Colonialism, I guess.īut none of that’s new what’s especially striking here is the fact that US culture has internalized this to to the degree that it feels pretty natural to have a movie in which the humans, in general, are the bad guys (were there any sympathetic human characters other than Robin Wright? Most of the other humans we see hurl epithets at the replicants: “skin job,” etc.). I am not sure how/if Europe is supposed to feel this guilt, given that they abolished slavery earlier and didn’t have native peoples (the Celts?) to drive out. (as opposed to “shame” culture stereotypically associated with the East). I know not everything’s a religion, but it feels really hard not to connect this to Christianity, original sin, guilt, etc. Basically, we have lots of good reasons to feel guilty about America’s successes. And then, of course, there are the Native Americans. This is supported, in the US, by the economic theory that the US could not have become a world power if not for the capital accumulation enabled by slavery (no, I don’t think this theory is correct, but it’s common, at least in the academic humanities). We should therefore hate ourselves, on some level, for our inability to give up capitalism despite its being founded on evil. Yes, in this religion slavery is the original sin that makes possible everything we love. This widespread and extreme “guilt” about Western civilization was quite clearly revealed with the Jared Leto line about “every major technological advance has happened on the backs of an expendable workforce,” a clear reference to slavery. Have heard it called “oikophobia” (fear of the familiar) or “xenophilia” (love of the foreign). I feel this transition reflects a weird moral development in the West I sort of groped after here. replicants and maybe the hero is a replicant,” to now “replicants are literally the oppressed good guys who are leading a rebellion against the humans in the sequel that probably won’t happen if box office sales don’t pick up.” Just saw the new Blade Runner (posting here instead of older thread as I doubt many are still reading that one) and liked it fairly well, at least in terms of visual aesthetic and some, though not all, strong performances (especially liked Robin Wright did not care for Jared Leto, though this tends to hold for both of them in general), and struck especially by the following:Īs Atlas says here, we’ve gone from “replicants are kind of scary and lacking in empathy,” to “replicants are scary but there is moral ambiguity about humans v.
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