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Wednesday 17 October 2018

Day 172: Tears in the snow #1

I've been watching Blade Runner 2049. Actually I watched it yesterday, but then Fran came round and I had no time to sit and compose my thoughts, so I had to write about wild mind monkeys instead. I had fifty different things to do today, but found an hour to sit in a coffee shop and make notes. Now I've got a little time to try to form the thoughts into a blog post. Who knows how coherent or flowing it'll be, but I'll do what I can... [Spoilers ahead, I would imagine]

So Blade Runner 2049 is a film that was not crying out to be made. Fans wanted it, certain executives no doubt wanted it, but artistically there was nothing about the first one that required further exploration. It was perfect and final, open, ambiguous, and anything added to it would necessary detract from the purity of the expression. The theatrical release, in fact, famously mashed the film, with an egregious voice-over narration added to explain the moments better left unspoken, and a tacked-on happy ending that didn't fit with the tone.

The director's cut (and later "final cut") removed all that, and pared the film back to its bolder, more mysterious vision. And there the story should lie.

But now here's a sequel, that through its very existence must take that gorgeous possibility soup of the original's ending, in which opposites exist together, and questions remain thankfully unanswered - is Deckard a replicant? What happens to Rachel? Does Gaff let them live? - a sequel must take this soup and boil it down into one single outcome, create a new canon, and remove all ambiguity. It's like taking a piece of art that you love and saying "I don't care about your interpretation, actually we're telling you that it means /this/." And what they say is just the work of some hip young screenwriters, and is never better than the unlimited potential that froths and swirls in your head.

It happened with Star Wars, both the prequels and sequels, and it's what happens here. Of course, they attempt to retain some ambiguity - the Deckard-replicant question, the most tiresome and uninteresting part of the whole thing, gets nodded and winked and nudged and coughed at, and never properly answered. Which, like, who gives a shit? But other stuff is tied down. Rachel, it is revealed, was programmed with an extended lifespan (like in that cheesy theatrical V.O., which for me ruins the whole fucking point - that we don't have much, but we have this; "it's too bad she won't live, but then again, who does?"), and her and Deckard escaped, and she became implausibly pregnant with Deckard's baby, because she was a super special replicant, and Deckard sent them away and went into hiding so none of them were discovered, but then Rachel died in childbirth, and the baby... well the baby drives the plot of the sequel.


The filmmakers work so hard to get this all to hold together, and to use it to carve out space to tell their own story. In many ways they're successful, but, Christ, can you feel the plot straining on its guy ropes, and you never overcome the sense that everyone involved is making the best of something that inherently shouldn't exist.

But, hey, saying all that, you can still watch the original and then turn it off and leave it there. And you can still watch this and see it as its own beast, and keep it separate from that thing you love. And there is much here to admire.

The opening is excellent. Gone, yes, is the sumptuous fiery nightscape that begins the original, but in its place - after the obligatory callback of the close-up of the eye - is a soaring journey over the grey desolate gloom of protein farms and industrial installations stretching into the mists - swallowed by the mists - the structures of a humanity not forging new life from the flames but clinging to the edge of a dying rock in the emptiness of space.

It's bleak, it's low-key, and I love it.

Down from the establishing landscape shots our first intimate moment is of a rubber-gloved hand scooping maggots out of a murky pool. This is life, the film posits: maggots crawling in the murk. Whether human, insect, replicant, or computer AI, life for all of us is the same: cold and lonely and meaningless, yet we cling to it still with everything we possess. We crawl, we know not why, even as our planet fades beneath us, and if pressed we will kill others to keep ourselves alive. Killing in the world of Blade Runner is not savoured, it is repugnant and sad, yet everything does it, when there is no choice.

So it is with Officer K, the replicant protagonist played by Ryan Gosling. He is a Blade Runner, a bounty hunter tasked with tracking down and "retiring" the older models of replicant who were not as obedient as he himself is. He retires them by shooting them with his gun.

Officer K has found an older model in the film's opening - the owner of the gloved hand, a replicant that has been hiding out for twenty years as a protein farmer, played with physicality yet a gentle weariness by Dave Bautista - and Officer K is here to do his job.

He does it. He does not enjoy it. But if it wasn't him it would be someone else, and he would just be killed for not following orders. Such is life.


It's a good scene, with themes from the Philip K. Dick source novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, that were less explored in the first Blade Runner film, and it works well through Denis Villeneuve's direction. The cinematography is exquisite, the colour work is affecting, the framing is great, there's superb chiaroscuro, a good rhythm, good sound design, excellent performances, it all works a treat.

Any time the film is exploring this theme, of existence as something filled with pain to which we nevertheless cling, it is strong. There's another related theme about K wanting to be special, to be unique, to be the chosen one, the hero, and then finding it all was a lie and he's no one, he's not the baby that was born, but a replicant made in a lab - and this theme is great as well. We all believe ourselves to be special - we have been the centre of everything we've experienced, after all; the world literally revolves around us - but in truth we're flecks of dust, meaningless maggots - we crawl to stay alive, because that's all we know, and then we die.

Yet beneath the shifting forms of life and death, beneath the almost incessant pain, is there not something shared that binds us together, something deeper to which we are drawn. "Kinship" the murderous Roy Batty cries at the conclusion to the first film, as in his dying moments he reaches out and saves the falling Deckard's life. The story of Blade Runner 2049 ends with Officer K sacrificing himself for another, bleeding out in the snow, alone and unnoticed, yet having for a brief time truly lived.

I am reminded of that classic haiku by the Buddhist poet Issa:

This dewdrop world -
May be a dewdrop world,
And yet, and yet...

And now I must leave that there, because I'm in for the delivery at 7am tomorrow, and once again it is past midnight. But I think I'll jot down some more thoughts if I have time tomorrow (though I'm busy until late evening), about the engine of plot, Harrison "Will Act for a Paycheck" Ford, and the film's problem with women.

Until then x

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