Content area
Full text
Redmond, Sean. Studying Blade Runner (Revised "Student" Edition). Leighton: Auteur, 2008. 95 pp. Trade Paper. ISBN 978-1-903663-79-0. $15.00.
Though initially derided by audiences and critics - in fact prematurely relegated to endless cable television screenings - Ridley Scott's 1982 production Blade Runner has become something of a darling to film studies and film education. The film fits the widest possible range of syllabi, from the course on representations of multiculturalism to the unit about the intersections of sf and philosophy. That the film has a rich, highly contested production history, straddles the line between "art cinema" and the "commercial," and has become about as close as possible to a mainstreamed cult movie only adds to the allure. A genre -mashing story of "blade runner" Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) who works as a bounty hunter in pursuit of a group of AWOL "replicants" lead by the imposing Roy Baty (Rutger Hauer), the film combines the appurtenances of film noir - perpetual night, femme fatale Rachael (Sean Young), the relentless pursuit of an obscured truth - with the imaginative vistas, technologies, and philosophical entreats of sf. With auteur Ridley Scott at the helm, narrative basis in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), and music by electronic sensation Vangelis, Blade Runner has proved endlessly fascinating to diverse scholars and filmgoers.
Outside of the typical ancillary goods - action figures, video games, wearable merchandise - few films have been as able to sustain their own cottage culture industry of scholarship as has Blade Runner. In addition to Paul F. Sammon's Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner (initially published in 1996, before the most recent chapters in the film's uncanny afterlife), there are edited collections (Judith B. Kerman's Retrofitting Blade Runner [1997] and Will Brooker's The Blade Runner Experience [2006], to say nothing of stray pieces in books about Philip K. Dick and sf more generally), essays in scholarly journals, books solely about Blade Runner, and formative books on the study of sf film that give Blade Runner generous attention, such as the chapter on the postmodern eighties in Vivian...