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.[1]

See especially for the "Esper machine" and the significance of the Esper sequence beyond its instancing of a possibility for enhanced police surveillance.[[2]

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,[3] 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)[4]

See also Garrett Steward on "Videology" in SF film[5], Judith Kerman's "Technology and Politics in the BLADE RUNNER Dystopia"[6] and, for background, Meyer Abrams's The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953).[7]

RDE, Completing, 18-20June19