REFLECTING WINDOWS The Blade Runner Films in the English Classroom
A favourite English teacher of mine used to say that a text can perform two functions: it can be a ‘window’ looking out at other people and places, working to strengthen students’ empathetic muscles as they walk a mile in unfamiliar shoes; and it can also be a ‘mirror’ for self-examination that employs familiar characters and stories, reflecting students back at themselves. We might say that the best texts for teaching perform both these functions. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the title character tells Horatio that the purpose of a play is to ‘hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature’, but the play itself also provides a window – into Elizabethan theatrical practices and early modern beliefs about theology, ghosts and the afterlife – that effectively takes readers back in time.
A great school resource can encourage students to look both within and without. Another classic classroom text, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, works by exacerbating concerns about the rise of totalitarian ideology and the threat it poses to individual liberty, projecting these concerns onto an imagined ‘worst-case scenario’ forty years into the author’s future. There, the life of everyman protagonist Winston Smith – featuring outward capitulation and furtive pleasure – strikes an empathetic note, forcing us to admit that we too would most likely be leading a meek existence in the dark corners of the novel’s bleak world. Of course, not all works of speculative fiction achieve this window/mirror function, and some don’t even try to. I’m reminded of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a film that sci-fi writer Brian Aldiss claimed appealed to viewers by baffling them. It was, he said, ‘the first work of science fiction that actually … depicts the future as unknowable’.
Director Denis Villeneuve does something similar to Kubrick in (2017). He doesn’t do it on the same operatic scale, but there are moments in his film that contrive to alienate the
