Reflections in a Silver Eye: Lens and Mirror in BLADE RUNNER

'''Shetley, Vernon, and Alissa Ferguson. "Reflections in a Silver Eye: Lens and Mirror in Blade Runner."' Science Fiction Studies'' #83 = 28.1 (March 2001): 66-76.

See especially for the "Esper machine" and the significance of the Esper sequence beyond its instancing of a possibility for enhanced police surveillance.[

From the Abstract. -- Blade Runner is a film centrally concerned with vision. Prostheses of vision — the Voigt-Kampff test and the Esper machine — permit detective Rick Deckard to probe physical and even mental space, and extend his search for android "replicants" into distant rooms and into the minds of the characters [...]. In the Esper sequence, Deckard analyzes the photograph cherished by the replicant Leon, an analysis that turns on the presence of a convex mirror at the center of the image. This photograph echoes the mirror seen in Jan van Eyck’s [...] The Arnolfini Portrait. Both mirrors are signs of artistic self-consciousness, [... indicating] an extended meditation on pictorial or cinematic vision. In Blade Runner, the form of vision embodied by the Esper machine — which is characterized as probing, dominating, and ultimately lethal — is played off against a mode of vision tentatively but crucially present in the moment when Rachael’s photograph "comes alive" in Deckard’s hands, a mode of vision that turns on imaginative empathy. (p. 76)

See also Garrett Steward on "Videology" in SF film, Judith Kerman's "Technology and Politics in the BLADE RUNNER Dystopia" and, for background, Meyer Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953).

RDE, Completing, 18-20June19