Hollywood Utopia

214 Hollywood Utopia
Eco-Closure
Sobchack pinpoints most precisely where to place Blade Runner: poised at the
meeting point of high modernism’s focus on time and postmodernism’s
concentration upon space:
On the one hand its mise-en-scène valorizes space for its capacity to accumulate and
conserve past experience as a future present of tangible things. On the other, the
narrative elegizes temporal memory, its invisible flow, its ephemerality, its lack of
tangibility
(Sobchack 1997: 272).
Blade Runner, as a postmodern text, most certainly ‘valorises space’ and ‘elegises
temporal memory’ as Sobchack suggests. However, the conjunction of time and
space, as projected through closure, produces the most explicit site of an ecological
agenda aided by a form of remediated excess. Focus on closure has remained a
preoccupation with film critics generally. For example, David Lyon argues that
omitting the ‘return to nature’ denouement in the director’s cut version of the film
‘simply leaves one with increased apocalyptic unease’ and pessimistically wonders
‘are decay and death the terminal postmodern condition?’ (Lyon 1994: 3). The
audience must also ‘work harder’ to appreciate the narrative complexity of this
version, having no mediated voice-over explication. Instead, audiences are left with
the non-diegetic (remembered) evocative words of an otherwise conventional
policeman to articulate the most profound voice-over statement of the film -‘Too
bad she won’t live . . . but then again, who does?’ - implying and reinforcing the
necessity of mortality and calling into question Deckard’s human status.
Essentially this can be read as a paean to human, cyborg and replicant mortality
which is counterpointed by the frailty of all creative forces, especially ‘human art’,
as represented by the origami paper figure of the unicorn discarded on the floor by
Gaff the policeman. This is also evoked by the mythic dream of the white unicorn
(another fantasy hybrid figure), which can be read as symbolic of both imaginative
otherness and escape from oppression.
The therapeutic closing moments in the film (re)mediating a form of sublime raw
nature is totally at odds with the dominant urban future corrupted by ‘acid rain’,
decaying infrastructure and environmental pollution generally, as expressed
through the claustrophobic noirish aesthetic. The use of conventional
representations of an idyllic environment helps to construct nature as fulfilling the
psychological function of mediator and exemplar for its protagonists, who have
finally accepted the ephemeral nature of their existence and the strength to
experience such transformation. The excessive dysfunctionalism of the dystopian
mise-en-scène, which dominates the film, becomes displaced by this sublime