Here we can have a discussion on the various topics relevant to Blade Runner.
To those new to it: which version did you see? What were your overall impressions of it.
What do people think of the narration in the film?
If you've read the source material, how does it size up to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Here I'll confess I've never actually finished the book. I've started reading it twice but for no particular reason I've never read it all the way through.
Also check out the post which inspired the selection for this week:
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I think I might buy the Blade Runner soundtrack on iTunes. I just dig the heck out of that sound lately. I've been listening to a few artists on New Retro Wave records, and it's a good time. It's good music to work to.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is borderline unreadable, but then that describes virtually everything Phillip K Dick ever wrote. The twin subplots of Sheep are "is it ethical to murder androids that imitate humans so well" for Deckerd and "can androids have a religion" for the androids that ties together in Mercerism, which basically becomes nihilism, which is the basic message of everything PKD ever wrote. The "Blade Runner" aspect of Sheep is reflected in a minor character Deckerd meets at the fake police station who is a cop that is also a replicant that doesn't know he's a replicant. Peebles, Fancher et. al. correctly surmised that this angle is far more human and relatable than the original Deckerd and his wife Iran, who eventually settle quite happily with yet another fake barnyard animal. The book is a hard-core waste of time. I can't recommend it.Deckard goes to an uninhabited, obliterated region of Oregon to reflect. He climbs a hill when he is hit by falling rocks and realizes this is an experience similar to Mercer's. Rushing back to his car, he stumbles abruptly upon a toad, an animal previously thought to be extinct, and one of the animals sacred to Mercer himself. With newfound joy, Deckard brings the toad home, where Iran quickly discovers that it is just a robot. While Deckard is unhappy, he decides that he at least prefers to know the truth: whether the toad is real or artificial, remarking with an exhausted reflection upon the events that have taken place that "The electrical things have their lives too, paltry as those lives are".
I feel like I read a quote somewhere that Phillip K. Dick was high on speed writing a lot of his fiction because he needed to pump out books to support a family. It... might explain a lot. I've been trying to find the quote - Can't seem to, but I have found a lot of information about Dick and his relationship with drugs, which doesn't seem to have been a good one, on the whole. I mean, most people take drugs because they have a hard time dealing with their shit, and the shit they see in the real world. It makes sense that, if Dick saw the world the way he often described it in his fiction, that he'd want to check out.
I Was Philip K Dick's Reluctant Host on BBC Radio 4 might interest you.
yo. page 11, Future Noir. Still, the author never looked upon his early drug usage as anything other than a purely pragmatic answer to money problems. While once speaking to me in 1981, Dick himself justified his amphetamine habit by stating "I took so much speed simply because I had to support myself by writing fiction. And the only way I could do that was to write a lot of it."I feel like I read a quote somewhere that Phillip K. Dick was high on speed writing a lot of his fiction because he needed to pump out books to support a family. It... might explain a lot.
Despite this extra income, however, Dick's financial state was still precarious. Casting about for ways to further increase his literary output, Dick hit upon a dangerous solution: amphetamines. Massive quantities of them. This gambit initially paid off with increased productivity, but eventually levied a heavy fine upon Dick's mental health, as we shall see.
I ended up seeing the U.S. Theatrical Cut. Grumpy Ford was mostly unneccessary, as the pre-film explanation text was enough to infer most of what Deckard was thinking. Especially considering the plot was pretty darn predictable - based on the first parts I already guessed that the Replicants would die one by one, with some standoff at the end. But I acknowledge that that's my modern movie-trained eye watching this piece of film history, so it's not an entirely fair point of critique. (In similar vein, is Blade Runner and/or Philip K. Dick the origin for the 'is he a robot or not' trope? Westworld comes to mind...) The faults that I found pretty noticeable were the film's odd pacing and some of the plot holes. The final scene just drags on without a good reason - you could cut it in half and wouldn't notice a change in the narrative. The snake lady chase had similar issues. On the other hand, I did like how the movie slowed down from when the first bullet hit her to the resulting scene around the crime. If only other parts of the movie lingered in a single space, during a single dramatic moment like that. I found the aesthetic and the music the most enjoyable aspect of the film. To my untrained eye, the cinematography was often great and retro-futuristic L.A. very impressive considering how old the movie is. The movie was very dark most of the time - maybe my TV isn't phenomenal in rendering blacks, maybe I needed to close more curtains, but I felt like the movie tried to hide flaws in darkness. My dad is a Vangelis nut and he immediately recognized the music, despite never having seen the movie. I wished there was more of it in the film, it's spread quite thinly in my opinion. Concluding, the narrative itself was not something to write home about and I wasn't very engaged in that senes. But given its combination of music, cinematography and visuals, I can appreciate Blade Runner for the (mostly) cohesive style and outlook that it brought to the table.
Blade Runner is a noir, and noir have tropes. Blade Runner hits those tropes. "Is he a robot or not" could probably go clear back to "is she a witch or not". I mean, by the time Westworld had come out Star Trek had been off the air for six years and off the top of my head there's three "are they robots" episodes in there. I can think of a couple Twilight Zones, too. A quick dive down TV Tropes makes me hypothesize Pinocchio in 1883, which wouldn't exist without Frankenstein in 1818. Ridley Scott is all about odd pacing. He comes from an art/commercial background and look matters far more than story. Tony Scott was far, far worse. Here's one of the most useless, slowest, most pointless openings of a vampire movie ever made that is also totally fucking awesome: Blade runner is, most assuredly, style over substance. But that style, when it came out, was something. Here's Meg Ryan in 1982: Here's Chevrolet in 1982: Here's TV in 1982: And, I mean: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billboard_Year-End_Hot_100_singles_of_1982 Blade Runner represented "another direction" almost as firmly as Star Wars had. I think most people who are still entirely too enamored of it definitely view it in context, while people who, like, weren't born yet will never really have the same relationship with it.
I'm definitely with him on the voice-over. I'm pretty sure it got added in simply because they were afraid audiences wouldn't understand what was going on, which is a hell of a danger sign. The director's cut without it is far better.