Blade Runner and New Brave World's Perspective's on Humanity Ridley Scott’s film “Blade Runner: Director’s Cut” and Aldous Huxley’s novel “Brave New World” explore the concept of ‘In The Wild’ by focusing on the natural world and its rhythms falling victim to unbridled scientific development. They present a wedge that is divorcing man from his relationship with nature, in an attempt to define what it means to be ‘human’. Both texts depict chilling dystopic futures where the materialistic scientific and economic ways of thinking have been allowed to quash the humanistic …show more content…
The World State clearly symbolizing the Totalitarianism in Huxley’s context. Though Huxley and Scott’s settings are diametrically opposed, they both overtly depict humanity straying from its natural origins and becoming metaphorically lost in the wilderness of science and materialism.
Both texts explore ‘In The Wild’ by demonstrating the ways in which scientific progress is divorcing humanity from its natural origins. The technocratic World State of “Brave New World” is populated by scientifically engineered beings – a complete subversion of the natural rhythms of the human life cycle. A love of nature has been satirically replaced with a love of “Our Ford” and it’s hedonistic “orgy porgies”. This parody of religion is a reflection of the spiritual depletion of the ‘Roaring Twenties’ and gives a god-like image to Henry Ford. Now, The World State has “applied mass-production to biology” – people are engineered by the 1000s and The World State even denies nature unless technology is integrally involved. However, the very existence of the necessary surrogates symbolizes the uncultivated nature of the natural order. In diametric opposition,
…show more content…
John the Savage, from the Savage Reservation, rejects the “Brave New World”: his characterization as someone who does not want fake “comfort” but rather the naturalness of “god, poetry, freedom and sin…I claim them all”, is reinforced by the accumulation and personal pronoun. By contrast, inhabitants of the World State have been manipulated since their foetal state to fit the requirements of society and to “like their inescapable social destiny”. “Brave New World” portrays a world in which technology is fast growing as the new God and its ironic that it’s the ‘outsiders’ that are each composers’ mouthpieces, used to articulate the human qualities so lacking in the ‘insiders’.
In “Blade Runner”, the responders are forced to question what constitutes a human consider the state of nature: a key difference between texts. In “Brave New World”, nature exists but is denied because, according to their consumerist values, ‘a love of nature keeps no factories busy’; however in “Blade Runner”, they lament its loss. Paradoxically, Tyrell capitalizes/corporatizes the role of God by technologically manufacturing life - Replicants – ironically
A Comparison of the Themes of Blade Runner and Brave New World ‘Humanity likes to think of itself as more sophisticated than the wild yet it cannot really escape its need for the natural world’ Despite different contexts both Aldous Huxley within his book Brave New World and Ridley Scott in the film Blade Runner explore the idea that humans feel themselves more sophisticated than the natural world, yet are able to completely sever relations between humanity and the nature. Through various techniques both texts warn their varied audiences of the negative ramifications that will come from such disdainful, careless opinions and actions. All aspects of the ‘New State’ within Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World indicate a belief that humanity is more sophisticated than the wild.
The central theme of Bladerunner is the relationship between humanity and nature. More specifically it has a purpose in showing how science can negatively influence this fragile relationship. Set in Los Angeles of 2019 we see the decadence of western society into an inhumane harsh impersonal, technology-dominated realm. The inhabitants who fight for their daily survival are in desperate want for nature, contact with which is denied to them by the unrestricted scientific progress and the consequent exploitation of the natural world conducted for the sole purpose of profit. Humanity is also losing touch with it’s own nature. The compassion, the empathy, the love and the emotion are all rare or absent. This ailing relationship between humanity and nature is conveyed through the means of scene setting, dialogue, plot, camera techniques and other film features. All these elements of cinematography synthesise to create an effective portrayal of the unifying theme.
Regardless of their financial successes, both novels and their respective film adaptations are held in high esteem by many. They both utilize unique visual techniques to immerse their audience in the worlds of Philip K. Dick, but differ on their strictness of plot and characterization. In the end, however, the departures from the original source material of Blade Runner are executed so well that they come across on par with the literal A Scanner Darkly. Both movies play tribute to genius of Philip K. Dick’s writing by being complete, well-rounded works.
Despite the changes in time and therefore, societal values, both Frankenstein and Blade Runner suggests that humanity’s pursuit for power and progress results in moral and ethical trepidations. Consequently, the comparison of these two texts expose the imperfections of human nature that will always remain perpetual regardless of context.
Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was first published in 1818 in an increasing secular British society, after the French revolution but the beginning of Industrial Revolution and during a period of technological and scientific advancement. Over 150 years later, Ridley Scott released Blade Runner, a film set in the 2019. The influence of the Cold War, capitalism and rising consumerism and uncontrollable scientific developments in areas of cloning, came together to form a dystopian world. Despite the differing contexts, values such as man's fascination with creating life, an obsession with science and discovery and the importance of parental responsibility are present in both texts, essentially representing Mary Shelley in the 1800s and Ridley Scott in the 20thcentury. The universality of such values are how each text broke through boundaries of their time, thus leading to being viewed as valuable. Shelley and Scott’s concerns for such issues lead to not being critically acclaimed at the time.
Despite different contexts, both Shelley’s Frankenstein and Scott’s Blade Runner enthrall the audience in a journey to explore the inner psyche through the various perspectives that are drawn.
Humans have an intrinsic fascination with contravening the innate tenets of existence, as the proclivity of the human condition to surpass our natural world leads to destruction. This inherent desire of man to augment our knowledge through conquering science and the secrets of life has transcended time, denoting literature premising the corruption of humanity. These pieces are reflected in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ridley Scott’s film Blade runner, perpetuating this assertion that man’s unnatural desires of deducing reality are precarious. Thus both composers postulate a grim future arising from man’s predilection of aberrant behaviour, as commonalities reinforce this desires opportunity to cause destruction. Paranormal creation and humanities emotive detachment are explored in both pieces, as their respective context has shaped conceptualisations of man’s desires which lead to destruction.
After the publishing of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, modern literature has changed forever. It is considered a masterpiece and one of the pillars of the dystopian novel. However, both of those affirmations can be called into question. The former based on a subjective opinion of a reader and the latter through compromising its dystopian nature. Similarly to George Orwell’s novels, the main appeal of Brave New World is within the ideas it contains, not within its literary merits. Huxley’s talent is essentially composed of his ideas and the attitude he assumes towards the problems he presents. He took full advantage of his endowment in Brave New World Revisited, a non fiction work sequel to Brave New World. The sequel is devoid of a mediocre narrative in favour of factual information and proposing solutions of the tackled problems. Simply put, Brave New World Revisited is what Brave New World should have been.
Essentially, when all is said and done, "Blade Runner" is really a film about questions, questions that we should ask ourselves of humanity. What is a human? What does it mean to be human? Do humans have more of a right to life than replicants? Have humans and androids become the same thing? It is not so important that one answers these questions, but that he or she asks them.
Alduos Huxley, in his science fiction novel Brave New World written in 1932, presents a horrifying view of a possible future in which comfort and happiness replace hard work and incentive as society's priorities. Mustapha Mond and John the Savage are the symbolic characters in the book with clashing views. Taking place in a London of the future, the people of Utopia mindlessly enjoy having no individuality. In Brave New World, Huxley's distortion of religion, human relationships and psychological training are very effective and contrast sharply with the literary realism found in the Savage Reservation. Huxley uses Brave New World to send out a message to the general public warning our society not to be so bent on the happiness and comfort that comes with scientific advancements.
Blade Runner became a cult classic. “The film may have survived long enough to benefit from a renewed taste for darker, more violent sci-fi. It’s appeal has less to do with a fascination for outer space (which does not feature beyond reference in a few lines of dialogue) than with a vision of earth and humankind in the near future” (Roberts and Wallis Pg 157-8). Both films have a timeless quality to it, as they are representative of the future of our planet earth. I find it so interesting that even though these films were made in different times their ideas about the futuristic city and society are almost identical.
For years, authors and philosophers have satirized the “perfect” society to incite change. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley describes a so-called utopian society in which everyone is happy. This society is a “controlled environment where technology has essentially [expunged] suffering” (“Brave New World”). A member of this society never needs to be inconvenienced by emotion, “And if anything should go wrong, there's soma” (Huxley 220). Citizens spend their lives sleeping with as many people as they please, taking soma to dull any unpleasant thoughts that arise, and happily working in the jobs they were conditioned to want. They are genetically altered and conditioned to be averse to socially destructive things, like nature and families. They are trained to enjoy things that are socially beneficial: “'That is the secret of happiness and virtue – liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their inescapable social destiny'” (Huxley 16). Citizens operate more like machinery, and less like humans. Humanity is defined as “the quality of being human” (“Humanity”). To some, humanity refers to the aspects that define a human: love, compassion and emotions. Huxley satirizes humanity by dehumanizing the citizens in the Brave New World society.
...be, as the Tyrell Corporation advertises, “more human than human.” Ridley Scott uses eye imagery to juxtapose the tremendous emotion of the replicants with the soullessness of the future’s humans. By doing so, Scott demonstrates that our emotions and yearning for life are the characteristics that fundamentally make us human, and that in his vision of our dystopian future, we will lose these distinctly human characteristics. We are ultimately losing the emotion and will to live that makes us human, consequently making us the mechanistic, soulless creatures of Scott’s dystopia. Blade Runner’s eye motif helps us understand the loss of humanness that our society is heading towards. In addition, the motif represents Ridley Scott’s call to action for us to hold onto our fundamental human characteristics in order to prevent the emergence of the film’s dystopian future.
The task presented about “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley (1932). I choose a newspaper article because I want to inform people from other parts of the world to know more about how it was the society in England and their plans for the director to create an ideal society or a utopia.
Duckworth, A.R. (2008). Blade Runner and the Postmodern use of Mise-en-scene. Available: http://ardfilmjournal.wordpress.com/2008/08/26/blade-runner-and-the-postmodern-use-of-mise-en-scene/ Last accessed 21st Dec 2013.