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The Postmodern Condition in Film: Blade-runner and Matrix" 6 "Early in the 21 st Century, The Tyrell corporation advanced Robot evolution into the NEXUS phase - a being virtually identical to a human - known as a Replicant. The Blade Runner "Welcome to the desert of the real. " - Morpheus, The Matrix Blade runner speaks about the XXI century Los Angeles with rain, mist, and fog swirl about titanic structures built upon the ruins of the city, as mammoth space machines walk heavily about promoting the good life on the "off-world colonies. " The whole Earth is in decay, both physically and psychologically. The best of the human race has departed for better and more fertile space pastures, leaving the waste to mill around in the congested, rain-drenched streets, full of ugly machines-Replicant's. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), an aggressive blade runner" who is also a killer and android. Rick unwillingly accepts a given "freelance" assignment that stipulated his hunt for human like cyborgs, that go by the name of "replicant's, " who have returned from space colonies on Earth, to extend their lives by reprogramming themselves. Roy Batty plays the role of Hauer, while Mrs.
Young plays Rachel, another advanced Tyrell replica and android leader who thinks (because of implanted memories) she's human. The movie Blade Runner speaks about Replicant's who were superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them. Initially these Replicant's were used Off-world as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and colonization of other planets. Yet after a bloody uprising by a NEXUS 6 combat team in an Off-world colony, Replicant's were declared illegal on earth - under penalty of death, while the special police squad, called Blade Runner Units could kill Replicant's on the spot calling the procedure retirement, not a murder. The whole point for Rick Deckard is to "retire" four escaped, intelligently advanced, Nexus 6 replicant's. These replicant's Zhora, Leon, Roy, and Pris, are on earth looking for the ways to extend their limited (4 -year) life span.
Rich easily kills Zhora, and with the help of Rachel shoots Leon. Roy kills the Tyrell corporation leader, Tyrell, who refused to reprogram him, while Rick and Rachel fall in passionate love. The movie also shows great graphic episodes of fight between Rick Deckard and another replica Pris, who ultimately dies from the hand of Rick. Yet during the last fight between Rick Deckard and replica leader Roy, Roy does not kill Rick but rather lets him live to understand the supernatural perspectives on death.
The viewers are then able to listen to a profound replica speech regarding death, and subsequently watch Rick Deckard and the replica Rachel leave the scene together. The movie Matrix, on the other hand goes in completely different realm of science fiction depicting some future period of time that is actually not precisely estimated. The Matrix speaks about human computer technology that was developed to the point of creating an artificial intelligence; a thinking, willing, speaking, mutable, self-determined, conscious computer. This computer continued to learn and grow, "spawning a whole race of machines" (from Matrix movie), gaining influence over human society incrementally to the point of almost total control. The main character Neo (Keanu Reeves) learns from his friend Morpheus that Human revolt against thinking machines took the form of an atomic cataclysm intended to initiate a nuclear winter that would block sunlight from the surface of the Earth and shut down the solar-powered computer. In response, the main computer called Matrix started to breed human beings for use as a power source.
It created a technology that grew people in gel-filled baths and tubes, intravenously feeding them nutrients while tapping their body heat and electro-chemical activity to power the computer. To keep people alive as long as possible the computer created a program called "the Matrix, " that was an exact sensory duplicate or, as it is called in the film, "neural interactive simulation, " of late 20 th century earth (from movie Matrix). People grown in tubes and baths, were plugged directly into the computer network via implants on their spine and skulls. Each individual within the matrix perceived themselves as living out a normal life somewhere in late 20 th century earth while in reality their lives were spent within a battery.
Neo was a normal person, a computer programmer who lived in a matrix, enjoyed programming and selling software on the black market. He wondered about some enigmatic names Morpheus and Trinity, who were considered by the government the most wanted terrorist. He strives to find out the truth Yet it was the truth that found him. He would receive various messages on the computer screen, and was contacted by a girl in the bar who would start to lead him in the direction towards the truth The movie then starts to take a dramatically interesting turn when at work, Neo receives a FedEx with a cell phone and immediately receives the instructions from some voice as to how to leave the building. He fails to do it and is captured by FBI that offers him cooperation, yet after his refusal inserted a chip inside of him. Neo is subsequently contacted by Trinity and is saved as well as was granted access to the truth.
He understood that all he saw was nothing but his brains imagination that consequently was triggered by the computer generated reality The Matrix. The movie pointed out that everything, including gravity, Neos size and strength were imaginary, thus he should not be afraid of such things, he just needs to understand that and believe. Later on, the movie depicts various scenes and encounters with the agent who represent the computer Matrix. Neo falls in love with Trinity and love ultimately adds him more faith and understanding of what was real and what was imaginary. Ultimately, Neo stops the bullets, saves his friends (Morpheus, and Trinity) and penetrates the agents, as well as performing other miracles that are possible in the imaginary world. Neo became the messiah who at the end of the movie could easily act without any limits in the matrix as well as work on the ways to let other people know the truth and the reality.
In sum, Matrix can be viewed as the dialectic of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis (Zygmunt, 1997). As Matrix demonstrates, most of humanity is content to live within the virtual walls of spectacle, preferring the illusion of steak to the "real" taste of mush. The mix of Zen, Kung Fu, fundamentalism, and New Age spiritualism is not an integrated film-message (Wheale, 2000). What is interesting is that the movie does not reject science; it re-masters it and sets it along slightly different path.
The final message is that it is by freeing our mind from spectacle that we attain freedom. Ironically, to free the mind, the rebels use virtual teaching machines and simulated combat arenas to learn to fight terror with terror. I would also like to draw your attention to the fact that as they use new Age spiritualism, taking us along Neo's journey of self-discovery, revealing to us spectators that if we believe in ourselves, all is possible (Wheale, 2000). I personally believe that Blade Runner serves primarily as a means of demonstrating the futuristic portrayal of the regular life: namely, the accepted compression of time and space. While the Blade Runner depicts the life on earth full of cyborgs that fight with humans for the available resources, the movie Matrix managed to show to the world a coexistence of machines and humans, humans used as resources to power machines. The Blade Runner depicted the machines as albeit smart but limited in space and time, while the movie Matrix showed the machines (computer) as all inclusive and capable of creating a reality in which everyone can live.
As a result of the unevenly distributed advantages of post-industrial economies as depicted in Blade Runner, post modernity is characterized also by an extreme class polarization; the rich and the poor becoming increasingly socially and economically isolated from each other (Powell, 2001). In the Matrix, the computer represents the upper class that reaps all the benefits from human batteries giving them in exchange a virtual reality that serves for the purpose of extending human lives. In Blade Runner post-modernism is portrayed vividly in the architecture, most notably with the monolithic ivory tower of the Tyrell building dominating the otherwise impoverished urban landscape. In Matrix the Fields of Human Batteries, human incubators with monstrous robots searching back and forth for things that might halt human development managed to achieve the same effect (Lovejoy, 2000). Speaking about a movie condition of post-modernity in the movie Blade Runner I would like to note the effect of accelerated exchange and consumption on the experience of time.
It is this lack of secure temporal continuity (Jameson, 1985) that is, in fact, represented throughout Blade Runner: from JF Sebastian's accelerated ageing disease, to the neurotic preoccupation of its characters with personal histories. Therefore it seems that an ephemeral contract in Blade Runner is the hall mark of most-modern living. Another thing worth mentioning is that in Blade Runner the increased speed of development, production and life-span of commodities necessarily brings with it their rapid, destruction and decay. In conclusion I would like to note that also a viewer can observe post-industrialization as part of the post-modernism in the movies Blade Runner and the Matrix. Blade Runner accurately portrays as scenes of seething, small-scale production while in the movie Matrix there is assumed to exist no production (except for the nutrients to feed humans) because of the nuclear winter-plants cannot live and humans actually do not work. Blade Runner; is saturated with technology, from video-phones, to high-tech photo-enhancers, to hovercraft police vehicles, to huge electronic advertising blimps.
The Matrix went a step further, everything that could be seen was individually created in the minds of humans in exchange of their electricity and heat. In a future post-modern world in innovation are considered impossible, people strive to imitate the past. For example in the movie Blade Runner, Rachel, a Replicator, is pointedly clothed in a style which blends 1940 s utility clothing with 1960 s space-age fashion. The bar where Rick finds Zhora also belongs to the retro 40 s style. Blade Runner also presents an extremely heterogeneous, Creolized vision of street-life seemingly serving the dual function of portraying urban decay and pastiche. At the same time, the Matrix managed to still concentrate on the XX century style in clothes, cars, and technology (guns, etc. ) as also representing the society during which the humans like to live (full of violence, pain, etc. ) as opposed to the world that the matrix initially created for humans and that did not work.
a world of total urbanization in which nature has been in some way destroyed or over-run ("ecocide"). As in Bladerunner, nature in the movie gets relegated to "off-world, " in this case to the completely artificial Free-side. On earth we are presented with a world in which cities are taking up the entire landscape without living much actual space for humans. The same sort of ecocide is presented to us in the post-apocalyptic "reality" of The Matrix, where machines take up all human mind with the illusions of cities, while at the same time leaving nothing on the earth but fields where humans are grown. Bibliography: The Matrix Movie, The Blade Runner Movie.
Jim Powell, "Postmodernism for Beginners", McGraw Hill, 2001 (reprint). p 17 - 71 Margaret Lovejoy, "Postmodern Currents", Prentice Hall, 2000, p 78 - 95 Nigel Wheale, "The Postmodern Arts" NY Random House, 2000, p 101 - 114 Bauman, Zygmunt, Postmodernity and its Discontents, Washington Square, NY: NY University Press, 1997 Best, Steven and Kellner, Douglas, The Postmodern Turn, NY/London: The Guilford Press. 1997
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Research essay sample on Late 20 Th Century Blade Runner
