Blade Runner And Frankenstein Comparison
2010 English (Advanced) Paper 2: Texts in time
Band 6 student sample
Analyse how Frankenstein and Blade Runner imaginatively portray individuals who challenge the established values of their time. |
Mary Shelley’s seminal novel Frankenstein and Ridley Scott’s cult classic film Blade Runner express the contextual concerns of the post-industrial and post modern eras respectively. Where Shelley’s novel operates as a Gothic expression of the conflicting paradigms of Romantic idealism and Enlightenment rationalism, Scott’s film functions as a response to a postmodern period predicated upon the dissolution of boundaries, in which logocentric truths are fractured and blurred. Both composers, however, imaginatively portray individuals who challenge …show more content…
Victor’s Promethean allusion, “flow dangerous in the acquirement of knowledge” acts as a condemnation of Enlightened man’s hubristic desire to achieve intellectual triumph, while Shelley’s allusion to Galvanism, “I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet” suggests an elaborate circumvention of the natural process of procreation. Furthermore, the sexual imagery, “they penetrate into the recesses of nature” expresses scientific progress as both phallocentric pursuits of domination and carnal gratification, in turn allowing for Shelley’s critique of man’s narcissistic exploitation of nature. Moreover, Victor’s emotive expression “the change was so rapid, the overthrow so complete!” is ironic in its negative reference to the expedience of the Industrial Revolution and his own metaphorical function as Faustian figure, repudiating Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionary theory and, by extension, challenging the established values of the era. The growing chasm between religious institution and empirical dogma of Shelley’s era is rendered obsolete in Blade Runner with the aerial shot of the towering Tyrell Corporation building acting as a dual metaphor for the fusion of technology and history’s worship and scientific domination. In Scott’s film, the sublime alps of Mont Blanc are replaced with the architectural juxtaposition of pyramidal form and electric surface, an ironic representation of a postmodern culture, one which collapses formerly rigid social boundaries in favour of a universal consumerism. Scott characterises a detached Deckard as the 1940s film-noir hard-boiled detective, evocative of an existential nihilism that forms the foundations of an omnipresent sense of collective isolation, one which
Band 6 student sample
Analyse how Frankenstein and Blade Runner imaginatively portray individuals who challenge the established values of their time. |
Mary Shelley’s seminal novel Frankenstein and Ridley Scott’s cult classic film Blade Runner express the contextual concerns of the post-industrial and post modern eras respectively. Where Shelley’s novel operates as a Gothic expression of the conflicting paradigms of Romantic idealism and Enlightenment rationalism, Scott’s film functions as a response to a postmodern period predicated upon the dissolution of boundaries, in which logocentric truths are fractured and blurred. Both composers, however, imaginatively portray individuals who challenge …show more content…
Victor’s Promethean allusion, “flow dangerous in the acquirement of knowledge” acts as a condemnation of Enlightened man’s hubristic desire to achieve intellectual triumph, while Shelley’s allusion to Galvanism, “I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet” suggests an elaborate circumvention of the natural process of procreation. Furthermore, the sexual imagery, “they penetrate into the recesses of nature” expresses scientific progress as both phallocentric pursuits of domination and carnal gratification, in turn allowing for Shelley’s critique of man’s narcissistic exploitation of nature. Moreover, Victor’s emotive expression “the change was so rapid, the overthrow so complete!” is ironic in its negative reference to the expedience of the Industrial Revolution and his own metaphorical function as Faustian figure, repudiating Erasmus Darwin’s evolutionary theory and, by extension, challenging the established values of the era. The growing chasm between religious institution and empirical dogma of Shelley’s era is rendered obsolete in Blade Runner with the aerial shot of the towering Tyrell Corporation building acting as a dual metaphor for the fusion of technology and history’s worship and scientific domination. In Scott’s film, the sublime alps of Mont Blanc are replaced with the architectural juxtaposition of pyramidal form and electric surface, an ironic representation of a postmodern culture, one which collapses formerly rigid social boundaries in favour of a universal consumerism. Scott characterises a detached Deckard as the 1940s film-noir hard-boiled detective, evocative of an existential nihilism that forms the foundations of an omnipresent sense of collective isolation, one which