I have been a Blade Runner fan since the summer of 2001, which was the first time I was able to see the Director's Cut all the way through. I had made an early attempt to watch the theatrical cut on VHS in 1988, at age eleven, and could not get through it because aspects of Rachel's Voight-Kampff test were so disturbing to me at the time that I literally had to turn it off.
It was the "Are you trying to find out if I am a Replicant or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?" question. At that point, had the Voight-Kampff test been given to me, I was certain I'd have registered as both. I had been struggling with my early feelings of pansexuality on top of the profound sense of alienation that I'd had for most of my life - the sense that people were responding to cues I just wasn't seeing, and operating by a set of procedures and social protocols which I had never received. The idea of being outed as an 'other' due to this and assigned a "not-person" status was just horrifying, and I couldn't finish the movie. I didn't try again for years.
The overall theme of Blade Runner, and now its sequel, is often stated as "what does it mean to be human?" but this is a dramatic oversimplification. The true theme seems to be "what happens when sentient beings are dehumanized and/or commodified? What happens when people lose their humanity enough to do this to other sentient beings, just because it might be profitable and/or politically expedient?"
This video breaks it down pretty well IMHO.Fast forward to 2001. As an adult, I had learned to be ok with my weirdness. I was now ok with everything that had once spooked me about the movie. My teen obsession with David Bowie had given me a role model and a reference point for bending gender, sexuality, and societal roles. I watched Blade Runner, and was completely blown away by it. I jumped on the local Google group for it (lol because this was 2001) and exchanged ideas with other fans.
I launched a fan site that was very well-received, but lost my hosting in 2002 when the service I'd gone through decided to jack their prices up from $25.00 a year for the basic package to $75.00. I had never done site backups before then, and when the one backup that I thought had archived correctly had not, and I lost a bunch of content. I decided "fuck it" and walked away from it rather than rebuild it from the ground up, despite the protests of other BNFs in the fan community.
I fell out of touch with the fandom after year or so. Some of those people have since passed away. Lukas is dead. Netrunner is dead. I feel bad about losing touch with people in that community around the time when it seemed that most of the active fandoms were moving to LiveJournal.
I saw Blade Runner 2049 back in October, opening week. I was in the middle of one of my worst anxiety attacks of the last few months, touched off my moving, sleep deprivation, and the looming threat of nuclear war, thanks to Donald Trump. It wasn't a good experience. I should have waited until I was in a better headspace. So I went back. Then I went back three more times.
The first time I went back was simply because I felt like this was the closest we were going to get to seeing Neuromancer on the big screen - there were a lot of nods to William Gibson's cyberpunk novels within the film, which is ironic because
when he was originally writing Neuromancer, he was afraid of being accused of having ripped off Blade Runner. But then I was hooked again.
I think there is something to the fact that folks are calling Blade Runner 2049 the best sequel ever made. Thematically, it does not skip a beat when compared to the original. And I don't care about the fact that it is "too long." Screw the haters, some of us enjoy long atmospheric movies. I'd have watched the rumored four-hour cut. I mean, the original Blade Runner (well, the Final Cut) is a movie I occasionally just put on in the background as I am doing stuff. If anything - I'm actually going to say it - I think 2049 is a superior film.
I understand that there is sharp criticism of this film in some feminist circles - but I feel like this falls into the realm of the "depiction of misogyny is not in itself automatically misogynist, sometimes you have to depict misogyny to show why the patriarchy is shit" argument that I have been making for decades now. This film depicts the capitalist commodification of sentient beings, something that the patriarchy has been doing for centuries, and that it tends to accelerate and exacerbate whenever checks on neoliberalist capitalism are removed. This is why it is called a freaking dystopia, guys.
Yes, the original film is problematic as hell on that front: and it's one of the reasons that I disliked Deckard.
True confession time: I did not like Deckard in the first film and sympathized very heavily with the escaped Nexus 6es. I almost saw it from their perspective like a horror story - they are on the run, with a limited lifespan, surrounded by people who see them as malfunctioning objects and who want them dead. Sebastian might have been nice to them, but he is ultimately part of the same system that creates them only to enslave and mistreat and ultimately dispose of them.
Deckard is like a slasher who is stalking them, a "killer with a gun and a list" to paraphrase Philip K. Dick's novel. He shoots a fleeing woman in the back, on a crowded street where there might have been innocent bystanders hit by his gunfire. He obviously has reservations about his work, but he does it anyway - and drowns his emotions in liquor. And this doesn't even get into how problematic his relationship with Rachel is.
He only sees Roy as a person right as Roy is dying. This is the epiphany that humanizes him.
K/Joe (Ryan Gosling's character) by contrast, is sympathetic almost from minute one. He is polite. He does not abuse his partner. One gets the feeling that he respects life. He wants to be validated and valued as a person, and his actions validate others around him, even as he is called upon to kill his own kind. K/Joe is worth fifty of Deckard as we see him in the original film.
It's obvious that Deckard has gone through a lot of character development and is way more likable in 2049 - I was furious with Wallace (Jared Leto) for taunting him in the scene where he confronts Deckard in his Zen Room, and I had gone into the sequel on Oct 7th 2017 still not liking Deckard. It's a testament to the script, and to Harrison Ford's skill, that I suddenly felt so strongly for a character I had detested. I wonder if something will ever cause Niander Wallace to have an epiphany like Deckard did, something that will cause him to see his creations as people?
In another timeline, presumably one where Al Gore had gotten to serve as president and things would not be as fucked up as they are now, I'd have resurrected my fan site. Maybe I should do that in some fashion.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
