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Introduction
What if a group of slaves murdered their overlords and returned home to find themselves targeted by a bounty hunter? What if the slaves were really bioengineered beings seeking not only emancipation but also extensions on their predetermined life spans? What if simulacrum might no longer be distinguished from human? Such are the basic questions that fuel the plot of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), but this only scratches the surface. While the film has been poked, prodded, and scanned for going on four decades, there is still much value to be gleaned from it. This article places Blade Runner in dialogue with the notion of exile to enliven our understanding of the film as well as the aesthetic power of science fiction as a genre. Multiple questions animate this discussion: How does the theme of exile operate in Blade Runner? In what ways does the exile in Blade Runner interrupt other theoretical analyses of the film, such as those championed by the postmodern, genre, and feminist schools of theory?
Any analysis of Blade Runner risks morphing into a journey down a rabbit hole. Barry Atkins remarks that "it has been some time since it was possible to discuss Blade Runner as if it were a single and fixed text that might be considered in isolation from its multiple prints, or detached from its vast array of intertexts, paratexts, references and allusions" (79). Therefore, this article treats Blade Runner as a single text, inclusive of the 1968 source novel, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and touching tangentially on the long-awaited sequel, Blade Runner 2049 (2017). We will focus on the literal and symbolic manifestations of exile as revealed through plot, mise-en-scene, and character, placing the film in conversation with other cinematic representations of exile. The exercise reveals not only that this commercial film may reside comfortably in the canon of exilic films, but also that Blade Runner through its boundaryand genre-crossing supports a stunning degree of narrative and symbolic complexity.
First, we should consider some descriptions of exile. In Reflections on Exile, Edward Said states that "exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unbearable rift forced between a human being and a native...