Bladerunner_Frankenstein

The respective Romantic and Post Modern contexts of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner lead them to share a similar critique of an overweening rationalism that purports to be ‘progress’. Due to its bleaker context, Blade Runner amplifies its critique; yet for the most part they follow a common trajectory of meaning, exploring humankinds usurping of the role of creator, the displacement of nature and the unseating of the human condition. However their historical differences lead them to radically diverge in their treatment of the value of art in responding to this crisis of hubristic reason. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein explores how traditional views on creation were displaced by the Enlightenment. Viktor Frankenstein is quoted as possessing a “fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature”. The implication is that Frankenstein is usurping the power of a pantheistic God. Shelley also uses literary allusion to Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a poem which Shelley admits was very influential in shaping her young mind, to strengthen her argument. Like Frankenstein, Coleridge’s Mariner is eternally punished, and the chaos caused by the monster represents a message against the enlightenment ideology. Clearly, Shelly wants us to realise that to betray God is to wreak havoc on the harmonious structure of life. In Frankenstein, Nature is being displaced; the binary of industrialised city versus harmonious nature is constantly portrayed. “Insert technique”. Through Frankenstein, we can see that nature is highly valued in the text as a redemptive agent “No one can feel more deeply than he does the beauties of nature... still to have the power of elevating his soul from earth” Viktor through creating an aesthetic abomination superseded the role of nature. Yet he finds refuge in nature. True to her Romantic roots Shelley pays homage to the sublime in nature with beautiful visual imagery “Insert quote here”. Shelley is a true romantic in the sense that she sees nature as a haven from the problems of her world. The fall from grace of the enlightened philosophies of the French Revolution into ‘la Reign du Terreur’ had caused disillusion in man and society among the Romantics. Shelley along with her contemporaries flees to the harmony of nature and seeks refuge in sentimentality from a world ever removed by rationality. The movie Blade Runner, a genre mash up directed by Ridley Scott, deals with the same issues as Frankenstein, in a specifically twentieth century context. Post-World War Two, human society was forced to deal with the collapse of traditional social values and certainties, as well as the regression of culture. The society that Scott grew up in was centralised around narrow minded scientific development. This fuelled various the cold war and the subsequent arms race between America and Russia. Scientific expansion also led to the fear of global nuclear holocaust that is depicted in film. Dr Eldon Tyrell, the tyrannical head of the android-manufacturing Tyrell Corporation, represents this new world order. He not only usurps God, but, unlike the regretful Frankenstein, he willingly adopts the position of a deity. At the beginning of the film, we see a close up shot of Tyrell’s eye. Hauntingly reminiscent of Foucault’s Panopticon, it surveys like a god the bleak world that it has created. Tyrell’s glasses are also a symbol of his scientific tunnel vision, demonstrating that he is only capable of understanding matters of scientific progress, and caught up in the hubris of science, he neglects the regression of culture in the world. Tyrell’s lack of true vision has led to the totalising displacement of Nature. The panoramic scope of the first shot depicts a completely dystopian society, devoid of any form of nature, in which one could seek refuge. The absence of light is a constant technique, used to display the loss of hope in a post nuclear war setting. The Film Noir genre as a whole clearly reflects the exhaustion of contemporary ideologies and their inability to escape, in Henry James’ apt phrase, from the “Imagination of disaster” that has dominated so much of the 21st century. Unlike Shelley, Scott has seen industrialisation cause two world wars and the death of over one hundred million human beings. He has also seen the atomic bomb utterly destroy the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because of this, Blade Runner places nature as a lost element, and one that has been acquitted of any role of salvation. In both texts, we are shown that rational progress has unseated human nature. Frankenstein questions what it means to be human through the storyline of the monster: "My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy, and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change”. This quote shows an exemplification of a traditional romantic view, the innocence of the child. The monster is born benevolent; yet he is turned malevolent by society’s superficial hatred of him. The monster in a sense, adopts the superficial views that society has on him, and becomes exactly what they expect of him. Shelley is reaffirming John Locke’s theory of Tabula Rasa, the epistemological thesis that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception. Scott explores the question within the Post Modern literary movement. The commoditisation of the human is seen through Detective Bryant. He refers to Zhora as a ‘Standard pleasure model’, indicating that she is no more than an industrial identity. He quotes “If you’re not police, you’re little people”, Bryant is the epitomization of modernism and its association with identity, authority, and certainty. He strikes similarities between Gordon Gecko in ‘Wall Street’, and his unmoving certainties that greed and capitalism is good. These qualities can also be bestowed on Rick Deckard, whom Gaff quotes "You are the blade, blade runner" in Japanese. This metaphor suggests that Deckard is modernistic in that he has no individual thought and is merely a tool for his superiors. Post modernism was a reaction against the certainties of the modernistic movement; it turns to empathy and individuality in the evaluation of the Human. The origami unicorn symbolises the possibility that Deckard might be a Replicant. This coincides with his gain of a post modernistic sense of humanity, a form of self reflexivity that we see in his final statement “I’m finished”. As he listens to Roy Batty’s final lament on mortality, the camera cuts to a close up on Deckard’s face, it is brimming with empathy and a new found perspective, which reinforces his gain of humanity. The Replicants are inherently metaphors for a Post Modern account of humanity. They are individuals as seen in Pris’ quote “I think therefore I am” which refers to thought on a reflexive and critical level separating the Replicants, from the biological humans. The thought that Deckard might be a Replicant occurs not because he has lost any humanity; it is a symbol for his gain of humanity. The thematic similarities of the two texts are belied by a fundamental difference in how they concern the role of art in representing the disaster of ‘rational progress. Shelley reflects the thoughts of her husband, Percy Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, in her ambitious value of ‘the role of the poet’ to redeem the problems of the world. In Frankenstein through the use of Didactic Catharsis she is able to bestow an underlying allegory that one should “always preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb tranquillity. Death is the element Shelley uses to bring out Catharsis, a common technique in Shakespearian tragedy and the Gothic Genre. The Cleansing process is a vital technique, in which audiences reflect upon the failure of the protagonist. Ultimately, however, the negative emotions are ultimately purged, because Viktor’s eternal suffering is an affirmation of human values rather than a despairing denial of them. Blade Runner does not seek to purge the emotions; it is essentially a critique of the totalising ambitions of art itself. In a reaction against totalisation, Scott uses two main techniques; The use of ‘street speak’, which is a concoction of Austro- Hungarian, Japanese and English, shows the confusion and uncertain way of representing art, and the mash up of genres with sci-fi, film noir, and hardboiled detective shows the need for fragmentation., Scott does this because he believes it represents “more truly the realities of life”. We are exposed to this predominantly in the Vesper Sequence, in which Rick Deckard, while searching for the missing Zhora, analyses a photograph cherished by the Replicants Leon, an analysis that turns on the presence of a convex mirror at the centre of the image. The mirror has a special significance because it clearly does not belong in the stingy, base apartments typical of the Film noir genre. The photograph alludes to the mirror seen in Jan van Eyck’s famous painting, The Arnolfini Portrait, a portrait that Scott was exposed to while working at the national gallery of art in London. Scott uses both mirrors as signs of the artistic self consciousness. By spotting a sleeping Zhora through the convex mirror, Deckard is able find what he is searching for. Without the convex mirror and the ability to see things in a ‘different way’, Deckard would not have found any answer to his questions. –The mirror is Symbolism of the gratifications of self reflexivity in art. Through analysing the meaning of both texts one begins to understand that context is vital in understanding more completely the values and purposes of pieces of literature. They are different in that severity of the critique in Blade Runner is augmented; yet strangely enough the two texts explore similar accounts of meaning in the usurping of the creator, the displacement of nature and the unseating of human nature. However, in their critique, their thematic similarities are countered by an intrinsic antithesis in how they concern the role of art in representing the disaster of ‘rational’ progress. The differences are a result of the respective contexts in which each text was produced.