The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic (review)

In the process of canonization, a film such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner earns titles such as “classic” and adjectives such as “essential.” The Blade Runner Experience, edited by Will Brooker, reopens the 1982 text and exposes it to recent scholarship in media studies, revealing and exploding notions of canonization at the same time. In the words of Brooker, Blade Runner (BR) has “splintered and warped” (2) since its 1982 release, and this collection of essays explores the various platforms—literary, fan, digital, and theoretical—where the film continues to resonate.

The collection opens with essays by Brooker and Judith Kerman that discuss the spatial and temporal dimensions of the film, specifically how the film maps onto a contemporary Los Angeles in the wake of the new millennium. Brooker’s essay “The Blade Runner Experience: Pilgrimage and Liminal Space” delves into the liminality of fan culture, addressing the phenomenon of fan pilgrimages to sites where BR was filmed. In the attempt to reconcile the actual spaces with those portrayed in the film, fans find themselves in an “in-between” state that allows for multiple meanings to be transcribed on the actual sites and back onto the film. Judith Kerman also investigates BR’s apocalyptic foundations in “Post-Millenium Blade Runner,” considering the film in light of the millenium and the apocalyptic fervor that accompanied the transition to the year 2000.

The first section of the collection focuses on the cinematic influence of Phillip K. Dick on BR and science fiction in general, an aporia that both scholars and fans feel is often overlooked. Although several of Dick’s works have been adapted to the screen, scholars such as Aaron Barlow and Dominic Alessio look at the way Dick’s works have pushed the science fiction genre as a whole. Barlow’s essay, “Reel Toads and Imaginary Cities: Phillip K. Dick, Blade Runner and the Contemporary Science Fiction Movie,” discusses the way both Dick and Ridley Scott introduced themes from noir and the hard-boiled detective novel into the male protagonists of contemporary science fiction. The resulting ambiguity in characters such as Deckard and the like, according to Barlow, has led to new depictions of morality in general within the genre; the influence of the pulp tradition has lent an introspective tone to science fiction, where fault lines are blurred, and conflicts are internally, rather than externally, prompted. Dominic Alessio’s essay, “Redemption, ‘Race,’ Religion, Reality and the Far-Right: Science Fiction Film Adaptations of Phillip K. Dick,” expands on Barlow’s discussion of moral ambiguity by adding facets of religious and moral redemption; looking closely at how the characters in BR and other Dick adaptations challenge categories of “human” and “non-human” and add dimensions of race and class to his works, Alessio points out how Dick’s often religiously motivated themes of love and morality translate to the contemporary big screen.

Although the previous section highlighted the influence of the films’ two “authors,” the second part of the collection, “Playing Blade Runner,” explores the extension of Dick and Scott’s science fiction themes into digital realms. Contemporary science fiction films, with their elaborate mise-en-scène and technologically motivated narratives, lend themselves to video game translation, and both Barry Atkins and Susana P. Tosca address the implications of turning BR into a video game. Atkins, in “Replicating the Blade Runner,” argues that computer game Blade Runner PC, by turning the film’s two-dimensional space into three-dimensional possibilities, allows users/viewers to explore the spaces of the film in detail, and his argument for this type of “remediation” adds another kind of space to the fan pilgrimages of Will Brooker’s study. Although the game does encourage new interpretations of the film’s themes, Atkins is careful to mention an ideological inconsistency: whereas the games present a utopic vision of technology, BR is more invested in interrogating technology’s dystopic tendencies.

The ideological constraint that Atkins mentions...