Notes on the Perfection of Blade Runner
A random accumulation of notes on the rewatching of Blade Runner, and on trying to figure out why it leaves such an indefatigable impression on viewers.
It’s true that perfection has many definitions. And if you view something as perfect then how can it have faults? Or are faults contributing factors to the awe of the perfect? Can an effect be said to be perfect if you can see the wires that manipulate the puppet? Can a movie about artifice get the job done if you can see an awkward edit point? Is the very nature of perfection all tied up with its lack of obtainability, and so is perfection something different to flawlessness? I would suggest flawlessness is not the same thing as faultlessness. And so I see no fault when watching Blade Runner in seeing the wires that pull up the hover car. I think it’s a shame they were edited out digitally in the 2007 Final Cut (although I get that they couldn’t leave them in). I like the judder of the edit when Leon knocks Deckard’s gun from his hand. It reminds me we’re watching a film about the human relationship with technology (amongst other things), and whether will eventually be able to detect the joins.
I’ve been rewatching Blade Runner. I do this surprisingly often, and it’s the second time I’ve watched it this year, the first being the inuagural night my baby son was home from the hospital in early May and I sat up with him asleep in my lap into the wee small hours, his mother getting some much needed rest in our bed upstairs. Serendipitously, I am currently researching the evolution of the family unit in science fiction literature, specifically, writing concerned with climate catastrophe. So, this last week has brought me to one of my favourite subjects, and that is the Blade Runner universe. (Blade Runner is a climate change movie as well as many other things). I’ve reread the origin novel, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), and rewatched the Ridley Scott movie and the Denis Villeneuve sequel. All are great works, although the novel has the strange honour of being the least satisfying narrative and stylistic experience of the three, whilst being the most infuriatingly complex in its realm of ideas. Anyway, all that matters here is that the centre point of the three - Blade Runner - is perfection. It is the apex of director Scott’s layered approach to visual storytelling. Academic and Blade Runner expert Scott Bukatman has said of Scott’s philosophy that there is “no psychology without an accompanying sociology, no individual in isolation”. This technique has meant that Blade Runner stands tall in the heady world of science fiction, but also reaches far beyond the thrills of genre to a place of ideas. But it is also almost impossible to hold on to. I have found that every time I go back and watch Blade Runner, it is like experiencing it for the first time. There is a magicians spell at work. Or, rather, the spells of a college of magicians. I’m going to try and quickly pull apart some of my thinking on this here. It’s rushed and incomplete, but that approach, while compiling, has felt less fraught and more correct considering the subject matter.
Here’s why Blade Runner is perfect…
It is epic and personal
…just as all great films are in some way or another. If you wanted to break it down to a most asinine elevator pitch, Blade Runner is about one man’s quest for his own identity, and how he finds love along the way. But, outside the elevator, it is also, and most enduringly, about what it is to be human - and not in an abstract sense. The “replicant”, the androids created to work as slave labour on off-planet colonies, is the perfect metaphor for the evolving story of humankind. That Deckard falls in love with one, and we are left wondering (in original edits of the film, at least) if he is a replicant himself, adds epic richness, not personal confusion.
It’s sexy.
Whilst many critics cite Citizen Kane, or Vertigo, or The Exorcist, as the greatest movies ever made, I’d argue it’s not possible to meet the criteria without being sexy. Blade Runner is damned sexy, and those other films are not (unless moribund priests do it for you). There is a simmering intensity between Deckard and Rachael - one of the few things in the film that feels real, and is supposed to. But also, the lighting, the nourish tincture, and Vangelis’s sax. Harrison Ford has never looked better and Sean Young is stunning in her Uber-noir get-up. It’s a damn sexy film.
It’s cooler than the book.
The book, I must admit, leaves me a bit cold for the most part, and Deckard is at best a bit of dick; petulant and whiney and chauvinist and weak. The movie has him much more broody, much more Philip Marlowe. (Apparently Philip K Dick was angry about the heightening of the noir elements of his novel by Scott for the movie). But the most telling sign of the movie’s coolness is the renaming of elements from the novel source material. In the book, the androids are known colloquially as andys, which, when hunted, sounds like Andrews are in for a bad day. They become Replicants in the movie. The Rosens, the sinister family corporation that manufactures the andys, become the Tyrells, a more solid (and less… erm… Jewish) name to give a family of corporate puppet masters. The title itself, Blade Runner, taken from the William Burroughs novel, is a better name for a film than the excellent but pensive and literary Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Ambiguity breeds longevity.
Up until the Final Cut in 2007, watchers of Blade Runner could never be sure if Deckard was a replicant or not. This kind of ambiguity is the stuff of great cinema. To create something that excites in its nebulosity, rather than confuses, and for the questions to linger for a generation or two, is high art. The alternate versions of the film that have been released over the years (most of them neatly housed in the 5-disc box set) have offered up different weights for different interpretations, and I have sympathy for those who resent the Final Cut for being definitive on this in the final frames. But this leads me to my next point…
Blade Runner is many films.
It’s okay to have your favourite edit, but, really, they all mean something. Be it the Workprint Prototype version shown at San Diego test screenings in 1982, the US theatrical release with a “happy ending” and Deckard voiceover, the International release from 1982 with extra violence, the 1992 Director’s Cut which wasn’t edited by Scott, or the Final Cut from 2007, which was, they all feed in to the experience of the film.
You can watch it any way you like.
There is no optimum environment or print. There are wonders in store if you have never seen the high definition remaster. All the details of the constructed world, the lighting, the grain, the lived-in feel of the retrofitted Los Angeles. But there is still so much atmosphere and filth to wallow in if you watch the muted muffled original theatrical release. The gloopy shadows and burned ambers. If, like many, like me, you first saw Blade Runner on a grizzled VHS in the 80s with a fizzy line across the top and bottom, you remember the anxiety of the unseen. There is no “bad print” of Blade Runner.
It is structurally perfect.
Despite myriad edits and versions and interpretations, one thing that never falters is the integrity of the movie’s structure. A propulsive detective thriller that moves us through its chapters with the rhythms of an orchestra. Worth mentioning, too, that the structure is not complicated, doesn’t subvert or play around with structure like a Christopher Nolan movie might do (that guy is obsessed with twisting things around and blowing your mind by putting this bit that should be over there, over here). It is straight forward, emotionally and philosophically complex, but brick by brick is meticulously placed like one foot in front of the other. This allows all that other stuff to get to work ie. the magic of the vision of the future.
The music.
In the soundtrack, Vangelis created a soundscape that both spoke of the vast, wheezing, bloated futurism of Ridley Scott’s imagined universe, and of the retro noir feel of the plot. As movie openings go, the rising synths that wash over the cityscape are close to unsurpassed. It is a new dawn for sci-fi. We are in a world expunged of the classical delights of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and far removed from the rousing pomp of John Williams’ compositions for Star Wars. Vangelis’s synthesisers reverberate off the metallic structures, the deep amber light, and the acidic downpours. It is part of the landscape, not laid on top of it.
Detail is everything.
You can spend a lifetime going over the level of detail put up on the screen in Blade Runner. Scott’s technique for layering detail became his hallmark as a director, and in the making of… documentary, Dangerous Days (one of the great documentaries on cinema), there is an insightful segment on the attention given to Deckard’s apartment (something which really gives life to the hi-def version of the film now available). So, as I’ve argued, it’s a film that rewards countless rewatching. But the exemplar of the dedication to world-building can be most readily seen in the casting of Edward James Olmos as cop Eduardo Gaff. Olmos, without direction from Scott, invented the street lingo in which his character speaks, completely off his own back.
Special Effects
Obviously, the look of Blade Runner is era-defining, and its influence on cinema is far reaching. But it wouldn’t be a non-definitive list of reasons why Blade Runner is perfect if I didn’t mention that it’s the masterpiece of Douglas Trumbull. He wasn’t the only person to work on the effects (the story of how the film was made is as layered and troubled and rich as the story in the film itself), but Trumbull is a figure responsible (not single-handedly) for the direction of travel for the look and feel of American movies in the 1970s and 80s.
Cinematography
Just as Trumbull brought his own stamp to the vision of Scott, so did Jordan Cronenweth make a distinctive contribution with the lens. It’s difficult to imagine Blade Runner having the impact it has had without “the look” Cronenweth gave it. His technique, to use soft front light and uplight with hard back light to create, deep, intense silhouettes, not only evokes the noir movies of the 40s and 50s, but boldly updates it. But he also knows how to contrast interior darkness and exterior dreariness. Think of the dazzling neon in that remarkable sequence when Deckard “retires” Zhora and she crashes through the series of plate glass windows and the mannequins therein. Blade Runner, perhaps more than any other movie, is a carefully assembled tableaux of images that imprint on your mind. Think of the advertising blimp hovering over the Bradbury building, Deckard’s blood misting into his vodka, the testing of Rachael in the Tyrell building… these lasting images are all the work of Trumbull and Cronenweth.
Noir Gold
As I’ve said, Blade Runner evokes the atmosphere of noir whilst also updating it. This is seen most markedly in Deckard’s interrogation of the photograph that leads him ultimately to Zorah. Here, I’ll just quote the excellent analysis of this scene by Scott Bukatman…
“By electronically enhancing the photo with his computer, the surface of the image is penetrated. This inert object, a mere trace of the past, becomes multidimensional and is suddenly possessed of the present-tense modality of cinema. Deckard issues commands like a film director (‘Track right… Now pull back…’) and the frozen moment of the photograph is granted new temporality. A grid is overlaid on this field and measured co-ordinates regulate and guide the detective’s movement across the terrain of externalised memory. The classic scene of searching a room for clues is now played out on a terminal. The screen, the frontier separating electronic and physical realities, becomes permeable; the space behind it, tangible. The sequence anticipates the narratives of Tron and Neuromancer, in which humans are more physically inserted into cyberspace. The sequence, with its fantasied control of the projected image, is a most hypnotic meditation on cinematic power.”
Peopling the Universe
Another obvious point, but Blade Runner is perfectly cast. And the casting had some important ripple effects. In the storyboarding of Blade Runner, for instance, Deckard is sketched in a fedora, emphasising the noir detective ambitions of the vision for the film. It’s hard not to feel this would have been overkill. The casting of Harrison Ford, who had just played Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, meant the fedora was a no-go (Scott rightly felt it would confuse cinema-goers with the connection between the characters). As we have also seen, the casting of Olmos gave added depth to the Blade Runner universe with his invented street lingo; but also Rutger Hauer, who famously penned the immortal final speech of Roy Batty…
“I've seen things... seen things you little people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as magnesium... I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments... they'll be gone. Time to Die.”
As I mentioned at the beginning, Blade Runner is a movie that I return to frequently, and always, when that eye appears and Vangelis’ music rises, it’s like embarking on a new adventure every time. Blade Runner never gets old. I come to it every time, perhaps somewhat suspiciously, as if my historical relationship with it is an implanted memory, and I’ve never really encountered it before at all.
In this piece I have referred to Scott Bukatman’s brilliant book-length essay on the film for the BFI Film Classics series, and I highly recommend it.
Also, the excellent documentary Dangerous Days, which is available as an extra on disc versions of the film.
Notes on the Perfection of Blade Runner
This movie has been with me at least twice a year since it's release in 82. I love it as if it were a sentient being. Gloriously beautiful in every way.