Ridley Scott's 1982 film, Blade Runner, has been characterized as set in a "post-nuclear world that is being reassembled elsewhere in the solar system" (McNamara 422). It reflects the convergence of various technological, environmental and economic challenges that confront postmodern society as it attempts to make sense of the constraints under which it orates. This brief essay will examine these constraints and will argue that the central thesis advanced by Blade Runner is that man's destruction of his environment leads inexorably to the reformation of human identity, itself challenged by the technology inherent in artificial intelligence (AI) and the loss of meaningful human work in an era in which machines (including androids) are responsible for most productive effort.
In the central character of Deckard, the "blade runner" of the title, one finds a man who seeks a utopian reality while mired in a Dystopian universe. As Deckard moves through smoky, dimly lit streets in which the real and the unreal are juxtaposed in close contact with one another, he questions the nature of existence and the meaning of "human" life. Rachel, the beautiful woman who is actually revealed as an android, represents the culmination of technology's use of AI; other androids, such as Roy are given super-human traits but ultimately are rendered powerless by the very technology that created them in the first place. Roy's death, for example, is not the result of Deckard's superior strength or cunning, but the simple fact that his programming was designed to terminate at a certain date. Technologically, what this may suggest is that we are all being programmed in the postmodern era to "wind down" after our usefulness has ended.
Environmentally, this film emphasizes the devastation that occurs when mankind allows its warlike impulses to go out of control (Hutchings, 382-383). The world has been devastated by a nuclear holocaust and is set...