BLADE RUNNER: THE FUTURE WE GOT

Let us set ourselves in November, 2019 for a moment. From the heights, we see a night like any other: the view of a dense city, with an infinity of yellow lights and thickly contaminated air. High and robust buildings rise over others with wide vistas. With factories, vehicles and citizens full swing during late hours, this promises to be the dawn of an era and, likewise, the twilight of another. Such terms apply to the vivid images we keep record of from not very few cities at the end of the 21st century’s second decade.

Whoever has seen Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982), may be able to recognize in the former description the city of Los Angeles, in a look conjured, not to the past but facing the future, 37 years ago. In it, detective Rick Deckard is assigned to hunt androids who have rebelled against humanity, and ends up falling in love with one of them. While this plot remains in the past, the vision of the future - fear of a present time - has already arrived and stayed, its tale being observable in light of the events surrounding that once prophetic date.

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The myth we put our faith in

Let’s go back to our cityscape. Fire, an eternal promethean symbol, emanates from the ground like aspiring to reach the clouds, while two pyramids, headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation, dwarf all other buildings. 2019 is in the film a year where humanity pretends having reached the state of gods and, as such, to have stolen their spark, specifically in creating synthetic life. While such a Babylonian undertaking hasn’t been as visible outside of the screen, it is with other achievements that the flames have been taken.

Since the conquest of fire by the first humans, societies have already arrived at a usurpation of the night by the end of the 2010’s, with cities that remain ignited and active all 24 hours. This achievement leveraged the development of a workforce made to lengthen its daily industriousness during what in another time could be associated in a generalized way with sheltering and sleeping far from reach. Traffic, energy consumption and concentration of people on the streets would be common frames of the 2019 from both the 1982 and the 2020 perspective. So would be, as a footnote, the notion that, in reaching the state of gods, we fall (then again, who lives?, as detective Gaff sentences).

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A call to self-knowledge

Because of our own condition as mortals and how delicate our bodily existence can be, the reach of our ideas frequently ends up out of our grasp. Just like Blade Runner’s society project touched the top and began to fall apart when the androids (named ‘replicants’ in the story) went up against their masters and began killing them if perceived as enemies, around November 2019, COVID-19 was taking its first steps among humanity, a virus that over the following year would lead to massive confinements and obstacles putting a stop to the flow and rhythm of the productive mechanism, fearing for the health of our species.

With parties, services and street crimes of the night seemingly halted, new age initiatives have emerged so that human beings seek reinvention from the inner life of their homes, passing through their knowledge of themselves. This is the same that happens to the character of Deckard, facing the possibility that he might be in love with the android Rachael, or that of him being an android himself. Either way, both discourse crisis call to reflect in order to understand how our reality has been considerably designed by others, and to inquire what is beyond from where we’re standing.

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What is our reality?

The ideas Blade Runner has left us to meditate can be observed in light of current thinking. As an artistic text, the film poses a postmodern debate on what the last word should be regarding the stories we tell. Let us remember that the movie, itself a loose adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s novel and which borrows its name from Alan E. Nourse’s science fiction, went through multiple editions, the big difference in them being with regards to the standpoint of whether Deckard is a replicant.

Similarly, one can debate the importance of the original intentions of foundation myths, beyond the fact that these have been preserved in time and served to stimulate our search for sense. Blade Runner welcomed a sequel in 2017, set in 2049, and by keeping Deckard’s enigma intact, its answers could only be found in the past. Left behind also were the enquiries of whether or not the replicant Roy saved Deckard’s life because of an automatic reflex or empathy, or whether Tyrell was really a copy of an original human being who was dead or cryogenized at the time, in order to move on to the question of what makes a living being’s experience that of a human being.

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A new humanity

Particular about the dystopian vision of Blade Runner is the absence of a Big Brother figure, as even in positions of power, spotting replicants among humans - and foes among friends - was complex, and it was up to each citizen to be vigilant. Likewise, in our reality, with the difficulty of identifying a virus carrier before the latter manifests itself, or the acts to save lives in a growing worry over the economy, taking care of the world would be left in the hands of every human being.

Given the lack of absolute answers, if one could find in the story a relatable path to follow, it would be that of a reconnection with the natural world, hindered for its citizens by inhabiting a metropolis submerged in artificial environments, and for us, by all confinements that have prevented us from leaving home. Once given the opportunity, Deckard and Rachael went to the countryside to get in touch with nature (as seen at the end of original version and according to the sequel). So did Roy, at the end of his days, with the drops of rain that fell upon him.

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Originally written in Spanish on 26/11/2020 and published on 12/04/2021 at https://bienestaloquebienacaba.wordpress.com/2021/04/12/blade-runner-el-futuro-que-llego/