Ridley Scott's film "Blade Runner: Director's Cut" and Aldous Huxley's novel "Brave New World" explore the concept of 'In The Wild' by focusing on the natural world and its rhythms falling victim to unbridled scientific development

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Ridley Scott’s film “Blade Runner: Director’s Cut” and Aldous Huxley’s novel “Brave New World” explore the concept of ‘In The Wild’ by focusing on the natural world and its rhythms falling victim to unbridled scientific development. They present a wedge that is divorcing man from his relationship with nature, in an attempt to define what it means to be ‘human’. Both texts depict chilling dystopic futures where the materialistic scientific and economic ways of thinking have been allowed to quash the humanistic religious and philosophic ways of thinking, in the name of progress. In their texts, these composers question this progress that they were already witnessing in their own individual contexts, and thus warn future contexts about straying from humanity’s natural origins.

Both composers criticize their individual contexts which, though fifty years apart, deal with similar concerns for humanity and the natural environment.  Huxley’s context was the aftermath of WW1, where depression and disillusionment saw European countries seeking alternatives to democracy – Totalitarianism. These extreme dictatorial forces promised stability, order and security but at the expense of essential facets of humanity: freedom of choice, emotions, intellectual stimulation and a qualitative relationship with nature. Part of the 1920s melancholy was that the world witnessed their war machines annihilate considerable portions of the human race. Also, in 1913, Henry Ford founded mass production – maximum efficiency through monotonous conformity. These contextual elements stand as the birth place for Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ – a text that satirically explores the irony of progression that is, in fact, backward in its effects on humanity and its natural rythms  

In Scott’s 1980’s context, global corporations were rapidly expanding, and were increasingly threatening individual autonomy. This era saw these materialistic multinational corporations, as symbolized by Tyrell, rise to enormous economic and political power. Due to the movements of the 60s and 70s against environmental degradation, the state of the natural environment (eg: the ozone layer and industrialisation) was also a global anxiety for humanity. The utterly urban existence of  “Blade Runner” is Scott’s prediction of  1980s America’s future as a society overrun by commercialism, globalization and consumerism where nature was being rapidly exhausted to allow for man’s unbridled thirst for technological development. These texts, in reflecting the concerns of when they were composed, caution man against drifting from nature.  

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In their texts, the composers’ dramatic use of dystopic settings, illustrate humanity’s dislocation from traditional religious and philosophic ways of thinking. In “Blade Runner”, the panoramic camera shots of L.A. 2019 establish a hellish megalopolis through disorienting imagery of unnatural squalor and the domination of pagan edifices. Ironically, this post-apocalyptic tone has inverted L.A. into a “fallen city of angels”. Contrasting this with the dulcet soundtrack further emphasizes the dissonant nature of this environment. The reflection of this pessimistic setting in the motif eye symbolizes how the triumph of science has commodified individual freedom and happiness prohibiting a relationship with the natural ...

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