Blade Runner

There can be no denying that Blade Runner has excited a mass of scholarly work; a profusion of interpretation which has, perhaps, been matched in volume only by Blade Runner fandom’s creativity and productivity. There have been multiple guides to the film (see, for example, Bukatman 1997; Lacey 2000) and two editions of Studying Blade Runner (Redmond 2003, 2008). Reference works, such as Paul M. Sammon’s Future Noir (1996, 2007), have also enjoyed revised editions. It is unsurprising, then, that some scholars may react with world-weary sentiment to the monumental pyramid of scholarship now surrounding Blade Runner. Reviewing a 2005 edited collection, The Blade Runner Experience, Andrew M. Butler responded: ‘Enough already … There are other films that might warrant some attention … Here Blade Runner is not just a film which tanked at the box office then became a cult – it is an industry’ (2008: 142–3).

Butler hence alleges that Blade Runner has become part of an academic industry: publishers are supposedly cashing in on the film’s status, while academics are behaving like non-eclectic sheep, constantly writing about the same few texts rather than broadening their horizons. What the world does not need, we might suppose, is another book on Blade Runner. But the film has continued to exist industrially in the years since its first release, rather than merely being caught up in some sort of academic cash-in. Though it was hardly a box-office hit on its initial release – shown in 1,290 theatres across the US it grossed only $6.15 million during its opening weekend (see Sammon 2007: 316) – the 1992 ‘Director’s Cut’ grossed $29,557 in its opening US weekend (on 38 screens), while the 2007 ‘Final Cut’ scored a very strong opening of $89,150 on just two screens (see IMDb 2009). The film’s most recent cinematic release had grossed $1,445,283 in the US by 30 March 2008 (ibid.) (excluding money made internationally and from new DVD and Blu-ray releases).

Enough already with Butler’s line of thought: Blade Runner remains very much ‘an industry’ quite apart from academia’s efforts. And this ‘Cultographies’ title does something distinct in the annals of Blade Runner scholarship by specifically focusing on the movie’s cult status. To be sure, previous guides have included sections on this (see, for example, Lacey 2000: 80–1; Sammon 2007: 321–9; Redmond 2008: 75–8), but no single volume has been tasked with the assignment of exploring discourses and theories of the LA 2019 cult. As such, I am conscious of not wanting to roundly reiterate material and factual information available elsewhere; hence this should not be considered as a one-stop introduction to Blade Runner’s world. Rather, it is designed as a contribution to one strand of debate: how and why has Blade Runner become a cult movie?

This question immediately calls for several definitions. We need to examine how ‘cult’ itself has been theorised, of course. The next chapter introduces one major theory focused on textual qualities (Eco 1995), before exploring its blindspots. Chapter 3 shifts away from text-based theories of cult to explore reception and audience-based approaches (Bourdieu 1984) – taking in the commonly-cited ‘flop turned cult’ idea – before the final chapter pursues a more historicised, layered take on multiple cult audiences (Hills 2006, 2008). However, as well as defining ‘cult’, we also need to determine exactly what is meant by ‘Blade Runner’. I will address this question first, before briefly discussing my own personal relationship to the Blade Runner universe.

This may seem like an odd query. However, as Aaron Barlow observes in The DVD Revolution: ‘these days, films as they are released on DVD may actually be purposefully more authoritative than the theatrical release … Which, then, is the “real” film?’ (2005a: 25). This question of multiple versions is far more complex in relation to Blade Runner, of course, rather than merely involving a theatrical/DVD binary. The recent Final Cut (2007) was made available as part of the ‘Ultimate Collector’s Edition’ five-DVD set, presented alongside three different ‘archival’ versions and the previously rare Workprint, making five commercially-available incarnations of the one movie. But it has been argued that there are further versions – Sammon identifies seven in his Video Watchdog article, including the Criterion laserdisc as a separate ‘de facto’ entry due to its then ‘generous … letterboxing’ (1993: 45), as well as separating the Workprint and ‘Fairfax Cut’. By 2007, Sammon had revised his estimate of variant versions downwards to six (not including the Final Cut), identifying the rough Workprint as identical to certain other reported versions (see 2007: 500). The five-disc DVD release of the Ultimate Collector’s Edition (UCE) thus does not encompass all variations – however minor – that have circulated in the public domain. It does, however, make readily available the Workprint, a rough cut of Blade Runner which included temporary music rather than the finished Vangelis soundtrack, and which also began with an entirely different text caption to the 1982 theatrical release. Attributed to a fictional ‘New American Dictionary … 2016’, the Workprint begins by defining the term ‘replicant’: ‘See also ROBOT (antique): ANDROID (obsolete)’. Quite unlike the introductory text eventually used, this version is at pains to strongly distance Blade Runner’s ‘replicants’ from SF clichés such as the ‘robot’ and the ‘android’, indicating that such labels are redundant. By doing so, it paradoxically links replicants to these generic, science-fictional identities, seeming to imply that they are possible synonyms for the film’s invented language.

Blade Runner’s belated reappearance as a multiple DVD set also suggests that its different versions, previously researched and tracked by fan-scholars, have been repositioned as a ‘disciplined’, official sequence rather than as an object of relatively underground, cultist knowledge (see Caldwell 2008: 159). For, as John Thornton Caldwell has argued, ‘DVD “hardens” the entertainment experience into a sale-able consumer product’ (2008: 161). This ‘hardening’ of audience/text interactions may, of course, partly benefit fans by catering for their desire to learn about behind-the-scenes information:

Reviewers and critics become superfluous in this scheme, for the DVD system pre-authors and provides critical analysis as primary onscreen content. The resulting ‘dumbing-up’ rewards distinction in viewers who fancy themselves discriminating, culturally knowledgeable, relatively sophisticated fans. (Caldwell 2008: 161)

Caldwell may well overstate this change. After all, far from becoming seemingly redundant, fan-authored DVD review sites and professional DVD review magazines have proliferated in the era of digital media. However, his argument does usefully address the ‘mainstreaming’ of behind-the-scenes commentary represented by DVD extras, with forms and levels of fan knowledge now becoming standardised parts of mainstream consumer releases. As well as an array of extras, even the design of the UCE menu screens caters to cult fans’ desires to symbolically immerse themselves in the world of Blade Runner, depicting the DVDs’ restricted interactivity as if viewer selections are akin to Deckard’s diegetic ‘esper’ image-zooming and exploration. Jo T. Smith notes that ‘these interfaces are increasingly incorporated into the “look” and aesthetic world of the film’ (2008: 146).

However, the problem of which is the ‘real’ Blade Runner doesn’t only emerge as a matter of multiple DVDs (see Jonathan Gray 2005: 112). Even pre-DVD textuality was complicated around Blade Runner by the existence of a 1982 Marvel Comics adaptation, one which involved extensive narration from the character of Deckard, and a final flight into snowy, northern landscapes differing from the 1982 theatrical release (see Marvel Comics Group 1982a and 1982b). And in 1995, 1996 and 2000 three officially-licensed K. W. Jeter novels were published which continued Blade Runner’s narrative, expanding the filmic world into one of ‘templants’ as well as replicants (1995: 144), that is, ‘original’ human templates and their replicant ‘copies’. Will Brooker argues that fans have tended to view the Jeter novels as non-canonical, as ‘not proper Blade Runner’ (see 1999 :62). Instead, the novels have been represented as problematic attempts to reconcile Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) with Ridley Scott’s film vision (see Christy Gray 2005; Brooker 2009).

SF scholar Mark Bould contests this fan evaluation, however, arguing that as an academic he has no wish to become ‘the critical equivalent of a blade runner’:

Just as Rick Deckard … must track down replicants, deciding en route who is human and who is not, so the traditional textual critic … faced with ‘essentially [six versions of the movie] which have been seen by the general public’, must decide which is authentic (whatever that might mean). (1999: 166)

Unlike Blade Runner fandom, Bould thus studies Jeter’s novels as well as the movie texts and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? This decision takes us to another issue surrounding the supposedly ‘real’ Blade Runner, though: the extent to which it can be considered an adaptation of Dick’s novel. Though the author didn’t live to see a completed cut of Blade Runner’s 1982 theatrical release, on the basis of information available to him before his untimely passing away, Philip K. Dick declared:

The two reinforce each other, so that someone who started with the novel would enjoy the movie and someone who started with the movie would enjoy the novel. I was amazed that [David] Peoples could get some of those scenes to work … You read the screenplay and then you go to the novel, and it’s like they’re two halves to one meta-artwork, one meta-artifact. (In Landon 1997: 92)

This mutual harmonisation of book and film might well be called into question, but what is evidently called for is a model of textuality which can make sense of both pre- and post-DVD multiplicity or ‘meta’ artifactuality, where different versions/adaptations/continuations speak across one another, and where fans include/exclude elements of Blade Runner’s textual ‘cluster’ (Bould 1999: 165). In Fans, Cornel Sandvoss suggests that:

It is difficult to imagine a fan of a single baseball game rather than team, or a single episode of a television series rather than of the whole show. Even among committed cineastes, it seems, it is more difficult to find fans of a single film rather than a particular genre, actor … or director. (2005: 133)

Sandvoss’s argument is that elements ‘crucial to the qualities of the fan text … [include] regularity and repetition’ (ibid.). At first glance, the Blade Runner cult may seem to qualify Sandvoss’s contention that single films tend not to sustain detailed fan response, but in fact it supports his argument. Here we have a single film title which has very much become a ‘fan text’ but which has also mutated into a franchise by virtue of textual variation. Blade Runner is, unusually, a set of multiple film texts without cinematic prequels or sequels. It displays ‘regularity and repetition’ by virtue of its existence as a ‘text-cluster’ (Bould 1999: 165). As such, it is more than a single text ‘that might be considered in isolation from its history of multiple prints, or detached from its vast array of intertexts’ (Atkins 2005: 79), but simultaneously less than a regular film series. Indeed, the original theatrical release (1982), the Director’s Cut (1992) and the Final Cut (2007) might even be described as a trilogy of one film.

For Sandvoss, the multiplicity of ‘fan texts’ (that is, texts which provoke and sustain fan attention) allows fandom to shape textual boundaries. Fans can determine for themselves, from the multiple options, exactly what they count as ‘proper’ Blade Runner. Evidence is ruled in and out: ‘texts thus function as spaces of self-reflection, not only through the individual interpretation of particular signs, but also through a selective process of which signs are part of the fan text in the first place’ (Sandvoss 2005: 132). This goes beyond what media studies has termed ‘polysemy’ – the multiple meanings a text can carry – and into the realm of the ‘neutrosemic’ where no inherent meaning is given (Sandvoss 2005: 126). To give a Blade Runner example: is Deckard (Harrison Ford) a replicant? Individual fans can choose their answer to this by focusing on different versions of the film which more-or-less strongly provide evidence, as well as by choosing to refer to Ridley Scott’s extra-textual pronouncements, or deciding to rule these out.

Studying Blade Runner prior to the release of the Final Cut, Jonathan Gray also calls into question the usefulness of ‘polysemy’, suggesting that Blade Runner requires new theoretical models:

These fans scour over evidence and welcome more of it, but seem ultimately unconcerned with (or even anxious about the prospect of) finding some grand form of closure. The notion that any text ‘says something’ is paramount to much of textual studies, but these fans’ reactions suggest that we must also accept the equal and opposite notion that some texts ask instead of answer, and that their resulting persistent refusal of closure and continued open-endedness becomes a large part of what they ‘mean’ and of why they are valued. (2005: 117–8)

As Gray notes, this process of ongoing textual exploration ‘is not “polysemy” in the sense of a text allowing its audiences to decide what it means … for this itself requires closure’ (2005: 118). Instead, Blade Runner’s multiplicity-within-singularity appears to textually sustain and support ongoing rereading: ‘decoding continues … when it comes to textual reception, there is always another replicant – another interpretation, another decoding – potentially out there’ (Gray 2005: 118; emphasis in original). This suggests one potential difference between a fan text and a cult text: whereas the former might involve individual fans reinforcing their self-identities by making their own closed (that is, definite) meanings from a set of texts (see Sandvoss 2005), the latter appears to support an ongoing openness of meaning for its devotees (see Jonathan Gray 2005). As Jonathan Gray concludes: ‘To the fans I have interviewed, ‘Blade Runner’ is … an experience, a structure of feeling and multiple zones or spheres of emotional, intellectual and philosophical contemplation and reflection’ (2005: 123).

Neither strictly neutrosemic nor polysemic, Blade Runner can thus be thought of as a ‘thick’ text in critic Roz Kaveney’s terms:

What … is a thick text? The precondition of … recognising a thick text is that we accept that all texts are not only a product of the creative process but contain all the stages of that process within them like scars or vestigial organs. The film we see in the cinema may be further revised to the final form of an extended director’s cut; our knowledge of it may be transformed when viewing it on DVD by the presence of deleted scenes … We have to learn … that all works of art are to some extent provisional. (2005: 5)

This provisionality notoriously shows through in Blade Runner (1982) where Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh) tells Deckard that six replicants have got back to Earth, with one being killed. This should leave five replicants to track down, yet Deckard is allocated only four: Leon (Brion James), Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), Pris (Daryl Hannah) and Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer). The mention of six minus one replicants is precisely a ‘scar’ or ‘vestigial organ’; it is a mark left over from script plans to include an additional replicant, Mary. However, its remainder in the text allowed fans to speculate that Deckard himself was the extra replicant, enabling re-decoding. It also provided the narrative pre-text for K. W. Jeter’s first sequel, The Edge of Human (1995) which is thematically fixated upon revisiting Blade Runner. We are told that ‘watchcams in Bryant’s office’ (1995: 42) recorded events, meaning that within the diegesis Deckard himself can behave exactly like a re-decoding cultist, watching closely and reinterpreting textual details:

Bryant’s rasp of a voice again. Six replicants … three male, three female.

‘Six.’ Deckard gazed in puzzlement at the screen. ‘Now I remember…’

‘You’re catching on.’ Sarah [Tyrell] kept her own voice soft. ‘And then Bryant, on this tape, goes on to tell you about five replicants. One that he doesn’t name, who got fried in the security barriers around the Tyrell corporation headquarters … Do the count … Kowalski … Pris … Zhora. Plus the Roy Batty replicant … makes five. Not six … That means there’s a sixth escaped replicant still on the loose’. (Jeter 1995: 44–6; emphasis in original)

Under a watchful gaze?: Blade Runner’s ‘continuations’ take their cue from the film(s) and emphasise repeated re-viewing

In fact, the novel constantly returns to the movie text(s), replaying, reworking and remembering details. This self-reflexive looping back through textual material also characterises Replicant Night (Jeter 1996), where a movie recreation of Deckard’s assignment to track Batty et al. is being diegetically filmed, and Eye and Talon in which a character realises her true identity by watching this very recreation – Blade Runner (Jeter 2000:134; see Christy Gray 2005: 152). Constantly riffing on what we are shown onscreen, and looping back to it with new narrative extrapolations, these novels may be judged as non-canonical by many fans, but they nevertheless enact fan practices of rereading and textual re-decoding.

As an outstanding instance of Kaveney’s ‘thick’ text, surrounded by fan (and officially-licensed) re-decodings, Blade Runner is frequently approached via what Matei Calinescu terms ‘heuristic hope’ in his study Rereading:

I shall call ‘heuristic hope’… the hope of making a discovery … This … is … more than the idle expectation of a serendipitous find; it is a state of creative readiness … The ability to approach a text ludically is an expression of a state of overall well-being, self-confidence, and creativeness. The ludic attitude may prompt the reader to construct his or her reading as a game (competitive, cooperative, or mixed). The same basic attitude may also give rise in the reader to a vague but vital, healthy … ‘heuristic hope’. (1993: 139–41; emphasis in original)

This renders the text/audience encounter as a sort of game-playing, resembling Will Brooker’s (2009) account of Blade Runner as a textual ‘multiverse’ rather than a mere cluster. Brooker uses the concept to metaphorically capture a sense that fans can branch through different, incompatible possibilities, equally weighted across Blade Runner’s multiple textual versions. Conceptualising Blade Runner as something closer to a branching game-world rather than a conventional diegesis, this makes a lot of sense in relation to Blade Runner’s multiplicity, particularly in light of the fact that Ridley Scott has not sought to replace previous versions with a new ‘master’ narrative (unlike the stance adopted by Lucasfilm towards the re-versioning of Star Wars (1977); see Brooker 2009: 84). Though the Final Cut is marked as definitive in its title, it is nonetheless marketed alongside earlier versions, and not as their ‘final’ displacement.

However, Brooker’s useful concept of ‘branching’ downplays the fact that certain official Blade Runner intertexts are, indeed, ruled out by alternative filmic versions. By correcting Bryant’s dialogue so that two of the six replicants are killed before Deckard is sent to hunt down the remaining offenders, the Final Cut invalidates the re-decoding of The Edge of Human, which was nonetheless an officially-licensed narrative possibility. This supplement is, therefore, seemingly not an equally weighted possibility, but instead requires that specific branching decisions are followed (that is, the 1995 book makes no sense at all if you begin from the Final Cut). It is partly because certain branches are weighted that I favour the concept of ‘heuristic hope’ to explicate fan (and official) rereading rather than a purely ‘multiversal’ metaphor. Fans can explore and re-decode textual ambiguities at the level of any given, single textual version as well as supplementing this via other intertexts, all in the creative, healthy hope of discovering something new in Blade Runner. ‘Branching’ also tends to imply that coherent, singular and stable interpretations are important (it is somewhat akin to ‘neutrosemy’ in this respect), whereas ‘heuristic hope’ more strongly emphasises ongoing openness of interpretation. It stresses the creative pursuit of new textual details and discoveries, as opposed to an apparent switching between alternate diegetic routes.

Having said that, Brooker’s (2009) analysis is extremely helpful for thinking through a further way in which Blade Runner can be textually identified. He points out that film and television series are now designed as story-worlds, with each new franchise offering ‘a diegesis where many stories can be told across multiple platforms, from its inception’ (2009: 90). Brooker then argues convincingly that Blade Runner has shifted, over time, into this model of the story-world-as-brand, having been conceptualised very differently in the 1980s: ‘Blade Runner began in 1982 as an older kind of text – a film adaptation of a novel – and expanded, partly through accident and circumstance, partly through artistic or commercial decision, into a cross-platform phenomenon’ (ibid.).

Indeed, as well as mutating from adaptation/stand-alone film to a story-world franchise, Blade Runner has become a kind of template for the designing of present-day cult movies. Film series such as the Matrix titles (1999, 2003) now knowingly invite fans’ ‘heuristic hope’ of uncovering new textual detail:

one might see the The Matrix as emblematic of the cult movie in convergence culture … The film’s endless borrowings … spark audience response. Layers upon layers of references catalyse and sustain our epistemophilia; these gaps and excesses provide openings for the many different knowledge communities that spring up around these cult movies to display their expertise. (Jenkins 2006: 98–9)

Henry Jenkins’ description highlights that rampant referencing of genre, myth and popular culture aim to spark audience re-decoding or ‘epistemophilia’. But re-decoding is also structured and designed to loop out of and back into the movie text(s) via official, cross-platform intertexts such as tie-in games:

Neil Young [at Electronic Arts] talks about ‘additive comprehension’. He cites the example of the director’s cut of Blade Runner, where adding a small segment showing Deckard discovering an origami unicorn invited viewers to question whether Deckard might be a replicant: ‘That changes your whole perception of the film … The challenge for us … is how do we deliver the origami unicorn, how do we deliver that one piece of information that makes you look at the films differently’. (Jenkins 2006: 123)

Though invoking a textual detail from Blade Runner, Young is nevertheless discussing how to design a tie-in game for Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). The ‘origami unicorn’ is thus, in this case, meant to indicate a cross-platform intertextual supplement: ‘Our hope is that you would play the game and that would motivate you to watch the films with this new piece of knowledge which would shift your perception of what has happened in the previous films’ (Young in Jenkins 2005: 123). This multi-platformed franchise design may be emblematic of one type of contemporary cult movie, but it is evidently textually prefigured by Blade Runner. Unlike the Matrix trilogy or the Lord of the Rings films (2001, 2002, 2003), dubbed a ‘“cult” franchise’ by Paul Grainge (2008: 142), Blade Runner has been made over as a ‘franchise’ rather than initially functioning as one. This reinvention is partly a result of the film’s take-up by a dedicated fan community, who have then been co-opted as a target market for tie-in games such as the (1997) Westwood title or Jeter’s continuation novels, despite these coming years after the film’s first release. Blade Runner’s reinvention as a franchise is also partly an unintended outcome of the movie’s hyperdetailed story-world and generic intertextualities which, quite by accident, anticipate the aims of diegetic construction industrially normalised by latter-day convergence cults.

The origami unicorn: Blade Runner’s reorienting textual details have formed a template for designed ‘convergence cult’ movies

It is, then, no accident that Jonathan Gray (2005: 123) puts ‘Blade Runner’ in quote marks to indicate its uncertain status – not quite a single text, but not quite a conventional franchise made up of sequential instalments either. Nor is ‘it’ apparently a polysemic text where fans create definite, different interpretations, nor a ‘neutrosemic’ fan text inspiring self-mirroring interpretations, at least according to Gray’s empirical study of fans’ desire to avoid final, closed-down readings. Instead, Blade Runner’s multiple versions enable fans’ ‘heuristic hope’ that further details can be discovered, without overtly interpellating such a project:

the project of Blade Runner Internet fandom involves … an obsessive return to the ‘original’ text(s) … in order to pick over the clues and build threads of logic which explain … unsolved mysteries … For Blade Runner fans to go forward, then, they have continually to return to the past. (Brooker 1999: 60; 62)

And similarly, I want to return to the past in the next section. Part of the ‘Cultographies’ brief requests that contributors set out their ‘personal involvement’ with the movie written about. Of course, there is nothing inherently of value in this confessional process unless the ‘personal’ can be related to wider contexts of cultural meaning. Searching for a way to meaningfully contextualise my Blade Runner memories, I shall use them to investigate how memory itself has been thought about in relation to the Blade Runner phenomenon.

In 1982 – at least as far as this book is concerned – I saw the wrong film. With my Dad and brother, I stood in a queue that stretched around our local cinema in Aldershot, not knowing whether we’d successfully get in to see … E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. I would have been ten at the time, and my brother two years younger, so we weren’t a very suitable audience for Blade Runner. The film didn’t register with my childhood self, though I was already a devoted fan of SF, religiously watching Doctor Who on TV, and owning a collection of Star Wars action figures. Akin to film scholar Jeffrey Weinstock’s ‘missed encounter’ with The Rocky Horror Picture Show from 1975, which he first saw in a movie theatre some 13 years later (see Weinstock 2007: 1 and 7), I wasn’t part of the initial generation which embraced the Blade Runner cult. By an accident of birth, I didn’t see the film until much later, putting me in the position recounted by Future Noir author, Paul M. Sammon:

two elements of Blade Runner … have proven to be indisputable influences on post-1982 pop-culture. First and most obvious is Blade Runner’s design scheme, a gritty, hyperdetailed, sleek-yet-distressed mixture of the old and the new that set the visual tone for many science fiction films to come. Blade Runner’s second, equally important influence involves its brooding cyberpunk edge, a dark intellectualism that insists on … a tough-minded willingness to confront the ethical ramifications of unfettered technological advancement. These twin virtues have been noted by a long line of middlebrow and academic critics, many of whom did not really ‘see’ Blade Runner until well after its original 1982 release. Be that as it may…. (2007: 389; emphasis added)

Sammon’s ‘be that as it may’ suggests that this late arrival of academic critics is a trivial matter. Yet it is evidently worth remarking upon, implying a lurking disdain for the latecomers here (see chapter 3 on ‘authentic’/‘inauthentic’ cult) which resembles subcultural value systems. Mark Jancovich has argued that ‘subcultural ideologies are fundamental to fans [sic] cultures’ (2002: 308). These ‘ideologies’ tend to place a premium on being there at the beginning, that is, as an originating cult audience or subculturalist. Dick Hebdige analyses punk subculture in exactly these terms:

The style no doubt made sense for the first wave of self-conscious innovators at a level which remained inaccessible to those who became punks after the subculture had surfaced and been publicised. Punk is not unique in this: the distinction between originals and hangers-on is always a significant one in subculture. (1979: 122)

Thanks to my 1971 birthdate, this would tragically make me a Blade Runner ‘hanger-on’, someone who didn’t see the film until the late 1980s. And worse is to come: my memories of first viewing the film are, on the whole, extremely hazy. I recall the circumstances of my first viewing – it was with a group of sixth-form friends, watching on video at a mate’s house. One of the group had previously seen Blade Runner, and wanted to ascertain what the others thought, lending some situational credence to Janet Staiger’s notion that ‘cult texts are … texts to which people wish to initiate others … often outside of the mainstream’ (2005: 125). Though I was not the cultist here, but rather the object of another’s nascent fandom.

What I remember more than anything else is the film’s final confrontation between Roy Batty and Rick Deckard, especially that shot of a dove flying up into bright, blue sky. And the music; I loved the lush synth sounds and the pulsating closing theme, making my initial relationship to the text, as I remember it now, just as much aural as visual (see Stiller 1997; Larsen 2005; Whittington 2007). In The Remembered Film, Victor Burgin argues that film studies needs to pay less attention to movies as wholes, and more to the ‘metonymic fragments [and] … image scraps’ which viewers remember, carry with them and imaginatively hold on to (2004: 9). After my first Blade Runner encounter, it was Batty’s death scene and the dove that stayed with me. Cognitivist Carl Plantinga uses this very sequence to exemplify how film narratives can seek to build up empathy between spectators and characters. The fact that it stuck with me could therefore be interpreted as a result of this kind of emotional elicitation:

Roy Batty … relates his cherished memories to Deckard … then bows his head and expires. Here we get almost one minute of a close-up of Batty, punctuated by brief point/glance shots of Deckard. Empathy is a process that occurs in time, and emotions take time to catch. Therefore, the faces are either left on the screen for sufficient duration, or else we continually return to them within the point-of-view structure. Emotions also have a residual effect. Once they are caught, they are not quickly overcome. This in particular accounts for the placement of scenes of compassionate empathy at the end of many films, where an emotional response can serve as a release. (1999: 250)

Ironically for a film dealing with characters’ capacities for empathy, my earliest Blade Runner experience was not much concerned with ‘dark intellectualism’ or even the movie’s ‘design scheme’, centring instead on an empathetic response, and sympathy for Roy Batty. Plantinga points out that to build audience/character empathy, a narrative context is required in which facial expressions can directly express ‘the interiority of the character … [hence] social display rules are irrelevant and the face becomes an accurate sign of emotion’ (1999: 251). Blade Runner achieves this through Batty’s impending death, with the character having no reason to dissemble or hide his true feelings: ‘his speech here is a kind of confession, a heartfelt expression of his cherished memories and deepest regrets … the filmmaker creates a context in which we may interpret the face as an accurate sign of inner experience’ (ibid.). As well as being emotionally potent, this sequence could also be viewed as especially ‘quotable’ (Smith 1999: 69), given its emphasis on condensed, poetic dialogue, and the highly tangential, incongruous moment featuring the released dove. It may well have lodged in my mind partly for these reasons.

If my first textual encounter lives on primarily as a memory of felt emotion, my second encounter was more scholarly in tone. I was at Sussex University when the Director’s Cut was released, and I saw a late-night screening at the Duke of York’s Cinema in Brighton. This was followed by much analysis – I was a keen film student – and attempts to theorise and critique the movie. Not quite a ‘classroom cult’ (Hoberman & Rosenbaum 1991: 330), it was nevertheless strongly mediated by my undergraduate activities in film theory. Extracurricular cult, perhaps. This time around I was intrigued by the question of Deckard’s identity, and the meaning of the origami unicorn.

I’ve seen the different versions repeatedly since, often for work purposes. But it wasn’t until I saw the Final Cut on DVD, and began to research and read in preparation for writing this book, that I truly became captivated by Blade Runner. This textual encounter instilled me with a passion for the film’s design work and created world. I inexplicably found myself wanting to own the same type of whisky glass used by Deckard – a Cibi square double old fashioned – despite the fact that I hadn’t previously been a whisky drinker. And I toyed with purchasing an Acme ‘Brick’ pen emblazoned with Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis-Brown textile block design (not a piece of Blade Runner merchandise at all, but a product aimed squarely at aficionados of architecture and design). I was deeply annoyed to discover that I’d missed out on owning a fan-made replica of Deckard’s futuristic Johnnie Walker Black Label bottle, and equally annoyed to discover that UK Customs seemed likely to confiscate a Plager Katsumate Series-D (PKD) replica blaster if I attempted to import one ready-made (see Netrunner, n.d.).

What had changed? I suspect that in my earlier textual meetings I lacked access to many of the discourses which now enabled me to engage more intimately with Blade Runner’s world. Watching it as a film studies’ academic, a cult fan of other SF texts and an interested consumer of industrial/product design, Blade Runner made a whole new, belated sense to me. That I found my interest in design reflected back to me, therefore reinforcing my self-identity as a ‘nesting’ thirty-something, might suggest that I was becoming a fan in Cornel Sandvoss’s terms (see 2005); mirroring a version of my self-identity through neutrosemic textual interpretation. But this didn’t seem to be all that was happening, precisely because my desire to materialise elements of the text in my living room (the whisky glass) was both strongly felt and, above all, surprising to me. I wasn’t just, or only, reproducing a pre-existent, enclosed sense of self via the movie: it was also transformatively and experientially acting on me as this time I identified not just with one character (Roy Batty) but rather with a designed mise-en-scène and narrative world. My newfound design ‘interdiscourse’ (Fiske 1990: 85) lent the film a lived, felt relevance to me which reconfigured, rather than mirrored, my prior sense of self. John Fiske argues that where such interdiscourse exists ‘between the social discourses in the text and those through which I made sense of my “self”, my social relations, and my social experience’ then pop culture will be especially felt as relevant and pleasurable (ibid.).

Barbara Klinger has argued that cult movies can be experienced in a number of ways – through ‘audience identifications at public screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show or the re-released sing-along version of The Sound of Music [1965] in 2000’ but also through cases which are not about public, ‘spectacular fandom’, instead speaking very much to personal identities and memories, and where ‘personalised films … become cult films’ (2006: 185–6). Blade Runner has attracted cult discourses for many years – hence this book – but in all honesty, it has only recently been experienced as a personalised cult movie by me. There is, after all, a significant difference between seeing a film one is told is a cult but then feeling no great need to rewatch it, perhaps merely registering its reputation, and experiencing a movie as cult. Janet Staiger suggests that this creates a fatal problem for any text-based theory of cult status: ‘many people may see these films with no “cult” effect occurring for them’, meaning that text-centred models fail to explain ‘why only some individuals become cult viewers’ (2005: 126). This problem can be diachronic as well as synchronic, of course – why did Blade Runner ‘come alive’ for me as a cult series of multiple texts in my late thirties but not in my teens or twenties? I will return to this intriguing issue – why cult texts leave some audiences cold but have a huge impact on others – in the next chapter. For now, I want to note only that Blade Runner has become more than a sequence of blurred, indistinct memories for me, shifting into something I feel is a ‘personal’ possession, but which also phenomenologically acts on me. Alison Landsberg captures this duality when she analyses ‘prosthetic memories’, that is, memories of media representations rather than purely embodied experiences:

The cinema, in particular, as an institution which makes available images for mass consumption, has long been aware of its ability to generate experiences and to install memories of them – memories which become experiences that film consumers both possess and feel possessed by. We might then read these films which thematise prosthetic memories as an allegory for the power of the mass media to create experiences and implant memories. (1995: 176)

Landsberg reads Blade Runner as a meditation on the idea that it makes no difference to self-identity whether memories are ‘real’ or ‘prosthetic’, because ‘either way, we use them to construct narratives for ourselves, visions for our future’ (1995: 186). Suggesting that ‘the film makes us call into question our own relationship to memory’ (ibid.), Landsberg steps perhaps too quickly from one of Blade Runner’s themes to ideal audience interpretations. As I have pointed out, my problem with Blade Runner wasn’t that it called into question my philosophical account of my own memory-work, but rather more prosaically, that I simply couldn’t remember much of my first teenage encounter. Landsberg’s use of ‘prosthetic memory’ is more convincing when she moves away from textual analysis:

In contrast to collective memories, which tend to be geographically specific and which serve to reinforce and naturalise a group’s identity, prosthetic memories are not the property of a single group. Rather, they open up the possibility for collective horizons of experience and pave the way for unexpected … alliances. (2003: 149)

This, after all, reads like a validation of cult fandom, which is not strictly ‘geographically specific’, and which is based upon ‘collective horizons of experience’ in the form of shared filmic appreciation. Cult fandom’s prosthetic memories are also seemingly not the property of a single pre-existent group; anyone can in theory become such a fan. However, things are not this simple: remember Paul M. Sammon’s subculturalist disdain for newbies and academics – the people who missed out on the original scene. Cult movies like Blade Runner raise matters of textual ownership, not merely in the legal sense, but also in terms of fans’ felt moral ownership. Blade Runner’s prosthetic memories supposedly ‘belong’ more definitively to those who were there from the very beginning in 1982. And Jonathan Gray’s striking term for the film’s multiplicity-in-singularity, that it represents a ‘structure of feeling’, also implies this specific belonging. Drawn from the work of Raymond Williams, structure of feeling has been defined as generational, as:

a particular sense of life, a particular community of experience hardly needing expression, through which the characteristics of our way of life that an external analyst could describe are in some way passed, giving them a particular and characteristic colour. We are usually most aware of this when we notice the contrasts between generations … The term I would suggest to describe it is structure of feeling: it is as firm and definite as ‘structure’ suggests, yet it operates in the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity. (1965: 64)

Williams goes on to argue that this typically decadal structure of feeling ‘does not seem to be, in any formal sense, learned’; although one generation can transmit knowledge and cultural patterns to its successor, the new generation will still possess its own emergent structure of feeling, ‘which will not appear to have come “from” anywhere’ (1965: 65; see also Williams 1981: 157). As part of a structure of feeling, Blade Runner would therefore appear to ‘belong’ to a specific generation of 1980s fans, those who have embraced the movie since its inception and aged with it. Williams’ notion of a generation is that of a ‘cohort of individuals who are born at a given time’ rather than a socially-constructed concept where widely differing age groups can identify with specific trends and attitudes (Edmunds & Turner 2002: 6). Such generational identity resonates with the ‘subcultural ideologies’ of Blade Runner devotees. Prior to the release of the Final Cut, one of Gray’s respondents, Dan Gorski, hoped that a noughties’ version of the film would help to create a new generation of fans:

It will provide a new generation with the opportunity to experience Blade Runner, since … hype will grab new fans who might be intrigued by a multi-version ‘cult classic’. And it’s bound to strike a cord [sic] with various ‘pop’ cultures that have grown and matured over the 1990s … environmentalist culture … technologist culture … and a conservative culture against playing God. (In Gray 2005: 115)

Though Gorski welcomes the possibility of fresh acolytes, his assumption that this depends on a new textual iteration implies that existent versions belong to those generations of fans who already constitute the cult community. Gray notes that ‘undoubtedly, other fans may well feel possessive of their beloved text, fearful of what new generations might “do” to it. But whether hoping for or guarding their text from new generations, as fans of the film’s “deeply immersive atmosphere”, these fans do not want it to become just a memory’ (2005: 116).

Blade Runner was also voted the number one film the public ‘would wish to share with future generations’ (BFI 2009) in the British Film Institute’s ‘Visions for the future’ poll. It garnered 8.1% of votes, with reportedly more than 20,000 votes cast in total (see Kemp 2009). Voters could choose from 75 titles selected by a range of industry experts, politicians, journalists, critics and personalities, with Blade Runner being nominated for the list by James Christopher, film critic on the Times newspaper (see Times Online 2008). The BFI event assumes that some films, Blade Runner among them, deserve to break out of their generational fandoms, attaining transgenerational recognition. This process is no doubt already underway for a range of 1970s and 1980s cult movies, given that the ‘Cultographies’ Rocky Horror author was born in 1970, and this title’s author in 1971. But whereas I respond to Blade Runner within what might be called a ‘late-analogue’ structure of feeling, admiring the film’s practical special effects in place of CGI gloss, and recognising it as ‘one of the last great analogue SF films’ (Brooker 2009: 80), its lack of computer-generated imagery is likely to make a very different kind of sense within newer structures of feeling:

I am part of the last generation … to be born into a world without personal computers, the Internet, cable television, MTV, VCRs and iPods. My frame of reference differs markedly from that of those born in the 1980s and after … My lived, felt experience of the world, my strategies for obtaining, organising and valuing knowledge and making sense of things … have developed out of that complicated mix. (Weinstock 2007: 2)

I was too young for the authenticity of ‘first wave’ cultdom, but the introspective, personal fandom encircling Blade Runner (see Brooker 1999: 69) can clearly incorporate my generational, late-analogue structure of feeling.

Blade Runner’s strange, provocative multiplicity has not just acted as a lure for cult fans’ ‘heuristic hope’, but has also caused audiences’ textual memories to overlap and form interference patterns. As Philip Strick argues, although ‘it seems sensible to judge each version of a work in isolation, disregarding what it was “supposed” to be … things aren’t so easy. The knowledge of alternative footage creates distractions, affecting our response to what we see’ (2002: 47). The Director’s Cut and its erasure of Deckard’s voice-over means that fans can ‘replace the missing phrases from memory … the words … cling in our memory, whispers too strong to be ignored’ (2002: 50). Similarly, Leonard G. Heldreth suggests in Retrofitting Blade Runner that:

The viewer now confronts an original and a replicant version of the film, and … must decide which is the more authentic … Memories … are now labelled false, studio implants to cushion the emotional reaction of an audience not capable of grasping on their own the implications of the original inquiries. Yet those images and sounds intrude into the director’s cut because they are in our memories. (1997b: 312; emphasis in original)

Heldreth interprets this situation as an extension of diegetic concerns into the extra-diegetic (real) world of ‘the film artifact and the viewing audience. The uncertainty of identity … now seeps into the viewer’s relationship to that film … and to the viewer’s own memories’ (ibid.). This semiotic manoeuvre has frequently informed work on the film (see also Hills 2005c; Landsberg 1995; Gray 2005; Brooker 2009), and I give in to the same temptation here by referring to ‘replicant cult’ (authentic/inauthentic cult status) in chapter 3 and ‘retrofitted cult’ (the historicised layering of different cult discourses) in chapter 4.

However, rather than audiences’ memories criss-crossing and reworking different versions of Blade Runner, it could be argued that the ‘disciplined’ DVD release of five Blade Runners in the UCE enables cultists to re-experience their textual encounters with the various incarnations: ‘mediated experiences may serve as popular ways to mark … individual biographies … DVDs allow new relationships with film … first, as collectibles, and second, as ways to “memorialise” one’s personal history’ (Caldwell 2008: 166–7). Although I have deliberately sought to recount my personal memories of Blade Runner here, there is a sense in which consuming the UCE calls up or interpellates these very narratives of self, interweaving the history of Blade Runner’s different releases with audiences’ lived histories. Far from clearly being a critical, scholarly contextualising of Blade Runner, then, this ‘Cultographies’ detour into my ‘personal investment’ in the film(s) may actually recap, and be partly complicit with, mechanisms of consumerism and consumer identity in the post-DVD age (see Hastie 2007).

Though the ‘Cultographies’ template separates out ‘Production, Promotion, Initial Reception’ and ‘Audiences and subsequent reception’, I would argue that this logical division makes relatively little sense as a result of Blade Runner’s multiple versions and unusual text-cluster. Should the release of the Director’s Cut count as ‘subsequent reception’ following on from the 1982 original, or should it be examined in relation to ‘promotion and initial reception’ in its own right? And what of the Final Cut from 2007? It might also be observed that the film’s production lore, and its initial 1982 critical reception, have been well covered elsewhere (for example, Sammon 2007). Partly because I wish to avoid replicating this Blade Runner common sense, and partly because of Blade Runner’s distinctive textual history and multiple circulations, I will study it rather more thematically in the following chapters. Chapter 2, ‘Telling the Cult Difference?’, deals with Umberto Eco’s (1995) text-based theory of cult status, arguing that Blade Runner both fits and challenges Eco’s model of ‘metacult’. I also consider how theorising Blade Runner’s cult textuality – those qualities which separate ‘cult’ from ‘non-cult’ – can nonetheless account for different audience responses, and for changing responses over time (like my own). And I briefly focus on cult fan activities such as the creation of ‘DIY merchandise’, arguing that rather than logically contrasting cult ‘texts’ and ‘audiences’, we might instead theorise and empirically investigate the ‘interdiscourses’ (Fiske 1990) through which specific textual attributes such as Blade Runner’s production design are animated, celebrated and commemorated by active fan audiences.

Chapter 3, ‘Authenticities and Anxieties’, then explores Blade Runner’s multiple releases specifically via fan distinctions of ‘authentic’ cult versus sold-out, commercial cult. Has Blade Runner’s increased ‘mainstream’ availability, first on video and then DVD, led to an erosion of the film’s subcultural, cult cachet? I conclude the chapter by focusing deliberately on Blade Runner’s most recent critical receptions, analysing UK media magazine reviews of the Final Cut as attempts to restore cult distinctions. Finally, chapter 4’s ‘Different Cults?’ suggests that Blade Runner’s cultification may be just as multiple as the movie phenomenon itself, involving Philip K. Dick fans, ‘auteur cultists’ reading Blade Runner as Ridley Scott’s vision, and even an ‘academic cult’ that refutes auteurism but nevertheless contributes to Blade Runner’s cult(ural) status via postmodern, philosophical ‘interdiscourse’. Throughout, my emphasis is on the cultifying collision of texts and audiences, and hence the impossibility of creating a Voight-Kampff test to finally distinguish between text-based or audience-based accounts of cult status. I shall begin this de-differentiation, however, by examining what has been dubbed ‘the Eco paradigm’ of cult texts.