When Differences Fall Apart

Abstract

Although Blade Runner combines the conventions of film noir, sci-fi, and action adventure, the film transcends these genres through the complexity with which it portrays its central motif, constituting the cyberpunk genre. Literature had already illustrated the dangers of technology either running amok or attempting to simulate humans in works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, ¹ Herman Melville’s “The Bell Tower”, and in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman”. Cinema had already depicted the relationship between man and machine in films such as Frankenstein, in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, or in Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey. In BR, however, this relationship acquires a status much more complex than the one presented in these previous movies. The subject is confronted with its Other, an Other-machine that, in its anguish to become human and to prolong its life, becomes more human than the humans.