Blade Runner and the Future

Movies about the future tend to take one of two courses – either they go for the apocalyptic stone age feel a-la Mad Max, or else they’re set in a dimly lit Chinatown, with only the neon and grungy hi-tech to remind us that we’re somewhere many years from now.

Blade Runner opts for the latter and is still one of the finest futurist movies ever made – and proof that at least one good thing came out of the 1980’s, a decade to forget. It’s also one of the only movies in which Harrison Ford puts in a good performance. Would that he had stopped there.

Blade Runner conjures up a future where the earth is already trashed and anyone who can pass the basic health tests heads for the off world colonies. Only freaks, those on the make and police still inhabit a world with acid rain, where it seems to be permanently dark and where searchlights create a constant atmosphere of unease and darkness.

Light years ahead of the likes of Terminator and artistically superior to the Matrix, Blade Runner is yet based on the possibly flawed notion that androids (here called replicants) can achieve independent, emotional consciousness. The AI debate rages elsewhere but here at least, we’re faced with the arrogance of mankind in assuming the right to allot life and, in the character that Ford plays, to end it.

But even as philosophical questions are raised in Blade Runner, the genius is all in the atmosphere. That we see geishas on giant screens on the side of buildings, hovercraft advertising a better life in the colonies (‘helping America into the new worlds’) and noodle stalls and Chinese symbols everywhere, even in graffiti, all create an America that is dense and bewildering for us. Just as any kind of future is likely to be.

There are all kinds of unanswered questions that echo back to the vision of Philip K. Dick on whose book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the movie is based. The apparent market in artificial animals, the Mardi Gras-like characters in the bars and the fact that it always seems to be raining, all transport us to a future where our present day paradigms are rendered redundant. We’re left with no choice but to just watch as the protagonists choose their courses and the plot thickens.

So many of our choices and values are based on the acceptance of society or, at the very least, our peers. In Blade Runner there’s no longer any such thing as society and everyone is alone. As Ford’s chief reminds us when he refuses to take the job (oh those 80’s retired detective clich?s):

‘You know the score, pal – if you’re not cop, you’re little people.’

In a world that only continues to operate out of pure obstinacy and because there’s still a buck to be scraped out of it somewhere, power is the only real value left.

Like much futuristic fiction, Blade Runner predicted the pace of change a little too soon (‘sometime in the early 21st century’) – and it may have picked only one of many possible parallel future universes – but the present is that much richer for knowing what life is like in a social vacuum in a decaying metropolis under the searchlights of flying police cars.