Analysis of Blade Runner and Brave NEw World
...enefits and wonders of technological advancements such as human cloning, rapid maturation, and prenatal conditioning. The description is short, concise and colourless to indicate logic, a characteristic commonly associated with a machine as opposed to a human. However, the embracement of technology is in fact how Huxley satirically comments on the World State. This supposed technological utopia is in actuality a dystopia populated by dehumanised people robbed of free thought and emotion, who are lorded over by a government who derives its influence and power from technology. This idea relates back to the context Huxley was writing in. Brave New World was composed in a Post War period where a government’s power was measured by the technological superiority of its military arsenal. This dangerous technology gave governments who were striving for stability the power to inhibit the ability of a person to be free and express that freedom as they saw fit, thus plunging post war 1930s humanity into emotional wasteland. Huxley also comments here on the increased emergence of totalitarian regimes throughout Europe. Although the World State is never referred to as a dictatorship, totalitarianism is implied through technological mechanisms such as hypnopaedic brainwashing and conditioning, that the world controllers have implemented to further suppress individuality and humanity. Unlike Huxley, Ridley Scott makes no attempt to illustrate the Los Angeles of 2019 as a Utopia. It is an environmentally and naturally degraded world where pollution, overpopulation, and amalgamation of business are rampant, where replicants are prevelant and where all signs of human emotion are absent. In fact technology has become so far advanced and so dominant that machines display more emotion and humanity than humans themselves. In the commencing scene of Blade Runner the panorama of the emotionally baron LA is presented. There is virtually no trace of light and the only light that is present is generated from artificial spotlights. This diminished light represents the diminished presence of the natural element and the artificiality of humanity. In fact, the opening panorama does not focus once on a human. This further indicates the absence of the human factor. The only face displayed is that of an Asian geisha women advertising Coca Cola on a 400 story high electric billboard. This again reinforces the dominance of technology and how it has synthesised humanity. Scott in this opening scene is depicting his concerns of the direction that 1980s society is taking. Making the movie in a time of mass technological advancement, he comments on how technology is separating mankind’s physical dimension from their emotional dim...