TY - JOUR

T1 - Feeling Real, Feeling Free

T2 - The Body, Bio-politics and the Spectacle in Blade Runner 2019 and 2049

AU - Diken, Bulent

AU - Gilloch, Graeme

PY - 2023

Y1 - 2023

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - blade runner

KW - spectacle

KW - bio-politics

KW - slavery

KW - free use

KW - tactile

U2 - 10.56801/esic.v7.i1.1

DO - 10.56801/esic.v7.i1.1

M3 - Journal article

VL - 7

JO - Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture

JF - Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture

IS - 1

ER -