Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott, 1982)
November 2019. Blade Runner has ceased to be a story of the future and is now an alternative history. It has happened many times before, particularly with Philip K. Dick, who never seemed to date his fiction more than a couple of decades from their publication. Still, this feels momentous, like when Orwell’s nightmare vision became the prosaic, still bleak reality of 1984 or when we were still piddling around in low Earth orbit instead of visiting Jupiter and beyond in 2001. As for 2010? No need to worry about attempting any landings on Europa any time soon.
Being that this is a benchmark year for Blade Runner, it seems like everyone is revisiting the film and measuring its fiction against the real world. Bioengineering isn’t anywhere near creating artificial humans like the replicants of the Tyrell Corporation. We do not have the blimps to advertise a better life in the off-world colonies, let alone anywhere else for us to escape to. Climate change is keeping apace, although the Los Angeles of the film at least has a milder, wetter climate instead of being on fire six months out of the year. Speaking of the city, the real infrastructure hasn’t met the vision of either production designer Lawrence G. Paull or futurist Syd Mead: no ziggurats dominating the horizon, no flying cars choking the air with even more noxious smog, and—try as the downtown developers do—no vibrant, polyglot street life, though I assume you can buy noodles fairly easily.
And, it must be said, we haven’t exactly gotten onboard with the fashion of the film to my eternal disappointment. We are locked in a pattern of nostalgia when it comes to style and pop culture, much like it is in the film, but we have the much grimmer version where we do not get to dress like it’s the thirties and lounge around Art Deco buildings, but do get to see the Disney corporation skip the step of pilfering from the public domain for new content and instead have the opportunity to see remakes of animated films devoid of artistry or emotional connection.
Fantastic, isn’t it?
The noir stylings of Blade Runner were mostly fashioned for the adaptation. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was more in line with the rest of Dick’s paranoid pulp project in which the sixties and seventies never end even as we colonize space and ingest whole new identity shattering drugs. Rick Deckard was still a cop hunting rogue androids, as they are called in the novel, but the story focused as much on the total effect of environmental degradation on the culture. What happens when most animals go extinct, and we’re the only things left? You create new religion—the empathy-based Mercerism—-and you invent a new category of chattel to exploit.
The film can be seen as engaging in pure stylization with its incorporation of such trappings of film noir as a lone detective, femmes fatales, suits and coats and period-specific hair, and–in the theatrical cut, at least–a voice-over narration from a very tired sounding Harrison Ford, but I think it’s worth examining less obvious aspects of the film’s look to its themes.
Neo-noir is fundamentally a self-aware genre, and incorporating it into a science fiction setting makes it that much more ostentatious. Why is Deckard characterized as a hardboiled detective out of Hammett and Chandler’s fiction? Is it merely a lift from older films and books or does Harrison Ford just look good in a trenchcoat?
I think we need to consider what a ‘blade runner’ actually is in the context of the film. They are cops whose only job is to kill ‘non-people’ as they think of them. The blade runner then is part of a very American lineage that began with fugitive slave patrols in the antebellum South and continues to this day with militarized police forces that disproportionately target people of color. The blade runners are nothing but a death squad, but the combination of Harrison Ford, the right look, and the right lighting can fool you—at least until we see what their work entails.
The writing and performance of Deckard as well fits within the neo-noir mode, particularly when comparing the initial version of the film first released to theaters and the later director cuts supervised by Ridley Scott. The first person narration from Deckard is in the mold of Raymond Chandler, and it is frequently criticized as leaden, reductive, and unnecessary. Having grown up watching this version of the film, I have some fondness for it, but all of those complaints aren’t exactly wrong. More than that, Deckard’s narration has a way of making his actions in the film appear more palatable to the audience. Framed as a remembrance of past events, they offer at least the sense that Deckard is a changed man. With the narration excised, Deckard becomes a blank to the audience. We can only judge him from his actions and what we can read into his expression. That is, he shoots two women and forces himself onto another while seemingly have no thought in his head.
This, I suspect, is a major reason why the later releases of the film tend to support the argument that Deckard is a replicant. I think it works better as an ambiguity and best as all with Deckard as a human with a diminished capacity for empathy for anyone unlike him—just like the replicants and a sizable percentage of the police in this country.
As his superior Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh) tells Deckard: “You know the score, pal. You’re not cop, you’re little people!” The arc of his character is to move beyond this line of thought just as Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) perhaps does in the moments before his end.
The retro aesthetic of Blade Runner makes sense as well when you accept that this technologically advanced future Los Angeles is mired in an ideology that was prevalent in the 1930s. The word ‘eugenics’ is never spoken in the film, but what else could you call a society that has genetic caste system that consigns the disabled like J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson) to a doomed planet but a eugenicist dystopia? The racial politics of the film as well begin to cohere. The replicants—all of whom are played by white actors—can be read as an ethnic other, though this is problematic given their borderline sociopathy and superhuman capabilities. As a way for an audience to engage with the idea of racial discrimination in a somewhat subtle manner, though, it’s not a bad strategy. The East Asian influence on the production design and the presence of such actors as supporting and background players has similar issues considering their little more than set dressing to signify that this is ‘the future,’ but their presence on a ruined Earth asks us, “Just who is making it to these off-world colonies anyway?”
The answer, of course, is not us.
oliveresque 