Home > Research > Publications & Outputs > Feeling Real, Feeling Free

Links

Text available via DOI:

View graph of relations

Feeling Real, Feeling Free: The Body, Bio-politics and the Spectacle in Blade Runner 2019 and 2049

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>2023
<mark>Journal</mark>Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture
Issue number1
Volume7
Number of pages13
Publication StatusPublished
Early online date1/10/23
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

This paper sets Scott’s original film Blade Runner (1982) and Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) in a ‘disjunctive synthesis’ in order to provide critical analyses of both films with respect to some complex configurations of the body along two axes: bio-politics and the spectacle. We offer a reading of these configurations by focusing on the relationships between the human (organic), the non-human (android) and the immaterial (holographic); the eye (optics), the hand (haptics), and aesthetics; slavery, instrumental labour and free-play; the politics of bodies and of memories; the potentialities of revolution and the transmission of ‘tradition of the oppressed’. In this, we foreground two seemingly marginal characters – J. F. Sebastian and Ana Stelline. These ‘little people’ embody and inhabit the convolutions of Blade Runner’s ‘more human than human’ world through ‘free use’ of the body and playfulness which, superficially innocent, nevertheless bear within them the promise of radical political change.