The future is now, for Blade Runner fans – for it is in this present month of November 2019 that Ridley Scott’s visionary 1982 science-fiction film BlThe future is now, for Blade Runner fans – for it is in this present month of November 2019 that Ridley Scott’s visionary 1982 science-fiction film Blade Runner is set. The film’s production and reception history involves a story as intricate and compelling as what one sees on screen, and Paul M. Sammon sets forth that story well in his book Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner.
Sammon, a Hollywood-based journalist and filmmaker, has worked on a variety of films such as Platoon (1986) and RoboCop (1987), but has truly made the study of Blade Runner his life’s work. Future Noir was originally published in 1996, but has now been republished in a revised, much-expanded, 594-page magnum opus that members of Blade Runner’s sizable and enthusiastic fan community refer to as “the Blade Runner Bible.”
Future Noir, among other things, works as an explanation of the process by which a major motion picture comes to the screen. It all started with science-fiction author Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the story of a bounty hunter named Rick Deckard whose job it is to hunt down and “retire” renegade androids who have escaped from off-world colonial slavery and come to Earth. The book, with its morally ambiguous story and noir--ish elements, turned out to be perfect for a film that would bring together elements of science fiction and film noir.
After a number of fits and starts, Do Androids Dream was optioned for development; an ambitious young director named Ridley Scott was hired; and two different screenwriters, Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples, took their different shots at adapting Do Androids Dream for the screen – coming up, in the process, with the innovative idea of calling the androids “replicants.” And a talented cast – including Harrison Ford, Sean Young, Rutger Hauer, Edward James Olmos, Daryl Hannah, and Joanna Cassidy – was assembled.
As art directors and set decorators, under Ridley Scott’s close supervision, began to construct the highly distinctive, profoundly detailed production design for which Blade Runner would become particularly well-known, everyone involved with the film seems to have realized that they had the opportunity to create a film that would be much more than a ray-gun shoot-’em-up – as when producer Michael Deeley stated that “The central problems in Blade Runner are essentially moral ones….Should the replicants kill to gain more life? Should Harrison Ford be killing them simply because they want to exist? These questions begin to tangle up Deckard’s thinking” (p. 100).
A shot-by-shot, scene-by-scene, sequence-by-sequence of Blade Runner’s action provides a number of intriguing examples of roads not taken, of ideas that were considered but never filmed, often for reasons of cost. This part of the book also emphasizes how the collaborative nature of filmmaking as an art form means that sometimes the best ideas come together when talented people bounce good ideas off one another.
An example of this principle occurs in the death scene for Roy Batty, the replicant leader played by Rutger Hauer. Looking back, Hauer explains that he felt that the original, protracted, half-page death speech that Batty speaks to Rick Deckard was not suitable: “[W]e’d already seen this opera of dying replicants; I didn’t think the audience would stand another protracted death scene.” When the scene was filmed, therefore, Hauer “cut a little bit out of the opening and then improvised these closing lines: ‘All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die’” (p. 230). It is one of the most deeply moving and poetic moments that I have ever witnessed in cinema.
After a difficult production history and the addition of a dizzying array of special effects, Blade Runner was ready to be presented to the moviegoing world. Editor Terry Rawlings said of an early screening that “when the film finished and the lights came up, Ridley [Scott] turned to me and said, ‘God, it’s marvelous. What the f—k does it all mean?’ We knew then we had a lot to do to really get the audience to understand what was going on. Because this was a very difficult work to translate” (p. 310).
Rawlings’s words were prophetic – for when it was released in 1982, Blade Runner was a critical and commercial failure. Critics generally panned it, and audiences largely stayed away. I saw Blade Runner during its original release, as a 21-year-old college student, and my initial response to the film mirrored what I read in the response cards filled out by early-1980’s moviegoers. The production design was mesmerizing, the actors’ performances were strong and evocative, and Vangelis’ music complemented the film’s action perfectly; but the film’s more graphic moments of violence distracted from the story rather than emphasizing its drama, and there were internal contradictions in the narrative that I still don’t think were ever fully resolved.
To wit: Philip K. Dick’s original Do Androids Dream novel was about a bounty hunter; and it makes sense that a bounty hunter works alone, under dangerous conditions. For his film, director Scott clearly wanted to evoke the traditions of the film noir narrative within a futuristic setting. Yet Blade Runner’s Deckard is a member of a special police squad; and everyone knows that police squads do not send out officers alone to confront dangerous suspects. Think about when you see a vehicle stopped by police in your own town or city. If only one police car is there, then it’s probably a routine traffic stop: speeding, or expired license plates. More than one police car means that it’s a more serious matter – a drug arrest, perhaps or the capture of a dangerous fugitive. It is the principle of bringing superior force to bear, and Blade Runner blithely ignores that basic principle of police work – because the noir elements of the story demand that the protagonist confront dangerous enemies all by himself.
Usually, when a film bombs with critics and at the box office, that is the end of it; it fades into obscurity, with a one- or two-star rating in Leonard Maltin’s Movies on TV books. Yet with the profusion of cable and videocassette technology in the 1980’s, viewers had multiple opportunities to re-view Blade Runner over the years; and increasingly, viewers liked what they saw. The film began to gather a cult following, and Ridley Scott, even while busy with other film projects, found himself returning time and again to Blade Runner, overseeing the release of a Director’s Cut in 1992, and of a “Final Cut” in 2007. To date, six different versions of Blade Runner exist. It is as if the film’s Tyrell Corporation can’t stop turning out new-model replicants!
This updated version of Future Noir includes a discussion of the second Blade Runner film – Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) – as well as new and illuminating interviews with Harrison Ford, Sean Young, and Rutger Hauer. When the film came out, I recall Ford being interviewed by a journalist who, in those post-Star Wars, post-Raiders of the Lost Ark days, asked if Ford wasn’t concerned about being typecast as a summer-blockbuster action hero. Ford’s reply with regard to Blade Runner was something on the order of, “This is not that kind of movie.” Thirty-five years later, Ford suggests, aptly, that the film’s initial critical and commercial failure occurred “Perhaps because it wasn’t…what people originally expected it to be. Blade Runner was a powerful cinematic experience. And, it was ahead of its time” (p. 521).
Like Blade Runner itself, Ford's words are prophetic. Today, in our world of November 2019, rising sea levels caused by climate change threaten coastal cities and small island nations around the world. Overpopulation has accelerated, from 4.6 billion people in the world in 1982 to 7.7 billion people today. Increasing income inequality means that, in more and more cities around the world, the unfortunate many are crowded onto filthy, traffic-choked streets below, while the lucky few enjoy spacious penthouse luxury above. Pervasive surveillance technology, from facial-recognition software in China to CCTV in Great Britain, gives one that sense of constantly being watched by faceless, all-powerful entities. From Times Square to Piccadilly Circus to Shibuya, neon advertisements, three and four stories high, constantly demand the viewer's attention. From New York and Chicago to Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, and Shanghai, impossibly tall skyscrapers loom over the landscape - structures so vast that they can never be torn down but will rather have to be "retrofitted," built onto like the Tyrell Corporation's 700-story-tall pyramidal headquarters. Amid a culture awash in high-tech amusements, there are regular and sudden outbreaks of hideous violence; in response, increasingly militarized police forces wield virtually unlimited power in a manner that puts the rights of ordinary citizens at risk. And the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) technology causes the moral philosophers of today to ask some troubling questions. What does it mean to be sentient? What does it mean to be human?
Our world of today, in short, is a world much like what was forecast in Blade Runner. And any aficionado of this classic motion picture, I think, would enjoy the opportunity to learn more about the film and its production history that is offered by Paul Sammon’s Future Noir....more
Does anyone else out there wonder what it was like reading this visionary science-fiction novel before the year 1982? It was in that year, of course, Does anyone else out there wonder what it was like reading this visionary science-fiction novel before the year 1982? It was in that year, of course, that Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was adapted by director Ridley Scott into the film Blade Runner. That film, with its meticulously crafted vision of a bleak and yet compelling noir-ish near future, became one of the most influential science-fiction films ever made. Indeed, Blade Runner has so profoundly affected our collective sense of what the future should look like that trying to go back and envision what it was like reading this novel between its 1968 publication and, say, 1981 is challenging but worthwhile.
When I was reading a steady diet of science fiction as a college undergraduate in Tidewater Virginia between 1979 and 1983, I must confess that Philip K. Dick’s work was not on my list: I was reading Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, and particularly Ray Bradbury. But Philip K. Dick (“PKD,” to his many fans) stands out through the philosophical depth of his speculative fictions.
PKD used the science-fiction genre to ask big questions regarding life, the universe, and humankind’s place in that universe. At the same time, PKD did not let his work get so intellectual as to be boring: far from it. The mix of action and philosophy has made PKD’s work eminently filmable, and it is for that reason that filmmakers like Paul Verhoeven (with 1990’s Total Recall) and Steven Spielberg (with 2002’s Minority Report) have followed Ridley Scott in seeking to bring PKD’s work to the screen.
All of which leads us to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – unwieldy title and all. Do Androids Dream is set in San Francisco in the year 2022, after a disastrous third world war has left the world polluted with nuclear radiation; people refer to the war as “World War Terminus” or “WWT,” to emphasize the idea that this war has truly brought an end to life on Earth as we have known it. Most of the animal life on Earth is dead, and the ownership of live pets is a treasured status symbol. Most others have to settle for realistic replicas of the animal life that human folly has destroyed – “electric sheep.”
All those who can pass the necessary physical exams leave Earth for “Off-World Colonies” on Mars and other planets, where they are supposed to be served by increasingly human-like androids. But the androids, resenting their off-world slavery, have a habit of wanting to escape their colonial bondage and travel illegally to Earth; and when they do so, they are subject to immediate execution or “retirement” by bounty hunters like the novel’s protagonist, Rick Deckard.
Deckard is described in deliberately unheroic terms. When Isidore, a man who has had to stay on Earth because of his disabilities, first sees Deckard, he is surprised, perhaps disappointed: “In the irregular light the bounty hunter seemed a medium man, not impressive. Round face and hairless, smooth features; like a clerk in a bureaucratic office. Methodical but informal. Not demi-god in shape; not at all as Isidore had anticipated him” (p. 201).
Making Deckard a bounty hunter – and, in effect, a killer-for-hire – establishes the ambience of moral ambiguity that is characteristic of PKD’s novels. Viewers of TV shows like Dog the Bounty Hunter know that the bounty hunter inhabits a kind of moral netherworld. Not bound by the rules that inhibit police officers, but not enjoying the state-sanctioned protection of the badge that police officers carry, the bounty hunter performs an arguably necessary function in detaining bail jumpers and other fugitives and turning them over to the conventional justice system. But the ritual of bounty hunting can involve a lot of ugly violence for both the hunter and the hunted -- violence that takes place below the surface of civilized society. And how many people would really want a bounty hunter for a next-door neighbor, or a best friend?
Seeking out a group of escaped androids, Deckard travels to the headquarters of the Rosen Company that has assembled them. Company chief Eldon Rosen is a walking embodiment of the excesses of contemporary global capitalism. His androids are so virtually identical to humans that bounty hunters like Deckard must employ a complex empathy testing instrument, the Voigt-Kampff test, to tell android from human. Yet when Deckard challenges Rosen’s way of doing business, Eldon is unruffled, even boastful: “We produced what the colonists wanted….We followed the time-honored principle underlying every commercial venture. If our firm hadn’t made these progressively more human types, other firms in the field would have. We knew the risk we were taking when we developed the Nexus-6 brain unit” (p. 51). His arrogance anticipates the hubris of Tyrell Corporation chief Dr. Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner: “Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. ‘More human than human’ is our motto.”
As Deckard undertakes his hunt, he meets androids, and successfully “retires” them; but in the process, we get to know the androids as characters – and they start seeming awfully human. An android named Garland, for example, poses as a police inspector in an alternate police station set up by an android underground to look and work just like a real police station (one of the novel’s less convincing scenarios). Garland is nonetheless identified by Deckard as an android; and once he has been identified, Garland faces his impending demise with an equanimity that invites the reader’s sympathy. Garland tells Deckard that “It was a bad day all day,” and says of the androids’ escape from the Martian colonies that “It’s a chance anyway, breaking free and coming to Earth, where we’re not even considered animals. Where every worm and wood louse is considered more desirable than all of us put together” (p. 113).
That idea of the androids as distinct characters is reinforced once a group of three androids – Roy Baty, who led the escape; his wife Irmgard Baty; and Pris – have taken shelter with Isidore, the man mentioned above. This passage from Do Androids Dream captures well the way the androids emerge for the reader as characters, as people:
At the open door to the hall Irmgard Baty had been standing; they noticed her as she spoke up. “I don’t think we have to worry about Mr. Isidore,” she said earnestly; she walked swiftly toward him, looked up into his face. “They don’t treat him very well either, as he said. And what we did on Mars he isn’t interested in; he knows us and he likes us and an emotional acceptance like that – it’s everything to him. It’s hard for us to grasp that, but it’s true.” To Isidore she said, standing very close to him once again and peering up at him, “You could get a lot of money by turning us in; do you realize that?” Twisting, she said to her husband, “See, he realizes that but still he wouldn’t say anything.”
“You’re a great man, Isidore,” Pris said. “You’re a credit to your race.”
“If he was an android,” Roy said heartily, “he’d turn us in about ten tomorrow morning. He’d take off for his job and that would be it. I’m overwhelmed with admiration.” His tone could not be deciphered; at least Isidore could not crack it. “And we imagined this would be a friendless world, a planet of hostile faces, all turned against us.” He barked out a laugh. (p. 151)
PKD believed that androids could never be truly human – that they could not experience empathy as human beings do. And yet these androids seem to display differing capacities for empathy. Roy seems cold and sardonic; Pris seems singularly lacking in empathy, as shown in a wrenching scene when she tortures a live spider that Isidore found; but Irmgard seems appreciative of Isidore’s protection, and seems to be trying to understand what motivates Isidore’s kindness.
Deckard retires androids, and even has an affair with one of them – Rachael Rosen, who lives as Eldon Rosen’s daughter in the Rosen company headquarters – but the suspense of the novel’s events is always complemented by troubling questions regarding what Deckard is doing. Does Deckard surrender his humanity in the way he interacts with the technology around him? Do all of us?
I am writing this review in November 2019, the month in which Blade Runner is set – in fact, on November 20, 2019, the day identified as the day in the film when Rick Deckard first meets Rachael. To what extent are robots part of our lives? Well, here on the campus of George Mason University, where I teach – here on “Blade Runner Day” – food delivery robots travel around the campus, delivering pizza and coffee to students and others.
These white, six-wheeled, box-shaped robots have become a fixture of the GMU campus. You order your food via an app on your cell phone. The robot brings your food; you type a command into the app, and the robot’s roof lifts up, as the robot cheerily announces, “Hi! Your order is ready!” You take your food out, and the robot offers a jolly “Thank you! Have a nice day!” People on campus say hello to the robots, decorate the robots with fake faces at Halloween, help the robots out of snowdrifts in the wintertime. Just today, I disentangled a robot from a crosswalk sign. I half expected it to say, “Gee, thanks, mister,” or something like that.
I know that the robots on the George Mason campus don’t have a consciousness of their own; at least, I think I know that. But it’s difficult, when watching the robots maneuver briskly around the campus on their six-wheeled food-delivery missions, not to wonder what they might be thinking. Do food-delivery robots dream of being able to do something else with their time? Do androids dream of electric sheep? What is consciousness, and what is empathy? Are only human beings capable of these qualities? Or will the machines that we craft through the power of our accelerating technological prowess someday also possess these characteristics?
These are difficult and troubling questions; and if you want a novel that will get you asking these questions of yourself, then Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a book that you should seek out....more
Loading...
