiction films that is itself more centered on vision than are most other genres. "The most significant 'meanings' of science fiction films," Bukatman suggests, "are often found in their visual organisation and their emphasis on perception and 'perceptual selves.'" Continually thrusting their spectators into "new spaces that are alien and technologically determined," sf films serve in technological culture to construct an important "space of accommodation to an intensely technological existence." Within such a visual context, the brilliance of Blade Runner, Bukatman holds, is "in its visual density," as director Ridley Scott's "layering" effect of accumulating detail in every corner of the frame (Scott calls a film a "700-layer cake") makes the film "a total environment that one inhabits in real time." Quite beyond its troubling story of humans and replicants, of humanity and inhumanity, quite beyond its numerous references to and emphasis on eyes within its semblance, Blade Runner gives us a striking visual environment, "an infinity of surfaces to be encountered and explored." As Bukatman's Introduction sums it up:

Like the best science fiction stories and city films, Blade Runner incorporates at once the magisterial gaze of the panorama, the sublime obscurity of the phantasmagoria and the shifting fields of the kaleidoscope. Blade Runner's elaborate mise-en-scène and probing cameras create a tension that is fundamental to a period of inexorably advancing technological change. The inescapable and immersive city becomes a synecdoche for, and distillation of, all these unsettling technologies that continue to pervade lived experience. The film's aesthetic and its narrative underpinnings magnify and enhance the admixture of anxiety and delirium inherent in its experience. Its instability induces the epistemological and ontological uncertainties--the crises of knowing and being--that it narrates and theorizes. Seeing is everything in Blade Runner, but it guarantees absolutely nothing.

From such an intriguing opening, Bukatman's study organizes itself into three main parts dealing with "Filming," "The Metropolis," and "Replicants and Mental Life." Each of these primary categories is further divided into seven or eight sub-categories, with the result that Bukatman's discussion is both easy to follow and an effective critical parallel to Scott's visual layering in the film itself. While Billson's The Thing and French's The Terminator felt like expanded reviews, Bukatman's Blade Runner feels like a major book that has been expertly pared down. Indeed, an index to this study (books in the BFI Modern Classics series do not offer indexes) would be a Ballardian treat, implying worlds of discourse, only one of which would be focused exclusively on Blade Runner.

In detailing Blade Runner's pre-production and filming history Bukatman works from a savvy understanding of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) through a series of would-be producers and scriptwriters as the novel lurched toward the screen. Ridley Scott eventually introduced screenwriter Hampton Fancher and then David Peoples to the visual example of Metal Hurlant, leading to influence from comic artists such as Moebius, Philippe Druillet, and Angus McKie. Drawing from films noir, production design by Lawrence Paull, the retrofitting aesthetic of futurist Syd Mead, and artists ranging from Hogarth to Hopper, Scott fashioned the film's stunning look, at once an evocation of an appealing techno-sublime and of a threatening tech noir. Bukatman does a particularly fine job of describing Douglas Trumbull's special-effects work for the film and Jordan Cronenweth's cinematography. Speculating about reasons for Blade Runner's initially disappointing critical and public reception, Bukatman closes this first section with a brief account of the film's eventual rise to critical, commercial, and cult success, the release of the Director's Cut in 1992, and the continuing expansion of Blade Runner's influence.

It is in his second section, "The Metropolis," that Bukatman makes some of his most original and most provocative contributions to our understanding of this film. This is, after all, familiar territory for him, refocusing some of the central concerns of his excellent Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Duke, 1993). In this section centered on Blade Runner's construction of the city, Bukatman offers as an example of the film's shift of emphasis from urban space toward cyberspace the scene in which Deckard uses a computer to move into the space depicted in a replicant's photograph. This scene, apart from being "a most hypnotic meditation on cinematic power," also takes its place in a larger representational crisis in which Bukatman argues that both sf and sf film have struggled "to construct a new position from which humans could interface with the global, yet hidden, realm of data circulation; a new identity to occupy the emerging electronic realm." Blade Runner presents terminal identity displacing urban identity and the traditional subject itself as the city-state becomes the cybernetic state.

Covering the now well-recognized reciprocal relationship between postmodernism and cyberpunk (and between this film and the dominant issues of postmodern cultural criticism) and moving to consider "the alienated spaces" of hardboiled detective fiction and film noir, Bukatman describes Blade Runner's "Dark City" of "mean streets, moral ambiguities and an air of irresolution" as "an almost literal Inferno," compared to the dystopian purgatory in noir. The film's retrofitting of noir narrative onto sf concerns with human definition might even spur us, Bukatman suggests, to think of retrofitting "as a useful--and convenient--metaphor" not only for Blade Runner as a whole, but for science fiction itself. "If the genre often combines speculation with an uncanny resistance to change," he reasons, "this can be understood as an unavoidable part of its retrofitted nature."

Bukatman's discussion of Blade Runner's Dark City then yields to a much more surprising consideration of the film's representation of the Bright City, its utopian face. Following Rem Koolhaas's consideration of New York as "a delirious space masquerading behind a rational facade of gridded streets and high technology," Bukatman asks what if the positive value of Blade Runner's city actually derives "from its status as an irrational space?" Invoking the bright, carnivalesque, chaotic "city" of Coney Island as a delirious ancestor of Blade Runner's futuristic Los Angeles and of aspects of cinema itself, Bukatman considers possibly positive aspects of urban congestion as a provider of kaleidoscopic varieties of experience, and he suggests that cinema can play an important role in our recognition and celebration of this Bright City. The essence of cinema is motion and Blade Runner's "incessant movement through urban space" can be profitably considered, Bukatman argues, in terms of Wolfgang Schivelbusch's concept of "panoramic perception," one result of technology's ability to put visual perception in motion. Cinema extends the experience of panoramic perception from Schivelbusch's train riders to Bukatman's film-goers--Blade Runner's audience.

For that audience, Blade Runner's "urban experience of inexhaustible fluidity, endless passage and infinite perceptibility" provides what Bukatman terms "a utopian vision...as distinct from a vision of utopia." The early sequence in which Deckard flies through the city in a police spinner illustrates this phenomenon, reminding Bukatman of the famous trolley ride in Sunrise (1927), "perhaps the most profound expression of panoramic perception in the history of the cinema." Against such panoramic moments, Blade Runner presents equally striking camera tracking "through endless levels of scale," moving into as well as across the spaces of the city (as Deckard does with the photo), exploring its "fractal geography." Bukatman concludes his focus on the representation of the city in Blade Runner by considering whether it may actually be more modernist than postmodern--possibly as much a New York film in the tradition of Lang's Metropolis as it is a film of the quintessentially postmodern Los Angeles.

Bukatman's final section turns to Blade Runner's story--to issues relating to the adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and to new issues of character and theme developed in the film. Yet even in this discussion of "Replicants and Mental Life," Bukatman maintains his focus on Blade Runner's film-specific strengths, tying its story of synthetic humans not just to other synthetic-human and definition-of-human films, but also to ways in which cinema is itself an animator of human simulacra. In addressing ways in which Blade Runner develops Dick's central oppositions between Human/Android and Human/Inhuman, Bukatman also explores the film's cyborg politics (a retro-fitted category following Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto") as well as its gender and racial politics. Bukatman emphasizes ways in which Blade Runner desta-bilizes its apparent racial and gender categories, confounding "simple definitions and distinctions" by refusing "to naturalise" its victims as either women or blacks.

Replicants in Blade Runner are programmed with ersatz memories emblem-ized in their omnipresent photographs. This externalization and commodification of memory usurps history both here and in other sf films, leading Bukatman to a brief but valuable meditation on the nature of constructed memory. The value of Blade Runner and of much of Dick's writing, concludes Bukatman, "is that it makes us unreal--we are forced, or at least encouraged, to confront our own constructedness, and by confronting our selves, to remake them."

Finally, Bukatman sidesteps the inevitable question of whether Deckard is a replicant, persuasively arguing that the ambiguity of his status--the result of a crafted double reading--is what is crucial to the film's take on what it means to be human. Moreover, we are reminded that we focus on Deckard's status at the risk of overlooking or undervaluing Roy Batty's exuberant performance of self. Terming Batty a "perfect denizen of the modern city," Bukatman urges us to pay more attention to him as a "figure of resistance and play" who gleefully transgresses "the given topographies of urban space." Batty's fluid personality may be crucial to "the continuing struggle to exist in the bright dark spaces of the metropolis." Even when addressing the condition of the replicants, the question of their humanity or inhumanity, Bukatman insists that we see Blade Runner as a film, as a science-fiction film, and as a city film.