In the film "Blade Runner (BR)" and the novel "Alice in Wonder Land" by Lewis Carroll, images play a controversial role in interpreting reality. Through strange looking creatures, talking animals, advertisements, art work, or even machines (such as the replicants), it is evident that humans tend to associate the realities of the world with what he or she can see with their eyes. In "Blade Runner", the central conflict is to be able to determine a replicant from a human being. The replicant becomes such a threat to society due to the fact that to the average person, a replicant appears to be equal to humans in physical stature and image. In "Alice in Wonderland", Alice travels through a world that is so diverse and unsystematic in physical image and vision that it poses a self-conflicting issue for Alice, because she knows that in order to get out of wonderland, she cannot discriminate any beings because of their appearance because everyone looks different. Both Alice and Blade Runner face the issue of having to look beyond the image to find a means to their ends. .
"Blade Runner" is a film in which the future is mainly represented by physical change in society using L.A. as the "Futuristic American city". L.A. present day is a wide, sprawling, suburban city lacking density. Yet in BR, L.A. is a vertical, dense, and unnatural environment. It is full of television billboard advertisements of Coca Cola and other American products. The future is only different to the audiences" eye because there is a physical change, because everything looks different. Quite contrary to this, the greatest advancement in future America in the film, the Replicants, stands out the least physically. A replicant looks no different than any ordinary human. There are two questions that rise out of this fact. One being why it is human desire to create a machine that not only mocks our own capabilities, but also mocks our own physical appearance? And two, are human beings really any different than replicants if replicants have the same physical traits? The latter question also applies to Alice in Wonderland but from the opposite angle.