What I've Seen With Your Eyes

I went the other day to see the "final cut" of Blade Runner on the giant screen at the Uptown Theater the other day, and if you're a fan of the movie you should find a theater way it's playing. I'm too young, of course, to have seen it in theaters in 1982 but it occurs to me that that wouldn't have been the proper, voiceover-free version anyway and that since it wasn't especially popular on first release there are probably lots of people who've seen it on DVD or TV but never on a large screen. It makes a big difference to such a visually poetic film.

Meanwhile, it's just so rich and textured, so you notice new things each time. My observations for this go-round, fittingly enough, have to do with the way the movie portrays the climate. I remembered, of course, that the story is set in Los Angeles and that it's raining constantly, but the striking thing to me on this reviewing is that the LA setting appears to play no other role in the plot. The striking cityscape doesn't even bare any real resemblance to LA. Meanwhile, not only is it pouring but nobody mentions this as if torrential downpours are a common phenomenon. Just a couple of years ago, I would have overlooked all of this (the LA setting just flashes briefly across the screen at the very beginning and the rain, in part, is just a kind of noir cliché) but in the contemporary context it obviously has a certain resonance and melds with the subtle suggestions (the book is very heavy-handed and clear on this point) that there have been massive die-offs in the animal population.

UPDATE: Brian Beutler whines IRL that I failed to mention that he was present for this afternoon cinematic excursion. This, in turn, raises the question of whether it's really wise to admit to having been at the movies in the afternoon, but my official position is that since I'm blogging about it right now I was actually working.

Comments

PKD was waaaaay ahead of the curve on climate change.

He has numerous books where the 21st century Earth climate had drastically warmed up.

Posted by Petey | November 2, 2007 1:45 PM

"I'm too young, of course, to have seen it in theaters in 1982"

There was a non-voiceover re-edit in theaters sometime around '92 or so.

-----

"there are probably lots of people who've seen it on DVD or TV but never on a large screen. It makes a big difference to such a visually poetic film."

Ya think?

Posted by Petey | November 2, 2007 1:47 PM

it occurs to me that that wouldn't have been the proper, voiceover-free version

I prefer the voice-over version. I'm old enough to have seen the original theatrical release, with the voice-over, and I may simply feel that way because that was my first memory of the film and I don't like having my memories tampered with. But I'm also really not convinced that the sans voice-over version is somehow Ridley Scott's "proper" cut, and it also seems to me that the voice-over adds a more distinctly noirish dimension to the film that's not as evident without it.

___________________________

Posted by Aris | November 2, 2007 1:50 PM

Ah, a fellow Blade Runner cultist. I'm one who's seen multiple versions about 10-15 times on TV (have most of the dialogue memorized), and have read the book ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep"), but have never seen it on a big screen (even though, unlike you, I'm old enough to have done so). I'll have to keep an eye out for this new version. Even though I've long since memorized most of it, I keep re-watching because I also notice new things every time I do; it's a real feast for the eyes. I always assumed the constant rain was due to catastrophic climate change (even though the movie was made well before this became an issue), though it also does add to the film noir atmosphere. (I strongly recommend the book "Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner.") The book makes the loss of animals much clearer than the movie does, which I see as a weakness of the movie; I thought that the bit about people taking out mortgages to own animals was a particularly nice touch. In general, though, the movie is far superior to the book; Dick was a visionary, and his ideas are fascinating, but it's just not very well-written, and the characters aren't very sympathetic, IMO. I'm one who didn't mind the voice-over nearly as much as many other cultists did, though the dropping of the fake "happy ending" in the Director's Cut made perfect sense. Incidentally, I believe Deckard is human, not a replicant, and this is crucial to the story (for most of the movie, the replicants act far more human than he does).

Posted by beckya57 | November 2, 2007 1:51 PM

Incidentally, I believe Deckard is human, not a replicant, and this is crucial to the story (for most of the movie, the replicants act far more human than he does).

But you could say the same of the Sean Young character (that she's a considerably more robotic affect than the earlier replicants). I think there's supposed to be some irony there, in that the most advanced, most difficult to detect models aren't the most colorful personalities.

Posted by bza | November 2, 2007 2:01 PM

The novel was set in SF not LA, and as I recall it was a fairly late decision in screenwriting and design to reset it in LA. The rainy-noirish mood have have been settled on before the city was finalized.

Posted by Jacob T. Levy | November 2, 2007 2:02 PM

But I'm also really not convinced that the sans voice-over version is somehow Ridley Scott's "proper" cut

Well, Scott is certainly convinced about that, and he's said so on many occasions. The voice-over in the original cut was added at the end, not as part of how he planned (and shot) the movie originally.

Of course, you're welcome to prefer whichever version you like (which is probably all you meant to say). All of the different versions will be available on the big DVD release that'll be out in December.

Posted by Haggai | November 2, 2007 2:02 PM

The voiceover wasn't the problem with the 1982 version. The freaking happy ending was the problem with the 1982 version. (see also, Brazil)

Posted by BruceR | November 2, 2007 2:05 PM

The rainy-noirish mood have have been settled on before the city was finalized.

Sure, sure. But the causation here's not relevant. Obviously they weren't sitting around in 1982 planning to make a movie about 2007's catastrophic climate change concerns, but that's what you wind up with -- an LA setting who's only function is to highlight the oddity of the constant, un-remarked-upon rain.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | November 2, 2007 2:06 PM

If only you'd seen what I've seen with your eyes.

Being another fan of the original (and a big PKD fan), I too have a hard time accepting the lack of a noire voice over by Deckard, and even more so, can't come to grips with the revelation that Deckard is supposed to be a replicant. That just doesn't seem right.

If you had to be assassinated, would there be a better way to go than to be squeezed to death between Darryl Hannah's thighs?

Posted by Bragan | November 2, 2007 2:08 PM

The book makes the loss of animals much clearer than the movie does, which I see as a weakness of the movie

I like the way it's handled in the movie. It seems realer to me that the animal die-off would be a background condition ("if I could afford a real snake do you think I'd be working in a place like this") rather than a foreground element of human life.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | November 2, 2007 2:09 PM

Ridley Scott has come out and said that Ford's character is a replicant.

I don't like it, either.

Posted by tequila | November 2, 2007 2:13 PM

It seems realer to me that the animal die-off would be a background condition ("if I could afford a real snake do you think I'd be working in a place like this") rather than a foreground element of human life.

I don't know that it's "realer." It makes sense in the book, but it would have been too removed from the main storyline to try to shoehorn it into the movie in any detailed way.

Posted by Haggai | November 2, 2007 2:14 PM

I was just wondering what movie I should go to this weekend. Now I know.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | November 2, 2007 2:17 PM

There was a non-voiceover re-edit in theaters sometime around '92 or so.

Yeah. I wonder what this Cut has as different from the '92 Cut? Contrast and compare, folks!

Posted by Al | November 2, 2007 2:18 PM

Time to die.

Posted by garymar | November 2, 2007 2:19 PM

Having lived through the winter of 30 inches of rain three years ago in LA, including torrential rain for days at a time, the weather in Blade Runner actually isn't as far fetched as you might think.

LA normally gets rain fairly regularly between November and February, although less or none the other months of the year.

Posted by hopeless pedant | November 2, 2007 2:19 PM

"Yeah. I wonder what this Cut has as different from the '92 Cut? Contrast and compare, folks!"

I read an article a few months back that detailed the differences. But I have no link, so why am I even bothering to tell you this?

Posted by Petey | November 2, 2007 2:20 PM

There aren't many differences between this new "Final Cut" and the '92 "Director's Cut" (I saw the Final Cut last week at the same theater MY went to). There are some re-done effects, one apparently involving Zhora crashing through the glass (I never even noticed anything wrong with that, but a lot of people thought it was a big deal), and also a re-done background for the "dove flying away" shot near the end that makes it fit in more with the dark surroundings. The "unicorn dream" bit is re-done, but not in any way that I would characterize as being massively different. Also the line where Roy addresses Tyrell as what sounded like a blend of "father" and "fucker" now just sounds like "father."

Posted by Haggai | November 2, 2007 2:25 PM

(1) Dumbledore is a replicant.

(2) Deckard is gay.

That is all.

Posted by Ridley Scott & J.K. Rowling | November 2, 2007 2:29 PM

If you missed it in August, Adam Gopnick in the New Yorker wrote what I thought was a pretty fair essay on Dick, though I strongly disagree with his elevation of Pynchon over PKD as a writer.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/08/20/070820crbo_books_gopnik

Posted by Bragan | November 2, 2007 2:35 PM

Ah Blade Runner.

I am old enough to remember Blade Runner in the theatres, and was extremely excited to see it.

As a huge Star Wars fan, I couldn't wait to see Harrison Ford in a sci-fi movie.

But it made such little impression on me at the time. I only remember the billboards well.

I haven't seen it since and I'm always surprised at how crazy people still are for this movie.

Another PKD inspired movie -- Total Recall -- blew me away when I saw it. That was a great movie worth seeing again and again.

Posted by pj | November 2, 2007 2:38 PM

I forgot to add that I think some of the violence in this new Final Cut--Roy meeting Tyrell, the fight between Pris and Deckard--is a bit stronger than it was in the '92 Director's Cut. I believe the '82 version included that stuff as well, but only in the prints that were shown outside the U.S. (making this new one at least the 4th different version of Blade Runner that's been seen in theaters at some point).

Posted by Haggai | November 2, 2007 2:46 PM

If a theme of the movie was that the distinction between replicant and human was artificial -- if you're human, you're human -- what's the point of having it be an issue regarding Deckard? Kind of undercuts things a bit.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | November 2, 2007 2:49 PM

the weather in Blade Runner actually isn't as far fetched as you might think.

Sure, sure, it sometimes pours in LA. But if you had big rain like that in southern california it'd be a constant subject of conversation, right? It'd be unusual. Everyone in Blade Runner acts like it's normal.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | November 2, 2007 2:51 PM

I preferred Rutger Hauer's ad-libbed version of the line upon meeting Tyrell (“I want more life, fucker”) to the “father” version in today’s cut, which I happily caught at the Ziegfeld a few weeks ago. I appreciated that the replicant slideshow that Captain Bryan gives Deckard is fuller and more detailed, giving some meaning and appropriateness to the incredulous looks that Deckard gives in response. I also detected more shots of Tyrell Corp headquarters, and more views of those Japanese geisha billboard ads, but I can’t say for sure that there really are more of them.

I think what is important is not that we know that Deckard is or isn’t a replicant but that the suggestion is there, just as it was important in the Sopranos finale to suggest Tony’s doom rather than spell it out.

The only thing that makes "Blade Runner" less than timeless is the cheesy saxophone in the soundtrack. That’s pure ‘80s.

Posted by tinisoli | November 2, 2007 2:56 PM

Just last month, I was on Hollywood Blvd. late on a Sunday night and the scene was mobbed. Club goers, tourists, hustlers, street vendors, all rubbing elbows as they shuffled past one another. The street was jammed with cruising cars. I remember thinking that, if only it was raining, this would be a lot like Blade Runner.

Posted by Kevin Walker | November 2, 2007 3:08 PM

I much prefer the "Deckard is a replicant" thing to be ambiguous, as I said at the American Scene.

Posted by Freddie | November 2, 2007 3:08 PM

ps It's too bad she won't live... but then again who does?

Posted by Freddie | November 2, 2007 3:10 PM

As a pathetically loyal PKD fan I miss elements from the book--the arguments Deckard has with his wife (whose name was "Iran" if I recall) and the detail that in the book the replicant Rick has fallen for and the one who is trying to kill him are the same model and look identical. Why in the world was that ommitted from the movie?--Jay C. Smith

Posted by Jay C. Smith | November 2, 2007 3:19 PM

Matt and I had a wonderful date. We are in love.

Posted by Brian | November 2, 2007 3:52 PM

I was 17 when the movie opened in the summer of '82, and it made quite an impression on me at the time. It was the first movie I'd ever seen that created such a convincing future -- familiar yet unfamiliar, strange and violent and byzantine. I went and saw it twice -- once in the evening, once at a matinee, and there was no shortage of seats at either screening.

I thought the voiceover narration was annoying, but I didn't realize it was added at the last minute. However, even as a 17-year-old, I could tell that the happy ending had been tacked on. It was very jarring after what we'd seen for the last two hours.

I later saw the first version of the director's cut on television. It didn't change the movie all that much -- even without the narration and the happy ending, the movie would have flopped in 1982 (I suspect it would have flopped had they first released it in the summer of 2007 ....it just needed time to build an audience).

Seems amazing that people are still talking about this movie, but I'm glad they are.

Posted by Uncle Mike | November 2, 2007 3:55 PM

Oddly, the score seems less dated to me now than it did in 1992---dunno what that says about current music, but there it is.

And yeah, one of the best things about the movie is how much it treats as background details---the animal die-off, climate change, the Asianization of Los Angeles, the ghettoization of Earth. None of these things are ever said, they're just made clear from context, which makes everything feel much realer and more lived-in than someone saying "As you know, in 2015, all animals died..."

Posted by That Fuzzy Bastard | November 2, 2007 4:02 PM

If Deckard is a replicant, how come he gets his ass kicked by so many other replicants? And I mean not just kicked, but thoroughly kicked. Oh well, maybe now that he's stopped dicking around with this old film, some of his new films (I'm hoping American Gangster) won't be boring pap.

Posted by norbizness | November 2, 2007 4:04 PM

Well, don't we have the opportunity here for a perfect geek sci-fi convergence? Since William Adama is apparently already on Earth (living under the pseudonym "Gaff"), and replicants don't seem much different than cylons, isn't Blade Runner really just Season 5 of BSG?

Posted by vanya | November 2, 2007 4:07 PM

The climax takes place in the beautiful 1890s Bradbury Building downtown on Broadway, which is now the main immigrant shopping street. So, the human density (although not the rainfall) outside the Bradbury now approaches the level seen in the movie.

A few years ago I went to the Bradbury on a Saturday afternoon to see a display of abstract sculptures by Edward R. Tufte, author of the cult classic "The Vision Display of Quantitative Information," but the building was locked. Out of the thousands of people streaming by on Broadway, the dozen or so of us there on the sidewalk to see Tufte's exhibition quickly identified each other and started talking, literally, over the passing crowd's heads, since we were, on average, a head taller than the immigrant shoppers.

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 2, 2007 4:20 PM

"Blade Runner" has to take place in LA for film noir reasons -- Hollywood is where detectives live, traditionally speaking.

The visualization of LA in Blade Runner is the artistic masterpiece of anti-immigrant paranoia -- they've even ruined the sunshine!

It would have been an even better movie if there were more references to the old LA still surviving here and there in the hellish new LA than just the Bradbury building -- for example, the Dodgers could be playing in a domed stadium to keep the rain out.

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 2, 2007 4:26 PM

'I much prefer the "Deckard is a replicant" thing to be ambiguous, '

Scott saying that Deckard is a replicant does not detract one iota from the ambiguity. Even if you accept Scott as an authority on the subject, there is no reason to assume he isn't lying.

Lying isn't really the right word. Manipulating is better. As a director, his job is to manipulate the audience perception of the story. By making that statement, he's just continuing to tinker.

Posted by Njorl | November 2, 2007 4:27 PM

I agree that the story's more interesting if Deckard is human or we don't know if he's a replicant or not, but he's definitely a replicant in the 1992 and current director's cuts. Gaff leaves an origami unicorn after Deckard's dream and Deckard's eyes glow orange when only artificial animals' eyes glow. (These were both added for the original director's cut.) Saying he's human is contrary to the visual language of film.

If Deckard is a replicant, how come he gets his ass kicked by so many other replicants?

They're the newer, more advanced Nexus-6 models.

Posted by croatoan | November 2, 2007 4:31 PM

Why all the rain in Blade Runner?

I read somewhere that it was because PKD spent a short period in a cheap hotel in Vancouver, where it rained constantly for weeks (as it tends to here). It made a big impression on him and showed up in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?".

Posted by GC | November 2, 2007 4:32 PM

"Oddly, the score seems less dated to me now than it did in 1992---dunno what that says about current music, but there it is."

Great score. Got it on my iPod.

Ten years out is always the height of music datedness.

Posted by Petey | November 2, 2007 4:43 PM

Unfortunately, the answer about Deckard’s status is that the movie is flawed and the issue is irreconcilable - not because of ambiguity, but because the movie was a product of competing voices that never fully resolved themselves within the work.

The idea of Deckard as a replicant was an idea Scott came up with after the 82 version (or late in its production). There were lines in the voiceover that David Webb Peoples had written like “I could see that Roy and I were brothers. But though he could confront his maker, I couldn’t confront mine”, which were, y’know, metaphors but Scott had the bright idea of a Surprise Twist Ending! So he added the unicorn.

Unfortunately, Scott, great as he can be at creating environments and atmospheres, didn’t really think through his decision beyond “wouldn’t this be cool?”. So Deckard as replicant makes absolutely no sense in the plot and sort of wrecks the thematics, but there’s nothing else you can convincingly do with that unicorn.

Posted by Toadmonster | November 2, 2007 4:54 PM

just as it was important in the Sopranos finale to suggest Tony’s doom rather than spell it out

I hate you

Posted by Toadmonster | November 2, 2007 4:56 PM

It's not the rain in LA that gets my goat when I'm watching Blade Runner. It's the sheer number of pedestrians everywhere. I can understand how, in a post-warming world, weather patterns would change radically, but nobody walks in LA when it's gorgeous and warm out. You think suddenly there'd be an active street life after the weather got crappy?

Posted by factlike | November 2, 2007 5:00 PM

No, it's not a movie that's supposed to warn us about the perils of global warming -- it came out in 1981 when people were worrying, if at all, about the Coming Ice Age. Blade Runner is instead an anti-immigration work, like "The Camp of the Saints." Tens of millions of immigrants have turned sunny, laidback LA into a rainy ant colony.

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 2, 2007 5:09 PM

Hollywood is where detectives live, traditionally speaking.

Sam Spade, C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Travis McGee, and Joe Leaphorn unite in condemning you.

Posted by rea | November 2, 2007 5:14 PM

And its remarkable tht Steve Sailer seems to think that immigration causes rain.

Posted by rea | November 2, 2007 5:17 PM

what, forty odd posts and no one mentions the "were there 5 or 6 replicants that jumped ship" controversy? walsh says 6 jumped ship, one got fired going into tyrell, leaving 5, but then only IDs 4 for deckard to go after (and then another once rachel bolts). so either deckard or rachel could have been one of the 6, but either option makes little sense (less sense with deckard, who people know).

as for scott's statements that deck is a rep, i consider them just as reliable as lucas's statements that he knew all along darth was luke's father (or leia was sister or whatever) even though there's no hint of that in the first space opera.

Posted by dj superflat | November 2, 2007 5:17 PM

Nice flick. Wears well, as it was adult, character-driven vs. kid-targeted and All About the FX.
Loved the rain, the moodiness, the little things they did to keep someone seeing it knowing it was a very different future..

Better than the Dick short story that inspired it, which is rare in Hollywood.

Well-acted too, IMO. Olmos, Sean Young, Harrison Ford, Forrest, Brion James did great. And Rutger Hauer had one of his best roles ever. His last 5 minutes in the movie made it really sing.

I also prefer the voiceover version, but think some of the cut scenes were great and should have been in the original version.

And Sean Young and Daryll Hannah were both stunningly attractive women back then, and both have aged well. (Saw the 1992 Director's Cit version last month)

Posted by Chris Ford | November 2, 2007 5:24 PM

The original DVD release (which is the Director's cut) is one of the worst DVD transfers I have ever seen. Tons of film dirt, bouncing frames, lousy resolution. It looks barely-OK on a standard def screen, but if you see it upconverted it looks like hell.

The new hi-def releases should be nice. Now if only they'd get done with their idiotic hi-def format war...

Posted by jimBOB | November 2, 2007 5:47 PM

I always liked Blade Runner pretty well, but was never a rabid fan. The only thing that's always bugged me about it is that its supposed to take place in 2019. That just never seemed far enough in the future for things like clones, flying cars, and well-established space colonies. Even in 1982 I thought that was kind of dumb.

That said, has anyone noticed that every movie Scott has made since then has sucked? I mean really really sucked. Well, I guess Thelma and Louise was OK.

Posted by Rob Mac | November 2, 2007 5:50 PM

The striking cityscape doesn't even bare any real resemblance to LA.

That's because it's one part Manhattan, one part Japan, one part industrial northern England. The 'LA' moniker is just that.

Last time I saw it in a cinema was about five years ago at a film-soc special showing. Old print of the Directors' Cut, but that opening sweep needs a big screen.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | November 2, 2007 5:51 PM

Isn't it a bit surprising that they placed it in 2020? Why not 2120 or something? To place space travels and robots just 40 years into the future doesn't seem, ahem, realistic, but rather slightly ridiculous.

Posted by Norway | November 2, 2007 5:52 PM

Steve Sailor -- twice you've asserted Blade Runner is anti-immigrant:

"The visualization of LA in Blade Runner is the artistic masterpiece of anti-immigrant paranoia -- they've even ruined the sunshine!"

"Blade Runner is instead an anti-immigration work, like "The Camp of the Saints.""

Care to back that up? I bet you can't.

The film has always looked to me like a panethnic future set in relatively tough times, and I'm careful about my use of the word "is."

Aw, hell what do I know -- I miss the voiceover vesion.

Posted by Chris | November 2, 2007 6:02 PM

I think you are overstating any prescience on the part of the movie makers as to climate change. Living in a post-environmental catastrophe world is pretty much a required element of dystopic fiction. Now, I have never read the book, so PKD may have been more explicit in expository of how the world of 21st Century LA came in came into being, but I believe you are giving the filmmakers too much credit.

Posted by Kenny | November 2, 2007 6:31 PM

I was 17 when the movie opened in the summer of '82, and it made quite an impression on me at the time. It was the first movie I'd ever seen that created such a convincing future -- familiar yet unfamiliar, strange and violent and byzantine. I went and saw it twice -- once in the evening, once at a matinee, and there was no shortage of seats at either screening.
=================================================

You beat me to the "convincing future" part. Most science fiction movies merely transplant recognizably contemporary people into a future that looks different only by advanced technology of some sort.

Bladerunner has been more successful than any other SF movie I have ever seen in that it creates a whole world - not only do things look different, but the people talk and act slightly differently as well. Just as it should be.

Posted by Campesino | November 2, 2007 7:05 PM

Here's a typical post-modernist academic reading

Members of the American middle class [in 1981=, however, were far from immune; as they bore witness to the unenviable plight of their blue-collar counterparts, they also feared joining them – a “fear of falling,” as Barbara Ehrenreich phrased it, from their positions of precarious privilege that Blade Runner both registers and, problematically, elicits. This fear is intensified by an arguably racist mise-en-scene that depicts Los Angeles in the year 2019 as an urban wasteland overrun by largely squalid, multicultural masses who represent, along with the humanoid invaders, the new face of California’s working class. These crowds, I suggest, invoke “fear” and “revulsion” in viewers because they seem poised to engulf our white, middle class protagonist, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), who himself fears joining these “little people” (Fancher 4).

Policing Traumatized Boundaries of Self and Nation:
Undocumented Labor in Blade Runner
Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Fall 2006, Volume 5, Issue 2
http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2006/narine.htm

Anil Narine
Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 2, 2007 7:08 PM

I'm always fascinated by how obtuse political correctness makes people who think they are pretty smart. Here you guys are yammering on about how "Blade Runner" from 1981 is about your current fashionable 2007 obsession, global warming, even though it's not hot in the movie. It's raining all the time.

If you'd just believe your lying eyes for a second instead of listening to the PC narrative in your head ... and look-at-the-movie ... you'd see then a vast amount of effort went into making a film about a California with at least 100 million people living stacked on top of each other in giant buildings. And 95% of them aren't white and many barely speakly English. How'd they get there if not via immigration? Spontaneous generation?

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 2, 2007 7:16 PM

Amusingly, various Hispanic film theorists are mad at "Blade Runner" for depicting California being taken over by Asian immigrants rather than by La Raza. From the blog Evening Classes:

"One of my favorite bits, albeit a throwaway without much explanation, is [Ridley] Scott's admission that he consciously chose to go Asian with his futuristic scenario rather than Hispanic. Several Chicano theorists have criticized Scott for what they feel is an inaccurate depiction of the future San Angeles."

COMMENTS:

Maya said...

I was on a board at the Mexican Museum with a fellow who wrote his thesis on this some years back and he completely convinced me that the vision of San Frangeles was erroneous and borderline racist. But again, it's a question of it being Scott's vision and he's the one who got the funding for it so, guess what? He gets to run with it.

It works both ways, though. Scott elected to go Asian because Asians are, of course, associated with technical gadgetry. That likewise strikes me as borderline racist.

At least he had Olmos--El Vato--in a prominent role.

Brian said...

I must admit that whenever I've given a second thought about ethnicity in Blade Runner, I just assumed Deckard's beat happened to center around a heavily Asian part of San Angeles, not that it was intended to represent the entire megalopolis. It seems from the interview that my interpretation was not the one Scott intended to present, however. And I must recognize that the luxury I have in not having felt the necessity to give this issue more than a second thought is because I come from a place of certain (Anglo) privilege. I'm thankful you've brought it up for this reason.

Interestingly, Olmos's role as Gaff is much larger than that of any individual actor of Asian descent.

Perhaps even more interesting is something that I'm sure I'd never considered until engaging in this discussion: the shared ethnicity of all the actors playing replicants in the film. Replicants are a slave class, but also said to exemplify perfection. What implications does THAT have?

http://theeveningclass.blogspot.com/2007/10/blade-runner-final-cut-wired-interview.html

Indeed.

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 2, 2007 7:23 PM

Steve Sailor -- I think I wasn't clear about my point. You'd said twice that Blade Runner "is" anti-immigrant, so you're claiming to have facts on the matter.

Now you've cited someone else's opinion to back yours up. I'm all about opining on stuff, but if you don't have the facts, it's OK to say "Blade Runner seems anti-immigrant."

Also, global warming won't necessarily make everything hot -- the vast majority of climatologists don't make that claim. Instead, they expect weather patterns to change radically.

But I don't think Blade Runner was intentionally made to portray a globally warmed future.

Posted by Chris | November 2, 2007 7:33 PM

A Google search of

"Blade Runner" dystopia

brings up 150,000 hits, so it's safe to say that the famously elaborate and expensive setting of the film is widely considered to depict an unappealing future. Wikipedia, for example, summarizes "The film depicts a dystopian Los Angeles in November 2019 ..." which reflects the consensus. (I know one person who says he always wanted to live in a city just like Blade Runner's LA, but he's rather unusual ...)

The dominant difference between the real LA in 1981 and the one depicted in the movie (at least as measured in the % of the film's budget devoted to portraying this differnce) is that the 2019 LA's population is _vastly_ larger and dramatically different in ethnic origin -- i.e., overwhelmed by immigration.

So, we are shown a hellish new LA, which was largely brought about through a tidal wave of immigration. If that's not objectively anti-immigration, I don't know what is.

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 2, 2007 7:49 PM

Steve Sailer -- There's nothing in those quotes to suggest that Hispanic film theorists are "mad at Blade Runner for depicting California being taken over by Asian immigrants rather than by La Raza."

The quote you chose says: "Several Chicano theorists have criticized Scott for what they feel is an inaccurate depiction of the future San Angeles."

So? Hispanic populations are right now bigger than Asian populations in California. They think the movie's inaccurate that way. Fine.

There's nothing about "La Raza" or "California being taken over." Just population change over time. You've got some paranoia to attend to, sounds like to me.

The more I think about this, the more it seems like I've fallen into a troll trap. Or maybe just an argument with a terrified prejudiced paranoid. Whatev.

Posted by Chris | November 2, 2007 7:51 PM

Chris Ford -- Sean Young was my neighbor for a while last year, and she has indeed aged well. She is still a very beautiful woman, but boy is she loony. All the stories you have probably heard about her are true.

Posted by shnooky | November 2, 2007 7:58 PM

I'm always amused by the workings of hepster aesthetic-moral-status logic:

- Blade Runner is cool work of art.

- Being concerned about the impact of immigration is totally uncool.

- Thus, Blade Runner can't possibly express any concern about immigration. It just can't!

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 2, 2007 8:01 PM

Steve Sailer -- Seriously?

The main difference between 1981 LA and Blade Runner's LA, judged by $ spent in the movie, is the size and make-up of the population?

Oh!! And the flying cars! And the set design! But if you've got the budget numbers to prove it, I'm game.

You don't.

And Blade Runner's LA ain't "hellish" -- it's kinda down on its luck, maybe. As for it being "largely brought about through a tidal wave of immigration," that's entirely your own invention.

Please refrain from using forms of the term "objective" when you're terrified of the browns -- it's ruining your reputation.

Posted by Chris | November 2, 2007 8:02 PM

Don't worry Steve, if you're around in 2019, you can buy yourself a hot, White replicant chick to take your mind of the mongrel horde at your gate.

Posted by SoCalJustice | November 2, 2007 8:04 PM

I'm surprised to see not yet mentioned: the "tears in rain" speech by Roy Batty as he dies; one of the bestest scenes in any movie, ever. Which, as I only recently learned, was ad-libbed by Rutger Hauer.

The near-ruination of the movie is Deckard's, er, rough sex scene with Rachel, which I'd really like not to have to interpret as near-rape.

Posted by Ken C. | November 2, 2007 8:15 PM

Sailer, have you no decency left, trollishly trying to turn a perfectly nice thread in which people congregate to talk about one of their favorite movies into a discussion about one of your stale ideological hobbyhorses?

Shut up! Go away, you're a dork, nobody likes you, nobody takes you seriously.

Posted by novakant | November 2, 2007 8:45 PM

Even if we accept Sailer's assertion that the number of Asian faces we see is meant to represent the result of a wave of immigration, there's nothing in the movie to suggest whether the climate change and the financial change that made the city more run down was a result or a cause of the wave of immigration.

Of course, what do I know. If the ethnic mix of the population was supposed to invoke fear and revulsion, it failed miserably--in 1981, in 1992 and today--at least for this viewer. On the couple of occasions I've visited LA, I've found the place so creepy that Scott's vision seemed a vast improvement over what's there today. I say "Scott's vision," but every time I've watched the movie, it seemed that mise-en-scene of the early street sequences were pretty much a wholesale ripoff of the first 30 pages or so of Samuel Delany's novel "Triton" rather than anything by PK Dick.

On the other hand, Sailer may have a point, in that in the early 1980s, when this was shot, the popular imagination had not yet caught on to the idea that industry would simply export jobs, rather than import workers. Therefore, to the extent that xenophobic anxiety is at the center of this telling of the story (and it is explicit in the replicant storyline, so seeing it implicit in the racial makeup of the city is not far-fetched), the way that issue has unfolded is far more relevant to 1981 than to 2007 (in much the same way that it's highly unlikely that the notion of "global warming" was what drove the constant rain and animal depopulation aspects of the story, rather than more generic "pollution"--which was the more common environmental concern of the day).

Posted by Steve | November 2, 2007 9:07 PM

Oh, and the narration was inane. Good noir narration makes the connections between things you can't see on screen, fill in the gaps. The narration in the first version of Blade Runner was a constant annoyance because all it did was point out things that were bleedingly obvious to anyone watching the movie with their eyes open.

Posted by Steve | November 2, 2007 9:11 PM

"The climax takes place in the beautiful 1890s Bradbury Building downtown on Broadway"

Also the site of the 2nd season, 1st episode of the original Outer Limits with Robert Culp: Devil with a glass hand, story by Harlan Elison.

Posted by PierreB | November 2, 2007 9:18 PM

If you read David Rieff's "Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World," a book that may have been a couple years ahead of its time (but then California is often a couple of years ahead of the U.S.), Blade Runner is invoked by white upper-class Angelenos as a shorthand symbol of a potential future dystopia. This is, in both Rieff's book and real life, partly a sign of white upper-class myopia as much as a reflection on Blade Runner. After all, the same people eat in ethnic restaurants and hire Latino household help.

Incidentally, the fear in 1990 California and the distinctive aspect of Blade Runner are both _Asianness_, while the current immigration debate is really focused on Mexicans; I am dubious that they are so closely related.

The invocation of Blade Runner is also shorthand for the persistent California fear that one day the big earthquake will come, the population will increase to the point where other people will always within arm's reach (that is, it will be Hong Kong, or worse yet, New York), or that the rains won't stop in March, and it will just keep raining and raining, a symbol of the environmental knife-edge that Californians subconsciously fear they are balanced on.

Anyway, I'm not interested in rehashing this as today's immigration debate. It's ironic that the Blade Runner dystopia is being used in that context, because a (the) major point of Blade Runner is the morality of having created a servant class (replicants, duh) that is subjugated to humans, yet is sophisticated enough to have the same desires.

It doesn't matter whether or not Ridley Scott thinks Deckard is a replicant. It matters what Deckard thinks. In the movie - and this is what makes the movie singular - Deckard, I believe, realizes that he does not know whether he himself is human or not.

This was a longtime Philip Dick obsession and is why the movie is possibly even more Phildickian than his own book.

Posted by Ben | November 2, 2007 9:36 PM

Exactly. "Blade Runner" has been used for a quarter of a century by Southern Californians as a telling euphemism for where the region is headed due to immigration / population growth.

I'm fascinated by just how obtuse all you Blade Runner obsessives are to the elephant in the room in the movie. Lots of sci-fi movies have flying cars and cyborgs and the like. What makes "Blade Runner" so memorable is its setting. Really, does political correctness just lower your IQs so much that you can't see anymore?

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 2, 2007 9:55 PM

Re: Sure, sure. But the causation here's not relevant. Obviously they weren't sitting around in 1982 planning to make a movie about 2007's catastrophic climate change concerns, but that's what you wind up with -- an LA setting who's only function is to highlight the oddity of the constant, un-remarked-upon rain.

Back in 1982 there was a very strong El Nino event that in fact did produce torrentrial rain and mudslides in California during the winter-- and thunderstorms in Michigan on Christmas Day which is why I remember the freaky weather of that year.

Posted by JonF | November 2, 2007 10:04 PM

I guess the PC nerdster mindset works like this:

- I'm better than the average American for two reasons:

A. Because I like superior, high IQ pop culture works like Blade Runner.

B. Because I loudly pronounce my belief in human equality, unlike the average American who is a closet racist.

So along comes this horrible person pointing out that Blade Runner is a masterpiece of anti-immigration paranoia, and we all know that anti-immigration = RACISM. But ... I _love_ Blade Runner, and my loving Blade Runner is one of the ways I know how much better I am than other people, so if Blade Runner is racist then that means ... oh my god, it's too horrible to even contemplate! Must spew mindless hatred toward horrible person who brought this up!

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 2, 2007 10:30 PM

Chris Ford -- Sean Young was my neighbor for a while last year, and she has indeed aged well. She is still a very beautiful woman, but boy is she loony. All the stories you have probably heard about her are true.
Posted by shnooky

Man, I envy you!

My ideal neighbor is an attractive, eccentric nut.

I had Heather Lockyear's wild and crazy hairdresser galfriend for a neighbor - even had her -Fucking Shatner was by one day looking at her geese (he was interested in getting some for his ranch) and asking me how I liked military life.

Now it's East Coast and a stuffy doctor couple on one side of me, a less cool Iranian-Jewish banker with peacocks in a crib to the back of me, and an old Italian family who have lived forever in a 2800 Sears prefab house on a 300K lot since before my MOM&DAD were born and the are went upscale. Far more boring than Sandy Eggo.

Man, would I like to see Sean Young out on her hands and knees on the lawn at 5:30 AM, in her nightgown, barking like a dog. I miss that sort of shit about Cali.

Celebrityhood doesn't mean much to me. Just other people doing work and being (sorta) human when not in "game mode". Even Shatner.

Music is different. My year was made when Dr. Brian May, Queen guitarist & God of Riffs, did a post on his Blog 10-11 months ago mentioning me as having a good idea about IT. Glow! Glow!

Posted by Chris Ford | November 2, 2007 10:32 PM

"Blade Runner" was cyberpunk before cyberpunk was cool. Blade Runner" came out in 1982, "Neuromancer" not until 1984. But there were cyberpunk forerunners to Neuromancer - including PKD - that obviously influenced Scott, including John Brunner's works such as "Stand On Zanzibar" which was published back in 1968, as well as "The Jagged Orbit", "The Sheep Look Up" (1972) - which was a prophetic warning of ecological disaster - and 1975's "The Shockwave Rider", in which he coined the term "worm", used to describe software which reproduces itself across a computer network.

And that explains the Asians over Latinos. The expectation in most early cyberpunk stories is that the Japanese, the Taiwanese, the Chinese, the Koreans, etc., all those countries with serious economies based on technology, would be all over the United States because they were thought to be buying most of America at one point. Remember when this movie was made.

Nobody expected - or expects - Mexico to buy the United States OR be a technological titan.

So the population mix in the movie has nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with technology and economics. Of course, there might also be some suggestion that Asians breed faster given the population in China as well, but I think the other factors make more sense.

It's that simple.

As for Daryl Hannah, I hated the whacked out makeup. She was one of the best looking women in Hollywood back then, and Scott made her look like a freaked out Milla Jovavich. But her thrashing after she was shot was probably one of the scariest parts of the movie, next to Rutger Hauer running through the building howling.

But Joanna Cassidy was supposed to be the hot one, so I guess that makes sense. I just wish we got to see more of her in the movie. We did get to see SOME more of her than we did Pris, if you remember the shower scene, but not enough. Joanna was a very hot but very underrated actress.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | November 2, 2007 10:46 PM

By the way, here is the rollout schedule of the "Final Cut" version, cities and dates and theaters"

http://www.slashfilm.com/2007/10/25/see-blade-runner-the-final-cut-on-the-big-screen/

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | November 2, 2007 10:48 PM

Blade Runner feeds off various anxieties including but not limited to fear of environmental catastrophe, fear of population growth, and yeah, fear of a ethnic planet. It does this to make, I'm gonna say it, art, not as a tract against Asians. Ridley Scott may be a hack, but a damn good one.

Please read what I said before about how a central point of Blade Runner is that it questions the line between humans and their replicant servants.

Also, Asians and Mexicans have been in California for a long time - I think it's actually quite unpersuasive to think that a 1982 movie was specifically playing on anti-immigrant sentiment. That was before the demographic changes of the "new immigration" were particularly obvious. The fear of Asia was more that rich Japanese were going to buy up all our industry and real estate.

If you were going to make a movie in that time period that played on white fears, you'd make a movie about urban decay, use blacks as boogiemen more so than Asians, and you'd set it in New York. And it would star Kurt Russell, not Harrison Ford. You compare these two movies and tell me which one reflected the nativist paranoia of its time.

Posted by Ben | November 2, 2007 11:07 PM

Here you guys are yammering on about how "Blade Runner" from 1981 is about your current fashionable 2007 obsession, global warming, even though it's not hot in the movie. It's raining all the time. — Steve Sailer

That's precisely the sort of idiotic thing that people who know nothing about climate change say all the time. 'It's cold out today. Isn't it supposed to be hot? Al Gore is a liar!' Here's the deal, Steve: Climate change may result in increased mean temperatures in one place AND decreased mean temps elsewhere. Global warming refers to an overall increase in mean temperatures––NOT that every point on Earth will be warmer or that it won't rain ever again in Los Angeles. If you want to dismiss anthropogenic climate change and disparage it as a fashionable concern (as opposed to TERROR! and ISLAMOFASCISM!, those "real" Threats to Our Civilization as certified by Rudy and Dick) you could at least drop the moronic Coulteresque comprehension of the subject. Maybe you could go down to the nearest high school and sit in on an Earth science class.

I'm fascinated by just how obtuse all you Blade Runner obsessives are to the elephant in the room in the movie. Lots of sci-fi movies have flying cars and cyborgs and the like. What makes "Blade Runner" so memorable is its setting. Really, does political correctness just lower your IQs so much that you can't see anymore?- Steve again

There is nothing explicitly or implicitly negative about how the many non-caucasians are portrayed in the film. They are minor players, and the implication is simply that Los Angeles in 2019 is still ethnically diverse, perhaps moreso. Responding with fear and dread to the presence of various foreign accents and non-white faces in a film set in a futuristic megalopolis is about you and your own xenophobia. Ridley Scott did nothing to encourage the connection you made. It is a baseless leap to go from "Hmmm, there's an Asian selling Deckard some noodles" to "THIS IS WHY THIS FUTURISTIC LOS ANGELES IS SO HELLISH: IMMIGRANTS!!!!!" Did it not occur to you that perhaps something else might have rendered both Los Angeles (and Earth itself) so hellish by 2019? Did the lines about Replicants waging war in other galaxies not suggest to you that, just maybe, other events had affected and altered Earth in a way that made most humans want to leave? Recall that J.F. Sebastian could not leave Earth because of his disease. Did this not suggest to you that Earth as a whole in 2019 was unpleasant? Let me guess, that's because of immigrants from other planets.

To characterize your own fear and preoccupation as an elephant in someone else's room is absurd.

Posted by tinisoli | November 2, 2007 11:21 PM

This reminds me of how amusing it is that so many libertarians see Neal Stephenson's 1992 sci-fi novel, Snow Crash, also set in a dystopian near-future LA, as a utopian novel.

It's the early 21st Century in Los Angeles, and government has fallen apart just about everywhere in the world, except perhaps Japan. Private enterprise has taken over all the functions of the state. A few ethnic groups -- the Cantonese and the Sicilians -- are flourishing in the absence of public order (indeed the Mafia are pretty close to being the good guys in the novel).

A major plot element in Snow Crash is the Raft, a vast agglomeration of flotsam, inhabited by impoverished south and southeast Asian refugees drifting inexorably across the Pacific, headed for California. Stephenson's description of The Raft is a pretty funny variation on the usual sentimental cant about how illegal immigrants have more gumption than us natives, and thus are just what us decadent Americans need:

"When [the Raft] gets to California, it will enter a new phase of its life cycle. It will shed much of its sprawling improvised bulk as a few hundred thousand Refus cut themselves loose and paddle to shore. The only Refus who make it that far are, by definition, the ones who were agile enough to make it out to the Raft in the first place, resourceful enough to survive the agonizingly slow passage through arctic waters, and tough enough not to get killed by any of the other Refus. Nice guys, all of them. Just the kind of people you'd like to have showing up on your private beach in groups of a few thousand." [p. 272]

Clearly, Stephenson picked up his idea for the Raft from Jean Raspail's 1973 anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints, which is about a similar ramshackle armada heading from south Asia to the south of France. So, I went to Google to read about the influence of Camp of the Saints on Snow Crash. As a cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash is, unsurprisingly, much discussed on the Internet, with 360,000 Google hits. Camp of the Saints shows up in 53,000 places.

And how many webpages discuss the overlap between them? As far as I can tell, exactly one.

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 2, 2007 11:52 PM

First of all, the environmental theme is not something Matthew is imposing on the movie. If you read the original novel (or indeed almost any Dick novel from the 1960s and 1970s) it’s clear that this is a world where some sort of environmental apocalypse has happened. Dick was far ahead of his time in thinking about environmental issues and many of his novels have, as background, a post-catastrophic background.

Secondly, it could be argued that the movie is not so much about immigration as emigration. That is to say, the reason why LA has so many non-whites is that all the whites (except for working class stiffs like Decard and a few elite scientists) have fled off-world. There is a suggestion in the film that there is some sort of spatial segregation: the dark-skinned people have inherited a devastated planet, the whites have moved to Mars and the other planets close to earth, and the replicants are being used to work on the far planets.

Thirdly, the whole history of whole movie reveals the problem with the genre of the “Director’s Cut”. While directing the movie in the early 1980s, Ridley Scott got into an argument with Harrison Ford. Scott believed Ford's character, Deckard, a cop hired to hunt down and kill androids, should himself be an android. Ford rejected this idea, believing it robbed Deckard of his humanity.

Working with his producers and actors such as Ford, Scott had to make numerous compromises in the first version of Blade Runner. In addition to adding a voice-over and a happy ending, Scott was allowed only to suggest that Deckard was an android, but the idea is so ambiguously presented that the audience can make up its own mind on the subject.

In the early 1990s, Scott made suggestions for a new release of the movie to make it closer to his original ideas. In addition to removing the voice-over and happy ending, Blade Runner: The Director's Cut (1992) also resolved the issue of Deckard's humanity: In this version, he is clearly an android.

There is a real problem with this loss of ambiguity. By making Deckard an android hired to kill androids, rather than a human who comes to appreciate the humanity of androids, the film lost its moral centre. Moreover, if Ford played Deckard as a human, the director's cut violates the integrity of his performance.

Ironically, Scott himself is not completely happy with the second version of Blade Runner. Busy working on another movie, he did not devote all the time to it he had wanted. Most of the re-editing was done by another filmmaker, Peter Gardiner. For this reason, Scott has been known to refer to the 1992 release as "the so-called director's cut." Hence the current movie, the “final director’s cut.” But movies aren’t books. They don’t have a single author and hence don’t lend themselves to endless revisions and do-overs. I think Scott would have been wiser to stick to the original movie, compromised as it is. Movies are a collaborative art and it’s wise to acknowledge the compromises that go into them.

Posted by Jeet Heer | November 3, 2007 12:01 AM

Back to the connection to the original material --

R. S. Hack and others are quite right to point out a lot of other SF sources for the movie besided PKD. Also, the title and maybe other elements were inspired by William S. Burroughs's writing.

Chris Ford, it was a novel, not a short story, by PKD. I think it's arguable that either one is "better," but I think it's more helpful to realize that Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are more different than they are similar. The share character names and some thematic elements, but they focus on very different things.

• Rick Deckard in the novel is a married, middle-aged schlump, not a desperate action hero.
• In the novel much more is made of the animal die-offs . . . there's a suggestion of nuclear or other apocalyptic war, and an aching, vast spiritual emptiness that people feel in the absence of animals.
• So, in fact, they pretty much worship animals, and consider caring for animals a basic requirement of being human and a religious duty.
• Rick's dilemma in the novel is that his job requires him to murder without empathy, but he must have empathy to remain human, so to survive he must become what he hates. It's less important whether he "is" an android than whether he behaves like one . . . the theme is that empathy makes us human. This theme is heightened by the contradiction between murdering organically human androids who are described as machines, while caring for robot animals (because he can't afford real ones) to fulfill his religious duties.
• There's a similar theme in the movie, but a much more prominent theme is mortality, because of the short lifespans of the replicants. The religion of the novel is completely absent, so instead the brevity of life is the important theme.
• (Incidentally, there's also a god named Mercer and a technological communion with him in the novel, but that's beside my point.)
• J. R. Isidore in the novel is not a brilliant geneticist, but a "chickenhead" whose mind has been rotted by radiation . . . so the sympathies of the novel are with the most downtrodden and degraded people.
• An opera singer in the novel becomes a stripper in the movie. Oh, Hollywood.
• Maybe most important, the San Francisco of the novel is nearly abandoned, and the people cluster in little inhabited islands among a vast wasteland of abandoned buildings. The loss of our connection with nature is treated totally differently, and there is no "future shock" vision of multi-ethnicity.
• The novel is a fable about dehumanizing labels, such as racism or ethnocentrism, mental health diagnoses, measures of intelligence, or any other mechanism for making some people less than human . . . and a fable about the danger we will become less than human when we stop caring. And a fable of the loss of a connection to nature. The movie is more about the inevitability of death.

Posted by rm | November 3, 2007 12:35 AM

"Cityspeak is a mixture of words and expressions from Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Hungarian and Japanese. The "conversation" between Deckard and Gaff in the beginning of BR is an example of this."

And Decker refers to it as 'gutter talk'.

In the normal course of things, Spanish, OK. Maybe even Chinese. But how is it that large numbers of French-, German-, Japanese-, Hungarian- and Finnish-speakers end up in America as poverty-stricken street-level people?

Ummm, refugees? But what possible event in the late-20th Century, could have, from a 1980s viewpoint, resulted in an influx of refugees from those particular countries?

Class? class? anyone?

Posted by MikeN | November 3, 2007 1:49 AM

Finnish?

Linus Torvalds explains that one!

Actually, remembering that the book is set in San Francisco, in San Francisco today if you walk down the street you will see people and hear languages spoken from almost literally everywhere in the world - from Haiti to Finland to Russia to the ME to Africa to South America to Asia to the South Pacific...And every ethnicity has its niche. The Hindus run the cheap hotels, the Middle Easterners run the convenience stores, the Chinese run the laundries, the you-name-it run the whatever...

San Francisco is probably THE most multi-cultural, multi-national, multi-ethnic, multi-racial city in the US.

I wouldn't be surprised if LA is second, so that would fit the movie.

Besides, just because they're poverty-stricken street people doesn't mean they were refugees from those countries. This is set in the future. A lot of economic disasters could have occurred by then to reduce the existing middle- or lower-class normal immigrants to the state seen in the movie.

In fact, there are very few "middle class" people seen in the movie, outside of the corporate office workers who are mostly props. Since this is a gritty "street" movie, it's not surprising we don't see more of the middle class, though.

In fact, given the affluence of Tyrell's housing and the apparent poverty of everyone else - even one of his engineers - it seems to reflect a more stark division between wealth and poverty, an indication that there might not be much of a middle class in that time.

It's all very cyberpunk. In most cyberpunk, you have the obscenely wealthy corporate types, you have corporate drones, you have wealthy criminals, and everybody else is "street people" - which includes the cops, the medical profession, the media, the journalists, and the artists. You either work for a corporation or the government or you're nobody. Which is pretty much the way it is now - except the "nobodies" in cyberpunk are usually armed to the teeth and have skills they've developed to help them survive, whether it's black market medicine or computer hacking or combat.

Actually, in "Blade Runner", I'm not that sure everybody is "street people". We see them shuffling through the streets and they don't look rich, but they don't look seriously different than ordinary people today - other than the outlandish fashions and the environmental protection gear. So we don't really know what the average relative income level is in that world.

Based on the bar scene, it would imply that nightclubs still function - and you don't have those in a world of poverty stricken street people. Somebody has money to spend on booze and strippers.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | November 3, 2007 3:03 AM

There is a real problem with this loss of ambiguity. By making Deckard an android hired to kill androids, rather than a human who comes to appreciate the humanity of androids, the film lost its moral centre.

See, to me this is exactly what is brilliant about Deckard's finally being revealed (or strongly suggested) to be a replicant. The film seems to move towards that moral epiphany -- the "human who comes to appreciate the humanity of replicants" -- and then yanks away even that last hope of a shred of moral redemption of a completely dystopian world. It's the bleakest, most noir-ish move imaginable. Reminds me of kind of a step beyond Chandler at his bleakest, where you finally realize you can't really get to the bottom of what happened, you wish you hadn't learned the things you've learned trying to get there, and you don't even know any more why you're trying.

Not sure if I've put any of that clearly, but it's what I find compelling about the film.

Posted by live | November 3, 2007 3:44 AM

I guess it's not surprising that sci-fi fans tend to be out of touch with reality, but it's really quite fascinating to see how white nerds just want to wish away topics like race and immigration. Here you have a movie where for 25 years its title has been a byword among normal people for an over-the-top visualization of where out-of-control immigration might take us, and yet lots of the nerds obsessing over it here totally missed what Blade Runner is most famous for!

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 3, 2007 5:27 AM

There we have degenerate racist Steve Slime Sailer insanely degenerate as ever.

Posted by Jennifer | November 3, 2007 9:10 AM

A source for the disagreement here has to do with the nature of science fiction. Science fiction deals in free-floating metaphors; these metaphors can be interpreted in different ways. Hence, science fiction is a Rorschach test.

An example: the Frankenstein monster: is he a symbol of technology run wild? Sure, plausibly. But from his earliest inception Frankenstein has also been used as a metaphor for all manner of things that frighten people: secularism, socialism, woman’s right, German nationalism, third world liberation movements. All of these have been described as Frankenstein.

The same is true of Mr. Spock: plausibly enough a symbol of rationalism. But also sometimes seen as a symbol of Oriental cunning, suppressed and smoldering homosexuality, or even diabolic pride (those ears!).

So, someone like Steve Sailer looks at Blade Runner and says, “see, this shows you what happens with the dark-skinned hordes take over.” (And I’m sure that many white Californians do in fact use the phrase “Blade Runner” in this way. Mike Davis has talked about this). But it’s just a plausible to say, this is what will happen after the whites wreck the planet and leave the devastated remains to the poor. And in fact the second interpretation is more in keeping with the original authorial intent of P.K. Dick.

It seems to me that Sailer is caught in a hermeneutical trap: because for him race is everything, he sees it everywhere. And if someone doesn’t see race where Sailer sees it (or doesn’t interpret a racial narrative in the same way he does), Sailer just accuses that person of being a p.c. liberal ignoring reality. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I would invite Sailer to open is mind to the possibility that there are different plausible ways to interpret the same information. This is especially the case if you’re interpreting a work of art, and even more so interpreting the free-floating metaphors developed by science fiction.

Posted by Jeet Heer | November 3, 2007 1:49 PM

I think Sailer has a point about immigration and Blade Runner if you limit it to Asian immigration.

A couple of years ago I went to some neighborhood of Queens to go on a first date with a girl I met on Craig's List. For those who don't live in the NYC area, those of us on the mainland almost never go anywhere in the city outside of Manhattan, so I had no idea what to expect. The girl, who was white, and I, were literally the only non-Asians on the street in the downtown area of this industrial neighborhood. We went out for dumplings somewhere and then to a bubble tea shop (where they serve iced tea with little balls of tapioca in them). I remember saying to the girl, "This is like BladeRunnverville" and she nodded in agreement. It didn't require any explanation, because the simile was so apt.

One meta-point about this discussion: Blade Runner was a great movie in some ways, but also a pretty boring one. Another, far more entertaining sci-fi movie had its 25 year anniversary this year: Star Trek II. Go see that on the big screen if you can.

Posted by Fred | November 3, 2007 2:02 PM

I can't quite tell if Steve Sailer is expressing his own ethnocentric paranoia, or if he is making a legitimate point about the nativist paranoia that floats in the atmosphere of Blade Runner, at least in a lot of viewers' minds. That point is there to be made. Steve's ranting tone and remarks about "PC" liberals makes me think he's a bigot, but I'm not 100% sure of that because there is a point there.

Posted by rm | November 3, 2007 3:05 PM

And if someone doesn’t see race where Sailer sees it (or doesn’t interpret a racial narrative in the same way he does), Sailer just accuses that person of being a p.c. liberal ignoring reality.

Well, to be fair to Steve, he also accuses them of having a "lower i.q.," (see his 9:55pm post) just as he does for brown people.

Posted by SoCalJustice | November 3, 2007 3:38 PM

Fred should live in San Francisco if he wants to see "Asian immigration" in action...:-)

I love it - the number of cute Asian women is in the scores of thousands (unfortunately, most of them apparently date only in their own ethnicity.)

Beyond that, we have Thai restaurants, Chinese restaurants, Japanese restaurants, Korean restaurants, Vietnamese restaurants, you name it. And bookstores and movie houses and everything else.

Interestingly, though, Japantown is now mostly non-Japanese - the Japanese moved out to better digs elsewhere town and in the suburbs. Nobody wants to live in the Tenderloin, so that's stayed mostly Vietnamese, although there is a large Hispanic population moving in. Chinatown I think is still mostly Chinese - and is the only place in town where the streets are that crowded - because they're narrower.

San Francisco is as "Blade Runner" as it gets, despite the presence here, as I indicated above, of just about every nationality on the planet.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | November 3, 2007 9:58 PM

Fascinating discussion, particularly about the climate.

I'm old enough to have been an adult and rushed to see the movie when it was first released with my dad, both of us being major SF fans. I was so ovecome by the opening shots of a future Los Angeles I literally started to shake and then weep.

You guys, the big scary issues back then weren't immigration and climate change per se, and certainly not global warming, they were pollution and overpopulation. LA was on track to become too poisonous to support human life, and we were being warned that the planet was soon going to be unable to support the number of people living on it.

Seemed perfectly reasonable at the time that the constant rain (and it was *dark* all the time, too) in the movie was somehow the result of that. And that the people who could afford it would flee the planet when it became possible, leaving teeming masses of poor and/or stubborn people crowded into cities even as they became more and more unlivable.

Whether that's what Dick wrote or Scott intended or not, that's what we small brave few who saw the movie just automatically assumed when we saw it. It was a chilling, and at the time, horribly realistic imgage of the future.

One thing that always puzzled me, though, is the fact that although the streets were jammed, the buildings we saw were echoing and nearly empty and falling apart. Why the folks in the street didn't break into the apartments and live there is a mystery.

Posted by gyrfalcon | November 5, 2007 9:49 AM

"San Francisco is as "Blade Runner" as it gets, despite the presence here, as I indicated above, of just about every nationality on the planet."

I've been to San Francisco a bunch of times, but this neighborhood of Queens was different: not just lots of Asians, but, except for us, all Asians, and all OTB Asians.

And for all your claims of diversity, San Francisco also has a notable paucity of blacks. You guys are so "progressive" and yet Bay Area blacks are largely consigned to the other side of the Bay Bridge.

Posted by Fred | November 5, 2007 10:00 AM

I saw the movie in the theatre when it first came out, and saw the better director's cut on DVD.

Frankly, if I thought at all about the racial composition of the people in the movie, I thought it was just an overcompensation for the shellacking the first (and, at the time pre-production on Blade Runner was started, only) Star Wars movie had gotten for the complete absence of non-white humans.

Until I read this thread I never heard of ANYONE who thought of the movie or its title as a "byword" for "where out-of-control immigration might take us." To try to argue that the people who thought that are "normal" and everyone who didn't is thereby "abnormal"--that's just whacko. And it's in direct conflict with the main storyline of the movie--which is all about the dangers and moral error of creating (literally, in its world) a permanent underclass and treating them as an inferior race.

Posted by Maxx | November 7, 2007 10:25 PM