The Automatik

The first time I saw this movie, I hated it. I hated the flat, emotionless voice over and the faux-Film Noir stylings. I loathed this movie for the next four years and dreaded the idea of having to analyze it for my Science Fiction Cinema class when I was a junior in college. After I watched it, though, I did a Pauline Kael and realized that it was truly amazing. I loved it even more when the Director’s Cut was released a few years later without all that ridiculous voice-over rubbish.

Probably the most astonishing thing about Blade Runner is that even today, nearly twenty years after it was first released, the world of the future still looks, well, futuristic. Everything a mish-mash of Asian, Latin, and Middle Eastern cultures; exquisite technology surrounded by trash, grime, smog, and rain. Someone mentioned the concept of retro-futurism to me once, the idea that the further technology is advanced the more the past will be fetishized, the more decrepit and decayed the world will become. Think of Rachael, the most technologically advanced artificial intelligence creation in the world, and her 40s hairstyle, red glossy lipstick and manicure and Joan Crawford suits. Picture Deckard and his photograph-analyzing equipment in an apartment comprised almost entirely of Frank Lloyd Wright-style sculptured cement bricks. No, the future isn’t going to be plastic and sanitized like it appears in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it will be dirty and messy, like the man genetically engineering eyeballs in the midst of rows and rows of ramshackle street vendors hawking their wares.

I watched the film again last night for the first time in probably five years or so, and it seemed even better than it did before. It’s an uncomfortably disturbing movie, particularly the scenes with Roy Batty and Pris towards the middle and the end. The only part that seems somewhat pleasant is the glorious and golden Tyrell Building, high above all that nasty precipitation, with the gleaming orb of the sun casting liquid shadows on the walls and the floors. A giant silicon chip in a pile of rubble. Yet even this state-of-the-art building has old-fashioned external elevators.

Perhaps Deckard is the most pathetic victim of all this retro-futurism, as he has been commanded to kill the most perfect of the androids, the Nexus 6. They are such perfect human copies that they are doomed to die after only four years just in case they should get uppity and decide to take over the world. Ironically, the one person who brings out the human in Deckard is Rachael, the pinnacle of the Nexus 6 line. And he’s been ordered to eliminate her.

Deckard seems cold and uncaring, but he is obviously haunted by the past, shown by the clutter of old family photographs on his piano and references to his ex-wife. He stares almost obsessively at the stack of photographs he’s snatched from one of the androids. And as he looks at the planted memories of Rachael, represented by the stack of snapshots she’s given him, one of them seems to come to life, just for a couple of seconds.

I couldn’t help but think of La Jetee, where strong memories of the past are the key to time travel used by the scientists to manipulate their test subjects like a pawn. One such subject, the narrator, journeys back to a time when the apocalypse hadn’t happened yet. The film, like Rachael’s fake past, is composed entirely of still photographs. In fact, the one brief movement in the film represents the strongest memory of all: perfect love. The narrator’s girlfriend awakes to a sunny morning with birds chirping in the background, flutters her eyes and smiles gently.

So in the same regard, her photographs represent an idyllic past to Rachael, a past that isn’t even her own but is nonetheless used to control her. And as Roy and Pris realized, to their horror, they can’t escape what they are, though they are willing to kill for a stronghold on a future that contradicts their very existence. They too, are trapped by a past they did not create. No matter how much science allows us to progress, creating human beings from synthetic material or a strand of DNA, we are always doomed to wallow in the past. There is no cure for nostalgia.