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Blade Runner as a Postmodernist Film Postmodernism is a term that is difficult to pin down but it used more and more widely to describe aspects of the culture of the last three decades. One of the main features is its eclecticism – the mixing and matching of different stylistic elements. Some who use the term welcome it as liberation from the ideas of and reverence for “high culture” (for example, opera, ballet, painting, classic literature, etc) and the disparaging of “low culture” (television, popular cinema, comics, etc). Others see postmodernism as a trivialisation of culture by irresponsible academics caught up in admiration for the glitter of consumer capitalism and its moral emptiness. Postmodernism describes conditions prevailing in the last three decades of the twentieth century, especially in the production of media artefacts, where there is a superabundance of images and styles – in television, pop videos, film, advertising, etc - which are readily available for recycling. The traditionally valued qualities of coherence, meaning, originality and authenticity are replaced by a random swirl of empty signs to produce a culture of disposable imitations, superficiality, “simulacra” (copies without originals), style valued over substance, surface appearance over depth, a mixing and matching of diverse styles. Another aspect of postmodernism arises from the view that it is no longer possible to have general theories of how humanity and society function, called “grand narratives” or “metanarratives” - theories which attempt to explain how history and society functions (such as Marxism which explains historical development in terms of the class struggle).
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