My Co-workers reaction and cultural landscape to the original Blade Runner's cyberpunk imagery was fascinating.

One of my older coworkers and I were talking about the original Blade Runner he explained his reaction and the cultural moment was much different then than it was now. I thought he was talking about how it wasn't the original cut and that it was the dumb narrated version with the happy ending instead of the unicorn/ Deckard might be a robot ending. He explained that many in the audience was actually horrified and stunned by the images.... of Harrison Ford eating with chopsticks, that an american billboard would feature a Japanese woman, and the city itself looked like Tokyo with neon lights covering the city. I was dumbfounded and I asked what is wrong with cool cyber punk imagery and Japanese influence?

He then explained back then there was a lot of anxiety of Japan being a major economic powerhouse with the rise of imported Japanese cars, electronics, and other exports that had American trembling at Japan's standing as the leading economy while america suffered a recession in the 80s with a large trade deficit with Japan increasing like there was with China recently. The idea of Blade Runner was actually more frightening to american audiences, not because of it's subject matter of Artificial intelligence, but the idea of america taken over by Japanese culture like colonizing and eliminated traces of american ideals. The american ideal was the stereotypical home of the suburban house with a white picket fence, green grass, and sunny weather occupied by the standard white families would be replaced with oppressive darkness from the cities and that english would be a second language. Harrison Ford eating with chopsticks looked oppressive to many since it was such a foreign concept of a white man eating like the Japanese instead of the expected fork and knife, the standard of beauty in america would transition from a white blonde to a Japanese model was uncomfortable to many women at the time, and without any images of the american dream gone and left with a Japanese influenced city was a real Dystopian idea to some Americans.

He added that you can trace this Japanese anxiety back to William Gibson's Neuromancer with a lot of japanese corporation names and a lot of 80s movies feature fictional japanese companies. Examples include Die Hard, Back to the Future 2 with Mcfly employed under a japanese company, the Punisher with him fighting the yakuza, and more. The japanaphobia was a real tide in american culture that even the Vincent Chin murder case embodied that anger and fear of losing their jobs to Japanese competition.

Pretty fascinating hearing from older move goers and the cultural landscape at the time.

TLDR; Some americans thought Blade Runner was more scary looking than cool due to the Japanese economic anxiety. Young americans just see it as cool.

Submitted June 12, 2019 at 03:00AM by Pancake_muncher http://bit.ly/2WwbgW9