Jeffery Cohen's Monster Culture

Blade Runner is set in 2019 Las Angles. While the dark and decaying city in Blade Runner is not quite accurate to today’s LA, there is a beauty to it. It shows a city where the downfall of people is the overdevelopment and excessive knowledge. Essentially the people got greedy, wanted more buildings, taller buildings, better, bigger, more advanced, and more synthetic. The replicant animals and the replicants themselves are a product for this craving for more. This principal embodies Jeffery Cohen’s first thesis of Monster Culture (seven thesis). The first of his seven theories is “The Monster’s Body Is a Cultural Body” within this thesis Cohen explains that “the monster was only born… as an embodiment of a certain cultural movement” in the instance of Blade Runner the replicants are the product of a population who decided to abandon morals to study and generate living non-living

The replicants are capable of reason, comprehension and because of their synthetic memories they have the very basic of feelings. It is unmoral and unjust to the destroy the replicants because the creators essentially gave them a life, or light and then destroy them. We know the replicants have developed feelings because in his final monologues Batty states “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn 't it?” He is addressing his fear of the end, of death. Battys need and “want for more life” is the embodiment of a natural human fear, the fear of death. This drive and fear that fuels Batty is completely justifiable when you consider the conditions in which he was created. Batty is the product of greed in a society that has disregarded all consequences and ignored the destruction that results from their ‘progression’. Batty and the other replicants are like humans in their desire for a longer life, however they are not human in the modern sense of