Figured I needed to get this Blade Runner post in while there's still a week left in the month.
November, 2019. As depicted above, that was temporal setting for one of my favorite films of all time, Blade Runner, based on the novella "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick. Thus, the movie is now about the present.
Maybe it always was.
So strange to think it is now November 2019, particularly when I remember my first viewing of Blade Runner sometime circa 1984. My young eyes and mind could not appreciate the depth and grandeur at the time. I thought it slow, boring, and most obtuse, but visually captivating. Oddly, my love for the movie grew in a snowball effect only after it was viewed in connection to multiple other texts (Derrida, I hope you're reading, because you were right...of course I would never argue otherwise).
A couple years after seeing the movie for the first time, I became a devotee of the short-lived ABC TV series, Max Headroom.
The show took place in a dystopian future where TV networks ruled the world. The character of "Max", while omnipresent in the series was also somewhat peripheral, allowing interesting plotlines to arise from supporting characters. I loved the show (still do) and began to recognize that I had seen a few of its aspects before. Like Blade Runner, the sun never seemed to shine in Max and everyone and everything operated under this oppressive atmosphere of weight. In my first months of undergrad, I would learn that this atmosphere and its accompanying generic motifs had a name.
Cyberpunk.
At my friend Chris' blog, Dorkland!, he does a fine job of explaining what that genre means, so I'll leave you to read it at the link. It was through Chris and the role-playing game, Cyberpunk 2020 (odd yet again that next year will be the projected setting for that game) that I would be introduced to the wide range of books and films that fall under this umbrella category. Chris, in what he will no doubt eternally lord over me, introduced me to my most favorite writer, William Gibson. "If you want cyberpunk, you need to read its foremost author," Chris said, or something to that effect. I read Neuromancer and then Count Zero and the rest, as they say, is history.
Throughout my early 20-something deep dive into cyberpunk, I kept seeing the obvious connections to Blade Runner. In fact, William Gibson is said to have left a showing of the movie in deep distress. So much of what he portrayed in his book Neuromancer he saw depicted on the screen. He thought Hollywood had beaten him to the punch. But Gibson went on to do just fine, publishing numerous short stories in Omni and long line of books. It was Blade Runner, though, that took its time cultivating an audience. It was something a box office flop, but people like me gathered as a cult following and the film eventually came to be regarded as a classic.
Here in the actual November 2019, many are publishing articles of what the film got wrong and got right. Those "gotcha" pieces seem to satisfy a pesky need for people to crow, "Ha ha! Science fiction doesn't get it all right!" Of course it doesn't. Gibson said as much when I heard him speak in 2010.
"I'm surprised how often we [science fiction writers] get it wrong. There were no cellphones in Neuromancer," he said.
There weren't any in Blade Runner either. Neither Philip K. Dick, nor Ridley Scott, nor most anyone else involved foresaw the omnipresent connection of technology in the way we would have now. We also don't have Replicants, artificial constructs that mimic humans in most every way and only an empathy test can help tell the difference. This of course is probably the biggest disparity between real life and the 2019 of Blade Runner, but give it time as we're getting close. Still waiting on the flying car, but we're getting there as well.
So what did it "get right"? Well, voice-responsive technology is one check mark in the "got it" column. Image scanning and manipulation is another, even if it's not quite to the degree shown in Deckard's apartment. I'm going to guess going by the incessant rainfall in the film that there was a serious climate shift. The warmer air holds more moisture and the rain just keeps coming. It's also probably an acid rain, given the sheer amount of pollutants belched into the air by stacks in the film. We've taken steps to curb acid rain, but there is no doubt that our climate is changing in real life.
Corporations also dominate the world of Blade Runner. The Tyrell Corporation, manufacturer of Replicants and no doubt many other "must-have" products, operates above and outside the law, wielding influence over much and greeted with shrugs of "that's the free market." It's a paradise for Libertarians and a dystopia for everyone else. The gulf between the haves and the have nots is both wide and deep. Need I really draw any overt parallels between the two 2019s? When almighty business sits so high upon its lofty perch?
There is one other aspect of the movie that I believe stands out far and above all the others when compared to our 2019: people want to live authentic lives.
That sounds like a no-brainer, but I urge you to really think about it as you watch the film. The environment of Blade Runner is downright oppressive in economic, environmental, spiritual, atmospheric, and in many other senses. Yet people persist. They eke out livings using what is available to them, usually technology. J.F. Sebastian builds his own "family" using his skills in robotics and biotech. Scan the street scenes and pause from time to time, inferring the different ways people of the city find to survive.
In yet another connection to Gibson, this practice is evocative of one his better known quotes: "The street finds its own use for things." This is seen our time as protesters in Chile use inexpensive laser pointers to confuse police drones and cameras.
Photo from The Atlantic.
What is amazing to me is that the people of Blade Runner still want to survive despite all reasons not to. I see little quality of life for the common person, I see little chance of them surmounting the draconian mechanisms which confine them to their stations, I see no room for avocations apart from vices, and yet...and yet...through either fear or courage, they persist. Perhaps as Camus suggests, they imagine Sisyphus as happy.
All of this, one may argue, is neatly encapsulated in the film's final scene. Why does Roy spare Deckard? The viewer is left only to speculate. That speculation is percolated (or spoon-fed, depending on your ethos) by Harrison Ford's noirish voiceover. Maybe in his final moments, Roy wanted life so much that he could not bear to take it from Deckard or anything else. Why am I here? How long do I have? Or as Roy perhaps less eloquently puts it to Tyrell in an earlier scene, "I want more life, fucker."
Speculation. Not all the blanks get filled. That is often the mark of great art. More to the pity of Blade Runner 2049, where I begged for them not to answer the questions. Unfortunately, that was but the least of the sequel's problems.
We live in uncertain times. File that under Understatement for $100, Alex. Often I and others of a similar mind find ourselves asking just how do we continue during such an era of political and economic oppression? I don't just mean that in regard to myself, but more specifically to many others, such as the protesters in Chile...and if you don't understand why we should care about others then we really have nothing left to say to each other. Additionally, I question my own future vis-a-vis what I value and what I do. What place is there for someone of the mind in a "go into the trades" world? How do I have? How can I keep going?
Today, as in the Blade Runner version of 2019, there may be no way to win. But people keep going.
"It's too bad she won't live. But then again, who does?"
I leave you with an instrumental piece by Nine Inch Nails which to me sounds most Blade Runner-esque.
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