Abstract
In Sir Ridley Scott’s immensely popular science fiction film Blade Runner (1982; rereleased in 1992 as The Director’s Cut and in 2007 as The Final Cut), Los Angeles in the year 2019 is an Asian city that has gone to hell. The opening aerial shot tracks across a dark industrial wasteland, punctuated by large smokestacks that shoot roiling bursts of orange flame high into the air. A giant Times Square-like video screen fills the side of one skyscraper. The screen runs a Coca-Cola advertisement on a loop, featuring a close-up of the powder-white face of a Japanese geisha popping a little red pill. A loud and menacing kabuki soundtrack accentuates the image. Hot neon business signs written in a jumble of kanji (Japanese characters based on Chinese ideograms) and kana (Japanese syllabary) are everywhere. Asian people crowd the sidewalks. Most are dressed in stereotypical rice-picker straw hats and black pajama suits, caught by the camera in the midst of running errands. Some run small street stands, selling things like noodles. In the street, they ride their bicycles in droves, just as in Beijing. The rain-drenched postapocalyptic scene conveys “the feeling that everything is contaminated and everyone will soon die from radiation poisoning,” as Danny Peary writes in a 1982 review.
Look at my face,—look at my hands,—look at my body.. why am I not a man, as much as anybody?
—George Harris, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly1
I want more life, fucker.
—Roy Batty, Blade Runner
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Notes
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life among the Lowly (1852; New York: Signet Classic/Penguin, 1998), 123.
Danny Peary, “Directing Alien and Blade Runner: An Interview with Ridley Scott,” in Omni’s Screen Flights, Screen Fantasies: The Future According to Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Danny Peary (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), 299.
Michael Dempsey, “Review of Blade Runner,” Film Quarterly 36, no. 2 (1984): 36.
Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner, BFI Modern Classics, ed. Rob White (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 74.
See Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1990), 88
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, United Kingdom: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 310–11
Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples, Blade Runner: Screenplay (Hollywood, CA: Script City, 1981), 94.
Philip Fisher, Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 100.
William M. Kolb, “Bladerunner Film Notes,” in Retrofitting Bladerunner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ed. Judith B. Kerman (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991), 169.
Thomas Dixon, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1905).
Michael Rogin, “‘The Sword Became a Flashing Vision’: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation,” Representations 9, Winter (1985): 150–95
Linda Williams, “Versions of Uncle Tom: Race and Gender in American Melodrama,” in New Scholarship from BFI Research, eds. Duncan Petrie and Colin MacCabe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 112.
David Savran, Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 4
Raphael S. Ezekiel, The Racist Mind: Portraits of American Neo-Nazis and Klansmen (New York: Viking, 1995), 72.
Lewis R. Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 5.
See Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997).
Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
Pauline Kael, “Review of Blade Runner,” in For Keeps, ed. Pauline Kael (1982; New York: Dutton Signet, 1994), 944.
Herb Lightman and Richard Patterson, “Blade Runner: Production Design and Photography,” American Cinematograph er 63, no. 7 (1982): 723.
Lawrence G. Pauli, “Lawrence G. Pauli,” in By Design: Interviews with Film Production Designers, ed. Vincent LoBrutto (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), 168.
Harlan Kennedy, “21st Century Nervous Breakdown: Interview with Ridley Scott,” Film Comment 18, no. 4 (1982): 65.
Harald Kueppers, The Basic Law of Color Theory, trans. Roger Marcinik (1978; Woodbury, NY: Barron’s Educational Series, 1982), 21.
Johannes Itten, The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color, trans. Ernst van Haagen (1961; New York: VanNostrand Reinhold Co., 1973), 35–6.
Michel Eugene Chevreul, The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors and Their Applications to the Arts (1854; New York: Reinhold, 1967), 56.
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© 2009 Brian Locke
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Locke, B. (2009). The Orientalist Buddy Film and the “New Niggers”: Blade Runner (1982, 1992, and 2007). In: Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from World War II to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101678_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101678_6
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