Bladerunner Channel 4

Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was published in 1968. Ridley Scott’s adaption Bladerunner set in a Los Angeles of 2019 follows a similar storyline. Deckhard (Harrison Ford) a former cop is told he must retire six replicants that have escaped from the Tyrell Corporation. Retire is a euphemism for kill. Killing replicants is not an offence because a machine or android cannot be killed. Replicants are property in the same way that a combine harvester, an eighteenth century Negro plantation child, or twentieth century sex slave is. The Corporation owns them and rogue elements must be destroyed otherwise it is not good for business, or society, which is the same thing. The interesting thing for me is how this post-apocalyptic world is viewed. Ridley Scott’s world is a sleazy kind of Americanised vision of Chinatown with flying cars, incessant rain and advertisements for Coca Cola. Philip K Dick’s is more difficult to visualise. The film has trumped it in my memory. Neither vision is entirely satisfactory. Predictions about the future become dated quicker than a cliche of milk on the turn.