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Blade runner and brave new world comparative

The desire for control can have disastrous consequences and both Aldous Huxley’s Brave new world and Ridley Scott’s ” Blade Runner : Directors cut” are dramatic futuristic depictions of potential worlds. Through the destruction and replacement of nature, natural processes and exploitation of freedom, controllers have turned the future worlds into dystopias, bringing to the fore consequences for the desire for control.

The destruction and replacement of nature in Brave new world is the world state’s attempt at maintaining conformity and increasing control. Civilisation is sterilisation”, ” a squat grey building” and ” pale dead as a ghost… corpse coloured rubber”, these are Huxley’s bleak images of the world state. However, his depictions of the savage reservation where nature is limited to are ” it’s horrible it’s horrible” and ” infantile decorum”. Lenina, as a product of her controlling and conditioning, finds no joy in nature and remains adamant about her ” conditioning”. This emphasises that in the world state’s desire for control, and in the past WW1 context of Huxley, that disconformities and nature must be eliminated.

This is further explored through Scott’s opening long panoramic shot of a hellish megalopolis scatted with towering smoke stacks emitting intense fireballs. The film uses film noir techniques of acid rain, smog filled low lighting and dirty alleyways in this concrete jungle to reiterate the lack of nature. The controlling and dominating shot of the Tyrell Corp building coupled with low angle shots of Roy batty and high angle shots of Deckard, emphasise that in Tyrell’s quest for control and ” more human than human” ” replicants”, he has merely destroyed nature.

Scott was mixed into a time of increased environmentalism due to the hippies’ awareness of global warming, pollution, and the OPEC oil crisis. These detail humans’ desire for control and its draining effects on the fragile Earth. Both Huxley and Scott show through the destruction and replacement of nature that dramatic consequences have been foretold, bringing to the fore the consequences of the desire for control. Natural processes such as relationships, birth and death have been replaced or done away with.

Brave new world uses ectogenesis to replace the viviparous birth process and bokanovskification, ” one of the greatest instruments of social stability”, to control. There are few relationships of meaning and the natural way of conception has been abolished. Lenina fails to be able to have a meaningful relationship and using her ” Malthusian belt” prevents all births as unwanted issues of change. Due to a rise in eugenics research in Huxley’s context, the consequences are brought to the fore by use of these evidential possibilities. Scott, in Blade Runner, takes the approach of replacing human love with mechanical/replicant love.

The supposedly human Deckard has little dialogue and struggles due to Scott’s forwarded context of rising divorce rates and destruction of the family structure. This then follows through to the birth and death, now replaced with ” the same biological matter as humans” but using replicants with a four year life span to fill in the gap in nature. The increase in IVF and human cloning technology forced Scott to produce a world where all is a merely a reproduction. Gaff says ” I want more life” though as a replicant facing ” retirement” he will find little more due to Tyrell’s increasing desire for control in Los Angeles, 2019.

Both the World State and Tyrell desire control and these two texts comparatively bring to the fore the consequences of that desire. Finally through the exploitation of freedom, consumerism has replaced God and religion and conditioning and dictatorship style control is the norm. In Huxley’s Brave new world, Henry Ford has replaced God as in ” Thank Ford”, ” for Ford’s sake” and ” AF” meaning the time ‘after Ford’. This follows the invention of the assembly line just prior to Huxley’s writing, Ford in the World State has produced ” mass production applied to biology”.

Also the consumerism driven depression of the 1920’s has been reflected in this consequential telling where ” progress is lovely” and ” everyone is happy nowadays”. ” Hypnopaedia, the greatest socialising and moralising force of all time” is used to condition things like ” community, identity, stability” into the minds of the population. Forced to act a certain way, using Soma, Huxley’s version of the currently popular anti-depressant, and media filtering, this is a direct reflection of Huxley’s context of fascist and communist media filtering, propaganda campaigns and the underlying desire for control.

Mirrored in Scott’s Blade Runner, Tyrell has become the ” God of biomechanics” and Roy his ” prodigal son”. These biblical allusions are evident of the consumeristic drive for growth of international companies in the 1980’s and further revealed how science easily take over; take control. The replicants are given implanted memories and as such are forced to act a certain way. Coupled with the eye motif and constant searchlighting, the ‘big brother’ governments and the cold war are being directly reflected. This control and desire for further control by Tyrell has introduced a world in which nature is gone and science is the supreme ruler.

A not too distant possibility of consequences, foretold. Both Huxley and Scott in their novel and film respectively highlight the desire for control though from completely different contexts. Focussing on themes such as destruction and replacement of nature and natural processes and the exploitation of freedoms, these texts highlight key issues of dominating parties. Comparatively they each produce new possibilities of futuristic societies where dominance is by technology and force is the easiest way to live. This brings to the fore the consequences of the desire for control.

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