Critical Essay | Critical Essay by William Fisher

Critical Essay by William Fisher

SOURCE: Fisher, William. “Of Living Machines and Living-Machines: Blade Runner and the Terminal Genre.” New Literary History 20, no. 1 (autumn 1988): 187-98.

In the following essay, Fisher identifies an emergent genre of “multinational, commercial avant-garde” films which he labels the Terminal Genre. Fisher comments that Blade Runner represents the highest achievement of this developing genre.

The possibility of finding likeness in diversity has always been a safety valve on the critical apparatus—“when in doubt, subsume it under a rubric.” Now, on the other side of long debates on the subject in film studies, we understand “genre” to be a place where social experience (in the form of narrative conventions, audience expectations, and industrial practices) combines with the critic's act of “subsuming it under a rubric” in a mutually constitutive way. But the real use value of the idea of genre rests with its divisibility: as the cultural sphere continues...
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