Will Brooker (ed),
The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic.
Wallflower Press, London & New York, 2005.
ISBN: 1 904764 30 4
240pp
£16.99 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Wallflower Press)

As editor Will Brooker points out in the introduction to this collection of essays, Blade Runner is one of the most talked about, debated, and analysed films of all time. Marketed as a detective/action movie with the star of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, its bleak depiction of a dystopian future and its somber meditation of what it means to be human confounded mainstream audiences, and the film appeared as if it was to be yet another failed blockbuster. But this was a studio film with an arthouse sensibility, melding together the visual impact that larger budgets can allow with the kinds of esoteric and contemplative narratives that are best served by what used to be independent productions. The ambiguities that arose from this conflation (or schizophrenia, as Sean Redmond notes in this volume) would not allow the film to die, and the film slowly acquired massive interest by both fans and academics alike. The fans debated the incongruities contained within the film, such as how many replicants were actually on the loose and whether protagonist Deckard was a replicant himself, while academics analysed the postmodern aesthetic and the film’s themes of what it means to be human.

Will Brooker, the editor of The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic, understands that academia does not need yet another volume that analyses the primary text, but that its place within a wider network of intertexts and debates warrants further attention. Several chapters of this volume do offer, to varying degrees of success, new readings of the film – Deborah Jermyn’s reappraisal of the role of the character Rachel as femme fatale is especially enlightening – but it is most effective in locating the film as an intertext, or one part of a jigsaw puzzle that can never be completed. This perpetual textual construction requires the book to be in its own way schizophrenic, re-interpreting the film and its cultural context from various points of view; the cinema of Philip K. Dick, the video-game, the fans, identities and ‘the city’. Just as the film itself generates constant debate, so too the book simply adds another, albeit contemporary, layer of meaning that creates further discussion without offering definitive answers. In fact, one of the book’s major strengths is that sometimes even its own contributors offer differing and contradictory interpretations of this seminal text.

For example, Jermyn’s re-reading of the role of the character Rachel offers a new and insightful argument – that the character’s traditionally understood role within the narrative as femme fatale is too simplistic. She is not, as femmes fatale should be, strong, attractive and dangerous but unstable, neither highly eroticised nor dangerous. And, in fact, Rachel, Jermyn argues, is the centre of the film’s narrative, the detective quest that drives the narrative is essentially the discovery of who she is as either human or replicant. Most other authors, as Jermyn noted, continue to sideline the character as operating within a distinctly male dominated narrative and genre, such as Redmond who argues here that the film re-appropriates the British social realist movie of the 1960s, with Deckard as working class man and Rachel as elite.

Equally contradictory, but more compelling is the discussions on the urban setting of the film, and whether the choice of Los Angeles, the nominal location of the film as revealed in its opening titles, is significant. In the opening chapter Brooker integrates the geographical space of the film – Los Angeles, 2019 – with the geographical space of contemporary Los Angeles, and finds that comparisons are difficult. Brooker likens this to a cultural pilgrimage, and following Aden (from Turner) starts from departing the habitus – the common-sense and everyday – and into a ‘promised land’ offered by the film. But instead of reaching that promised land we instead find ourselves in an ‘in-between-ness’ (the liminal): not in the everyday but neither in the fantasy world of the film. This liminoid offers a playful search for alternatives to everyday life. Here, it refers to the pilgrimage to sites where the film was shot, the everyday space of a railway station which was transformed into a police station, for example, and so the crucial connection between fan and place is never quite completed. The fully immersive experience can never be attained.

Elsewhere, Judith B. Kerman assesses the film, made in 1982, in relation to the apocalyptic fervour of the year 2000, and how the film assumes a contemporary resonance. Unlike Brooker, Kerman believes that its setting in Los Angeles is more relevant. As L.A. is at the edge of the American frontier, this inherently situates the apocalypse in an American context – most films noir, apocalyptic in themselves, are set there, for example.

Stephen Rowley discusses more broadly the differences between how urban planners and film texts respond to the construction of urban space. Linking film and spatial theory, Rowley argues that urban planning and cinematic representations are both conceptually linked to physical existence, so to write of the city is to write very broadly of film and reality. In this regard, Blade Runner‘s depiction of an urban hell, a depiction that the film offers as a given, conflicts with the field of urban planning, in that the latter regards the film’s depiction of the city as, in fact, successful. The modernist pursuits of visual order and efficient vehicle circulation are no longer primary, instead contemporary urban planners attempt to attain vibrancy and vitality, in which case the Los Angeles offered in the film is exceptional. “It has plenty of street-level convenience retailing and restaurants. The nightlife looks fantastic. There is either a good public transport system, or everything is pretty close together – everybody seems to get around okay on foot.” (210)

The second section looks at the video game version of the film and how the film becomes the basis for a fluid process of constant re-invention. The interesting note that Atkins alludes to is that the film is essentially an unfinished text. Through video games and novelised sequels, other producers are seeking to ‘finish’ the film in other very different ways. The Westwood game, for example, does not just allow players to replay sections of the film but creates a new narrative that exists alongside that of the film. This invokes the concept of the ‘expanded universe’; offering a replication of the film experience but at the same time producing a new and unique experience for the player.

Tosca looks more specifically at characters and the notion of freedom as a player. Freedom is, of course, important for both characters in the film and the player, but how free is the player really? By navigating a progressive series of finding clues to reach the next level, the player is still bound by the rules of a pre-written script. In this game, the producers attempted to circumvent this problem by including several different narrative strands such that a single player can play the game several times and have a different experience each time. The interest lies not in advancing the detective story but in developing clues that enhance the identity of the characters and the ways they can interact with each other. The game then is not one of solving the crime but in developing and identifying one’s own identity within the diegesis of the game-space.

The third section covers the people who know the film best – its fans, both amateur and academic. In a fascinating chapter, Jonathan Gray covers the long-awaited but still non-existent special edition DVD, while Christy Gray compares fans of the film itself with fans who more widely follow the works of Philip K. Dick and who count the movie as a mediocre adaptation at best. Film fans appear to devour other texts that expand the Blade Runner universe (including the novelised sequels by K. W. Jeter) while the fans of Dick are more guarded, tending to resist everything produced beyond the mind of Dick himself.
Hills looks at academic interest in the film and the ways these intersect with fan interest, such that both become inseparably intertwined. The fan interest may engage with notions of the ‘popular’ while academia invests in the text as ‘cultural capital’, but these divisions are problematic. Hills borrows the term ‘textual poaching’, to describe the kind of re-appropriation of theory and analysis from fan to academia. Key to this is the ability of the film to be picked apart and these parts then re-positioned outside the context of the film as a whole, to the extent, as Bukatman argues, that the irresolution of the text is the essence of Blade Runner.

Overall, The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic offers a disparate and often conflicting study of the location and interpretation of a single, but highly influential, film text in a wider social and cultural context. In fact, the book closely matches the multitude of responses to the film itself; schizophrenic, open to debate, rough at the edges, and all the better for each of these. The various essays offer intelligent and, seemingly impossibly, up-to-date interpretations of a film text that has been picked over like vultures on a carcass for almost 25 years. This film, with its postmodern aesthetic and its themes that engage with notions and ideas of human identity, is one that deserves to be kept alive within both fandom and the academic fraternity, and this volume serves this purpose well.

Neil Bather
University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Created on: Thursday, 23 November 2006