Fiery The Angels Fell' - America, Regeneration, and Blade Runner

Ridley Scott's Blade Runner indicates that the only possible path for evolution of humanity to take is a regenerative one, specifically, by renewing earlier human precedents in an Edenic America. When the film was released in 1982, the United States was experiencing the economic policies of Reaganomics. By the time of the film's March release that year, Reagan had begun implementing cuts in education, welfare, and housing, he had increased defense spending, and had survived an assassination attempt. In the same year, Sylvester Stallone began his meteoric rise as Vietnam veteran John Rambo in First Blood. Like Nixon before him, taken George C. Scott's portrayal of General Patton to the extent that he decided to invade Cambodia, Ronald Reagan was so impressed by the revision personified in the warrior-hero figure of action and war cinema that proclaimed he would send Rambo abroad in any future international emergencies. With this statement, and others like it, Reagan gave voice to a Vietnam myth that primarily had its foundation in the much older, and equally unfounded, archetype of the American warrior, effectively creating a cultural climate in which 1980s America was characterized not progress but by a valorization of regression.