"Há algo de mim em você": Personagem e espaço em blade runner e her

Abstract

All cultural production belongs to a production context. There are always historical elements in any given text. That is specially true when considering science fiction, a genre that has in its backbone the capacity of problematizing the meaning of “human”. Therefore, this work’s primary is objective to analyze, using narratological lenses, two films: Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, the director's cut 1992 version) and Her (Spike Jonze, 2013). In order to achieve that goal, we considered them as part of the science fiction production. Consequently, we started to work through a historical and contextual view of the genre. Afterward we moved on to the theoretical material, precisely two narratological categories: character and space. As a basis, we used the character studies of Antonio Candido et al (1968), then the adaptation studies by Linda Hutcheon (2006) and Robert Stam (1992, 2000, 2005, 2006, 2008). Our purpose was to analyze Blade Runner as related to the previous novel, Do androids dream of electric sheep?, written by Philip K. Dick in 1968, and the namesake comics published by BOOM Studios. We also used focalization theory defined by Gerrard Genete (s.d.), to analyze how the films’ structures could be used to further the character construction. On the space category we applied the perspective of experience concept by Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), analyzing the ways it adds narrative value to some narrative spaces. We have also discussed the concept of chronotope, by Mikhail Bakhtin (1973), applying it to the urban spaces represented in the movies, resulting in what we named “the city chronotope”. We have also used the miseen-scène category, as suggested by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell (1997, 2013), to analyze the conection between characters and their place in the fictional world. Ultimately we have analyzed spaces that remain unseen but nevertheless have important roles on the narrative conflicts (such as the deep space mentioned in Blade Runner, and the cyberspace of Her).