Blade Runner from Boy and Bicycle: Reassessing Ridley Scott’s Authorial Signature

When reading the existing scholarship on Ridley Scott as an auteur one could be forgiven for thinking that his Blade Runner (1982) bears no relation to the filmmaker’s earliest works. Brian J. Robb, for example, describes Scott’s first film Boy and Bicycle (1965) as ‘an arty, documentary social realist indulgence with a few small signs of what audiences could later expect from a Ridley Scott film’. Richard Schwartz feels Scott’s early films occupy a neoclassic sensibility as honourable and virtuous working-class protagonists must ‘temper passions with reason without eviscerating our emotions’ to battle corporate interests. By contrast, this chapter argues that Blade Runner crystalized Scott’s developing authorial signature. Like his first films, this work of science fiction provides a dialectical tension between social realism and modernism’s insistence on the dehumanization fostered by both technology and the standardization of time. By demonstrating how Scott moves between the thematic concerns of modernism and social realism, this chapter will bridge the gap between postmodern analyses of Blade Runner and auteur studies of Scott that continue to remain disassociated from one another.