by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I
watched a movie last night, and it was a doozy: Blade Runner, the 1982 adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (a title my late roommate and home-care client John P. thought they
should have kept) and, even though it was a box-office disappointment (the
film’s estimated budget was $28 million and in its initial release it grossed
only $27 million, which under the usual rule of thumb that because of
advertising and distribution expenses a movie has to make at least twice its
production cost to break even, would mean it was a pretty big money-loser for
Warner Bros.), the film that established Dick’s world of surrealism and
paranoia as suitable for filming. The film’s opening is quite close to the
central premise of Karel Cápek’s play R.U.R. (for “Rossum’s Universal Robots” — the play not
only was the first major work about a race of mechanical humanoids but even
gave them the name “robots,” from the Czech robotnik, meaning “worker”): a group of humanoid creations,
called “robots” in Dick’s novel but here given the catchier, snazzier and
separately copyrightable name “replicants,” rebelled on an off-world colony of
normal humans and slaughtered them all. Since then replicants have still been
allowed on Earth’s off-world colonies but have been banned on Earth itself, and
a squad of special police officers called “Blade Runners” are authorized to
hunt them down and shoot them on sight — which, the opening title crawl
explains, isn’t called “execution” but “retirement.”
The replicants are made by
the Tyrrell Corporation (I assume the name is a deliberate reference to Sir
James Tyrrell, Richard III’s hired assassin in Shakespeare’s play) and the
company’s founder, Dr. Eldon Tyrrell (Joe Turkel), is shown in the opening
scene giving a test to a job applicant, Leon Kowalski (Brion James), to test
for emotions like compassion and empathy, the absence of which would give him
away as a replicant trying to infiltrate the company. (Blade Runner was made in the early years of Ronald Reagan’s
presidency, and this premise that replicants differ from humans in showing no
compassion “plays” quite differently in an era in which the current President
is a man who not only utterly lacks compassion and empathy, but sees their
absence as a sign of his personal strength and superiority to the rest of
humanity.) When the test exposes Kowalski as a replicant, he draws a gun and
starts shooting, and though he’s easily subdued and blows himself up (at least
I think that’s what happened), the
scene establishes the film’s central conflict even before we meet the central
character. He is ace “blade runner” Rick Deckard and is played by Harrison
Ford, who until this had been known to movie audiences almost exclusively for
uncomplicatedly heroic roles like Han Solo in Star Wars and Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Obviously he wanted to “stretch” his chops as an actor and show he could play a
more complicated character, though he’s so taciturn through the whole movie I
was expecting a plot twist at the end in which he’d turn out to be a replicant
himself.
The plot consists of Deckart’s search through the mean streets of a
post-apocalyptic L.A. swarming with people (mostly Asians — Blade Runner was made during a period of intense American paranoia
that the Japanese were going to buy all our major corporations and take over
our economy by stealth, and that’s reflected in the movie in the innumerable
ads shown for Japanese companies like TDK, Atari and Kawasaki) and bathed in
fog. He’s looking for six replicants who shot up an outer-space colony and fled
to Earth, and one of them, Rachael (Sean Young, who turns in a highly competent
performance that should have marked her for stardom — alas, she ran afoul of
Harvey Weinstein and became one of the actresses whose careers he ruined
because she wouldn’t have sex with him), becomes his more-or-less love
interest. Blade Runner is
clearly a great film but it’s also an oddly cold one — ironic given the story’s
postulate that emotion is what sets humans apart from replicants — though the
visual look is stunning and quite 2001-ish (probably due to Douglas Trumbull’s work as an effects artist on
both), and the film also resembles 2001 in its reliance on imagery and use of very little dialogue. It was
adapted from Dick’s novel by Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples, who
trusted the story to tell itself and trusted us to get the point without a lot of explanation; and
directed by Ridley Scott, who like his star was coming off an enormous
blockbuster hit (the original 1979 Alien) that had earned him the brownie points he needed to get a personal
project like this green-lighted. Just as the science-fiction novel I’m
currently reading, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (a story Ridley Scott optioned for film but never
actually got to make), strikes me as the sort of science-fiction novel Ernest
Hemingway would have written if he’d ever done one, so Blade Runner strikes me as the sort of science-fiction movie
Josef von Sternberg would have made if he’d ever done one: the sheer density of the images,
the fumata effects, the overall air
of sleazy corruption (one key scene in a bar is straight out of The Shanghai
Gesture) and the enigmatic female
at the center of the action who may or may not be a replicant (Sean Young doesn’t
outright copy Marlene Dietrich but the air of world-weary inscrutability is
definitely there) are quite Sternbergian.
So is the excellence of the ensemble
cast, which includes a brief but indelible star turn for the young Daryl
Hannah; Rutger Hauer shines as Roy Batty, the out-and-proud replicant who
infiltrates Tyrrell’s compound and murders both him and his chief genetic
engineer, J. F. Sebastian (William Sanderson), after they inform him there’s no
way they can reverse the “terminator” gene that cuts short a replicant’s life
after just four years (if they let them live longer than that, the theory goes,
they could develop memories from which they could derive emotions, and then
they’d be indistinguishable from humans on the standard tests). The confrontation
scene between the three is by far the best in the film: it seems to me to come
closer to the spirit of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein than any of the films of Frankenstein itself. Blade Runner and 2001 also have one intriguing point in common: narration, or the lack of
same. Through much of the planning for 2001 Stanley Kubrick had planned to have a third-person
narrator running through the film explaining the plot as it went, and even
hired an actor to read it (Douglas Rain, who ended up in the film as the voice
of HAL), but he ended up deciding against it almost at the last minute. In Blade
Runner Warner Bros. insisted at
the last minute on adding a first-person narration by Harrison Ford’s character, much to Ridley
Scott’s opposition, so the first theatrical release of Blade Runner in 1982 went out with a narration that made it
seem like even more of a science-fiction film noir than it does without one. (Blade Runner is often referred to as the first science-fiction film
noir, which it isn’t; I’d give
that honor to Donald Siegel’s original 1956 version of Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, a much better movie than the remakes.) The version we
were watching was a DVD of the 1991 “director’s cut,” whose main difference
from the 1982 version was that Scott got to eliminate the narration and thereby
make the story foggier and more elliptical — much to its benefit, I suspect,
just as Kubrick’s last-minute elimination of the narration from 2001 gave the film much of its hallucinatory power.
(Most of the proposed narration for 2001 ended up in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel of the story.) There’s been a
further tweak of the material in a 2007 edition called the “final cut” — this
incessant tweaking with something that was presumably a finished product
recalls George Lucas being asked by a New Yorker interviewer when he was going to stop tinkering
with the Star Wars movies, to which he
answered, “When I die” — though my understanding is there weren’t any big
changes between 1991 and 2007.
Blade Runner is also interesting in light of the controversy in
the science-fiction world today over why sci-fi writers of the 1950’s and
1960’s offered hopeful versions of the future, with energy abundance,
interplanetary travel, moving sidewalks and flying cars, and now all they seem
to generate is dystopian futures and
post-nuclear or post-plague apocalypses. The odd thing about Blade Runner is that though it’s clearly dystopian, it still
has flying cars and an overall high-tech sheen — in 1982 even the dystopian
visions of the future were cooler than the one we actually got! In fact, one
could make the case that instead of proceeding outward as most science-fiction writers of the past
predicted — towards space, towards gargantuan cities and the development of
snazzier and more convenient infrastructure — the technological development
that’s actually occurred has been turned inward, with the rise of the Internet and its progeny
(notably social media and the smartphone), that have allowed people more and
more to cut themselves off from the rest of the world, form smaller and smaller
(and more exclusive) communities, and thereby lose any sense of a common
purpose for humanity — which explains quite a lot of the political evolution of the last 40 years or so and in
particular the rise of Libertarianism, with its exaltation of the rich and
powerful as morally superior because they are rich and powerful (actually the philosophy is that their moral
and intellectual superiority are proven by their wealth and power) and its
insistence that, as Margaret Thatcher put it, “There is no such thing as
‘society.’ There are only individuals.” Movies as a form have always tended to
glorify the heroic individual facing the corrupt, oppressive social order, and
what makes Blade Runner a great
but also rather off-putting (at least to me) film is that its makers are at
once presenting Harrison Ford’s character as an heroic individual facing down a
corrupt order and undermining our ability to
see him as such. The material could readily have accommodated a Fahrenheit
451-style twist ending in
which Deckert realizes that massacring replicants is wrong and switches to the
other side, but Ridley Scott and his writers wisely didn’t go there.
