Frankenstein and Blade Runner
BLADE RUNNER | FRANKENSTEIN | Blade Runner1 is a Ridley Scott adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? As a dystopia (dark future) it uses the glazed cinematic techniques of film noir that tends to distance us from the characters and actions. | This is a Gothic Novel. Mary claims the inspiration for her story came from a vision she had during a dream. Her story was the only one completed and has become one of the most famous Gothic novels of all time. Mary Shelley uses the narrative device of a Ship’s Captain retelling a tale through epistemology (letters to his sister) he has heard from an obsessed distraught Scientist he has rescued from an ice floe in the remote Arctic Ocean. | Blade Runner has a strong environmental focus. It was only after the publication of Rachel Carson’s (An American writer and scientist) Silent Spring, (1961) that people began to recognise the potential of human disaster through the vandalism perpetrated by improved technology. Rather than resilient, nature was fragile and vulnerable when fundamental natural rhythms were ceaselessly destroyed by ruthless exploitation by ever increasing mammoth technology. If Ecosystems are repeatedly defeated, human life will be diminished and likely extinguished. The bleak vision portrayed illustrates a chaotic nuclear holocaust, ecological fragility through soil depletion and acid rain. In BR. man has not only subdued the earth but conquered and utterly defeated it. As a Canadian Indian Chief queried; “When we kill the last fish, what will we eat – money? The sixties and seventies were times of great social, cultural and historical changes with changes in attitudes in s*xual relations, racial integration and political upheaval. | As Europe moved away from a world dominated by superstition and religious faith to one of empirical scientific research and logical deductive reasoning, the Romantics helped to retain some of the personal and emotional compassion