Fear, revulsion, and horror were the emotions
which the
big-city crowd aroused in those who first observed it.
-Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
I. Introduction
When Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner was released in 1982, American, and especially
Californian, industry was in the midst of a recession that affected nearly every
industrialized nation. Following the 1979 jump in oil prices, the second major
increase in five years, industrial production around the globe dropped between
5 and 10 percent, a trajectory that did not cease until 1983 (Veenhoven and Hagenaars
2). Since the early 1970s, American industries, especially the manufacturing
sector, had been relying upon methods of “flexible accumulation” that
allowed them to compete globally by repealing some of American workers’ rights
and unionized power, and by exploiting budding labor markets in Southeast Asia
and Mexico. In the decade following the prosperous 1960s, America’s global
position as the lone, victorious economic powerhouse, along with the middle class
livelihoods its economy supported, were challenged and both the American working
and middle classes felt the threat. Japan and Germany, whose economies were strong
by the late sixties, forced American “corporations into a period of rationalization,
restructuring, and intensification of labor control" in an effort to lower
production costs (Harvey 145). This restructuring of traditional labor processes
angered workers, especially those whose jobs had been relocated or made contractual,
in keeping with the need for a flexible labor force. Although workers on the
factory floor or in the service industries were the most immediately affected,
these changes also weighed heavily on the minds of middle class managers who
became acutely aware of workers’ grievances as the 1980-82 recession wore
on, and increasingly apprehensive about the possibility of vengeful workers rising
up. Thus, in California, members of the working class felt threatened by new,
cheaper labor forces and lost many of their hard-won rights, along with the sense
of security these maintained. Members of the American middle class, however,
were far from immune; as they bore witness to the unenviable plight of their
blue-collar counterparts, they also feared joining them – a “fear
of falling,” as Barbara Ehrenreich phrased it, from their positions of
precarious privilege that Blade Runner both registers and, problematically, elicits.
This fear is intensified by an arguably racist mise-en-scene that depicts Los
Angeles in the year 2019 as an urban wasteland overrun by largely squalid, multicultural
masses who represent, along with the humanoid invaders, the new face of California’s
working class. These crowds, I suggest, invoke “fear” and “revulsion” in
viewers because they seem poised to engulf our white, middle class protagonist,
Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), who himself fears joining these “little people” (Fancher
4).
Based loosely on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep? (1969), Blade Runner is also a reworking of Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)
and other incarnations of the Prometheus myth, which dramatizes the insurrection
and revenge of fabricated humanoid laborers who are exploited and then abandoned
by their capitalist creators. The horror and suspense of the film rely on the
threat posed by four such “replicants” who vanquish their unlucky
bosses in an off-world, forced-labor, mining colony and survive the journey back
to Los Angeles (as opposed to the novel’s San Francisco setting). There,
they want only to confront their creators, to lodge a grievance over the unfair
conditions in which they must live and work, and to find out how to lengthen
their four-year lifespans. The replicants represent colonial slaves in the world
of the film, which is replete with references to colonies, mutinies, and “skin
jobs,” a term for the replicants which Deckard’s voiceover equates
with the racial slur, “nigger,” found only in history books. And
yet, as invaders whose very presence in California is illegal, the incoming replicants
can also be read as undocumented immigrant workers whose ambitions are linked
uneasily with those of the mysterious Mexican detective, Gaff (Edward James Olmos),
who exhibits sympathies for the replicants even though he is gunning for Deckard’s
job killing them. Although Blade Runner has been widely read as a postmodernist
pastiche of film noir and science fiction genres that questions the distinction
between “human and non-human (artificial) intelligence” (Tasker 225),
a major element of the narrative has received less scrutiny: namely, the way
the colonial subplot allegorizes middle class anxieties about vengeful workers
rising up and demanding answers from their superiors, and working class fears
about being replaced by ambitious immigrants, whose invasion the borders and “security
fences” (as they are called in the film) can no longer prevent.
II. Surveillance and the Optics of Power
The chief method of border patrol deployed in the film to combat
the invading replicant workers is telling since it takes the
form of visual scrutiny. Given
that Los Angeles, as it is depicted, is home to every conceivable ethnic group,
and numerous artificial life forms, the replicant invaders – all Caucasian – blend
right in. An elaborate method of scrutiny is thus required to locate them amid
the crowds. The Voight Kampff test, which determines the presence or absence
of the subject’s humanity by examining the fluctuation of its retina when
certain emotions are elicited, serves this function in the film, which opens
with a scene in which the test is administered. The device is clearly represented
as a futuristic relative of much older methods of scrutiny, such as photography,
which came to “play a central and complicitous role in…the articulation
of race and racial differences” in nineteenth-century, colonial anthropology
(Green 31). Like colonial photography, which was used to demonstrate anatomical
inferiority, criminality, and barbarity, the Voight Kampff test establishes “a
normalising gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify
and to punish” (Foucault 25). The gaze of the Blade Runner detectives in
the film initially functions in this way, since their techniques of observation
are a means of distinguishing, judging, and ultimately condemning the undocumented
invaders.
Eyes are one of the most prominent images in Blade Runner. The film opens with
a skyline shot of a polluted Los Angeles at dusk, but quickly, the screenplay
tells us, the “camera moves into a window in the large pyramid-shaped building.
A man is sitting at a table. Another man enters the room and sits down. The following
scene is reflected in the eye until Holden is seated. The eye is magnified and
deeply revealed…The eye is brown in a tiny screen. On a metallic screen
below, the words Voight Kampff are finely etched” (Fancher 1). Holden (Morgan
Paull) is a Blade Runner. The eye in which he is reflected belongs to Leon (Brion
James), who may be a replicant. Setting the tone for the various modes of detection
and surveillance that follow, the film thus opens with the administration of
a computerized eye exam. It is one of many ironies in the film that humans must
rely on machines to assess the danger posed by machines; and people even use
machines to assess their own humanity. The Voight Kampff machine nonetheless
itemizes anatomical differences with a high degree of certainty and if the subject
is deemed deviant and inhuman, it is executed, or forcefully “retired” to
use the euphemism of the future.
Surveillance and differentiation are instrumental in policing the porous borders
of selfhood. According to Rey Chow, “visuality determines the nature of
the social object” to the extent that “the production of the West’s ‘others’ depends
on a logic of visuality that bifurcates ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ into
the incompatible positions of intellectuality and spectacularity” (60).
Chow’s subjects, like Green’s colonial anthropologists and Blade
Runner’s detectives, are thinkers, the possessors and wielders of knowledge
whose gaze is active and operative. The objects of the gaze, according to the
power structures to which Chow refers, must only have knowledge produced about
them, all the better to control them. They function best as objects if they are
seen but not heard from. That is, they are their bodies, designed in Blade
Runner for mining, military, and “pleasure” services. As the Blade Runner,
Holden, administers the test, he feels confident in his superior knowledge; the
gauges, meters and dials on his Voight Kampff machine will ostensibly tell him
all he needs to know about the seemingly nervous Leon, whose retina is grotesquely
magnified on the machine’s monitor. The screenplay contains telling stage
directions as the detective begins his inquiry:
[Holden smiles a patronizing smile.]
Holden: You’re in a desert walking along when…you look down and see
a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you…
Leon: A tortoise. What’s that?
Holden: Know what a turtle is?
Leon: Of course.
Holden: Same thing.
Leon: I never seen a turtle. [He sees Holden’s patience
is wearing thin.]
But I understand what you mean. (Fancher 3)
Holden and Leon, the upholder and the violator of the law, appear to be playing
out a traditional scene of interrogation, which affirms the subject’s knowledge
(evidenced by his patronizing smile) and the object’s naiveté, in
this case about the natural world. But the power relationship is not what it
seems; in fact, it is a charade that embodies a disturbing process of identification.
That is, the threatening notion that the policeman may have misidentified his
suspect – that he may have identified with him as another human – looms
uneasily beneath the apparent banality of the words exchanged. Leon, who has
cleverly infiltrated the Tyrell Corporation that created him by posing as a janitor
(aligning him with the working class) is far from naive. Rather, he is playing
a cruel game with his interrogator, stalling Holden’s efforts to discover
what he inevitably will. Holden’s sense of patronizing control over those
he is employed to identify and segregate is, then, also false. When “the
needles in the computer barely move,” Holden knows he has identified an
inhuman life form (Fancher 4). But by the time he reaches for his gun, “Leon
is faster,” shooting him repeatedly in a shocking display of speed (Fancher
4). Holden has failed in his inferences, or perhaps, ironically, because of his
all too human reaction time. Although he had been studying the movements of the
malicious “object” of his gaze, that object had been returning his
gaze – and perhaps with more skill and sharper reflexes.
III. Trauma as a Narrative Stimulus
In a film about policing the permeable, traumatized boundaries between selves
and others, Americans and replicant-invaders, it is significant that the plot
should begin with such a violent act. Practically speaking, violence not only
constitutes the action in the “action film,” it stimulates further
action and therefore drives narrative trajectories like the one Deckard follows
as a salaried killer. Ridley Scott is unusually skilled at mobilizing this strategy,
evidenced by the opening swordfight in The Duellists (1977), the eruption of
a creature from a man’s stomach during a meal that motivates the action
in Alien (1979), the stabbings carried out by Yakuza hit men in the opening restaurant
scene of Black Rain (1989), the sexual assault and revenge killing outside the
roadhouse that motivates the action in Thelma and Louise (1991; see Russell),
the murder of Marcus Aurelius that initiates the hero’s journey in Gladiator (2000), and the warlord shootings, interrupting the distribution of food in Somalia,
that violently begin his Blackhawk Down (2001). The violence in Blade
Runner,
however, also plays a more thematic role. It agitates previously stable (however
meticulously constructed) notions of selfhood. Notably, violence enlivens various
characters in the film, especially Rachael (Sean Young), Deckard, and his nemesis
Roy (Rutger Hauer), to re-examine the violent or complicit roles they play in
the larger late-capitalist economy for which they have sacrificed so much, including
the protagonist’s marriage and his emotions: “Replicants weren’t
supposed to have feelings, neither were Blade Runners,” Deckard says in
his voiceover. That is, as Judith Herman suggests:
Traumatic events call into question basic human relationships. They breach
the attachments of family, friendship, love and community. They shatter the
construction
of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others…They violate
the victim’s faith in a natural or divine order and cast the victim into
a state of existential crisis. (51)
Family and friendship have no place in the film, except in fabricated childhood
photographs like the ones Rachael discovers are fraudulent depictions of a
childhood that was never hers; love, too, is a complicated endeavour because
Deckard falls
in love with Rachael, one of the machines he was employed to kill.
Selfhood, the identification of the other, and the methods of literal and metaphorical
border patrol that police these categories become, more than the film noir
mystery, the central focus of the narrative. This shift results in human and
non-human
existential dilemmas: Deckard had been “an ex-cop, an ex-Blade Runner” and
a “cold fish” to his “ex-wife.” In our first encounter
with him, as the camera marauds through an outdoor food court, he is difficult
to distinguish from the masses of people who surround him. As he comes into focus,
we see that he is, tellingly, scanning the Help Wanted ads for his next role,
leaving us to ponder, who is he now? Interestingly, Giuliana Bruno links the
replicants with schizophrenia, a psychological condition she defines as “the
inability to experience the persistence of the ‘I’ over time” resulting
in a “perpetual present” (189). Deckard, it seems, suffers from this
condition at least as severely as those he polices. He is ex-everything, and
soon-to-be-nothing. He lives, like the late-capitalist landscape he inhabits,
with “no conceivable future on the horizon” (Jameson 119). Does he
have a place in society when he is not a fierce oppressor of the illegitimate,
undocumented workforce – the “little people” he threatens,
in one scene, with liquor violation fines, and the replicants he threatens with
death? What will be his function if the replicant workers achieve equal opportunity
status? What would be the result of his identification with them as equals? After
all, their fears of mortality, their immobility, their suffering, and their existential
questions are the same as his own. Does Deckard enact power, given that he is
an extension of the state, or is he, himself, a slave to his utilitarian function
within the repressive apparatus? In short, who is he without his other?
IV. Fears of Falling
Such questions haunt those in middle class professions who fear being
subsumed by the underclass and who begin questioning the extent to which
they themselves
differ from the “little people.” Just as the Freudian infant, whose
cry summons its mother, feels both omnipotent when she arrives with the breast
or the blanket, and fearful about losing its potency if one day she does not,
Deckard oscillates between these conflicting sensations of supremacy and insecurity.
Even though patrolling the border between those in power and those who service
them is the central activity performed by the authority figures in the film,
still the distinction breaks down, and the borders become permeable. Deckard,
one such figure of authority, is always also a servant to the power structure
he represents, as we see when he submits to the Police Chief Bryant’s
(M. Emmet Walsh) request that he return from retirement to hunt down Leon
and the
other escaped replicants:
Bryant: This is a bad one, the worst yet. I need the
old Blade Runner. I need your magic.
Deckard: I was quit when I walked in here [pauses]. I’m twice as quit
now. See ya, Bryant.
Bryant: Stop right where you are! [Deckard freezes at
the hard tone.] You know the score pal. When you’re not a cop, you’re
little people.
Deckard: [turning around] Forgot there for a minute about the little people.
No choice, I guess.
Bryant: No choice, pal. (Fancher 4)
If the replicants have no choice about the length of their four-year lives,
Deckard has no choice about the quality of his. He obviously despises his
job as a killer,
and yet it keeps him off the street and ninety-seven floors above it in his
lonely studio, where liquor is his pacifier. 1. His power
in his society, as a white
male representing the law, is also a type of powerlessness because, like
the underclass, he has so few options. We begin to wonder just how distinct
he
is from the poor masses over which he ostensibly wields authority. Furthermore,
since he clearly gives in to his captain’s rhetoric in the scene quoted
above, we might also wonder to whom (or to what forces) Deckard is really
submitting. Kevin McNamara finds it odd that the film never “open[s]
onto the political power structure above Captain Bryant” (430). He
suggests that “the
omission of politics from the film’s world [is] indicative of the postmodernization
of power” because “there exists no identifiable source” (430).
Instead, “power circulates through sophisticated management systems
that are so internationalised, so technical that they are beyond the control
of any
person or cartel” (431). Like the androids in its service, society
under capital has, itself, become a machine. It operates without human agency,
it seems,
and yet it prescribes, with little flexibility, the roles humans must play
within it. Bryant’s identification of a jobless Deckard with the masses
of “little
people” thus shocks him into submission: it stops Deckard in his tracks,
eliciting angst and fear that he may lose the few “privileges of whiteness” he
enjoys, and that he may become economically indistinguishable from the poor
masses of Mexicans, Asians, Hare Krishnas, Arabs, and Skin Jobs he polices
(431).
It is significant that Deckard is followed throughout the action by a mysterious
character named Gaff (Olmos), whom the 1981 screenplay also names “the
Mexican.” Gaff has an inexplicable ability to locate Deckard anywhere in
the city, and he seems intent on antagonizing Deckard throughout his unpleasant
mission. Like Deckard, we begin to have the nagging suspicion that, should he
refuse to work amid these conditions, “his job would fall to [his] non-white
subordinate, Gaff, and his social privilege would be revoked” (McNamara
431). Thus, Deckard, too, is a slave: a victim, however, of his class privileges,
or rather, of his obligation to continue playing the role defined for him in
society under capital, despite the fact that he has had “a belly full of
killing” which has left him traumatized. Indeed, as Bryant tells him, he
has no choice: if the replicants threaten American lives, the Mexicans threaten
their jobs.
In this sense, then, the violent Leon and the other replicants are only the
most recent menacing immigrants to arrive from foreign lands in Scott’s
dystopian fantasy. Leon, Roy, Pris (Darryl Hannah), and Zhora (Joanna Cassidy)
pose a literal
threat to human safety through their vengeful quest for equal rights, but
Gaff and the numerous other immigrant faces that populate the crowded sidewalks
are
also intended to appear threatening, at least to Californian livelihoods.
Los Angeles is traumatized, then, from without and from within. It is the “Third
World inside the first” (Bruno 186); those who once labored in Asia,
the Subcontinent, and Latin America producing America’s electronics,
food, and clothes are no longer peripheral and invisible, but now inhabit
the city.
For these reasons, the selection of Los Angeles, as opposed to the novel’s
San Francisco setting, is revealing. In the “four years before the
release of Blade Runner, 75,000 manufacturing jobs in the region
were lost to plant shutdowns and indefinite layoffs, while ten of the twelve
largest non-defence-related employers
entirely ceased their manufacturing operations in southern California” (Soja
201). In the early 1980s, a “pool of undocumented workers – an
estimated 100,000 of whom [were] concentrated in downtown Los Angeles” were
used “to
weaken unions and drive wages still lower” (McNamara 428). American
workers and managers in California faced fears of falling that are registered
throughout
the action across Harrison Ford’s traumatized, angst-ridden face – fears
that the film seems problematically content to exacerbate.
V. Conclusion:
Blade Runner’s Class Consciousness
The influx of immigrants in the film, for instance, has obviously not resulted
in a healthy multicultural workforce, but rather in form of “diversity
based on segregation, a confluence of rejects and outcasts, the wretched of the
earth” (Mueller 45). Here we encounter what might be the ideological limit
of the Scott’s images of miserable masses: the film appears to be suggesting
that immigration will convert American metropolises into sites of urban squalor.
But perhaps the film is relying on existing anxieties to make a more progressive
point: namely, that global capitalism will lead not to a classless utopia, but
to a deprived monoclass. Its distinct cultures will blend together like the “mish-mash” of
languages that comprise the “city speak” in which they do business,
and worse, it will remain dominated by a miniscule elite, a polarization that
leaves little space for Deckard, Bryant, Gaff, and the dwindling number of others
caught in between.
If we put any stock in the latter possibility – that the film is critiquing
the corporate organization of societies into dominant elite and deprived subaltern
classes – it is important that Scott’s speculative city is a decaying
and dangerous place before the replicants arrive. Most people with the means
have left: circling blimps, targeting the wealthy inhabitants of the high-rises,
advertise (in English) “the chance to begin again in a land of opportunity
and adventure.” On the high-rises themselves, targeting the groundlings
below, a “‘Japanese simulacrum’…which alternates a seductive
Japanese face and Coca Cola sign” advertises (in Japanese) various ways
to cope with life on Earth (Bruno 186). That is, the “beautiful, richly
dressed, exquisitely made-up female Oriental [is] connected in the film (directly
or indirectly) with emigration, Coca Cola and pill popping, various forms of
consumption, pacification and flight” (Wood 223). We, however, should not
conflate the advertising here: the blimps high above promote emigration and literal
flight to the wealthy; the electronic billboards below promote consumption and
pacification (figurative flight) to the poor who roam the streets, with the clear
suggestion that some people can leave, but others must stay. Furthermore, the “go
West” rhetoric, and the ostensible promise of peace and opportunity in
the off-world colonies, is noteworthy. After all, a “paramilitary force” maintains
order in Los Angeles, perhaps suggesting past race or labor riots (Lev 37). Contending
with violence, pollution, and few economic opportunities, we might wonder why
anyone of sufficient means, like Deckard, would remain.
As the borders separating Deckard from the human and replicant working
classes break down throughout the narrative, it becomes clearer that, like
them,
he has no means and no choice. His fierce drive to make his time on Earth
as comfortable
as possible is motivated by a fear of falling that is strong enough to
enroll him in the fight against the “little people” in order to avoid joining
them as an unemployed policeman. However, despite the fact that bonds between
replicants and humans are never meant to form, the work of the aptly-named Blade
Runners, which aims to sever all connections between humans and their disobedient
creations, becomes impossible. And although their function as “detective[s]
is precisely to dissolve the impasse of this universalized, free-floating guilt
by localizing it in a single subject, thus exculpating all others,” they
fail (Zizek 59). No real villain is identified, not even the replicants’ creator,
Tyrell (Joe Turkel), a genetic engineer and cybernetics tycoon whom the film
represents as yet another alienated soul, sitting sleeplessly on his bed in his
palatial room, playing a solitary game of chess while trading stocks on his computer – his
pacifier of choice.
The guilt for the impoverished state of society circulates, therefore,
in ways that even implicate our hero, who, before quitting, expertly served
the repressive
state apparatus, and returns to serve it out of fear. Furthermore, as numerous
other articles discuss (see Kuhn, e.g.), Deckard comes to love Rachael,
a
replicant; moreover, he and his nemesis, the replicant Roy, become uncanny
doubles. As
Deckard hangs from the beam of a skyscraper with his broken hand losing
grip, the mise-en-scene stages his fear of falling literally. In order not to fall, however, Deckard
must renounce his hostility toward his other, and instead place faith in
him. In a Christ-like act of charity and “human” compassion, Roy saves
Deckard’s life in the final moments of his own, by lifting him to safety.
In this climactic rooftop scene, which echoes the opening skyline shot and frames
the narrative, Deckard and Roy stare at each other in a different type of eye
exam after realizing that, in effect, both of them are slaves. Rather than seeking
out difference in order to eradicate it, however, the gaze here, exchanged between
man and machine, middle class bureaucrat-enforcer and working class laborer,
results in identification. The film even contains repeated hints that Deckard
is, himself, a replicant – why, for instance, has he remained on Earth?
How does the Mexican, Gaff, predict his movements and know his fantasies in advance?
If the replicants’ childhood pictures are fabrications, intended to provide
emotional stability, why not Deckard’s, too? Because of these points of
identification, the tacit boundaries between the classes that comprise American
society are allegorically scrutinized in Blade Runner, which depicts them being
policed in a violent, grotesque form.
Despite the fact that Deckard never “joins the replicant revolution,” a
scenario in which the film’s class critique should culminate, according
to Robin Wood, Blade Runner does more than exaggerate anxieties about undocumented
or foreign workers taking American livelihoods (227). And despite its irresolvable
plot and, in the end, somewhat ambivalent critique of American capitalism, this
allegorical narrative nonetheless questions – perhaps without breaching – the
borders between society’s dominant and subservient groups, and will continue
to occupy a unique place in American popular culture as a recession-era vision
of the future.
Note
1. Alcohol plays an important but critically disregarded role in Blade
Runner. Liquor pacifies Deckard in four key scenes: in their first
meeting, quoted
above, Bryant offers Deckard whiskey, which he quickly shoots back,
when he anticipates
Deckard’s resistance to the job offer. When Deckard visits the strip club
where Zhora works, he threatens its owner with a fine. Clearly to pacify Deckard
and fend off his threats, the owner supplies him with liquor. This exchange appears
routine for both men. Moments later, after Deckard has violently “retired” Zhora
by shooting her in the back, Bryant notices that Deckard is traumatized and implores
him to “drink some for me.” And finally, Deckard’s
domestic life is depicted as a liquor-induced haze during which he
numbs his fatigued
body, gazes down on the poor groundlings, and nostalgically plays the
piano. If Deckard is a replicant, liquor may well be a control mechanism
written into
his program.
Click here to return to your place in the article.
Works Cited
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Bruno, Giuliana. “Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner.” Alien
Zone. Ed.
Annette Kuhn. London: Verso, 1995. 183-195.
Byers, Thomas B. “Commodity Futures.” Alien Zone.
Ed. Annette Kuhn. London: Verso, 1995. 39-50.
Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary
Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
Ehrenreich, Barbara. Fear of Falling. New York: Perennial,
1990.
Fancher, Hampton. Blade Runner. First published draft. Burbank:
Script City, 1981.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. New York: Penguin,
1997.
Green, David. “Classified Subjects.” Ten 8.14
(1984): 30-37.
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From
Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1989.
Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The
Anti-Aesthetic. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983.
111-125.
Lev, Peter. “Whose Future: Star Wars, Alien and Blade
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Quarterly 26.1 (1998): 30-44.
McNamara, Kevin R. “Blade Runner’s Post-Individual
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Russell, David. “‘I'm Not Gonna Hurt You’: Legal
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Tasker, Yvonne. “Approaches to the New Hollywood.” Cultural
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mental health and mortality.
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Wood, Robin. “Papering the Cracks: Fantasy and Ideology in
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UP, 1996. 203-228.
Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through
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