How important is context to a film?
Take “Casablanca”. Context isn’t so important for the movie 1942. Oh, it might be helpful to understand the basics of World War II, Vichy France, the Nazis, and where and what Czechoslovakia was.
The same applies to Casablanca, Morocco.
It’s still not critical. You know it’s a love story about a man who breaks his heart and has to willingly break it again for the sake of the world.
It remains a classic and one of the best films ever made.
But “Blade Runner” is a complete 180 degree opposite of that. Context is everything. So much so that it’s not the same movie if you didn’t see it in a theater in the early 1980s. It’s still great, but there’s something missing.
The context that matters most: the detective archetype, the Reagan 1980s, and the rise of cyberpunk.
1. The detective archetype – Before “Blade Runner,” you had nearly five decades of detectives in film. It started unofficially in the 1930s with Sherlock Holmes, then passed through Humphrey Bogart in the 1930s and 1940s, all the way to Dirty Harry in the 1970s, for example.
The great detective writers took their turn with the archetype: Chandler, Christie, Hammett, Doyle, Spillane, and even Edgar Allen Poe. By the 1980s, the original model was fully used. I spent. busty.
You had “Chinatown” in 1974, and “The Long Goodbye” in 1973, but then it started getting very violent like the aforementioned “Dirty Harry” series with “Magnum Force” (1973) and “The Enforcer” (1976). .
Even the violence we see in Blade Runner has happened before. However, director Ridley Scott’s film revamps the archetype and reworks it into something new and bold: a hardened detective of the future. It was revolutionary and disturbing, like all great art.
2. Reagan in the 1980s The 1980s were the decade of neon glow. Think “Morning in America.” That “bright city on a hill.” Exercise and the health craze (think the latter is crazy now? Well, it all started in the 1980s).
We were collectively trying to ignore the inflation, malaise, and dirty hippie sentiment of the past. It was sleek, like Miami Vice, with hot cars, hot girls and hot pants.
Go-Gos and cocaine ruled…go! The film’s dystopian vision couldn’t be more different.
In that brilliant marketing campaign, Shadow: Cyberpunk was born. A dark, dirty and grungy attack on corporate gloss.
3. The rise of cyberpunk — It’s hard to imagine the birth of Cyberpunk, but you have to start with punk. Punk was a 1970s movement emerging from London, New York City and Los Angeles that interacted with disco, had hippie vibes and all that cool packaging.
He predicted the rise of the oligarchs and corporations as the most powerful institutions of our day, surpassing church and state. Money “ra-ra” as God, technology as a mental virus, and the deterioration of what it means to be human into the garbage of the gutters and into this violent mix of misery, poverty and neglected technology where only the strong can survive.
Harrison Ford Deckard is one of the survivors. He’s a punk. It’s a grunge runner.
One final bit of context: How extreme was “Blade Runner” when it came out in 1982. The Vietnam War had ended just seven years earlier. You had the Korean War, and the Pacific Theater of World War II.
Deckard is a kind of veteran that humanity has lost. It is important to remember that only the dregs of society live on dead earth. The likes of Elon Musk have long since left Earth in search of greener pastures on colony worlds where replicants operate.
The police, run by corporations, are the only form of government on the planet. “Cityspeak” and loudspeaker announcement in Japanese”Eri hi katamokoLiterally translated as “the sun sets.”
Actually it is.
I’m not sure if you didn’t live through that time, you could understand or get this movie even if you could undo all the different iterations of it we’ve seen since. Consider the melancholy as Deckard sits at the piano and looks at old photos, a monument to everything that came before then.
“Blade Runner,” like “Casablanca,” is a love story, for only love exists beyond time and space. To understand you have to live the context.
The final irony? “Blade Runner” was a disappointment in its theatrical run, but later emerged as a sci-fi favorite.