Blade Runner Frankenstein Comparative Essay

Comparative Study of Texts & Contexts

Elective 2: Texts in Time

How does the comparative study of two texts from different times deepen our understanding of what is constant in human nature?

Prescribed texts: Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein & Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner

The study of texts composed in different zeitgeists, deepens our understanding of human nature's constant overarching pursuit for perfection, ironically devaluing nature in the process. Our inherent human traits provide us with a paradox as it is inevitable that in the search for perfection, we cannot help but neglect this valued connection with humanity. The gothic-romantic novel, 'Frankenstein' (1818) by Mary Shelley, resonates with Ridley Scott's post-apocalyptic film 'Blade Runner-the Director's Cut' (1992), in deepening our understanding of how despite the spanning of nearly two centuries of social and historical change, the composers reveal innate fear to the devaluing of the natural world. It is compromised by man's desertion of humanity, to delve into the deductive and intellectual mysteries of the 'untamed yet obedient element'. The universality of this feared loss of humanity is encapsulated through the persistent abuse of freewill and ceaseless pursuit of knowledge, progress and perfection in human nature's intrinsic hubris which relentlessly seeks to surpass the beauty of nature and elevate man above it.

Human nature's struggle between science and nature can diminish connection with humanity. Shelley's epistolary novel, 'Frankenstein', is a direct reaction to the Enlightenment age of progress and objectivity as she questions man's ability to play god. It is challenged by the reflection of her Romantic context, where she values the sanctity of nature as a restorative force evoked through the imagery of "a divine spring [contributing] to convalescence" juxtaposed against the reductive stance of science, keen to "observe the causes and decay of life" emulating aspects of the Industrial Revolution such as Galvani's development of electricity to reanimate life. This is expanded in the juxtaposition of Frankenstein and Clerval as a metaphor for the dualistic nature of man's unresolved fractured self. The metonymic framework of nature portrays the potential good of man, symbolised in the "noble, so perfectly human spirit" of Clerval who was livened by the, "beauties of the sun, and colours of the landscape". Unlike Frankenstein's own grotesque reflection "so hideous... pressed by chains, darkness and black melancholy", a result of pursuing nature, "to her hiding places". This disconnection with nature is intensified in the alliteration of the "deep, dark, deathlike solitude" from the science he was immersed in, exemplifying his degraded sense of humanity. By inverting the Romantic structure to the Gothic vision of disenchanted gnosis, Shelley articulates her anxiety of the dehumanising consequence from being void of nature in the pursuit of science.

Comparatively, Ridley Scott's film 'Blade Runner-the Director's Cut', through the panoramic shot of blazing smokestacks and film noire characteristic of disoriented visual schemes with dominating shadows and subdued lighting, deepens this consequential dehumanising milieu. This lack of nature and abundance of artificiality, invokes an alienating and disconnected atmosphere, seemingly impossible for the existence of any humanity. In the paralleled absences bridging disparate societies, Scott reflects the ubiquitous value of nature, highlighting the threat technology poses to it. This miasmic setting establishes the films dystopian agenda symbolically addressing the technological overload of Scott's context and the resulting detachment. Scott's concern becomes an extension of Shelley's universal understanding of human nature to lose humanity in the face of hubris.

Despite human nature's inevitable potential to disconnect with humanity, we are not born that way, but rather transgress that way. In 'Frankenstein', Shelley's subversion of popular archetypes such as 'tabula rasa' where it is believed that man is naturally good at birth, but corrupted by society, reinforced in the allusion to Rousseau's 'noble savage' theory where "Men are born free but exist everywhere in chains", she depicts the Romantic view of the opaque temperament of defining humans. Ironically Frankenstein's "abhorred, wretched, daemonic...monster" appears more humane than Frankenstein evident in his emotive pleas of "life is dear to me, I will defend it" and in evoking pathos through his biblical allusion of, "I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel". The monster's characterisation connotes that it's through being, "alone...and irrevocably excluded" by society,