You cannot separate art from the time when it was created. It's why you see a lot of countercultural themes in 1960s movies, for example.
Some of my favorite pieces of art are deeply flawed. What's important is understanding what ideas they contain, so you don't just uncritically and subconsciously believe those ideas. The xenophobia in cyberpunk idea is jarring to me because I wasn't really aware of it, and if it is there, it means I have some unexamined biases that hid it from me.
In Blade Runner? I don't recall that... don't they kiss, and then it cuts to next scene. They still have their clothes on, standing by the door!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IjO8wsjPqbg
It’s… unpleasant, at best.
But you’re right it’s not exactly a “sex” scene, since any sex is implied
They proceed to kiss each other, and consensual sex is then implied.
It's zero.
Why aren't you getting your moral radar in a spin about the numerous violent and aggressive scenes in this or any movie? The real world has a huge problem with violence and guns after all.
I presume you eat popcorn as people or replicants are shot and killed on screen, or when poetic, philosophical replicants crush the skulls of their maker humans.... but draw the line at a coercive kiss? That's when you put the popcorn down?
Fiction movies are not real-life benchmarks or instruction manuals for life. Characters are flawed, scenes shocking, stories twisted. Deckard is not Dr Richard Kimble. Deckard is a "killing machine" in a dark sci-fi movie. His pre-kiss tantrum was him as Mr Nice Guy relative to his other actions.
British Leyland was a car company which broke up shortly after Alien came out. The implication in the W-Y name is pretty clear: A Japanese company bought out Leyland.
[0] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015
Edited for clarity and language.
This is a super interesting critique of basically everything cyberpunk, that I've only recently come across. I still don't totally buy the xenophobia angle, because to me it just came across as a projection of hyper-corporate/capitalist. Like it's an extrapolation out from where we were, but the problem isn't that it's foreigners, it's that it's hyper-capitalist. In blade runner the world has been globalized to the point where we don't recognize downtown LA, but that's not actually what's wrong with the world - big faceless corporations and environmental destruction are what's wrong with the world. While the environment itself is heavily influenced by asian imagery, Tyrell and Weyland-Yutani aren't very strongly coded asian. i.e. Tyrell is run by an Elon Musk type engineer-ceo, and Weyland is a decidedly white name to go along with the Yutani part.
I'm still digesting this idea tho, I definitely need to re-watch with this in mind. There is definitely some playing with xenophobia there, just... how much? and is it re-enforcing it, or is it challenging it?