Blade Runner and the Postmodern: A Reconsideration

The ambivalence implicit in the two versions of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982; "Director's Cut," 1992) echoes the diverse and divided critical responses to the film(s). Indeed, this film about authenticity and simulation has been so thoroughly interpreted and rewritten-by even its director-that a naïve return to the "original" is, perhaps fittingly, untenable. This essay does not advance a new reading, but rather takes as its subject the ideologies of interpretation evident in criticism of Blade Runner, particularly its problematic encounter with postmodernism. In hindsight, this encounter testifies to fundamental ambiguities in the postmodernist enterprise, ambiguities with significant social and political implications. I will argue that postmodern accounts of Blade Runner depend on a series of strategic exclusions. Such accounts effectively displace not only modernist readings of the film, but also questions of narration, genre, popularity, and the specificity of the film medium. Lost amid the theoretical battlefield of the modern and postmodern are the film's material and ideological contexts; Blade Runner's cultural intelligibility is blurred by the modern/postmodern exchange. This critical impasse underscores the troubled politics of postmodernism as it confronts commercial narrative and other forms of popular culture.

Roughly speaking, critical responses to Blade Runner fall on either side of a modern/postmodern line. Postmodernist accounts diametrically oppose reading strategies dependent on conventional aesthetic notions (narrative, character, structure, reference, metaphor, symbol, etc.) that collectively we might term modernist. These two approaches entail radically different positions on the nature and function of interpretation. Modernist readings presuppose the film's structural and semiotic depth, in stark contrast to the postmodernist emphasis on its surfaces. Some modernist interpretations discern Utopian fantasies of redemption and transcendence embedded in the film's apocalyptic veneer. A postmodernist approach, by contrast, emphasizes the film's resistance to the interpretive impulse, its voiding of symbolic, utopian, and narrative meaning. The depthless postmodern surface incorporates fragments of once-meaningful codes and conventions that are now blankly cited without context or referent. The result is not a coherent aesthetic structure but an opaque and resistant pastiche.

Interestingly, the two versions of the film document a similar ambivalence about narration, depth, and Utopian potential. The significant changes in the 1992 "Director's Cut" place the "original" in quotation marks, summoning in the process the question of filmic authorship and the much-discussed relation between the cinematic auteur and commercial film production. Furthermore, by foregrounding the question of authenticity, the phenomenon of the "Director's Cut" restages a central concern of both postmodernism and the 1982 film. One might argue that the "Director's Cut" functions as a kind of postmodernist reading of the "original," one that likewise suppresses narrative cues and utopian intimations. Ridley Scott's 1992 version omits the studio-enforced "happy ending" and Harrison Ford's voice-over narration, and introduces the chic postmodern suggestion-via the unicorn dream sequence-that Deckard himself might be a replicant. At the same time, however, the "Director's Cut" is also a modernist gesture. In particular, the voice-overs are a noir genre determinant, and their erasure lessens the film's legibility as commercial narrative in favor of modernist indeterminacy-a tendency supported by the "new," more ambiguous ending.

In fact the voice-overs are a touchstone of postmodernist readings. From the perspective of pastiche, the voice-overs are exemplary instances of cultural citation, blank allusions to an incongruous noir sensibility. The voice-overs and "happy ending" are either conventional or opaque, egregious or essential, depending on the critic's vantage point. The 1982 and 1992 versions of Blade Runner thus establish a foundational tension that fuels both modern and postmodern interpretations. Moreover, the genealogy of the dual texts and ensuing critical division center on the problem of cultural legibility and popular narration. What the modern and postmodern positions share is profound skepticism about the meaningfulness of conventions, codes, and other building-blocks of commercial narrative-a skepticism mirrored by the "Director's Cut" in its distrust of the film's "original" commercial basis.

On closer examination, the polarized responses to Blade Runner may reflect an elemental duality at the film's core. The differences between the two versions are suggestive and symptomatic but not extensive; divergent modern and postmodern readings refer to nearly the same set of raw materials. Can a single film embody the modern and postmodern at the same time? Aesthetically, many aspects of Blade Runner initially signal modernism: the juxtaposition of the old and the new, the dystopian vision of the urbanized future, the persistent doubling of copy and original epitomized in the two heroes and their distinct narratives, and the anguished redemption of the human through heroic suffering, sacrifice, and disalienation. These diverse elements are so seamlessly sutured that in another sense the film seems almost classical: in Los Angeles 2019, the Blade Runner Deckard is coaxed out of retirement to hunt a group of escaped replicants (cyborgs with emotions, intellect, lifespan, and even memory), led by Roy, a Christ-ciim-Oedipus figure (played by Rutger Hauer somewhere between Hamlet and the Waffen SS) who is out to meet his maker, the corporate genius Dr. Tyrell. In the course of his investigation Deckard falls in love with Rachel, Tyrell's assistant, who with her upswept hairstyle and ostentatious fur coat closely resembles a 1940s movie star. Rachel gradually discovers her memories have been implanted and that she is, in fact, a replicant herself. Meanwhile, Deckard has "retired" all the replicants except Roy, who, knowing that his four-year life-span is at an end, kills Tyrell by gouging out his eyes, spares Deckard's life in a final act of mercy, and dies on a rooftop as an almost absurdly symbolic white dove flies from his hand. Rachel and Deckard are reunited and, in the 1982 version, escape to a pastoral landscape north of Los Angeles.