Free Thinking - Blade Runner
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2015
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As Ridley Scott's science fiction extravaganza, Blade Runner is re-released, Matthew Sweet is joined by the critics Roger Luckhurst and Sarah Churchwell, and by the philosopher Max de Gaynesford, to discuss its enduring significance. And Matthew talks to Eric Jarosinski, a writer who claims he found his creative voice on twitter under the name @NeinQuarterly, and to linguist and medievalist Kate Wiles, and book historian Sjoerd Levelt, about the parallels between the tweets of today and the marginalia of Medieval readers.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, it's a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that at some level of genius. It also helps |
| 0:21.2 | that it's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream |
| 0:26.1 | van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. On tonight's |
| 0:32.8 | free thinking, why Twitter is like a lecture hall in 1960s Frankfurt and the creamy vellum margin of a 14th century Bible. |
| 0:41.3 | Look, we have philosophers and medievalists here to prove it, and it'll be totes amaze balls. |
| 0:46.5 | First, though, we're going all the way back to the year 2019. |
| 0:50.4 | The year of acid rain, neon, noodle bars, cigarette smoke, sex and Bars, Cigarette Smoke, Sex and Death, |
| 0:55.9 | the year when Blade Runner happened. |
| 0:58.3 | Ridley Scott's sci-fi film noir classic is re-released in cinemas this weekend, |
| 1:03.2 | a final cut by the director, repairing the unkind one made by the producers in 1982. |
| 1:09.7 | For 33 years, the picture has been intoxicating film critics, |
| 1:14.1 | literary critics and philosophers. Well, I've invited a small caucus of them here tonight to |
| 1:18.7 | unravel its mysteries. I'll name them in a moment. But first, I'm going to ask for their help |
| 1:24.0 | in using the medium of radio to show you one of the great opening sequences in cinema. |
| 1:30.5 | It begins with a blank screen and then a roller caption, but not one of those campy Star Wars ones. |
| 1:38.2 | This looks like the small print in the New Yorker, and it says, |
| 1:42.7 | Early in the 21st century, the Tyrell Corporation advanced robot evolution into the nexus phase, |
| 1:49.5 | a being virtually identical to a human, known as a replicant. |
| 1:54.1 | The nexus replicants were superior in strength and agility, |
| 1:57.4 | and at least equal in intelligence to the genetic engineers who created them. |
| 2:01.6 | Replikants were used off-world as the slave labour in the hazardous exploration and colonization of other planets. |
| 2:09.6 | After a bloody mutiny by a Nexus combat team in an off-world colony, replicants were declared illegal on earth under penalty of death. |
... |
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