Reagan’s Replicants: Blade Runner in the 1980s

The vast scholarship on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner underestimates the film’s relationship with Reaganism. This article links the two through a reading of the racialized status of its replicants and by applying a Reaganite prism to the film’s frequently cited nostalgic hue. This complicates our understanding of the political meaning of the replicants, moving beyond the simplistic observation that the white-skinned replicants are, politically speaking, Black. As such, the article suggests that, while the film’s presentation of corporate power and ecological devastation critique Reaganism, it portrays replicants as both victims and unwitting exemplars of Reaganism; in the process, the film becomes an example of Reaganism itself.