Blade Runner and Our Brave New World

Blade Runner. Consumerist prison of Los Angeles in the year 2019. City dwellers are occupied with constant psychological detergent of commercial promise and surveillance. Human and non-human replicant are programmed as the spending machines who sustain the dominance of giant corporations, the Masters.

Blade Runner (1982), one of my personal favorite film (a fully non-emotional credit), has always been an useful source of analytical reference, every time doubts loom over my over-extrospective cognitive thirst. The tag 'inspirational' could only deserved by a fantastic film like the one directed by Ridley Scott, for its investigative and precise accounts on human post-industrialist future.

How far could a 80's film provide an insight about a typical capitalist city, 40 year projected ahead? Its vision of a disjunctive passive consumerist society of Los Angeles, has been materialised way ahead. Los Angeles and other para-colonial Asian metro cities have been a major target of human migration, dislocation and marginalization. The fantasy depiction of a near future city was coupled with characteristics of severe decadence, ephemerality and inequality, brought to life by the roles like the human replicants, the rule of imperialistic corporations, and the subsequent dehumanization of the city's inhabitants. All of these pessimistic assumptions, have their highest degree of threat on some post-colonial asian cities, Kuala Lumpur, an easily conquerable colonial urban squalor, could not escape the implied implications of the whole system.Kowloon walled city, HK. Over-population, slum and urban squalor typify the dystopian cyberpunk cities.

Utopian visions, inspiring political slogans, gigantic advertisement screens and other 'feel good' ecstasies, march along the gradual deconstruction of these societies towards a much anticipated 'brave new world', of full-fledged consumerism, pluralism, diaspora and of course, the cunning dystopia.
Architecture and its semiotics lost its pace with the artificial signs that rule the colonial asian cities.

The replicants in Blade Runner, who act as slave of its creator, the Tyrell Corporation to exploit the resources of other planets, could be a silent mockery of the role of us today, living in a distorted vision of the past. How could the 'replicant' of today, escape the unhealthy reality of high-tech and low-life? Plus the fate of being the slave of the system of our own creation? Cultural pluralism, confusion, hybridity, are they celebrated achievements or a dark clandestine tools of our deceptive and feudalistic corporation and ruler? What they clearly bring to this postmodernist pastiche is the paralysed political and cultural sensitivity, of false futuristic noir that benumb its citizen's analytic thinking through endless hyperreal promises.

What if all the reasons of our existence are merely the subject of their strategic manipulation?

Blade Runner and its architecture projected everything communicable of its zeitgeist. From the monolithic headquarters of gigantic corporations, to the chaotic damped streetscape overcrowded with wandering immigrants, neon light billboards and eroticism. Everything from signature corporate glass box to dome-topped mansions of the little napoleons. From jumbled artificial mechanical ducting to the territorial battle of signage. Maybe only a Voight-Kampff machine could distinguish a true modernized first world and an enslaved savage garden of false civility, and thus, are we the replicant of our own system?Profile of a replicant Nexus 6 as examined by blade runner dectective Deckard (reference to Rene 'Descartes' with his theory of human and non-human soul).