Retro-fitted Los Angeles
It seems appropriate that there should be a new edition of my book on Blade Runner, given the many iterations of the film that are circulating out there. My combo pack includes the work-print used for test screenings, both the American and international versions of the 1982 version, the 1992 ‘Director’s Cut,’ that really wasn’t, and the new ‘Final Cut’ from 2007 (about which more later). It’s a film worth revisiting, and one that has played no small part in the development of my thinking.
There’s a story that I tell so often that perhaps I should finally put it to paper (or e-ink, or pixels, or whatever). While I was writing my dissertation, which became the book Terminal Identity, I produced an analysis of Blade Runner. It was beautiful: an elegant Althusserian deconstruction that I think involved the commodified image, the reification of the visual, and who knows what else. It was, trust me on this, really good, although it’s lost now (‘like tears in rain’?). But upon rereading it I realized that any reasonable person would believe that I hated the film – which I most certainly did not. Somehow the terms and tenor of my analysis, which centered on the film’s impact on that unnamed – and probably unborn – abstraction of the ‘subject’ slash ‘spectator,’ simply didn’t speak in any meaningful way to my own engagement with the film. Frankly, given my analysis, if you liked Blade Runner then you must have been some kind of ideological chump. I trashed it and began again.
This marked the first move toward a more phenomenological approach to textual and media analysis, as I tried ever harder to bring my own experience to the table. Suddenly it was okay to respect the film’s dense visuality, its seductive movement, its immersive world-building. Narrative – what the film said – was at least partly displaced by its spectacularity – what it showed. That engagement with Blade Runner marked a turning point in my intellectual life, and it remains a film that gives me a great deal of unalloyed pleasure.
Revisiting Blade Runner in order to think about this preface, I was relieved to say that it holds up well, some 30 years after its initial release. Its astonishing visual complexity translates well to the world of blu-ray and plasma screens, technologies unimagined by the film itself. The ‘retro-fitted’ world of Los Angeles, in which the old and new are cobbled together in restless juxtapositions has kept the film from dating too badly – this still looks like a future that could happen (though perhaps not in the next seven years, which is all that separates us from the film’s 2019 dateline). The style of the film is retrofitted too, and the noir trappings now lend the film a timeless classicism that is wearing quite well. Heck, even the fashions still look plausible.
What’s also striking about Blade Runner is that it hails from that annus mirabilis for science fiction films, 1982, which also gave the world Videodrome, John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing, and Tron. Tron pointed the way toward the future of filmic effects, with its digitally generated vehicles and landscapes, but Blade Runner is a film on the cusp. Its ravishing visuals still involve the compositing of physical elements: miniature sets, matte paintings, models of vehicles. Blade Runner’s world, then, is still ontologically our world, in a way that the digital environments of Avatar (2009) and even Zodiac (2007), are not. I offer this not as nostalgia (well, maybe a little), but as a simple fact. Digital effects are no longer, to a great extent, special effects, seamlessly integrated as they are into the physical spaces occupied by actors or whatever portion of the setting is available in the pro-filmic world. The integration of actors and the effects shots of the pre-digital era posed special challenges, and so many of those special effects are depopulated. As the camera tracks over Los Angeles, circa 2019, the viewer is free to contemplate the space as well as the majestic special effects that are simply and straightforwardly on display. Or again, in that most gorgeous of sequences, as Gaff brings Deckard to police headquarters. The narrative pauses here, as the screen is filled with the intriguing geometries and panoramic movements of both the future Los Angeles and the film that is present, here and now, to the viewer.
The final version cleans up some of the messier moments: wires are no longer visible hoisting hovercars in the air, and the special effects mesh together more cleanly. It also ups the violence, bringing in the more gruesome moments from the 1982 international cut. Most disturbingly, though, it removes the ambiguity of Deckard’s status as either human or replicant. Yes, I’m referring to the new treatment of the unicorn scene, discussed in some detail near the end of this book.
The 1992 version gave us Rick Deckard, drowsily picking out some notes on the piano. There is a mysterious cut to a galloping unicorn moving in slow motion through a forest (what my wife calls the ‘My Little Pony’ scene), then back to Deckard, seen from behind. The new (I hesitate to call it the ‘final’) version gives us an extreme close-up of Deckard, his eyes wide open, then a more beautiful and more extended visit to the land of unicorns, then back to Deckard’s face. What might have been a dream (or an editing mistake) in the earlier version is now unmistakably some sort of vision, and when Gaff leaves the tell-tale origami unicorn at Deckard’s apartment at film’s end, it is hard to avoid coming to the conclusion that the unicorn was an implanted memory, and that, therefore, Rick Deckard is first, last, and always, a replicant.
If you’ve already read this book, you’ll understand why this change bothers me so. I think it’s urgently important that Deckard’s status remains an open question, rather than settled doctrine. Rick Deckard’s name may or may not be a play on ‘René Descartes,’ but in any case, the state of radical doubt is central to the film. It’s not just a state of mind experienced by Deckard, as his certainties crumble around him, but by the attentive viewer, who might realize that this visually dazzling film is predicated upon the unreliability of vision.
The film-maker and theorist Jean Epstein once wrote that cinema could train our minds to ‘move from established absolutes to unstable conditionals,’ and Blade Runner fulfills that modernist mandate wonderfully. One could also say that science fiction, at least some strains of it, works along the same lines, and surely the science fiction of Philip K. Dick (whose book was adapted to become Blade Runner) is again exemplary. The ontological crises suffered by Dick’s protagonists became ever more profound as his career moved forward – in the early works, there is a ‘real’ reality lurking behind the false front of another, but the later writings produce more of a mise-en-abyme as the shadow realities multiply. To map this onto Blade Runner is again to note the irrelevance of Deckard’s actual status – how much more radical, more modernist, it is to move away from the ground of the real and the given, towards an acceptance of uncertainty.
Revisiting Blade Runner raises the further question of what it is to re-view a film. Despite how much I love to read, I find that I rarely re-read a novel. But a film worth watching seems, to me, to be worth watching over and over. Clearly it isn’t the teleological drive of the narrative that sustains my interest: Roy will still die (unless there’s yet another version out there). Clearly it’s the extra-narrative elements that encourage the re-engagement: the way it moves, the beauty of the visuals, the satisfactions of the score, the nuances of performance, the immersion in its world. The pleasure of re-viewing suggests that the act of watching films may be more akin to listening to music than reading a book. Here, perhaps, the technologies of home video have played their part, producing the ability to, say, jump to a favourite musical number, or replay a subtle bit of business between Cary Grant and Jean Arthur – to ‘play’ a film as one played a record (or CD, or MP3, or whatever). Once, such control was the province of the film-makers alone, with their Moviolas and Steenbecks, but this power has been thoroughly democratized. In many cases the result is that the film comes to have less power over us – they begin when we want, rather than when scheduled, and we watch in conditions that lend themselves more to multi-tasking than rapt cathection onto the large screen – but it can also lead to a greater intimacy with a film, the ability to live with it, to make it a part of one’s environment. And it also allows for the pleasures of instant repetition. If the Surrealists claimed to value only about five minutes of even the best films, now they could concentrate their full attentions on those five minutes. In most cases, the result might be disappointment and disenchantment, but not in every case.
There are many moments in Blade Runner that are worth revisiting as often as possible – any of the panoramic shots of the city, the sequence in which Deckard ‘investigates’ a single image, the scene at the eyebank. Some of the moments are brief, ephemeral: the photograph that briefly flickers to cinematic life, the blood that languidly seeps from Deckard’s mouth to tint his drink. And, of course, there is the now iconic speech – the last words in the film – which Roy delivers to the human whose life he has just, unexpectedly, saved: ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.’ He pauses. ‘Time to die.’ It’s this scene that Paul Pope has chosen to illustrate in his wonderful cover for this edition.
Confronting Tyrell, his maker, in the final version of 2007, Roy says, threateningly, ‘I want more life, father,’ a cleaned up version of the original line, filmed long ago for inclusion for broadcast television screenings. Perhaps the change also imparts to Roy some Christ-like undertones. But I miss Rutger Hauer’s vehemence, and the raging entitlement of the original line. In fact, I used it as the epigraph to the book you’re about to read, and I’m not changing it. Some things are better left alone.
Retro-fitted Los Angeles