Episode 116: On 'Blade Runner'

In his 1978 bestseller The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins described humans as "survival machines" whose sole purpose is the replication of genes. All of culture needed to be understood as a side-effect, if not an epiphenomenon, of that defining function. Four years after Dawkins' book was published, Warner Brothers released Blade Runner, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's dystopian novel Do Androis Dream of Electric Sheep?. Ridley Scott's film presents us with a different kind of survival machine: the replicant, a technology whose sole function is the replication of human beings. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss the ethical, metaphysical, and aesthetic dimensions of one of the greatest and most prophetic science fiction films of all time.

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REFERENCES

Ridley Scott (dir.), Blade Runner

Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Philip K. Dick, “The Android and the Human”

Philip K. Dick, “Man, Android, and Machine”

Dennis Villeneuve (dir.), Blade Runner 2049

Weird Studies, Episode 114 on the Wheel of Fortune

Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner: BFI Film Classics

Alan Nourse, The Bladerunner

Weird Studies, Episode 115 on Brian Eno

Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Weird Studies, Episode 5 on “When Nothing is Cool”

JF Martel, “Reality is Analog: Philosophizing with Stranger Things”

John Carpenter (dir,), The Thing

Beyond Yacht Rock podcast

Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”

Weird Studies, Episode 86 on “The Sandman”

Orson Welles (dir.), Touch of Evil

George Orwell, 1984