The replicants
were antagonists throughout most of Blade Runner, and represented the first point of analysis. They are robotic servants indistinguishable from humans in every way other than their lack of emotional or empathetic responses, illustrate the fine, and often blurred, line between modernity and post-modernity by personifying simulacra. Modernity is an acceptance of what we see as truthful, and post-modernity is the understanding that what we see may not be truthful, but our acceptance of it regardless. There is no original replicant, and each one is genetically engineered to be fully functioning humanoid adults. The replicants, in order to stabilize their emotional development in their four-year lifespan, are implanted with memories to give them the impression of authentic lives that ultimately convince the replicants that they are human. Additionally, the impetus behind the genetically engineered humans was an attempt to harness human biopower for capitalistic gain, without having to pay a ‘regular human’ in exchange, in order to raise the standard of living for ‘regular human’s who do not need to do the hard labor anymore. Hence, ‘replicants’ represent the ‘other’ in this distopic slice of America. Typically, throughout American history, minorities who have ‘origins’ or ancestry from another country—‘American-immigrants’—have been treated as the ‘other’-American (‘African’-American, ‘Latin’-American, ‘Native’-American and ‘Asian’-American) even though most White-Americans’ ancestry originates come from another countries than North America. Reflecting the role of the ‘other’-American, replicants are built on another world where they are designed for slavery and service to their creators on the ‘real’ world. Replicants do their service from afar, and if they cross the border into the motherland, Earth in Blade Runner, they are systematically killed – “retired,” as the film puts it, emphasizing that the sole purpose of their life is work. In a post-modern/post-racial world, a “colorblind” world, we like to believe that we do not see ‘otherizing’ signifiers and mechanism. True to this, the replicants are white—the creators were engineering a ‘better human’, and obviously another skin color would be less than perfect. The video on the bottom exemplifies how replicants mimic the social role of the ‘other’-American.

The second point of analysis looks for those social phenotypic signifiers of the ‘other’-American. In the world that Blade Runner constructs, traditional ‘other’-Americans are no longer discriminated against by ‘real’ Americans—even the popular language is a mix between other languages, like Japanese and Spanish, and English. This follows the traditional concepts of post-modernity, in which the self is decentered and in constant conflict with identity. This renders social identities so ambiguous that there is no need for people to be defined by them—‘colorblind’.

Ironically, this is all framed in an incredibly otherizing way. For example, even the billboards showed otherizing mechanisms in the form of orientalization. Additionally, minorities in Blade Runner were all casted as minor roles. Minorities who lived in this distopic Los Angeles were all located on the ground level, while ‘real’ Americans (white Americans) seemed to live above them, and the more privileged lived on the tops of buildings the size of mountains. The lowest rung of people, shown through chemical smoke,
pouring rain, and dismal grime, are all ‘other’-Americans, specifically Asian American, who rarely speak English. In a society where everyone is ‘colorblind’ and the only overt discrimination is focused toward replicants, while historical ‘otherizing’ signifier are supposedly eviscerated, Blade Runner is the perfect example how post-modernity can still echo aspects of modernity. The framework of ‘modernity’ was constructed around Western and European thought, especially in America, which has always included an ‘otherizing’ mechanism in its world-view. Post-modernity might have a different framework, but it has not separated itself from this ingrained world-view shown in Blade Runner, and has continued into the 21^st century,  such as “The Matrix Trilogy”.

Begin this path

1. The Matrix: Reloaded And Post-Modernity in the 21st Century

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