Blade Runner

Matt Hills

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231504645
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Film & Video

More than just a box office flop that resurrected itself in the midnight movie circuit, Blade Runner (1982) achieved extraordinary cult status through video, laserdisc, and a five-disc DVD collector's set. Blade Runner has become a network of variant texts and fan speculations—a franchise created around just one film. Some have dubbed the movie "classroom cult" for its participation in academic debates, while others have termed it "meta-cult," in line with the work of Umberto Eco. The film has also been called "design cult," thanks to Ridley Scott's brilliant creation of a Los Angeles in 2019, the graphics and props of which have been recreated by devoted fans. Blade Runner tests the limits of this authenticity and artificiality, challenging the reader to differentiate between classic and flop, margin and mainstream, true cult and its replicants.

1

MULTIPLES AND MEMORIES

There can be no denying that Blade Runner has excited a mass of scholarly work; a profusion of interpretation which has, perhaps, been matched in volume only by Blade Runner fandom’s creativity and productivity. There have been multiple guides to the film (see, for example, Bukatman 1997; Lacey 2000) and two editions of Studying Blade Runner (Redmond 2003, 2008). Reference works, such as Paul M. Sammon’s Future Noir (1996, 2007), have also enjoyed revised editions. It is unsurprising, then, that some scholars may react with world-weary sentiment to the monumental pyramid of scholarship now surrounding Blade Runner. Reviewing a 2005 edited collection, The Blade Runner Experience, Andrew M. Butler responded: ‘Enough already … There are other films that might warrant some attention … Here Blade Runner is not just a film which tanked at the box office then became a cult – it is an industry’ (2008: 142–3).

Butler hence alleges that Blade Runner has become part of an academic industry: publishers are supposedly cashing in on the film’s status, while academics are behaving like non-eclectic sheep, constantly writing about the same few texts rather than broadening their horizons. What the world does not need, we might suppose, is another book on Blade Runner. But the film has continued to exist industrially in the years since its first release, rather than merely being caught up in some sort of academic cash-in. Though it was hardly a box-office hit on its initial release – shown in 1,290 theatres across the US it grossed only $6.15 million during its opening weekend (see Sammon 2007: 316) – the 1992 ‘Director’s Cut’ grossed $29,557 in its opening US weekend (on 38 screens), while the 2007 ‘Final Cut’ scored a very strong opening of $89,150 on just two screens (see IMDb 2009). The film’s most recent cinematic release had grossed $1,445,283 in the US by 30 March 2008 (ibid.) (excluding money made internationally and from new DVD and Blu-ray releases).

Enough already with Butler’s line of thought: Blade Runner remains very much ‘an industry’ quite apart from academia’s efforts. And this ‘Cultographies’ title does something distinct in the annals of Blade Runner scholarship by specifically focusing on the movie’s cult status. To be sure, previous guides have included sections on this (see, for example, Lacey 2000: 80–1; Sammon 2007: 321–9; Redmond 2008: 75–8), but no single volume has been tasked with the assignment of exploring discourses and theories of the LA 2019 cult. As such, I am conscious of not wanting to roundly reiterate material and factual information available elsewhere; hence this should not be considered as a one-stop introduction to Blade Runner’s world. Rather, it is designed as a contribution to one strand of debate: how and why has Blade Runner become a cult movie?

This question immediately calls for several definitions. We need to examine how ‘cult’ itself has been theorised, of course. The next chapter introduces one major theory focused on textual qualities (Eco 1995), before exploring its blindspots. Chapter 3 shifts away from text-based theories of cult to explore reception and audience-based approaches (Bourdieu 1984) – taking in the commonly-cited ‘flop turned cult’ idea – before the final chapter pursues a more historicised, layered take on multiple cult audiences (Hills 2006, 2008). However, as well as defining ‘cult’, we also need to determine exactly what is meant by ‘Blade Runner’. I will address this question first, before briefly discussing my own personal relationship to the Blade Runner universe.

TRACKING DOWN THE TEXT, OR, WHAT IS ‘BLADE RUNNER’?

This may seem like an odd query. However, as Aaron Barlow observes in The DVD Revolution: ‘these days, films as they are released on DVD may actually be purposefully more authoritative than the theatrical release … Which, then, is the “real” film?’ (2005a: 25). This question of multiple versions is far more complex in relation to Blade Runner, of course, rather than merely involving a theatrical/DVD binary. The recent Final Cut (2007) was made available as part of the ‘Ultimate Collector’s Edition’ five-DVD set, presented alongside three different ‘archival’ versions and the previously rare Workprint, making five commercially-available incarnations of the one movie. But it has been argued that there are further versions – Sammon identifies seven in his Video Watchdog article, including the Criterion laserdisc as a separate ‘de facto’ entry due to its then ‘generous … letterboxing’ (1993: 45), as well as separating the Workprint and ‘Fairfax Cut’. By 2007, Sammon had revised his estimate of variant versions downwards to six (not including the Final Cut), identifying the rough Workprint as identical to certain other reported versions (see 2007: 500). The five-disc DVD release of the Ultimate Collector’s Edition (UCE) thus does not encompass all variations – however minor – that have circulated in the public domain. It does, however, make readily available the Workprint, a rough cut of Blade Runner which included temporary music rather than the finished Vangelis soundtrack, and which also began with an entirely different text caption to the 1982 theatrical release. Attributed to a fictional ‘New American Dictionary … 2016’, the Workprint begins by defining the term ‘replicant’: ‘See also ROBOT (antique): ANDROID (obsolete)’. Quite unlike the introductory text eventually used, this version is at pains to strongly distance Blade Runner’s ‘replicants’ from SF clichés such as the ‘robot’ and the ‘android’, indicating that such labels are redundant. By doing so, it paradoxically links replicants to these generic, science-fictional identities, seeming to imply that they are possible synonyms for the film’s invented language.

Blade Runner’s belated reappearance as a multiple DVD set also suggests that its different versions, previously researched and tracked by fan-scholars, have been repositioned as a ‘disciplined’, official sequence rather than as an object of relatively underground, cultist knowledge (see Caldwell 2008: 159). For, as John Thornton Caldwell has argued, ‘DVD “hardens” the entertainment experience into a sale-able consumer product’ (2008: 161). This ‘hardening’ of audience/text interactions may, of course, partly benefit fans by catering for their desire to learn about behind-the-scenes information:

Reviewers and critics become superfluous in this scheme, for the DVD system pre-authors and provides critical analysis as primary onscreen content. The resulting ‘dumbing-up’ rewards distinction in viewers who fancy themselves discriminating, culturally knowledgeable, relatively sophisticated fans. (Caldwell 2008: 161)

Caldwell may well overstate this change. After all, far from becoming seemingly redundant, fan-authored DVD review sites and professional DVD review magazines have proliferated in the era of digital media. However, his argument does usefully address the ‘mainstreaming’ of behind-the-scenes commentary represented by DVD extras, with forms and levels of fan knowledge now becoming standardised parts of mainstream consumer releases. As well as an array of extras, even the design of the UCE menu screens caters to cult fans’ desires to symbolically immerse themselves in the world of Blade Runner, depicting the DVDs’ restricted interactivity as if viewer selections are akin to Deckard’s diegetic ‘esper’ image-zooming and exploration. Jo T. Smith notes that ‘these interfaces are increasingly incorporated into the “look” and aesthetic world of the film’ (2008: 146).

However, the problem of which is the ‘real’ Blade Runner doesn’t only emerge as a matter of multiple DVDs (see Jonathan Gray 2005: 112). Even pre-DVD textuality was complicated around Blade Runner by the existence of a 1982 Marvel Comics adaptation, one which involved extensive narration from the character of Deckard, and a final flight into snowy, northern landscapes differing from the 1982 theatrical release (see Marvel Comics Group 1982a and 1982b). And in 1995, 1996 and 2000 three officially-licensed K. W. Jeter novels were published which continued Blade Runner’s narrative, expanding the filmic world into one of ‘templants’ as well as replicants (1995: 144), that is, ‘original’ human templates and their replicant ‘copies’. Will Brooker argues that fans have tended to view the Jeter novels as non-canonical, as ‘not proper Blade Runner’ (see 1999 :62). Instead, the novels have been represented as problematic attempts to reconcile Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) with Ridley Scott’s film vision (see Christy Gray 2005; Brooker 2009).

SF scholar Mark Bould contests this fan evaluation, however, arguing that as an academic he has no wish to become ‘the critical equivalent of a blade runner’:

Just as Rick Deckard … must track down replicants, deciding en route who is human and who is not, so the traditional textual critic … faced with ‘essentially [six versions of the movie] which have been seen by the general public’, must decide which is authentic (whatever that might mean). (1999: 166)

Unlike Blade Runner fandom, Bould thus studies Jeter’s novels as well as the movie texts and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This decision takes us to another issue surrounding the supposedly ‘real’ Blade Runner, though: the extent to which it can be considered an adaptation of Dick’s novel. Though the author didn’t live to see a completed cut of Blade Runner’s 1982 theatrical release, on the basis of information available to him before his untimely passing away, Philip K. Dick declared:

The two reinforce each other, so that someone who started with the novel would enjoy the movie and someone who started with the movie would enjoy the novel. I was amazed that [David] Peoples could get some of those scenes to work … You read the screenplay and then you go to the novel, and it’s like they’re two halves to one meta-artwork, one meta-artifact. (In Landon 1997: 92)

This mutual harmonisation of book and film might well be called into question, but what is evidently called for is a model of textuality which can make sense of both pre- and post-DVD multiplicity or ‘meta’ artifactuality, where different versions/adaptations/continuations speak across one another, and where fans include/exclude elements of Blade Runner’s textual ‘cluster’ (Bould 1999: 165). In Fans, Cornel Sandvoss suggests that:

It is difficult to imagine a fan of a single baseball game rather than team, or a single episode of a television series rather than of the whole show. Even among committed cineastes, it seems, it is more difficult to find fans of a single film rather than a particular genre, actor … or director. (2005: 133)

Sandvoss’s argument is that elements ‘crucial to the qualities of the fan text … [include] regularity and repetition’ (ibid.). At first glance, the Blade Runner cult may seem to qualify Sandvoss’s contention that single films tend not to sustain detailed fan response, but in fact it supports his argument. Here we have a single film title which has very much become a ‘fan text’ but which has also mutated into a franchise by virtue of textual variation. Blade Runner is, unusually, a set of multiple film texts without cinematic prequels or sequels. It displays ‘regularity and repetition’ by virtue of its existence as a ‘text-cluster’ (Bould 1999: 165). As such, it is more than a single text ‘that might be considered in isolation from its history of multiple prints, or detached from its vast array of intertexts’ (Atkins 2005: 79), but simultaneously less than a regular film series. Indeed, the original theatrical release (1982), the Director’s Cut (1992) and the Final Cut (2007) might even be described as a trilogy of one film.

For Sandvoss, the multiplicity of ‘fan texts’ (that is, texts which provoke and sustain fan attention) allows fandom to shape textual boundaries. Fans can determine for themselves, from the multiple options, exactly what they count as ‘proper’ Blade Runner. Evidence is ruled in and out: ‘texts thus function as spaces of self-reflection, not only through the individual interpretation of particular signs, but also through a selective process of which signs are part of the fan text in the first place’ (Sandvoss 2005: 132). This goes beyond what media studies has termed ‘polysemy’ – the multiple meanings a text can carry – and into the realm of the ‘neutrosemic’ where no inherent meaning is given (Sandvoss 2005: 126). To give a Blade Runner example: is Deckard (Harrison Ford) a replicant? Individual fans can choose their answer to this by focusing on different versions of the film which more-or-less strongly provide evidence, as well as by choosing to refer to Ridley Scott’s extra-textual pronouncements, or deciding to rule these out.

Studying Blade Runner prior to the release of the Final Cut, Jonathan Gray also calls into question the usefulness of ‘polysemy’, suggesting that Blade Runner requires new theoretical models:

These fans scour over evidence and welcome more of it, but seem ultimately unconcerned with (or even anxious about the prospect of) finding some grand form of closure. The notion that any text ‘says something’ is paramount to much of textual studies, but these fans’ reactions suggest that we must also accept the equal and opposite notion that some texts ask instead of answer, and that their resulting persistent refusal of closure and continued open-endedness becomes a large part of what they ‘mean’ and of why they are valued. (2005: 117–8)

As Gray notes, this process of ongoing textual exploration ‘is not “polysemy” in the sense of a text allowing its audiences to decide what it means … for this itself requires closure’ (2005: 118). Instead, Blade Runner’s multiplicity-within-singularity appears to textually sustain and support ongoing rereading: ‘decoding continues … when it comes to textual reception, there is always another replicant – another interpretation, another decoding – potentially out there’ (Gray 2005: 118; emphasis in original). This suggests one potential difference between a fan text and a cult text: whereas the former might involve individual fans reinforcing their self-identities by making their own closed (that is, definite) meanings from a set of texts (see Sandvoss 2005), the latter appears to support an ongoing openness of meaning for its devotees (see Jonathan Gray 2005). As Jonathan Gray concludes: ‘To the fans I have interviewed, ‘Blade Runner’ is … an experience, a structure of feeling and multiple zones or spheres of emotional, intellectual and philosophical contemplation and reflection’ (2005: 123).

Neither strictly neutrosemic nor polysemic, Blade Runner can thus be thought of as a ‘thick’ text in critic Roz Kaveney’s terms:

What … is a thick text? The precondition of … recognising a thick text is that we accept that all texts are not only a product of the creative process but contain all the stages of that process within them like scars or vestigial organs. The film we see in the cinema may be further revised to the final form of an extended director’s cut; our knowledge of it may be transformed when viewing it on DVD by the presence of deleted scenes … We have to learn … that all works of art are to some extent provisional. (2005: 5)

This provisionality notoriously shows through in Blade Runner (1982) where Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh) tells Deckard that six replicants have got back to Earth, with one being killed. This should leave five replicants to track down, yet Deckard is allocated only four: Leon (Brion James), Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), Pris (Daryl Hannah) and Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer). The mention of six minus one replicants is precisely a ‘scar’ or ‘vestigial organ’; it is a mark left over from script plans to include an additional replicant, Mary. However, its remainder in the text allowed fans to speculate that Deckard himself was the extra replicant, enabling re-decoding. It also provided the narrative pre-text for K. W. Jeter’s first sequel, The Edge of Human (1995) w...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• 1. Multiples and Memories
• 2. Telling the Cult Difference?
• 3. Authenticities and Anxieties
• 4. Different Cults?
• Bibliography
• Index