Ridley Scott's Dystopia Meets Ronald Reagan's America: Class Conflict and Political Dislousure in Blade Runner: The Final Cut

Abstract

Blade Runner has been the object of multiple inquiries over the last three decades. However, this essay analyzes the socio-political discourse of the text, one aspect yet to be elucidated. Taking as basis the 1992 re-edited version (Blade Runner: The Final Cut), the essay studies the film as a critical and contextualized response to Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1981-1989). The essay scrutinizes how the materiality of the socio-economic system presented in the film, and the discourses that revolve around it, embody a critical representation of the policy-making and cultural discourse of Reaganism. Thus, the ensuing text characterizes the film as a (counter) narrative that deconstructs the conservative ideology of the 1980s.