Listen to the Rain

So after a whole weekend of partying and staying up late, I came back to Chicago and...immediately decided to to go to a late-night showing of Blade Runner. I mean, now it's an alternate history movie (as of just under a week ago)! I had to see it while it was still on the bleeding edge of the future.

Also, the whole audience laughed when this came on the screen:


This showing was the Final Cut, which I've never seen before. The last time I saw Blade Runner was as a university student, when jdcohen and jmenda were astonished that I'd never seen it, so we piled into a disused conference room in Stouffer House along with t3chnomag3, meistert, and some other people I've fallen out of contact with and watched the theatrical release on a projector. As soon as the voice over started, jmenda audibly groaned. I didn't know what I was missing, but I thought it was pretty good.

This was all before I started describing my aesthetic as "cyberpunk elf" or "an extra from Blade Runner."

So that was my half-remembered experience when I went into Blade Runner this time, and I was surprised how much was the same and how much was different. For one, it's not all just Japanese in the background! There's a lot of Chinese too, and occasionally Russian and Spanish. Los Angeles of 2019 is more diverse than the derivative material gives it credit for. This time I did understand the brief bit of Japanese, when the noodle vendor welcomes Deckard and then tells him that two is plenty (二つで充分ですよ！) when he tries to order four fish. There's a Japanese comic about it here that answers the question "What is Deckard ordering and why are they arguing about numbers?"

I forgot how weirdly disjointed the movie was. I can kind of see why the studio execs wanted to add a voice over, though the movie is clearly better without it. There's a lot of confusing shots of rain-slick streets, empty buildings, crowds who almost completely ignore everything going on around them, and scenes with no dialogue and barely any action. It does a lot to immerse you in a world of future shock, where everything is weird and strange and what does it mean to be human--or as my brain insists on search-replacing that with, "What is a man?"--but I was sometimes relying on my memory of what the movie was about rather than what was actually happening on the screen.

I also love all the design aesthetics. The use of chiaroscuro, with the darkness everywhere occasionally lit by flashes of bright light, and the way there are a lot of "unnecessary" details on everything. Deckard's dingy apartment has a bunch of large blocks set together like bricks and almost bas-relief-like murals all throughout. And all the asymmetricality! The apartment is laid out strangely, the clothes have extra curlicues on them, and even the whiskey glasses Deckard drinks out of are strangely designed, as is the bottle of whiskey. A bunch of my clothes are asymmetrical like that now, because apparently that's the cyberpunk aesthetic, I assume entirely due to this movie.

I also completely forgot the middle section, much like when I reread Neuromancer a couple years ago, but I'm not sure if there were any scenes added to it for the Final Cut. And I appreciate how the Final Cut also hints slightly more strongly that Deckard is a replicant, but still leaves everything up in the air.

(I know about Blade Runner 2049, but I haven't seen it)

I'm really glad I went to see it again, since it had been so long and now I'm in a much better mindset to appreciate it, and at the perfect time to do so, too! Now I just need to wait thirty years and then go see Blade Runner 2049 before I die in the Water Wars.