Four critical essays on the 1982 Ridley Scott film "Blade Runner."
Runner"
When I started my blog Under the Hollywood Sign in 2009, I didn’t expect to delve into Blade Runner,
although the film had been a favorite of mine since its release in 1982. Rather, my aim was to promote my documentary Under the Hollywood Sign,
and to expand on the myriad subjects contained in it.
After a year of writing about the history of Beachwood Canyon and filmmaking in general, I happened to attend a symposium sponsored by the Los Angeles Conservancy that brought together Blade Runner
alumni Michael Deeley and Syd Mead. Afterward I wrote a piece on the event that attracted a normal amount of traffic while it was current. Within six months, however, it began attracting hundreds of hits a day, eventually becoming the most popular post on my blog. Because Wordpress has excellent statistics, I was able to see that my Blade Runner
readership came from all over the world. Sometimes there would be clusters of hits in Sweden or France as the post was featured on a site, but more often hits would come from individual searches--people typing blade runner into their search engines around the clock.
Meanwhile, I found myself watching the film again and again, and discovering new details each time. My background in Japanese language and culture inspired me to investigate the film’s Japanese elements, while a New Yorker article led me to rethink the replicant Roy Batty as a classical Greek hero. Reading Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the literary source of Blade Runner,
filled me with a new appreciation for the film’s visual elements, almost none of which are present in
