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Movie analysis: Postmodernism in Blade Runner

animals' and have no legal rights'(18).

Deckard fires at Zhora whilst she runs through an arcade of shops, past windows where mannequins can be seen in the background advertising punk and sexual looking clothing, Zhora falls through glass and dies. Her clothing is in fact similar to that on sale breaking down another barrier between humans and replicants. As Deckard fires, non-diegetic music plays, the music is sad and electronic, and is juxtaposed with a heartbeat that stops when Zhora dies. The heartbeat, like the mannequins show that although she is not a human, she is not lifeless either until she is retired'. The sad music may also reflect the hopelessness of her condition despite her struggle to survive a little longer which is essentially a human characteristic. It also illustrates that although Deckard does his job, he takes no pleasure in what he does.

The police arrive instantly to collect the body, they turn her around and neon can be seen flashing in the glass under her head, the lights pulsate replacing the heartbeat sound effect, life will go on without her as if she never existed. This highlights her temporal existence but also ours. This idea is taken up again at the end of the film, before Batty's time runs out, he recounts to Deckard how experience is washed away in time like tears in the rain'. The only explanation Deckard needs to give to the police for what can be considered murder is that he is a blade runner. The replicants are offered no protection from the law; authority wants only to use them and can destroy them at any time. This argument can be applied to both humans in our real capitalist society, and also the crowd in this scene. We are controlled by an authority to which we have no link and so we have in a sense, already given our lives over to someone else who can destroy us, especially if we consider the idea of extinction due to nuclear war. We can be seen as zombies or robots living mechanical lives, and in this way, the crowd are reflections of us.

Following Zhora's retirement, Deckard goes to a stall and buys a drink, a Budweiser' advert can be seen above the bar so this sign has been seen before the chase and again now that it is over. Perhaps this is supposed to represent the cyclical, repetitive nature of life and the illusion of progress.

At the end of the film, Deckard reflects that: The replicants are just like most of us. They simply want to know where they have come from, where they are going to and how much time they've


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Movie analysis: Postmodernism in Blade Runner

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    In 1985 Ihab Hassan noted that the term [postmodernism] is an oxymoron'(1)and like the term itself, any attempt to pin down

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