Soap has been at the center of some of the most visceral private and public expressions of racism in South Africa. For all the “apart-ness” that the government tried to enforce through both “grand apartheid” and “petty apartheid,” which worked to control the public interaction between black and white bodies in public toilets, benches, trains, buses, swimming pools, and other facilities, a contradictory intimacy developed in everyday private interactions as black people still labored, and even lived, in the workplaces, kitchens, nurseries, bedrooms, and bathrooms of white South Africans. The uses—and alleged non-uses—of this ordinary household item are thus entwined in the country’s history.
Books
Year One: Resistance Research
Probably the greatest misconception about the resistance is that it’s a youth movement. By an overwhelming majority, the leaders of the groups are middle-aged women—middle-aged white women, to be exact. A great many of them have never been involved in electoral politics before. Many never even went to a protest before they got on a bus to the Women’s March back in January. “The Democratic Party is really good at misreading energy on the ground,” says L.A. Kauffman, the author of Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism. I’m afraid that consultants will swoop in, vacuum up phone and email lists, import kids from Brooklyn to get out the vote, then vanish again. If people newly roused to political action are going to stay roused, then the Democratic Party had better pay attention and follow their lead.
Up the Masthead
The other day I was sitting in Melville’s house, writing at his desk. Outside, fallen leaves scudded by in the light Berkshires breeze. It was the 166th anniversary of the publication of Moby-Dick, a fact I realized with a bit of a shiver only after I returned home. Melville loved this corner of Massachusetts, and over the thirteen years he lived at Arrowhead, his farm in Pittsfield, he composed his greatest works in its second-floor study. And now here I was, staring at a blank page and breathing similar air. When I needed to stretch my legs I walked outside and in a few paces stood before the door of his dear friend Hawthorne, but no one was home. Same at Oliver Wendell Holmes’s place, and Longfellow’s too. Thoreau’s house was locked, a piece of paper printed with the words “Writer at work, do not disturb” laid on the doorstep.
Actually, I was at a shadow Arrowhead, a proxy second-floor study in the form of a freestanding tiny house. That the similar homes of four other quintessential Massachusetts writers of the mid-nineteenth century were only steps away from each other was a function of the same sleight-of-hand that brought these mobile writing rooms into existence and to the same patch of ground on the campus of Mass MoCA, a vast contemporary art museum housed in a defunct textile printing factory in North Adams. Architects Tessa Kelly and Chris Parkinson built succinct architectural quotations from the houses of five American Renaissance writers for the purpose of using “history as a platform to support the imagination and production of new creative work in Pittsfield.” Last summer these were scattered throughout northwest Massachusetts, five writers selected for residencies. Now together at Mass MoCA until the end of October and possibly beyond, they have been made available to anyone who reserves a three-hour slot. A mini-residency in a mini-house. But the experience had nothing small about it. It was vertiginously expansive. The less there is to observe the more there is to see.
The project is aptly named The Mastheads, after chapter 35 of Moby-Dick, in which Ishmael describes the visionary effects of standing watch in a minuscule aerie above the infinite sea, “lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie”
that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it.
Melville is just as surely depicting the act of sitting in a small study before the boundless white of the writing sheaf.
Each writer who goes into retreat — a circumstance that partakes of every aspect of Webster’s definition, from “to go back or backward” to “religious retirement” to “an establishment for the mentally ill” — faces both inward and out. What surrounds a writer matters integrally to what is produced there. There is the privacy of the “room of one’s one” that becomes permission; there is the solitude of the mountaintop upon which one either writes or gazes from afar. Every work of literature in existence incredibly enough began the same way, with someone entering a room and placing a mark on a previously blank surface. From void to plenitude, using only vaporous materials: thought, hope, bravery, foolhardiness. What Melville, for one, encountered inside his writing room was more dangerous than anything he faced on a whaling ship in the Pacific.
Not only does environment provide the specific conditions under which a work is made, it is in a way the only subject.
Mount Greylock, dominating the landscape of this portion of the state, also dominates the imagination of those who write here. From its height, Thoreau viewed “such a country as we might see in dreams, with all the delights of paradise,” as he wrote in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Its humped form might have inspired the figure of the white whale in Moby-Dick. Melville went on to dedicate Pierre: or, The Ambiguities to the mountain itself. In its shadow I shut the door on Melville’s studio and tried not to freak out.
Even though the battery on my phone had mysteriously died, the main occasion for emotional meltdown these days. Even though the idea of sitting anywhere Melville sat, even representationally, should have been terminally crushing to anyone who has entertained the notion of calling themselves a writer. Even though there was little way to procrastinate beyond going to peer into the other little houses, subtly different but all also the same, with ascetic pine interiors containing identical desks, single chairs, and benches — because you never know when you will need to recline. Even though I had to go find a rock to keep the latchless door closed against the wind that kept blowing it open, leaving me feeling exposed and unable to concentrate. (The houses’ doors, and walls, were admirably thick, perhaps to withstand the inevitable banging of heads against them.)
It happened all at once, then. I felt at ease and I felt time expand. Three hours was a yawning eternity that would end all too quickly.
Later I wished I could have known what was going on over there in Thoreau’s cabin: was inspiration coming in the louvered windows in great pine-scented gusts and its occupant transforming it into genius on the page even as I stared at knots in the wood? Had the spirit of Longfellow come to sit in his, minting money with every new line of Evangeline? Was Hawthorne in residence, changing fiction forevermore?
As I had approached North Adams, not knowing which of the little houses to which I would retreat, I had secretly wished for one. There was no disputing the honor of writing in the presence of the ghost of Holmes or Hawthorne or Thoreau. The only one I found myself hoping I might avoid was Longfellow’s, given the unappealing model of a writer who was a huge success in his lifetime but whom posterity has largely dismissed: the time for the first possibility had anyway passed, and the second was already all but assured. But I held out particular hope for Melville, grief-filled though his life might have been. Pierre received a major review under the headline “Herman Melville Crazy”; his first book of poetry’s modest printing remained largely unsold a decade later. The second attempt at a poetry book, his epic, had to be privately printed. The total run was a quarter of the first’s — with half of that ending up pulped. Only after his death did the world realize its mistake.
So in his house, how could I not: I wrote about writing. I thought about the conditions, and the courage, necessary for its production. I thought about how many separate pieces of wood made up the blank wall in front of me. Page after page of my notebook turned, except during those elastic minutes spent staring through the slit of window onto the green world beyond, where I heard as if for the first time the sound of an airplane crossing the sky. When I next looked inside, there it was. Nothing, and everything.
The less there is to observe the more there is to see.
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Ricketts to Reporters: Drop Dead
Was the shutdown of the online news sites DNAinfo and Gothamist purely an act of spite? Ricketts’s acquisition of Gothamist in March suggests that he had been determined to make the business work. He seemed willing to continue to try to “crack the code” of profitability at DNAinfo only if his reporters had no bargaining power. News organizations’ only recourse at present is to hope that Congress may enact antitrust legislation that takes into account the monopolistic evolution of the Internet.
Bolshevism’s New Believers
Yuri Slezkine’s monumental new study, The House of Government, situates the Russian Revolution within a much larger drama, but one that resists the modernization narrative and instead places the Bolsheviks among ancient Zoroastrians and Israelites, early Christians and Muslims, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Puritans, Old Believers, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Rastafarians, and other millenarian sects. As sworn enemies of religion, the Bolsheviks would have hated this casting decision and demanded to be put in a different play, preferably with Jacobins, Saint-Simonians, Marxists, and Communards in supporting roles. Slezkine, however, has claimed these groups for his story as well, insisting that underneath their secular costumes they too dreamed of hastening the apocalypse and building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The Bolsheviks, it seems, were condemned to repeat history—a history driven not by class struggle, as they thought, but by theology.
Virgil Revisited
David Ferry’s previous outings with Virgil, in his matchless Eclogues and Georgics, had already convinced me that he has some sort of uncanny connection to the great poet. Especially when reading the Eclogues, one hears a new-old voice, as if Virgil had miraculously learned English and decided it might do as well as Latin. This kind of translation almost needs a new name, to distinguish it from all the other worthy efforts to bring the ancient poets to life: it is an iteration, another version, but also—perhaps, almost—the thing itself.
The B&N Podcast: Lawrence O’Donnell
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
If you’re one of those people who thinks of 2016 as a uniquely tumultuous and unpredictable year in American politics, the writer and MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell would like to draw your attention to a presidential contest not quite half a century ago. His new book Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics takes a dramatist’s approach to history, revisiting the year in which President Johnson declined to run again, assassins cut down two of the most iconic leaders of the moment, and fight for one party’s nomination pitted protestors against the police in an American metropolis. The result, says the author, permanently altered the state of American politics. In this episode, Lawrence O’Donnell talks with Bill Tipper about how he melded memoir and history to render a portrait of a year that he believes is still shaping our society.
The 1968 U.S. Presidential election was the young Lawrence O’Donnell’s political awakening, and in the decades since it has remained one of his abiding fascinations. For years he has deployed one of America’s shrewdest political minds to understanding its dynamics, not just because it is fascinating in itself, but because in it is contained the essence of what makes America different, and how we got to where we are now. Playing With Fire represents O’Donnell’s master class in American electioneering, embedded in the epic human drama of a system, and a country, coming apart at the seams in real time.
Nothing went according to the script. LBJ was confident he’d dispatch with Nixon, the GOP frontrunner; Johnson’s greatest fear and real nemesis was RFK. But Kennedy and his team, despite their loathing of the president, weren’t prepared to challenge their own party’s incumbent. Then, out of nowhere, Eugene McCarthy shocked everyone with his disloyalty and threw his hat in the ring to run against the president and the Vietnam War. A revolution seemed to be taking place, and LBJ, humiliated and bitter, began to look mortal. Then RFK leapt in, LBJ dropped out, and all hell broke loose. Two assassinations and a week of bloody riots in Chicago around the Democratic Convention later, and the old Democratic Party was a smoldering ruin, and, in the last triumph of old machine politics, Hubert Humphrey stood alone in the wreckage.
Suddenly Nixon was the frontrunner, having masterfully maintained a smooth façade behind which he feverishly held his party’s right and left wings in the fold, through a succession of ruthless maneuvers to see off George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, and the great outside threat to his new Southern Strategy, the arch-segregationist George Wallace. But then, amazingly, Humphrey began to close, and so, in late October, Nixon pulled off one of the greatest dirty tricks in American political history, an act that may well meet the statutory definition of treason. The tone was set for Watergate and all else that was to follow, all the way through to today.
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Year One: It’s Up to Us
In a weak democracy, an authoritarian leader like Trump could do widespread and lasting damage. Such leaders often control the legislature, are immune from court oversight, and suppress civil society institutions. But our hallowed traditions of judicial independence, civil liberties, and a robust political culture have—thus far, at least—held Trump in check to an important degree. The courts cannot stand up to President Trump alone, however, and it would be a great mistake to think they could. In the end, the most important guardian of liberty is an engaged citizenry.
Putin’s Russia: Revolution, What Revolution?
Russia is no longer a country forged in the crucible of revolution; it is the land of the tsars and the Orthodox Church. Out went the relics of communism, with its mass demonstrations and portraits of Lenin; in came the relics of the Orthodox Church, with its miracles and icons. In the new lyrics of the national anthem, still sung to the old Soviet tune, “The unbreakable union of free republics” becomes “Russia, our sacred dominion.” In this revised version of Russian history, Vladimir Putin appears as the savior tsar.
Anatomy of an Android: The History of Blade Runner’s Future
Consuming almost three hours of screen time, Denis Villeneuve’s long-awaited — and simultaneously long-dreaded — sequel to Blade Runner, the 1982 film by Ridley Scott, challenges the viewer to affirm or deny that the original material — including Philip K. Dick’s seed novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — merits and can sustain such a monumental follow-up. Are there really still sufficient unexplored depths to the nascent franchise to shoulder such a return?
Despite a semi-disappointing performance at the box office, the film’s initial critical reception — and this writer’s personal appreciation — attests to the validity of both Villeneuve’s handling of the material and that material’s inherent unplumbed reaches. Indeed, the ramifications of Dick’s initial vision — very much the product of 1968 and quintessentially of its time — and its extension by Scott in the film, which embodies the burgeoning cyberpunk concerns and esthetics of the 1980s, are brilliantly and honorably extended by the 2017 vehicle.
But to fully appreciate the new addition to what has become an essential part of SF’s cinematic canon, we really do need to go back and examine its roots. Lawrence Sutin’s Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick provides essential context for the creation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Sutin reports that the year 1966 was a pivotal one for Dick, during which the writer’s block “that had plagued him ever since he left [his third wife] Anne in 1964” finally broke. There came swiftly, at Dick’s usual pell-mell, first-draft-only, amphetamine-fueled pace, several books, with Do Androids Dream? being completed that same year. The two-year gap between completion and appearance in 1968 has no recorded explanation, such as a list of publisher rejections. But when it appeared as a Doubleday hardcover in March 1968, thanks to the good taste and patronage of editor Larry Ashmead (1932–2010), Dick must have felt chuffed. especially after being restricted to so many paperback originals during his career (such as his previous outing, The Ganymede Takeover, in 1967). Some time later, an additional $9,000 for paperback reprint must have felt like manna from heaven to the always impoverished author. Astonishingly fast, the first film option money came in May 1968.
The book’s anomalous landmark status in Dick’s oeuvre — at one point in his career, and possibly to this day, it was his title with the largest number of sales — was not immediately apparent. It resembled very much, in themes, tropes, plot, and characters, that which had come before: an extension at best but not a sea change. Even the famous title was initially in flux, with Dick contemplating such misfiring alternates as The Electric Toad; Do Androids Dream?; The Electric Sheep; and The Killers Are Among Us! Cried Rick Deckard to the Special Man.
In the novel, Rick Deckard is a married man, a typically conflicted, somewhat schlubby PKD protagonist, prone to self-doubt, anxiety, and vacillation. He’s not a glamorous freelance mercenary but a government employee, almost a bureaucrat: married, in a dead, loveless relationship. His entire adventure is compacted into the course of a single day. His world, our faraway future of 1992, is not an ultra-urban landscape all chrome and matte, sleek and rain-swept, neon-laced and sexy. It’s not noir but post-apocalypse, a radioactive wasteland due to World War Terminus. The reduced populace huddles in half-abandoned apartments and civic structures.
These environments are plagued with “kipple,” an entropic accumulation of useless junk and clutter. Due to the extermination of all wildlife, any technology-fostered living animals are deeply prized, with simulacra offering the next best thing. Deckard’s dream is to have enough money to upgrade from his current fake electric sheep. A similar relief is found in two technologies: the Penfield mood organ, which changes brain functioning, reprogramming the user’s emotions; and the virtual-reality empathy machine which puts one in contact with a spiritual avatar named Mercer, thus engendering the religion of Mercerism. In addition to killing many species, the radiation has birthed “specials,” human mutants. Deckard shares the narrative with one of these, a hapless “chickenhead” named J. R. Isidore, who comes to shelter illegally three of the runaway androids (not “replicants,” as in the film).
Certainly the depiction of the androids is the most dramatically different aspect when the book is placed against the film. They are not exotic athletic killing machines — although they do mortally menace Deckard before he manages to lethally “retire” them — but simply confused, almost purposeless, nonhuman runaways, seeking to keep low profiles. Roy Baty, for instance, has been masquerading as a pharmacist; another is a salvage worker; a third risks attention by following her muse to be a famous opera singer. Their lack of agency is typified by their huddling in Isidore’s “con-apt” and just waiting for Deckard to track them down. They also have no cohesive philosophy along “us versus them” lines, humans versus their creations, and there is no sense that they are Homo superior, no lectures on justice and prejudice. In fact, their lack of empathy is portrayed as a crippling defect, rendering them substandard. Perhaps the most intellectual and partially empathetic of them is a non-outlaw android, Rachel Rosen, with whom Deckard has sex, and who takes her revenge by killing the live goat that Deckard has splurged on. Deckard’s own possible identity as an android is moot, decisively settled in his favor by the famed Voigt-Kampff test.
The book concludes with Deckard’s return to home and his wife, after receiving a small epiphany from the spirit of Mercer and the discovery of a toad found in the wilderness.
So this is what Mercer sees, [Rick] thought as he painstakingly tied the cardboard box shut — tied it again and again. Life which we can no longer distinguish; life carefully buried up to its forehead in the carcass of a dead world. In every cinder of the universe Mercer probably perceives inconspicuous life. Now I know, he thought. And once having seen through Mercer’s eyes, I probably will never stop.
From such unlikely, quintessentially genius-bonkers and idea-heavy fodder, director Ridley Scott and Hollywood would turn out the visually dominant, glamorous, narratively pared-down film we know today as Blade Runner. The title change itself, employing the licensed appellation from an Alan Nourse novel utterly unrelated in theme or style, would be indicative up-front of the vast changes made to the material of the book — changes Dick initially hated, then half-heartedly endorsed, then repudiated for a second and final time. And cruel fate would also ironically present him with an ethical and financial challenge connected with the film, as well as linking his untimely death to the film’s imminent premiere.
So much of this vital information — but not a few missing salient angles — is contained in the monumental tome Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. This third edition, updated with some pre-release musings on Blade Runner 2049, chronicles author Paul Sammon’s thirty-five years of involvement with the film, ever since, in June 1980, he was assigned by the editor of Cinefantastique to hang out with Ridley Scott, prior even to any shooting, and learn about Scott’s mysterious follow-up to his massive hit Alien.
What resulted from that fortuitous association is an exhaustive, loving history of the whole project, from the early, nebulous interest in Dick’s book by freelance screenwriter Hampton Fancher, through the script writing, the financial machinations, the casting, the shooting, the editing, the studio quibbles, the special effects, and on into postproduction and general release. This book is the very model of a well-crafted behind-the-camera documentary in printed form. It’s a breezily authoritative gold mine of data on the film.
We get a meticulous, scene-by-scene exegesis of the film that runs for well over 100 pages, presenting all the motifs, themes, unused takes, and Easter Eggs. Sammons deploys solid journalism derived from deep interviews with all the principals. No bit player is too small not to have a biography and an appreciation — a case in point being the massive detective work needed to uncover the identity of the fellow who played “Abdul Ben-Hassan” — yet Sammon does not merely laud but also digs critically into performances and other cinematic virtues and defects. Finally, the three decades of fallout from the film, its role in the canon and in the culture at large, is examined. And I fear that my portrait of the book has probably left out about half its content. About all that’s missing is an index.
The portions of Future Noir relevant to PKD and his original novel tell a story substantiated by other sources. When Dick saw some early drafts of the Hampton script, he disliked what had been done to his vision and publicly complained. He was wooed back into the fold with some revisions and, later, a look at some early reels. He reportedly emerged from that experience affirming Scott’s vision and happy with the prospect of seeing Do Androids Dream? onscreen, albeit transformed. But then, just four months before the premiere, he was dead from multiple strokes, never to witness his rising acclaim nor any of the profits.
But before then, he had had to deal with another irksome challenge. As was standard practice, the studio wished to issue a book connected with the film, a conventional novelization that would hew to the plot of the movie. Offered the task of producing such, Dick stood to earn a large sum — the figure of $400,000 was bruited about — that would have meant so much to the ever-impecunious author. But to agree also meant agreeing to the studio’s demands for the elimination and suppression of his original text. Dick declined and used his legal rights to force the issue his way. Do Androids Dream? was reissued for a token sum, with imagery from Blade Runner on its front cover — and inside, an apology from the publisher since the text deviated so radically from the film!
As for Dick supposedly being hunky-dory with the film, even after all the headaches, his own journal tells a different story. The Exegesis of Philip K Dick, finally published in 2011 in abridged form, is the infamous, massive, obsessive diary Dick maintained while striving to unriddle his famous mystical visions. The portion dated “Fall 1981” contains this take on the movie:
My god, this movie is the greatest defeat (what was done to the book) and victory (the Tagore kerygma promulgated); the first is ostensible, the latter cryptic. Oddly, the first appears ostensibly to be a victory but is really a defeat; nonetheless a real victory lurks secretly under it, but it is not the victory that people will think the making of a movie from my book is. They will say, “It is a great victory to have your book made into one of the biggest movies of all time,” but they will not know why; it doesn’t have to do with what is in the movie, etc.; it has to do with what is in the novel…
Viewed in terms of God’s strategy, Blade Runner has been used as a means to an end, the end being the kerygma in Androids. Thus to have suppressed Androids and either written or authorized the novelization based on the screenplay would have been to hand over victory to evil, but this did not happen…
I didn’t sell out to Hollywood: (1) do the novelization or (2) permit the novelization; (3) suppress the original book. And in view of what the film is about, it would have destroyed me for two reasons, not one: (A) the Tagore vision in Androids; (B) the Heinlein power fantasies in Blade Runner. These are antithetical: and they express the opposing kingdom’s [apostrophe sic] Christ (Androids) and Satan (Blade Runner). Look what it would have done to me spiritually and psychologically and politically. My soul is safe, and it was in jeopardy. This is why I see victory despite the vast defeat.
A definitive creator’s summation of Blade Runner as “Satanic Heinlein power fantasies” is a less-than stellar endorsement, no matter what equivocations Dick might have uttered in the screening room.
But we as viewers can practice cognitive dissonance and revere both Do Androids Dream? and Blade Runner as separate and worthy accomplishments. Exactly how does the film hold up today? I recently rewatched the version dubbed “The Final Cut.”
From the opening seconds, the Los Angeles of the far-off year 2019 assumes the implacable role of one of the main protagonists. The overpopulated, sultry, wet, polychrome ambiance of trash, modern ziggurats, and shabby survivals (the classic Bradbury building), with flying cars and product-placement animated adverts in every niche, offers a predestined and organic gestalt. Max Headroom (1984) is not very distant. When we see the populace, street life scramblers, the viewer is instantly back in the early heyday of quick cutting and cryptic MTV videos and New Wave fashion iconography, with that since famous infusion of French bande dessinée, also just then becoming known to English-speaking audiences. One could be inhabiting the urban hives of Jodorowsky and Moebius’s The Incal. But the retrofuturism of the technology (akin to what Terry Gilliam would soon dial up to eleven in Brazil (1985) — the skittering CRT screens, the PVC corrugated tubing, the dieselpunk weaponry, a little of which, in a pre-CGI world, has the charmingly clunky feel of Lost in Space or Star Trek: The Original Series — alleviate and soften and temporally displace any of these now-campy references into a kind of timeless bricolage, either 1949 or 2049, or both at once.
As each character comes onscreen they are nailed down vividly with deft touches — from the actor’s own skills and the script itself — that transcend mere tics or quirks to become defining. The slack-jawed deadly yokelism of replicant Leon; Deckard’s stony jungle awareness and defensiveness; replicant Rachel’s confusion, pride, longing and elegance. Each role, no matter how small or fleeting, is burnished and searing. And no one really has much of a back-story, certainly not our hero, Deckard. This only-nowness contributes to a certain archetypical, mythic quality for each player.
The chief antagonist, Roy Batty, makes his first appearance only after half an hour, contributing to the mystery and suspense of Deckard’s quest. Of course, he dominates every subsequent scene he inhabits.
As with the best prose SF, there are minimal “As you know, Bob” moments of dialogue. This lack of explanatory concession to the untutored viewer might explain why early critics — as detailed in Future Noir — found the movie garbled or enigmatic. But to subsequent generations reared on the challenging SF films that followed, from The Fifth Element to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the coherence and inevitability of the plot seem crystalline, like a ballet. There are also almost no inconsistencies or holes, although the emptiness of the Bradbury building in a teeming world, with only the Isidore-avator J. F. Sebastian as tenant — a holdover trope from Dick’s original? — is one of the few puzzlers.
The fashion eyekicks are unrelenting, the bell-like Vangelis scores uplifts and casts down and murmurs as demanded. The violence is surprisingly muted, and the chase scenes are interspersed at critical moments. Dick’s speculations on a world without living animals receives its due and is even extended in the symbolic instances of Batty’s dove, Tyrell’s owl, and Deckard’s dream unicorn. Additionally, Scott achieves something unavailable to mere prose: a layering of planes of action, both visual (simultaneously busy foreground, middle ground and background) and aural, with overlapping dialogue and ambient sounds. This multiplicity of dimensions reaches its apex in the death of replicant Zhora as she crashes through multiple sheets of glass, both a corporeal and a reflected presence.
The ending of “The Final Cut,” which finds Deckard and Rachel running away to some kind of imagined temporary two-person refuge, the elevator door closing on their scared yet hopeful faces, functions as the perfect stopping point.
Perhaps Dick, suffering from a lifetime of frustrations, the ailments that would kill him, the theophanies that plagued him, and a paternal reverence for Do Androids Dream?, was, in labeling this elegant, scrupulously crafted, humanistic film “Satanic Heinlein power fantasies,” rendering more a view of his own demons than of any that inhabit the film.
The world of 2017 obviously owes a lot to Blade Runner. Perhaps foremost is the boost it gave to PKD’s reputation and literary work, being the first translation of his fiction into a wider sphere. (A short story of his, “Imposter,” was actually filmed in 1962 for television.) With Dick now enshrined in the Library of America, his canonical stature, deemed laughable in 1982, now seems solid and secure, thanks in large part to Blade Runner.
Perhaps the cyberpunk eminence William Gibson’s take on Ridley Scott’s creation, as expressed in his Paris Review interview, should serve as the conclusive word.
I was afraid to watch Blade Runner in the theater because I was afraid the movie would be better than what I myself had been able to imagine. In a way, I was right to be afraid, because even the first few minutes were better. Later, I noticed that it was a total box-office flop, in first theatrical release. That worried me, too. I thought, Uh-oh. He got it right and nobody cares! Over a few years, though, I started to see that in some weird way it was the most influential film of my lifetime, up to that point. It affected the way people dressed, it affected the way people decorated nightclubs. Architects started building office buildings that you could tell they had seen in Blade Runner. It had had an astonishingly broad aesthetic impact on the world.
Elsewhere, in an online Q&A conducted at The Guardian newspaper site, Gibson added: “I think that Blade Runner was very important in that, in its wonderfully European depiction of a future Los Angeles that grew perpetually out of its own ruins. A very un-American vision, radically un-American. Something came from that.”
Indeed. And whether Blade Runner 2049 leaves a similar legacy is a question only future generations can settle.
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Sig Nordal 