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elieves if you go in disappointed and come out surprised then you’ll be a happy bunny. If not then nothing lost. But there’s a chance, a slight chance, that this could be possible. A whole generation gets their Blade Runner, many more get that chance to hold hands with their loved ones and dive back into Los Angeles 2019 or 2023 or wherever Ridley wants to take us. This is Blade Runner, and the aftermath of Blade Runner has been a long, torturous ride. If it weren’t for VHS, the Director’s Cut and luck then I wouldn’t be writing this today, there wouldn’t be any point. The aftermath of Blade Runner includes the ‘here we go again’ and it’s fun to think how that alignment is already happening. Daryl Hannah has been arrested literally as I’m writing this book, Rutgur just got off a very fun grindhouse feature called Hobo With A Shotgun, Ridley is tidying up Prometheus and Harrison is more than in shape. It sounds right, doesn’t it? It becomes scarily right when you consider the current Philip K. Dick Book Club that Hollywood has set up. The Adjustment Bureau with Matt Damon and other equally attractive and wellpaid actors/actresses all went at it to create a very competent blockbuster. It’s loosely based on Adjustment Team, one of my favourite K. Dick short stories, but then there’s many other films based on Phil’s legacy. There’s Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Screamers (Second Variety), Total Recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger(We Can Remember It For You Wholesale), Imposter (Imposter), Minority Report with shinyface Tom Cruise (The Minority Report), Paycheck (Paycheck) A Scanner Darkly (A Scanner Darkly), Next with crazyface Nicolas Cage (The Golden Cage), The Adjustment Bureau (Adjustment Team) and many more actually. In fact, Total Recall is getting a remake with Colin Farell and the short story King of the Elves is being made into a feature film. That’s not counting the Blade Runner version releases too. So Philip K. Dick is in the air. Hollywood has fallen in love with this author again, and that’s from the last thirty years of films. I can’t think of any other author with that many adapted stories, at least not science-fiction wise. It’s proven his work can be commercially viable, and suddenly the stars align some more. Blade Runner’s universe is more bankable than ever, the aftermath is ready to turn into something different. An added legacy, another chip on the shoulder. Blade Runner has become such a conscious image of pop culture it’s fed into generations of filmmakers. Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, Guillermo Del Toro, Zack Snyder (ugh) among so many filmmakers have discovered this film and fed it into their careers as filmmakers. Blade Runner is a film that exist amongst infinite possibilities and realities and versions and interpretations, it’s endless, you don’t have to look far to see some Philip K. Dick in Inception or the Blade Runner look in Batman
Begins. There’s even some pacing of Ridley’s world injected into the likes of Inglourious Basterds, and that dark stuffy atmosphere persists throughout all of Del Toro’s work. Blade Runner has become as much about the future as it has about the present. With this comes an interesting thought about the aftermath of Blade Runner: did it scare people enough to change? Well... why is it that Blade Runner is still relevant in every single way today? Why is more relevant than ever before? Blade Runner’s metaphysical ideas and all that good stuff have carried over... in Blade Runner. It’s an interesting thought actually, did filmmakers need to keep the same messages and show them to new generations and teach them about the world around them? Or was Blade Runner’s role already filled by Blade Runner? The look and feel of Ridley Scott’s world has already infected science-fiction cinema for decades, so why not take the next step and take those ideas? Maybe we live in a time that considers such things as too thoughtful for modern audiences; maybe we just don’t need it. The aftermath of Blade Runner may be in fact more interesting than Blade Runner itself because it teaches us that generations of filmmakers have used the same visual flavour but... the same ideas? Nolan sets his epics in parallel realities with dream machines, Tarantino is goddamn Tarantino and Del Toro loves the fantasy genre. But then again, the Hamlet example, Nolan actually managed to inject some post-9/11 commentary into his superhero masterpiece of The Dark Knight, Tarantino certainly played with some stuff in Pulp Fiction and Del Toro might follow an extreme Hamlet route. I don’t get the Blade Runner feel about modern films. I do get incredibly excited by the above director’s work and many others, but I don’t get that raw proposition of metaphysical ideas. I wonder if it’s because of the influence of technology and other media all turning films into this strictly ‘escapist’ medium. They’re not exactly ‘expressionist’ given they’re not interactive, that of course doesn’t make them inferior, but once in a while a film does come out of its screen. Once in a while it knocks you on the head and makes you think. I haven’t had a good think in a long while. The years after Blade Runner belong to the political stirring and the true wrath of Reaganomics and Conservatism bearing their fruits in the Western World’s political spectrum. Maybe that’s why more challenging media was finding commercial success, but here’s an interesting thought, was Blade Runner responsible for that commercial success? Were those media reacting to the times or were they pushing out the content they had wanted to release for a long while? I’m not sure. If one thing is for sure, it’s that Blade Runner’s aftermath was commercially jittery at first and then a real success and this might tell us more about the Eighties than we think. People were indeed less keen to embrace scary science-fiction but they warmed more to it throughout the decade as those prophecies came true. It’s quite disheartening really how it took the actual events to unfold to actually sell the ideas affiliated with
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Written and Edited By: Nathan Hardi
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INTRODUCTION Blade Runner is consid
Page 6 and 7: SECTION I: IDEAS I don’t think it
Page 8 and 9: (1.1) DECKARD Any film, video-game
Page 10 and 11: some of his wit. Yet, Blade Runner
Page 12 and 13: Perhaps he’s on the edge of his h
Page 14 and 15: about immigration, but he is also t
Page 16 and 17: he’s using it to go in and kill Z
Page 18 and 19: dependent he is upon her love now.
Page 20 and 21: Deckard is not a powerful character
Page 22 and 23: Roy Batty kills the last remaining
Page 24 and 25: What about his humanity? Well, as c
Page 26 and 27: Deckard appear so inhuman at the st
Page 28 and 29: system in any way. Roy, as evil and
Page 30 and 31: Whereas Sheep is definitely centred
Page 32 and 33: SECTION II: BEYOND 1980s. This was
Page 34 and 35: for Star Wars and Blade Runner. The
Page 36 and 37: cityscape scene from Episode Two. A
Page 38 and 39: Superhero movies aren’t exactly s
Page 40 and 41: eal first ‘ideas’ film that led
Page 42 and 43: notes. There was a great rusty feel
Page 44 and 45: with ideas and philosophies and not
Page 46 and 47: I mentioned the Hamlet comparison e
Page 48 and 49: The biggest grossing film of 1982 h
Page 50 and 51: opposite to what E.T said, but the
Page 52 and 53: games that was an inevitability I c
Page 54 and 55: (2.5) AFTERMATH Blade Runner was a
Page 58 and 59: those events. Blade Runner is undou
Page 60 and 61: SECTION III: SYMBOLS Memories. Is t
Page 62 and 63: Batty takes this upon himself to ri
Page 64 and 65: Coming away from the more abstract,
Page 66 and 67: give more evidence and integrity to
Page 68 and 69: Tyrell is then rewarded by having h
Page 70 and 71: a family, now he is only Roy Batty.
Page 72 and 73: through the ceiling, hangs off stee
Page 74 and 75: Blade Runner does not argue with re
Page 76 and 77: (3.3) TRAGEDY "When one man dies it
Page 78 and 79: thought I had won Ridley's agreemen
Page 80 and 81: Except the original Star Wars trilo
Page 82 and 83: the extreme of sympathy. Reduced, e
Page 84 and 85: to the Replicants. He knows what he
Page 86 and 87: (3.5) GAFF Who or what is Gaff? As
Page 88 and 89: common culture there is some humani
Page 90 and 91: (4.1) EAST AND WEST I write this at
Page 92 and 93: acist or other discriminatory attit
Page 94 and 95: physically into Deckard, to carry o
Page 96 and 97: (4.2) THE CAPITALIST MACHINE Blade
Page 98 and 99: parties but that he can watch them.
Page 100 and 101: Deckard recognizes this, eventually
Page 102 and 103: glory days of almost 1920s ‘rugge
Page 104 and 105: they fundamentally destroy it and l
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(4.4) TODAY Today. As I type this,
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capitalism. The docile populace see
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SECTION V: EVOLUTION Blade Runner e
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females who use their pure sexualit
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I respect Barr’s interpretation,
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and indeed the placement of women a
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(5.2) THE NEXT STEP “THE NEXUS 6
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Deckard spits in his face there’s
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Final Cut whether Blade Runner was
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trace of sarcasm from Holden. He’
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CONCLUSION When I took on this proj
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Kerman, J.B (1997 edit
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Nathan Hardisty is
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