Why ‘Blade Runner’ Ruled the ’80s

How important is context for a movie?

Take “Casablanca.” Context isn’t critically important to the 1942 film. Oh, it might help if you understand the basics of WWII, Vichy France, the Nazis and where and what Czechoslovakia was.

The same applies to Casablanca, Morocco.

It’s still not critical. You know it’s a love story about a man who has had his heart broken and has to willingly break it again for the world’s sake.

It remains a classic and one of the best movies ever made.

“Blade Runner,” though, is 180 degrees the opposite. Context is everything. So much so that it’s not the same movie if you didn’t see this in a theater during the early 1980s. It’s still great, but something is missing.

The most important context: the Detective archetype, Reagan’s 80s and the rise of Cyberpunk.

1. The Detective Archetype — Prior to “Blade Runner” you had almost five decades of detectives on film. It unofficially started in the 1930s with Sherlock Holmes and went through Humphrey Bogart in the ’30s and ’40s on up to, say, Dirty Harry in the 1970s.

The great detective writers took their turns with the archetype: Chandler, Christie, Hammett, Doyle, Spillane and even Edgar Allen Poe. By the ’80s the archetype is all used up. Cashed out. Bankrupt.

You had “Chinatown” in 1974, “The Long Goodbye” in 1973 but then it starts to get ultra violent like the aforementioned “Dirty Harry” series with “Magnum Force”(1973) and “The Enforcer” (1976).

Even the violence we see in “Blade Runner” had been done before. Yet director Ridley Scott’s film rejuvenated and re-contextualized the archetype into something new and bold: A hardboiled detective in the future. It was revolutionary and disturbing, as all great art is.

2. Reagan’s 80s — The ’80s was the neon-glow decade. Think “Morning in America.” That “Shining City on the Hill.” Aerobics and health crazes (You think the latter is crazy now? Well, it all started in the ’80s).

We were collectively trying to shrug of inflation, malaise and the dirty hippy vibes of yore. It was slick, Miami Vice slick, with hot cars and hot babes and hot pants.

The Go-Gos and cocaine ruled … GO GO! The film’s dystopian vision couldn’t be more different.

Into that slick marketing campaign a shadow was born: Cyberpunk. A dark, dirty, grunge-y attack on corporate gloss.

3. The Rise of Cyberpunk — It’s hard to imagine the birth of Cyberpunk but you have to start with punk. Punk was a ’70s movement out of London, New York City and L.A. reacting to disco, enduring hippy vibes and all that slick packaging.

It predicted the rise of oligarchs and corporations as the most powerful institutions of our day, overtaking church and state. The “ra-ra” money as God, technology as a mind virus, and the degradation of what it means to be human to gutter trash and in that heady mix of misery, poverty, and discarded tech where only the strong can survive.

Harrison Ford’s Deckard is a survivor. He is a punk. He is the blade runner of grunge.

One last bit of context: How radical “Blade Runner” was when it came out in 1982. The Vietnam War ended just seven years ago. You had the Korean War, the Pacific Theater in WWII.

Deckard is a sort of veteran of war, one that humanity lost. It’s vital to recall that only the dregs of society live on a dead earth. Elon Musk-types have long since left earth for greener pastures on the colony worlds where the replicants work.

The police, run by corporations, are the only form of government on the planet. “Cityspeak” and the ad over the loudspeaker in Japanese “Iri Hi Katamuku” translates as literally “the setting sun sinks down.”

Indeed it does.

Not sure if you didn’t live that time you could ever understand or get that movie even if you could take away all the various iterations of it we’ve seen since. Consider the melancholy when Deckard is at the piano looking at the old photographs, a memorial to all that was before then.

“Blade Runner,” like “Casablanca,” is a love story, as only love exists outside of time and space. To grasp that you have to have lived the context.

The ultimate irony? “Blade Runner” disappointed in its theatrical run but later emerged as a science fiction favorite.

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