In this chapter I want to consider how Blade Runner’s textual multiplicity has effected the ‘authenticity’ of its cult status. The fan and academic narrative of ‘Instant Flop to Cult Classic’ (Redmond 2003: 32) is a common one, implying that Blade Runner’s initial cultification in the early 1980s was largely based on its reception. By failing at the box office, the film was able to take on cachet as an anti-mainstream curiosity which fans could feel they had ‘discovered’ for themselves, rather than as the target of blockbuster marketing. Blade Runner’s poor 1982 box-office performance and first-wave critical reception have been well documented. Sean Redmond points out that critics ‘struggled with the film … Variety [16 June 1982] called it “dramatically muddled”, while Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune argued that the film “looks terrific but is empty at its core” [25 June 1982]’ (2008: 8). The famous US film critic Pauline Kael suggested in 1982 that ‘if anybody comes around with a test to detect humanoids, maybe Ridley Scott and his associates should hide’ (cited in Bukatman 1997: 33–4) also acidly observing that some ‘scenes seem to have six subtexts but no text’ (in Carper 1997: 190). However, Paul Sammon argues that the movie’s critical reception was not uniformly bleak; to suggest Blade Runner only received bad press ‘is not accurate history’ (2007: 314). The historical record has become almost incidental, though, displaced instead by the significance of Blade Runner’s cultifying reputation as a critical miss and a box-office failure.
Blade Runner’s ‘anti-mainstream’ reputation as visually excessive but narratively ‘muddled’ fed into its early cult receptions
Rather than purely reproducing this account, I want to critically theorise it. How does the film’s reputation impact on whether Blade Runner is viewed as an ‘authentic’ or ‘inauthentic’ cult? Producer Michael Deeley suggests that the film’s cult credentials are now unquestionable:
the financial disappointment of Blade Runner was tough for all of us who had spent years developing our dream … I’m immensely proud to have produced a picture which, over the years of recuts and reissues, has travelled from being more or less a flop to becoming a cast-iron cult. (Deeley with Field 2008: 262)
And yet this supposedly ‘cast-iron cult’ has been called into question in a variety of ways, as I will demonstrate here. In the next section I will examine how the film’s transformation into a ‘midnight movie’ validated its cultdom for early adopters. In effect, this mode of exhibition and its relatively restricted access sustained a cultifying audience reception, especially following in the wake of Blade Runner’s apparent rejection by ‘mainstream’ audiences and critics. However, representing just one stage in Blade Runner’s cultural circulation, its days as a ‘midnight movie’ cannot be taken as the whole story. For subsequently Blade Runner has become a revenue-generating success on varied consumer formats – video, laserdisc and then DVD. It is this scenario I’ll consider in the chapter’s second section. By returning to the mainstream, Blade Runner’s later receptions challenge cult/mainstream binaries of authenticity, suggesting that a once small-scale cult has been industrially co-opted. Blade Runner, it seems, may have been ‘sold out’ to the masses rather than ‘belonging’ to the discerning cognoscenti; its cult distinction eroded by ready availability. Finally, I will analyse how niche media reviews of the Final Cut – in assorted UK film, DVD and SF magazines – work discursively to remake cult difference by separating ‘casual passers-by’ from ‘real’ cult fans. Lost and perhaps re-found, Blade Runner’s cult status threatens to oscillate between authentic and inauthentic, original and copy. As a cultural distinction enacted by audiences (see Bourdieu 1984; Thornton 1995; Jancovich 2002), ‘cult’ has to be constantly policed and preserved from threats of inauthenticity. It is this reception process which leads me to dub Blade Runner a ‘replicant cult’ – its authenticity tested and sometimes found wanting by subcultural audiences. As Mark Jancovich has usefully argued:
the media exist not as a clearly defined Other to the cult movie audience, but rather as a complex range of communications systems that act to both compose and maintain the sense of an ‘imagined community’, but also threaten to destroy this sense through the profligate dissemination of their exclusive knowledges. Indeed, in cult movie fandom, information and inaccessibility need to be carefully regulated and balanced. (2002: 318–9)
Blade Runner’s cultural life as a commodity has brought this regulation of ‘information and inaccessibility’, this balancing of availability and exclusivity, into stark focus. Though text-based and audience-based approaches to cult film may sometimes be thought of as a kind of zero-sum game, forcing us to choose between explanations (see Eco 1995 versus Corrigan 1991), my jump from cult texts to receptions is meant to indicate the usefulness of each analytical mode. I will argue that they should, in fact, be productively interrelated rather than pitted against one another. First, though, how has the title’s 1982 reception been narrated as a guarantor of cult distinctions?
FROM FLOP TO MIDNIGHT MOVIE: EXHIBITING CULT AUTHENTICITY
Blade Runner was a big hit movie, massively popular with ‘mainstream’ audiences. Or so one might suppose from the fictional account given in K. W. Jeter’s self-reflexive novel Eye and Talon:
‘Blade Runner…’.
‘Catchy title.’ Iris searched her memory for a couple of seconds…
‘…It was a big hit, just about everywhere; got very high ratings. And beyond; it’s still got quite a cult following.’ (2000: 123)
But this rewriting of film history falsifies Blade Runner’s reception, amounting to an in-joke for fan-readers. As has been much remarked upon, Blade Runner lost roughly half its production costs of $28 million after its 1982 theatrical release, grossing close to a dismal $14 million. Sammon summarises this loss bluntly: ‘the writing on the wall began appearing in ten-foot-high capital letters: BLADE RUNNER IS A FLOP’ (2007: 318).
However, the movie’s failure proved vital to its cult valorisation, allowing textual appreciation to function as what Sarah Thornton has termed ‘subcultural capital’. This is fan knowledge which ‘confers status on its owner in the eyes of the relevant beholder … Subcultural capital can be objectified or embodied’ (1995: 11; emphasis in original) in the form of collecting Blade Runner merchandise and reference works, perhaps, or learning behind-the-scenes production lore. Creating ‘DIY merchandise’ might confer greater subcultural capital in the eyes of relevant beholders such as the propsummit.com fan community. What matters about subcultural capital is, precisely, that it carries a fan culture’s ‘subcultural ideologies’, that is, it makes cult fandom’s specific knowledges distinct from those of outsiders such as non-fans and casual, ‘mainstream’ audiences.
The concept of cult is often relationally defined against commercial, mainstream culture, and assumed to be an audience activity working outside the realm of successful movie blockbusters: ‘Word-of-mouth can break a film designed as a blockbuster, or elevate an obscure movie to the status of a cult film or even a sleeper’ (Meehan 1991: 60–1). Cult is equated with audience discoveries rather than commercial marketing campaigns. Adrian Martin argues that
a sinister, banal kind of phenomenon … looms: a banality caught in that tag of the ‘instant cult classic’ when no such thing can, by definition, exist. The ultimate problem, for critics and viewers, is a familiar one: the temptation to mistake something ruthlessly stage managed by the market as an example of our personal freedom as ‘cult consumers’. (2008: 40)
No such thing can exist: subcultural capital should remain the preserve of the discerning few. As Barry Keith Grant says: ‘cult films … tend to construct a microcosmic community of admirers. But what exactly makes this different from phenomenally successful popular movies like Star Wars or E.T.?’ (1991: 123). Vastly successful movies – E.T. not Blade Runner – may have their fans, of course, but Grant is concerned with separating out the merely ‘popular’ and the cultish. Akin to Eileen Meehan’s discussion of word-of-mouth, or ‘authentic’ grassroots audience reception, Grant stresses that ‘slowly simmered fare like Blade Runner’ (1991: 123) only gradually became a cult; audiences discovered and embraced it over time, following its initial commercial failure. The cult/mainstream binary set up here is one of instant, fleeting blockbuster popularity versus the durability of cult movies (Hills 2003).
It was as a ‘midnight movie’, a film shown outside regular moviegoing hours and thus deliberately exhibited as anti-mainstream or countercultural, that Blade Runner arguably began this slower audience-based transition. Insecurely linked to the cultural category of ‘mainstream’ cinema by dint of its financial losses and critical mauling, the movie was ripe for cult reclamation. In his analysis of midnight movies, Gregory Waller points out that
Because Night of the Living Dead, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pink Flamingos, and Eraserhead all achieved cult status after hours, during weekend upon weekend of midnight screenings in the 1970s, there is a common tendency to link – or treat as synonymous – the post-1960s cult movie … and the midnight movie. (1991: 167)
Authenticating the subcultural capital of midnight audiences – likely to be students and ‘hip’ cinephiles – such screenings of Blade Runner became a fixture in New York during the period studied by Waller (1980–85), as well as being shown in the area of Lexington, Kentucky, which Waller contrasts with New York’s ‘major market’ (1991: 168 and 178). The film’s NYC presence as a midnight movie was sufficiently sustained that Waller describes it as ‘anchoring’ one theatre’s schedule:
The … distinctive characteristic of the New York market was that two primary midnight movie venues – both independently owned and operated – initiated a policy of booking midnight movies in repertory fashion seven days a week … The St Mark’s midnight schedule was anchored by Blade Runner, which ran for 139 consecutive weeks, but otherwise it was decidedly eclectic … mixing revivals, rockumentaries, older Hollywood films. (1991: 182–3)
And yet, as the 1980s time-frame demonstrates, Blade Runner moved very rapidly from a ‘mainstream’ exhibition pattern to a ‘cult’, after-hours one via those ‘gatekeepers who … reclassified films through their advertising and exhibition’ (Jancovich 2002: 315). Though cultural movement between mainstream/cult categories may have enabled a narrative of authenticity, with the film ‘belonging’ to its midnight, subcultural audiences, Martin’s feared ‘instant cult’ seems to rear its head here. Blade Runner was not so much ‘slowly simmered’ as a midnight movie – though its late-night screenings kept subcultural capital away from ‘outsiders’ – as curtly switched over into cult exhibition. Midnight movies, given their limited release pattern restricted to small numbers of cinemas, provide fans with the sense that they are discovering obscure, authentic cult films:
Honestly, what would you prefer: a film that you discover for yourself, via some obscure distribution or exhibition byway, before uncovering the existence of a few scattered soul brothers or sisters around the world … or a film that is smoothly conveyed to you, signed, sealed and delivered as a certified cult item? (Martin 2008: 42)
This attempt to demarcate authentic versus inauthentic cult doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny, since midnight movies are both an ‘exhibition byway’ and a way of conveying ‘certified’ cult items. Like a failing Voight-Kampff test meant to distinguish human and replicant, but calling for more and more test questions (see Doel & Clarke 1997: 156), what seems to be a ‘line of defence between the logic of originals and copies’, between true cult and marketed cult, is ultimately a discursive construction rather than a factual observation (Doel & Clarke 1997: 154). Even at its earliest moments of cultification, when it was still a cult movie rather than a disseminated video or easy-to-find DVD, Blade Runner was always-already more cult than cult. The movie’s initial cult authenticity and subcultural capital hinged on exclusivity and rarity: it had to be tracked down and discovered by cinephiles. Seeming to support an authentic/inauthentic cult binary, whereas the film’s later cultural circulation on video and DVD threatened to make it inauthentically too accessible and too widely available, in fact first-wave cult was also premised on a type of inauthenticity. Like the Tyrell Corporation’s replicants, promoted as ‘more human than human’, Blade Runner’s status as a midnight movie involved (cult) marketing itself, throwing authentic/inauthentic cult discourses into a state of undecidability. Subcultural capital depends on conserving a sense of those who are ‘in the know’, set apart from the ‘mainstream’; given these processes of cult(ural) distinction, how did Blade Runner’s reinvention through new consumer technologies impact on ‘authentic’ versus ‘inauthentic’ cult?
FROM FLOP TO … VIDEO, LASERDISC AND DVD: ANXIETIES OF ACCESS
Blade Runner’s extra-cinematic existence has also contributed to its cultification, as Paul M. Sammon observes: ‘one of the major forces behind Blade Runner’s growing popularity throughout the eighties and early nineties was the fact that it was readily available on tape and laserdisc … videotapes and discs … helped build that cult’ (2007: 327). Video did this not just by making the film accessible to a wider audience, but also by allowing a newfound ease of repeated viewing. Where the film’s ‘intermittence’ and lure of surface detail have provoked dedicated fans to study its narrative world, video as a media technology made this process possible for less dedicated viewers too. Scott Bukatman notes that following its release on video, Blade Runner ‘became one of the most rented tapes on the market … the film’s density and complexity encouraged repeat viewings even among lay [that is, non cult] audiences’ (1997: 34 and 36).
Timothy Corrigan has theorised the place of video in relation to cult status. Corrigan rejects text-based models of cult film, arguing that audience reception is the determinant of cult:
I believe that these cultish formations and viewing activities are primarily a product of the … audience’s viewing conditions and have less to do with any strictly textual features … than with how these movies are historically acted on from outside their textual peripheries. Unlike B-films, the public precursor of cult movies, any movie today can become a cult film. Cult movies are those films that become the property of any audience’s private space. (1991: 80–1; emphasis in original).
In this account, audiences take ‘ownership’ of cult texts by not just literally bringing them into their personal, domestic spaces, but also by acting on and manipulating textual material. For video, this meant rewinding, re-viewing and studying the image:
What defines cult films is the materialisation of the text … Through the actual transformation of the film into a kind of physical fabric (most clearly dramatised, in one instance, through the imagistic manipulations that repeated viewings or VCRs allow), the textual materiality of the images largely replaces the sense of visual presence and textual transcendence through which the viewer simply accedes to the movie. (Corrigan 1991: 83–4)
Cinema’s massive ‘visual presence’ supposedly subordinates the viewer, whilst video liberates and empowers readers. However, this analysis implies that video played a resolutely positive, unproblematic role in facilitating cult status. By contrast, as a consumer technology it simultaneously threatened the cult(ural) distinctions of first-wave subculturalist fans. Remembering that ‘in cult movie fandom information and inaccessibility need to be carefully regulated and balanced’ (Jancovich 2002: 318–9), video potentially rendered Blade Runner an ‘inauthentic’ cult by tipping the scales in favour of information. What had been a midnight movie appreciated by those ‘in the know’, their subcultural capital recognised by fellow devotees, now became far less exclusive, striking at the gendered authenticity of subcultural ideologies:
The construction of the cultist as ‘manly adventurer’ also offers a way of distinguishing cult consumption from an everyday feminised practice. As Charles Tashiro has suggested, part of the thrill of video collecting in general comes from the sense of ‘bravado’ generated by acquiring a rarity that ‘provides a mark of distinction that the widely released director’s cut of Blade Runner doesn’t’. (Hollows 2003: 47–8)
Studying Blade Runner closely was no longer the masculinised, ‘active’ preserve of cultists. Eroding the mainstream/cult binary which propped up the subcultural authenticities of cult fandom, ‘home video … equalised everything’, in the words of Video Watchdog editor Tim Lucas (2008: 46). And this challenge to Blade Runner’s exclusivity has been alluded to by Paul Sammon, worrying over the free flow of Blade Runner information by the time of the Final Cut from 2007:
Has Blade Runner reached its cultural saturation point? Is there nothing more to say or enjoy about this movie? Might not the release of so many spin-offs – like The Final Cut or the DVDs or the second edition of this book – eventually overwhelm, if not outright kill, the fatted calf? Perhaps. Perhaps not … However, might not the recent surfeit of Blade Runner products actually reduce further interest in the film? (2007: 478; emphasis in original)
It might commonsensically be assumed that increased availability of Blade Runner information would spark new interest in the movie phenomenon, bringing new generations of fans to the Blade Runner universe. But Sammon displays anxiety about this newfound, generalised access: ‘Now that just about everything related to the making, breaking and remaking of Blade Runner has been made available to the general public, might not that abundant banquet … satiate … viewers who once so hungrily devoured crumbs of information?’ (2007: 478). Striking a note of nostalgia, this lament harks back to a moment when cultists could be reassured by ‘the inaccessibility of the scene’ (Jancovich 2002: 319).
Menu screen from disc one of the UCE: an ‘abundant banquet’ of Blade Runner?
Though Sammon seems to be talking only about the general public rather than fandom, I would argue that his phrases code a cultist concern over access. Blade Runner’s ‘devoured crumbs’ stand in for a minority audience’s knowledge, while a dangerously ‘abundant banquet’ – for this read ‘mass consumption’ – represents the overwhelming of restricted, subcultural fan knowledge. Too wide an access to behind-the-scenes knowledge threatens to destroy fans’ ability to ‘distinguish themselves from the “phantom menace” of the mainstream consumer’ (Hunt 2003: 198). Authentic cult shades into inauthenticity as its constructed distinctions are undermined.
There do remain, however, strategies for the recuperation of subcultural capital. One, displayed by Tim Lucas in his review of the (1993) Warner laserdisc release, was to retain a focus on reading Blade Runner differently. Although the film may be accessible to ‘mainstream’ audiences, fans can conserve their distinction as ‘expert’ viewers by ostentatiously displaying accumulated textual knowledge. To this effect, Lucas compares the letterboxing ratio of the 1993 Warner laserdisc with the 1987 Criterion Collection release, carries out ‘frame-perfect’ textual analysis of ‘the film titles on the Million Dollar Movie Theater marquee opposite the Bradbury apartments’ and challenges the ‘Director’s Cut’ title:
The phrase ‘director’s cut’ implies a version of a film that its director has declared as his own, as opposed to a compromised version more familiar to the moviegoing public. This definition does not really apply to Ridley Scott’s 1991 ‘director’s cut’ of his 1982 film BLADE RUNNER, which was made with the active and sympathetic collaboration of the current Warner Bros. regime, and might therefore be more accurately described as a ‘revised draft’ … Since Warner has pronounced the original version ‘out’ in favour of this modern revision, perhaps … it should be called: BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT. (1993: 61)
Uncannily anticipating the title which would eventually settle on the 2007 cut, Lucas’s entire review amounts to a performance of objectified subcultural capital. Despite such bravura fan interpretation, the eventual release of a five-disc DVD Ultimate Collector’s Edition (UCE) of the Final Cut (see Redmond 2008: 91–2) nonetheless intruded on fan distinctions by incorporating them into DVD extras, as Will Brooker has argued:
DVD supplementary material such as director commentaries can shape the meaning of a feature film, highlighting certain interpretations and ruling out others … the DVD format, with its range of additional material, presents a ‘blurring of the traditional distinction between primary and secondary texts’. (2009: 86, citing Brookey & Westerfelhaus)
But the DVD set went further than this, selectively drawing on the ‘tertiary texts’ (Fiske 1987: 124) of fan discussions:
[The title of the] documentary on Disc 4, discussing Deckard’s possible replicant identity … ‘Deck-A-Rep’, is borrowed from fandom and, through its inclusion on an official DVD, given the producers’ stamp of approval … The ‘self-contained package’ of the DVD collapses promotional material, criticism and interviews … into the product itself, so that the previously intertextual relationship between supplement and film becomes intimately intratextual. (Brooker 2009: 84 and 86)
Aspects of fan reading are thus brought under the intratextual umbrella of the UCE, inverting traditional relationships of textual poaching. Here, producers of the five-disc set effectively ‘poach’ from fan terminology, taking it back into the commodity-text. Whereas fan poaching contests commercial texts, counter-poaching commodifies fan activity by officially textualising it. Subcultural capital inhering in ‘Deck-A-Rep’, for example, is destabilised to an extent; fandom’s distinctive phraseology is generalised to any consumer who happens to buy and watch the five-disc set. The interpretative spaces of fandom are colonised by such official incorporation. Brooker’s suggestion that the UCE emulates ‘pleasurable argument of fan forums’ (2009: 84) strikes me as too benign an approach to this dialectic of fan and production discourses, given that Blade Runner’s cult is here becoming an adjunct to commercial intertexts and promotional contents.
As a result of Blade Runner’s media-technological modes of reception – moving from midnight movie to video, laserdisc and DVD – subcultural distinctions premised on exclusivity and inaccessibility have been challenged. The ‘authentic’, masculinised cult of an active audience discovering Blade Runner as a midnight movie, itself an unstable discursive construction, threatens to collapse further into ‘inauthentic’ cult, available to mainstream consumers and possibly even reaching market ‘saturation’.
Under these circumstances, Blade Runner might be thought of as a replicant cult – its ‘original’ cult existence being ‘copied’ via analogue and digital consumer technologies, and its earlier ‘authenticity’ (and fans’ subcultural capital) therefore called into doubt. ‘Cult’ versus ‘mainstream’ no longer works as a binary to secure the elevated cult(ural) status of Blade Runner. As well as being readily available to consumers, with even the sought-after Workprint included on the UCE, Blade Runner is no longer quite so obviously a flop, discursively positioned against or outside ‘mainstream’ success. Indeed, the restoration producer of the Final Cut, Charles de Lauzirika, points out, ‘with a twinkle in his eye’, that ‘Amazon sales for [this title for] the US alone … outnumbered … anticipated global sales’ (in Matthews 2007a: 57). And Ridley Scott asserts that after the Final Cut, Blade Runner’s rights owners have ‘made their money back … I would say they’ve done extremely well’ (in ibid.).
Given this change in Blade Runner’s commercial fortunes, and the destabilisation of fans’ subcultural distinctions, in the next section I want to consider how the ‘replicant cult’ of the Final Cut has been recuperated as subculturally authentic. Reviewers writing in ‘niche media’ (Thornton 1995: 122), that is, specialist commercial magazines aimed at fandom and often staffed by journalist-fans, have sought to recreate cult difference by demarcating distinctions between ‘insider’ cultists and ‘outsider’ casual audiences. As Barbara Klinger has pointed out, film reviews can provide ‘important sources of information about reception’ by indicating the ‘types of social discourse’, for example, hierarchies of cultural value and aesthetic distinctions, in play around a movie at any given time (1994: 69). How, then, do niche media reviewers put forward ‘a set of co-ordinates that map out and judge the significant features’ (1994: 70) of the Final Cut for movie fans and Blade Runner cultists?
REVIEWING THE FINAL CUT AND THE ULTIMATE COLLECTOR’S EDITION: RESTORING CULT DIFFERENCE
In what follows I will analyse a range of UK newsstand magazines, some of which are film titles (for example, Empire, Film Review, Sight & Sound), others dedicated to DVD (such as DVD Review, DVD Monthly) and a third strand focused on science fiction (SFX, Death Ray, Starburst). As Jancovich has argued, Sarah Thornton’s term ‘niche media’ is insufficiently precise; we need to think of such targeted media, instead, as comprising
stages in a continuum. For example, if the popular press are mass media … can we simply link Premiere and Fangoria together as niche media? Premiere is directed at a niche readership – movie fans – but Fangoria is directed at a niche within that niche – horror movie fans. (2002: 318)
Following this argument, I distinguish between the niche and differential ‘sub-niche’ publications that I examine in this section. However, this is not just important as a point of logic. Because they serve different imagined communities, various niche and sub-niche media may well put forward different cultural distinctions, discursively (re)constructing the Final Cut’s ‘authentic’ cult status in a variety of ways. In his analysis of niche media and cult movie fandom, Jancovich goes on to suggest that
while niche publications … act to disseminate information in order to produce a sense of community, they are also concerned not to disseminate it too widely. They frequently announce their selective nature – that they are not for everyone – and their combative style is at least as much to warn off ‘outsiders’ and to reassure insiders by advertising the inaccessibility of the scene. (2002: 319)
Protecting ‘authentic’ subcultural capital from ‘outsiders’ is, I would argue, a project of cultural distinction pursued to greater and lesser degrees by different niche media. For instance, magazines premised on the generalised appreciation of film, such as Sight & Sound and Empire, actually take care to distance themselves somewhat from Blade Runner’s cult fandom. As might be expected, scholarly crossover title Sight & Sound positions fandom as an object of analysis:
Fans of Blade Runner love the film for any number of reasons, from Vangelis’ gleaming score, to the visual mishmash of neo-noir, Asian-American and future-past, to the joyous lunacy of Rutger Hauer as replicant leader Batty, the film’s true hero, lost in rain … This apparently ‘final cut’ … seems to be about maintaining its world’s wraparound seductiveness … keeping the illusion’s integrity better intact for old and new generations. (Osmond 2008: 92)
Although reviewer Andrew Osmond appears to be observing the Blade Runner cult, he also implicitly devalues and others cult fandom by stating that ‘none of the revisions makes a human difference to the film. They’re about making the dream of 2019 Los Angeles more complete, mainly for those who’ve long bought into it anyway’ (ibid.). Enhancing the illusionism of the diegetic, designed world – digitally removing cables that could be seen supporting a Spinner prop; properly synching some of Deckard’s dialogue; replacing a stunt woman’s face with Joanna Cassidy’s and so on – may correct technical glitches, but there’s allegedly no ‘human difference’ to be found. This seems to semiotically bleed out of the text’s themes (see Hills 2005c); the curious implication is that fan audiences cataloguing the Final Cut are engaged in a soulless interpretative practice lacking in humanity. Cult fandom is, connotatively, othered as a replicant domain. Osmond also qualifies the completism of the UCE, suggesting that the five-disc set is ‘absurdly completist … If there’s a big omission, it’s the chance to evaluate some of the draft scripts written by Hampton Fancher and reworked by David Peoples, and tussled over by them in their commentary’ (2008: 92). The ‘absurdly’ makes no logical sense, given that Osmond goes on to identify major omissions. As an intensifier, it’s another lexical choice which others cult movie fandom, positioning it not only as an unfeeling, replicant realm but also as something excessive and irrational. Resonating with Jancovich’s argument, this niche media review does construct cultural distinctions between cult Blade Runner fans and other audiences (for example, movie fans), but it does so in order to denigrate cultists’ subcultural capital as improper knowledge.
An element of this Othering persists in Empire’s review. It strikes a blokeish, populist tone by quoting Harrison Ford’s sentiments: ‘“It was a bitch…” mutters … Ford, freshly interviewed for Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner, one of the most comprehensive and honest documentaries every [sic] produced to chronicle the creation of a film’ (Nathan 2008: 198). Film Review similarly demarcates its populist, demotic identity through the use of quotation, this time a statement from Rutger Hauer: ‘I think the movie is better than it was before … You can hardly put it into words because it’s so unique and such a treasure and such a f**king monument’ (in Prince 2007b: 78). Discursively constructing a ‘masculinised mainstream’ of filmic appreciation, as if seeking to ward off feminised consumer identities (Hollows 2003), Empire’s Ian Nathan interprets the UCE as completist in a more positive sense by reading it as especially candid:
The tortured production of Blade Runner has become as much a legend as the film itself, and … all the stories are addressed, contextualised, sniffed at and given a thorough airing for the obsessive to lap up like cream. As with the Alien Quadrilogy box set and Peter Jackson’s extended Rings, it is the candidness that sets it apart … What comes across like a clanging bell is the sheer force of Scott’s vision. (2008: 198–9; emphasis in original)
Even here, though, cult fandom is othered as ‘the obsessive’. Rather than engaging with the intricate detail of subcultural capital, Empire instead emphasises masculinised straight-talking and Ridley Scott’s ‘sheer force … of vision’. Cult fandom’s cultural distinctions are acknowledged but implicitly devalued in favour of a reading which focuses on the ‘matey’ tenor of DVD extras rather than on production lore. Despite their own marked differences, titles like Sight & Sound and Empire both other cultists’ ‘subcultural ideologies’ in this instance – Sight & Sound in favour of scholarly analysis; Empire in favour of its constructed, masculinised mainstream. At the same time, though, these cultural distinctions still maintain a sense of cult difference, despite the easy availability of Blade Runner’s variant versions in a consumer-ready package. Cultists may no longer have privileged access to Blade Runner’s texts and production legends, but they still read distinctively according to these devaluations – being ‘absurdly’ completist or ‘obsessive’ in their accumulation of knowledge. A cult difference is (re)made here, but from the other side, that is, favouring mainstream and academic audiences.
Sub-niche magazines serving DVD consumers addressed the cultural distinctions of Blade Runner’s cult in a rather different way when they reviewed the UCE. DVD Monthly immediately distinguished between ‘casual’ audiences and ‘die-hard fans’:
to the casual passer-by, The Final Cut doesn’t vary a great deal from the previous release of the Director’s Cut. However, closer inspection does reveal a plethora of subtle changes throughout, and for die-hard fans with a keen eye, it’s the small things that make this edition great. The differences/alterations are many, with very minor changes like a dilating pupil on the close-up of the eye at the film’s opening providing a surprise around every corner. (Griffiths 2007: 48)
DVD Monthly enacts cult distinctions by drawing attention to some of these ‘small things’, closely resembling, for example, Tim Lucas’s performance of subcultural capital in Video Watchdog (1993). Cult fandom is in the detail, and in an appreciation of the Final Cut’s grading and sound:
the biggest alteration of all is to the overall look and sound of the film. Scott’s movie has been fully restored from start to finish … One thing that does strike you instantly is just how blindingly beautiful the film is looking after its restoration. The lights on the buildings shine brighter than before, the murky environment has more of a textured look. (Griffiths 2007: 48)
Images of vision repeatedly structure Lee Griffiths’ review – fans ‘with a keen eye’ will notice changes to the infamous close-up eye shot; the restoration is ‘blindingly beautiful’. This may be unsurprising for a professional reviewer of visual culture, but Griffiths’ emphasis on seeing differences, even down to the altered brightness of shots, nonetheless approximates to reading practices within cult fandom. Cultist distinctions are naturalised; casual audiences simply won’t observe the Final Cut’s changes, whilst the acculturated fan is struck by them ‘instantly’. This is an account of ‘embodied’ subcultural capital in Thornton’s terms (1995: 11), albeit displayed through an immediacy of perception. Such a style of reviewing – marked by subcultural capital – seemingly accords with what Grant Blank, in Critics, Ratings, and Society: The Sociology of Reviews, calls ‘connoisseurial’ reviewing (2007: 7). Such work rests on the ‘sensitivity, training and experience of a single reviewer, a connoisseur’, unlike ‘procedural reviews … based on the results of tests – well-defined procedures – that allow reviewers to rank the performance of a product compared to similar products’ (2007: 7–8). However, professional DVD reviews may tend to combine ‘connoisseurial’ and ‘procedural’ elements, approaching film both as an art (performing versions of cinephilia) and as a consumer product (evaluating DVD extras and technicalities). Nonetheless, I would argue that it is possible to separate out ‘connoisseurial’ reviewing aspects that are aligned with cult consumption’s subcultural capital rather than opposed to it. Whereas Andrew Osmond and Ian Nathan enact critical sensitivities aimed at denigrating cult distinctions, DVD Monthly positively remakes cult difference, seemingly less invested in shoring up alternative cultural identities (discerning scholarship or masculinised mainstream).
Writing in DVD Review, Richard Matthews’ take on the UCE echoes subculturalists’ anxieties of access: ‘It’s easy to be cynical about yet another DVD reissue for a fan favourite. In this Ultimate Deluxe Special Edition-saturated market, it’s often hard to spot a genuine must-have release’ (2007a: 57). The fear is that Blade Runner’s once ‘authentic’ cult may have succumbed to ‘inauthentic’ marketing, becoming yet another reissue in a marketplace targeted at the ‘fan pound’. Threatening to degrade into a replicant, consumerist cult, Matthews’ interview with restoration and DVD producer Charles de Lauzirika reassures fan-readers that Blade Runner retains cult authenticity:
Lauzirika believes Blade Runner is a more compelling proposition. ‘If you look at Legend, Kingdom of Heaven, Alien and Gladiator, Ridley does like to have multiple versions out,’ says … Lauzirika. ‘But he doesn’t want to erase history like certain other filmmakers. We didn’t want this to be a Star Wars: Special Edition scenario where it was obvious what was new. Every time you saw a new shot you thought, “Oh, there’s a new shot! Is it better, is it worse, is it cheesy, is it good?”.’ (2007a: 57)
To reinstate ‘authentic’ versus ‘inauthentic’ cult, a specific Other is established: George Lucas and his handling of Star Wars’ digitisation (see also Brooker 2009: 84). Lauzirika attempts to cue fan readings, and professional reviewers’ responses, by pre-reading the Final Cut as a matter of subtle changes and digital discretion. Rather than changes to the analogue movie standing out as visually distinct CGI aesthetics (see Pierson 2002: 125), as was the case for Lucasfilm’s Special Editions, the guiding principle for the Final Cut seemed to be one of minimising audiences’ intertextual (or intratextual) comparisons across versions. This may seem to work against fans’ interests in making exactly such comparisons, but at a deeper level it cannily plays into the ‘structure of feeling’ of Blade Runner’s fan culture (Jonathan Gray 2005: 123). Such an approach to digital ‘restoration’ – the term itself connoting the conservation of a valued, high cultural artifact – reduces ostentatious appearances of digital intervention and thus preserves the latest cut as a ‘late-analogue’ movie. As Barbara Klinger has recently argued, CGI aesthetics are sometimes contested by cult movies’ fan cultures:
The digital aesthetic comes up against a series of resistant formations, including … fan cultures, notions of authenticity … and the more general, but powerful, force of nostalgia, wherein the true experience of the films is rooted in first … encounters. Although critics and fans often greet the digital remastering and alteration of films with enthusiasm … the digital aesthetic enters the cultural fray, where competing aesthetics question or attack its presumptions. (2008: 42)
Given this symbolic conflict between ‘the digital aesthetic’ and Blade Runner as a late-analogue structure of feeling, the film is digitally made-over for the Final Cut in a way that disavows its very digitisation:
Lauzirika wanted to … craft a film that felt right but seemed the same, with no flashy, razzle-dazzle changes that drew attention to themselves. He’s certainly achieved that … only devoted cyberpunks will spot the restored dove shot and Joanna Cassidy’s head being superimposed over her badly-bewigged stunt double. (Don’t look at us like that – it’s our job to spot the differences!) (Matthews 2007b: 94)
With this playful flourish, Matthews apologises for his performance of subcultural capital, but recuperates it as a marker of reviewing professionalism. An alignment of cult fan and professional reviewer identities is thus made in this sub-niche, connoisseurial context. This is not the only such alignment of cultism and professionalism, though, as Lauzirika self-identifies as a fan:
‘I saw … [Blade Runner] over and over because it’s like a puzzle you have to figure out … Like, there’s another unicorn in the film, not just the real unicorn or the origami unicorn: in Sebastian’s lab there’s a unicorn doll. Every time you see it, you see something new.’ Luckily that passion was strong enough to see Lauzirika through months of sifting through boxes and film cans in an underground vault in Burbank. ‘Nine hundred and seventy-seven boxes … I got to see everything that was ever shot. It’d take 100 DVDs to get everything on. As a fan, it was all about revealing something new we haven’t seen before.’ (Matthews 2007a: 58)
Lauzirika is granted the ultimate fan wish fulfilment of totalising access: unlike purchasers of the five-disc set, he’s seen the ‘100 disc’ version. At the same time, though, this production discourse achieves another authentication of Blade Runner’s cult status: it reassures fans that rather than merely being targeted as paying customers, their fandom is mirrored and shared by Lauzirika. More than that, it also restores the UCE to a state of incompleteness. Akin to Jean Baudrillard’s notion of collecting as a ‘serial game’ (1996: 96), Lauzirika’s comments hold out the lure of yet more undiscovered, rare Blade Runner content, suspending any absolute finality to the Final Cut. Blade Runner may be more accessible than ever before, including versions such as the Workprint, but even now there remains a reserve of further supplementary material. Like the incompletely furnished world of Blade Runner’s diegesis which incites fan productivity, its DVD extras remain necessarily ‘incompletely furnished’, leaving open a space for ongoing fan speculation and ‘heuristic hope’.
Finally, I want to analyse ‘sub-niche media’ coverage of the Final Cut that occurred in commercial SF magazines. The binary of authentic/inauthentic cult recurred here and, perhaps unsurprisingly, it was again focused on Blade Runner versus Star Wars. SciFi Now stated:
it is a relief to see that Scott’s career-defining film has not been the victim of CGI debasing a la Harrison Ford’s other notable sci-fi Star Wars. Instead of crudely inserting brand new scenes and shots like an over enthused child playing with his new toys (take note Mr Lucas), Scott has skilfully and seamlessly weaved the new cut together. (Morton 2007: 76)
And Death Ray magazine very similarly noted:
the changes Ridley Scott has made to The Final Cut have a painter’s eye for taste and detail. Unlike the whole ‘Greedo shooting first’ debacle, there’s nothing here to make you choke on your bacon butty. There’s nothing that stands out like a particularly sore thumb – yes, we’re talking you, CGI Jabba in A New Hope. (Hart 2008: 103)
Blade Runner’s subcultural authenticity is contrasted to the ‘debasing’ of Lucas’s work on Star Wars’ digital overhauls, and the ‘debacle’ of his textual alterations. The underlying analogue/digital binary in this (professionalised) fan discourse also appears in K. W. Jeter’s continuation novels, where the Tyrell Corporation is shown to possess an analogue movie theatre. A blade runner character, Iris Knaught, watches an analogue version of Blade Runner within the diegesis: ‘It looked … no different from any digital depiction … The knowledge made her uncomfortable, as though some subtle test had been put before her, like the trick questions used with the standard-issue Voigt-Kampff machine. And she had failed the test’ (2000: 124–6). Iris fails to appreciate analogue, though by invoking the Voigt-Kampff test, the novel implies that this is indeed a failing. Elsewhere, digital media is denigrated through an intertextual reference to George Lucas: ‘We’re not using digitised actors here. Those lucasoids will do … whatever you program them to do’ (2000: 59). Where ‘replicant’ replaced Philip K. Dick’s alleged SF cliché of ‘android’ in the move from novel to film (see Robb 2006: 112), Jeter adds the reflexive neologism of ‘lucasoid’ by way of devaluing showy CGI effects.
Such attempts at reinforcing the ‘authentic’ Blade Runner cult do not simply enable fans ‘to distinguish themselves from the “phantom menace” of the mainstream consumer’ (Hunt 2003: 198); they also mark out cultural distinctions from the menace of ‘inauthentic’ cult, tampered with by producers in order to re-sell a text. Fans’ subcultural capital means that they ‘lay claim to having special access to, and hence dominion over, specific texts owing to their supposedly superior knowledge of them’ (Hunt 2003: 186), and this cult fan ‘dominion’ is carefully catered for by the Final Cut rather than overwritten by official producers’ authority. What Jonathan Gray dubs the ‘producer-function’ (2005: 122) – discourses of commerce as opposed to the ‘art’ of Blade Runner – is thoroughly subordinated in the receptions of SF sub-niche media. Instead, an authenticating discourse of Ridley Scott’s auteurism is repeatedly stressed via his ‘painting’ metaphor for digital intervention:
I’m a painter, and so I’ll finish a painting, and then I’ll put it to one side and I can’t see it. Then one morning, after a month, I’ll go back and suddenly look at it and think ‘Uh, I’m not sure now,’ or ‘It’s done.’ So my point is you always go back and touch [up] the painting. You always look at it, and think ‘Is it done, or is it not done?’ (In McCabe 2007: 61; see also Hart & Meadows 2007: 66)
This ‘painter’s eye for taste and detail’ respects details of the text loved by fans, as well as reinforcing cultists’ sense of their own ‘good taste’ and superior knowledge. Writing in Death Ray, journalist-fan Lee Hart entirely reverses the assessment made by Sight & Sound’s Andrew Osmond: whereas Osmond alleges that the Final Cut makes no human difference to earlier versions, Hart says:
a new digital cityscape has been created for the dove to soar into and it fits perfectly; providing the ideal visual representation of Batty’s soul taking flight. Anyone who criticises Blade Runner for being a heartless design exercise should look at Batty’s death scene again and alter their opinion. (2008: 103)
In this interpretation, cultists’ ‘special access’ to and ‘superior knowledge’ of Blade Runner is enacted; readers disagreeing with the assessment made are directed to go back and watch more closely. There is a further naturalisation of subcultural capital via the assumption that anybody reviewing the Final Cut would inevitably ‘alter their opinion’, as if fannish attention to textual detail and design constitutes proper knowledge of Blade Runner.
Will Brooker suggests that the attentive ‘fan who clicks through menus, freeze-frames details and rewinds to check dialogue … becomes a detective, a participant in the fiction; a member of the Blade Runner partnership’ (2009: 90), thereby taking on metaphorical ownership of the text (the ‘Blade Runner Partnership’ is the legal entity which owns Blade Runner as intellectual property). Symbolic fan ownership is, however, also performed in the sub-niche media of SF magazines, as I’ve argued here.
The dove and skyline shot recreated for the Final Cut: fans’ ‘subcultural capital’ is not just about spotting the difference, it’s also about stressing its emotional importance
Unlike niche media aimed at more general movie fans, this sub-niche – along with that targeted at DVD consumers – discursively restores Blade Runner’s ‘authentic’ cult status by contrasting it to the ‘inauthentic’ cult of ‘Mr Lucas’; by emphasising tasteful, non ‘flashy’ work on Blade Runner’s digital restoration; and by validating the ‘art’ of Blade Runner. The intriguing paradox is that this produces a reading of Blade Runner’s latest incarnation which discursively ‘analogue-ises’ the film, positioning digital technology in the service of realising and archiving Ridley Scott’s 1982 vision. The potential taint of ‘replicant cult’, sold back to fans and marketed-as-cult to mainstream consumers, is thus held at bay in this reception context. And this in spite of anxieties that Blade Runner could be dangerously caught up in a ‘saturated market’ of Ultimate Deluxe Special Editions, reaching a ‘cultural saturation point’ where everyone has access to fans’ subcultural capital, and hence spelling the end for cult distinctions.
This chapter has demonstrated how different modes of reception from the midnight movie through to video and DVD consumption have impacted on subcultural ideologies of cultism. The impression deliberately given here has been of a linear, historical narrative sweeping from Blade Runner’s initial theatrical flop through to the financial success of its Final Cut on DVD: a narrative of fan authenticity, and anxiety when ‘cult’ and ‘mainstream’ worlds collide. This theoretical approach to reception and audience distinctions (indebted to Bourdieu 1984) is certainly analytically useful, but it potentially downplays the simultaneous circulation of different cult discourses (and fan communities), layered over one another in a sort of ‘retrofitted’ Blade Runner cult. It is therefore the matter of Blade Runner’s overlapping, intersecting plural cults that I will conclude by examining in the final chapter.