Good news! This post contains no major spoilers for Blade Runner! It was released in 1982, but its plot is largely based on film noir tropes and Philip K. Dicks' 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, so I'll be talking about its setting instead. I still encourage you to watch it, especially considering its sequel just came out to critical acclaim.
Blade Runner is an intensely pessimistic film. Its vision of 2019 Los Angeles is chilling not so much because it is the worst dystopia shown on screen, but because it was, in the 1980s at least, the one most based on the political climate of the time. It depicts a world of rampant consumerism; of global companies with immense power; and of a government complicit in the subjugation of its population.
By the early 1980s, the end of the Cold War was in sight. The Soviet Union was stagnating, and the capitalist half of the world, particularly the British PM Margaret Thatcher and the US President Ronald Reagan, was turning up the heat. Despite this, the pessimism brought on by the ever-present threat of nuclear war persisted, contributing to the film's bleak worldview.
The future of Blade Runner (the city of Los Angeles in the year 2019) is one in which most of the life on earth has been replaced by synthetic organisms called replicants produced by the global Tyrell Corporation. Conditions are cramped, polluted, and devoid of wildlife, all a result of massive corporations left unchecked.
This vision of the future is undoubtedly a reflection of the prevailing economic views of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Thatcher and Reagan pursued policies intended to advance capitalism; Thatcher, in particular, valued curbing inflation more than curbing poverty or unemployment. Both leaders' policies hinged on deregulation; they rolled back environmental protections, consumer protections, and labor protections in favor of economic growth. The world of Blade Runner is one without any such protections; companies are essentially free to do whatever they want, in an extreme exaggeration of these policies.
Blade Runner's depiction of Los Angeles's culture is, more than anything else in the film, reflective of global trends of the 1980s. In the late 1970s and continuing into the 1980s, Japanese firms underwent a large expansion into the American economy. This was especially prevalent in the automotive industry, with companies like Toyota, Mitsubishi, and Subaru, and the technology field, with companies like Sony and Casio. Many economists predicted that Japan would surpass the United States in economic output, and, in fact, by the end of the 1980s the Japanese automotive industry had become larger than its US counterpart.
In Blade Runner, these predictions have evidently come true. In the future of 2019, Japan wields enough influence that the Japanese culture and language are now dominant in Los Angeles. In one of the film's most iconic images, a woman in Geisha makeup is projected onto the side of a building, advertising birth control pills.
The one ray of hope in Blade Runner's world is leaving the planet. Off-world colonies are advertised as luxurious, spacious, and clean. The film's inclusion of these colonies could be in response to the recent launch of Voyager I, or even the space race as a whole; Scott evidently believed that we could have off-world colonies in the near future. Of course, these colonies are likely not what they are advertised to be; though not shown, it is implied that conditions are still harsh and crowded. This is perhaps the film's setting's most pessimistic aspect; the unchecked capitalism of 2019 has tainted even the noble goal of space exploration.
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