The Tao of Blade Runner

Introduction

Tao is a Chinese word conveying a complicated array of ideas, such as the journeys the mind makes—these mystical and yet tangible paths, and the process undertaken by the wanderer. The printed character for Tao resembles, to borrow from Woody Allen, “an elephant making love to a men’s glee club.” Of late, applying Tao philosophy to worldly things is more than just an extension of “Zen and the art of [add worldly word or phrase here].” It’s also a way to attach a cool title to a blog post I barely have time to write.

No, I won’t talk about Tao or any philosophy at all here. I don’t have time, and you don’t care anyway. This post is a review, without spoilers, of the new sci-fi flick Blade Runner 2049. Needless to say, it’s impossible to review this sequel without comparing it to Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner from 1982.

My review

The director, Denis Villeneuve, of whom I was instantly suspicious on the basis of his practically having a girl’s name, acknowledged the pressure of making a movie worthy of its predecessor. “I know that every single fan will walk into the theater with a baseball bat,” he is reported to have said. Sounds like a bit of a drama queen to me.

The fact is, the original movie, though a classic, isn’t perfect. I happen to own it on DVD and watched it with my older daughter as a rite of passage. We both enjoyed it, of course, but I couldn’t help feeling like it hadn’t lived up, in my daughter’s eyes, to all that I’d promised. The original Blade Runner mainly just looks cool. The plot isn’t all that, and the dialogue is just a tiny bit cheesy at times. For example, there’s the scene when Deckard grabs Rachael by the shoulders and utters some macho rough love folderol like, “Say ‘kiss me.’ [Say] ‘I want you.’” My daughter was shocked and I felt myself wincing.

That said, there were also scenes with great dialogue, like Deckard interrogating Leon in the beginning (the bit about “The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over,” etc.). But the scriptwriter didn’t have a perfect ear; for example, Rutger Hauer’s character’s final speech was dancing on the brink of twee. He managed to stick the landing, and because I couldn’t resist (damn it, I’m running out of time!) I did a little research and discovered that Hauer disliked the original speech. According to Wikipedia, he described the proposed final monologue as “opera talk and hi-tech speech with no bearing on the rest of the film,” so he “put a knife in it the night before filming” by trimming it down a fair bit.

My other complaint regarding the original movie is the absurd costumes, particularly Rachael’s ginormous shoulder pads. And the way her giant molded hair suddenly became this kinky Flashdance hairdo is almost laughable when you see it with your jaded 2017 eyes. It’s not easy to escape ‘80s silliness but some movies have.

But still, there was so much to enjoy visually in the original movie, like the dystopian but oddly recognizable, run-down, squalid but electrified rain-pummeled city, its buildings coated with giant electronic billboards, and the cool flying cars slowly rotating as they descend, like helicopters. The atmosphere was so much thicker and deeper and awesomer than just about any sci-fi movie before it.

So does Blade Runner 2049 uphold this standard? Well, yeah, mostly. But that’s not really enough, is it? I mean, since we still have the original available, do we really need a rehash? Much is lost simply because it’s not fresh. Not much new ground is broken aesthetically, and some landscapes in 2049 are too monotonous and blasted to be that interesting. To be honest, several of the scenes are just too dark.

The giant digital billboards are better than ever, but still, a retread is a retread.

Why did Peugeot pay for product placement here? (It’s visible on the dash of K’s car, too.) Does Peugeot even sell cars in the US? And check this out:

Is it possible we’re getting this billboard just to gratify the yen for nostalgia that ageing viewers like me are assumed to have?

Where new ground is broken, quite brilliantly, is with K’s virtual girlfriend, Joi (played by Ana De Armas). We’re introduced to her gradually, like Vladimir Nabokov introduced Lolita. First we get Joi’s voice from another room, so we’re curious, and then we see the projector, on ceiling-mounted tracks, that brings her into the room. She appears suddenly (as abruptly as when you flip on the TV with a remote), and of course it doesn’t hurt that she’s really pretty. But that’s not all: as soon as she appears she undergoes one instant costume change after another, and it’s not clear whether this is her own effort to please her man, or Officer K flipping through the outfits like a bored TV viewer channel-surfing. Their relationship—often warm and tender, but subject to modern realities like Joi freezing suddenly when K gets a visual voice-mail—is far more interesting than what we got in Her. Joi is my favorite character in the movie and her scenes steal the show.

(Should I apologize for blatantly favoring a character who happens to be good looking? Let’s be real. My wife rented Thor, despite having historically shown zero interest in Marvel comics, solely because it stars Chris Hemsworth. She knew the movie would be lame and that I also have zero interest in Marvel comics and their film adaptations, but she rightly assumed I’d roll with it because Natalie Portman also stars. Unfortunately this is one of the dumbest movies ever made and Portman is terrible in it.)

The other 2049 characters are a letdown after Joi. Officer K, the main character, has two things wrong with him. First, we know right off the bat that he’s a replicant. I wouldn’t necessarily say a replicant is automatically less sympathetic than a human (though perhaps this is the case), but K just doesn’t seem to suffer. He gets the crap beat out of him and shrugs it off like the Terminator. Huge misstep by Villeneuve there.

The other problem with K is that he’s played by Ryan Gosling, who is a good enough actor I suppose but totally unconvincing in an action-adventure tough-guy role. He was perfect for La La Land, but his simpering little half-smile destroys the gravitas we expect in a beaten-down blade runner. According to IMBD, he was the only actor considered for the role by Villeneuve, which is all the proof you need that this director doesn’t really know what he’s doing.

Harrison Ford is just fine as Deckard, but he brings to the role the same slightly annoyed, slightly disgusted air that he did to that Star Wars: The Force Awakens movie. Perhaps he’s bothered by the similarity between the two movies: upstart actors and characters new to the franchise head out on a long quest to find him, to give their knockoff movie more cred. I guess I can’t blame Ford for this ennui. In any event, he sets a good example of weariness and gravity for Gosling, which only serves to accentuate the flimsiness of Gosling with his ingratiating little half-smirk.

And then over here you’ve got Niander Wallace, the mastermind overlord (the 2049 equivalent of Dr.Tyrell). This character, as played by Jared Leto, is an annoying, wet-behind-the-ears, hipster-bearded douchebag with no redeeming qualities, and every moment of him on the screen sucks the life out of the movie.

Robin Wright does a good job with the role of K’s boss, Lieutenant Joshi, but she doesn’t have a whole lot to do. Sylvia Hoeks, as the evil replicant curiously named Luv, is pretty and also very badass, but her character is a bit too evil and cruel to be very interesting. What I loved about Rutger Hauer’s character in the original film was, ironically, his humanity. Luv is basically an evil robot type. Kind of a waste of Hoeks’ time and ours.

Speaking of wasting time, please indulge me in what I hope isn’t too lengthy a side note. I mentioned Nabokov above, and there’s a tribute to him in this movie. K’s mental health is evaluated, post-mission, via a strange protocol where he must repeat snippets of text including this passage from Nabokov’s poem-within-a-novel, Pale Fire: 

Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

Lest viewers miss the reference, a copy of Pale Fire is clearly visible in K’s apartment. How does this tie in to the film? Answer: it doesn’t. I’ve read Pale Fire at least half a dozen times, and I can’t see any link to the themes of 2049 at all. The poem within Pale Fire concerns an ageing professor ruminating on the hereafter, and the passage quoted is about a vision the man has during a mild heart attack. It has nothing to do with A.I., technology, slavery, androids, or electric sheep. My guess is that Villeneuve is just borrowing an air of intellectual legitimacy from Nabokov. And yet, I find an amusing link that must be unintentional: the bulk of the novel Pale Fire concerns a scholarly parasite who, in the course of 200+ pages of commentary totally dwarfing the poem, tries to co-opt the poet’s work into something of his own. I cannot think of a better metaphor for these movie sequels and prequels that seek to capitalize on the success of earlier works by more original writers and directors.

Okay, onward. Another complaint I have with the movie is the music. The original film had a gorgeous score by Vangelis, which was fundamental to its atmosphere. (I even bought the soundtrack.) But this 2049 movie barely has music … the main instrument is a big drum. We get a bunch of silence and then this big somber BOOM and then some more silence. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if we’re hearing some sound effect or something that’s supposed to be music. I have just discovered, via IMBD, that “Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson was attached to compose the music for the film; however, in August 2017, he dropped out from the project for unknown reasons and composer Hans Zimmer, along with Benjamin Wallfisch, were hired to replace Jóhannsson.” Aha, so the new “music” was tacked on at the last minute, like an afterthought. Well, it shows. Why spend $150 million on a movie and then skimp on the music? What a bonehead move.

Gosh, I’m starting to sound old and crabby and constipated. Look, it’s actually a pretty fun flick. I had a nice time seeing it with my teenage daughter. (Being a source of info and insight into the preceding movie, I suddenly had some cred in the eyes of a teenager, which is a rare thing.) And 2049, whatever opportunities it may have missed, does look really good. Go ahead and see it—don’t wait for DVD or whatever.

Now that that’s over with, let me complain some more. The screenplay for this movie is a mess. It’s based on a sparse 110-page novella, but there’s way too much going on to properly depict even in a rather long movie. A number of scenes must have been thrown out, because there are tons of loose threads. We also get subplots that could be their own movie, and flaws in logic that I can’t forgive. I won’t go into these because I don’t want to give anything away, but I could point to at least three gaping plot holes that any moviegoer who isn’t stoned ought to have a problem with.

All this being said, there is one scene more thrilling and chilling than anything I have seen in recent films. I can recount it without spoiling anything only because it’s so utterly disconnected from anything else in the movie. K, fairly shattered by all the beatings he’s been taking both physically and emotionally, is sound asleep when Joi wakes him up at like 3 a.m. and says, “We gotta change Deckard’s bag.” So they go to his room and Deckard’s ostomy bag has totally blown out, all over his gown, the sheets, it’s everywhere, like a massacre. K and Joi have never changed one of these before and the stench of the military-green quasi-stool is almost enough to make them wretch. (If you don’t think it’s realistic for a replicant and an A.I. projection to be grossed out by this smell, you’ve obviously never encountered it in real life and should consider yourself lucky.) So the whole bag apparatus is soaked in this foul goo, even the wafer that’s stuck to Deckard’s ostomy. The last nurse to change the thing screwed up and left some of the backing on the wafer’s adhesive, which is why it failed. Deckard, bearing considerable discomfort and indignity, is grumpy even by Harrison Ford standards, and K and Joi are obviously winging it, without much brio. K takes a deep breath (big mistake) and sticks down the wafer. He presses it down firmly which makes Deckard groan in pain. Now K’s got to attach the bag, which affixes via this thing kind of like a Ziploc but it’s round, and the bead is really narrow. “Hurry!” Joi cries, because a new flood of green goo is crowning from the ostomy. The ordeal seems to take forever, bringing the movie’s runtime to 164 minutes.

Wait, hold on. I think I’m confused. That whole scene recounted above? That wasn’t actually in this movie at all—why would anybody film that? I’m sleep deprived and confused and not sure where that came from.

It feels like over a month since I watched 2049 and you know what? I’d love to escape into a dark theater and see it again. Maybe this whole review is unfair. At a minimum I guess I should go delete that last paragraph, but I’m just too tired. Maybe I’ll rewrite this someday when I have my normal life back, and maybe then I’ll give Blade Runner 2049 a rave review.

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - The TechCorp Files, Part I: Interview

Introduction

Short stories are a slippery thing. If a story is true, it can be spun as a simple yarn, and no more is expected of it. Formal fiction, though, gets subjected to all kinds of critical evaluation. Is there a story arc? Is some kind of Truth revealed? Does the main character grow? After all, with all the freedom in the world to contrive characters and actions to make your point, you’d better say something.

I’ve found that if you try to dress up a true story as fiction, you’ll crash and burn. I tried this, in a writing class. Amazing things that actually happened to me were dismissed by the instructor as “totally unrealistic.”

One problem with my earlier writing is that I didn’t bother separating fact from fiction. I thought this was playful and fun, but I’ve come to realize it probably just confuses the reader. Besides, it deprives him or her of a sense of wonder when something unbelievable is actually true.

So it is with the following story, which is essentially nonfictional. Except where clearly noted (e.g., “Okay, I didn’t really say that”), almost everything happened exactly as I tell it. For example, I describe a pre-employment aptitude test, which was real. And, on my way to take the test, a homeless person really did pick a fight with me. I faithfully documented what he really said, and he really did seem to attempt to wring the neck of a parking meter. That said, there’s some hyperbole too; for example, the parking meter’s neck didn’t break. By exaggerating like this, I inadvertently pushed the whole episode into the realm of fantasy, where it didn’t belong.

I could go fix those problems in this archival tale, but a) that’s too much work, and b) the hyperbole is kind of fun. So instead I’ll preface what follows by itemizing what is truly fictional, so you can appreciate that everything else is true. Here are the other fictionalized bits:

• The interviewer’s abrasiveness is exaggerated through dressed-up dialogue;
• Names of corporations have been changed;
• Other job candidates’ credentials have been exaggerated;
• The Swan’s Oyster Depot episode is entirely fictitious.

A final prefatory note: given the length of this introduction and of the story itself, I have broken this post into two parts. No, I’m not indulging people’s shortening attention spans, à la Twitter. I’m just getting more mileage out of this story, like the magazines from Dickens’s time that used to publish novels serially. My second and final installment will go up in about a week, freeing me to work on my tax return.

The TechCorp Files, Part I – June 9, 1995

Last week I had an interview with TechCorp. A stern, cheerless woman scanned through my résumé.

ooooo“1350 Filbert Street?” she asked.
ooooo“That’s the apartment.” I said. “Where I live.”
ooooo“Nice place?”
ooooo“It’s all right.”
ooooo“Dana, imagine you’re in the desert—”
ooooo“Which desert?” I asked, uneasily.
oooooShe stared at me, exasperated. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “The Sahara.” She paused. “You’re walking, and you see a tortoise...”
ooooo“What’s a tortoise?” I demanded, with some trepidation.
ooooo“You know what a turtle is?” she said, quietly, disgusted. “Same thing.” She paused again. “You flip the tortoise onto its back. Its stomach is baking in the hot sun. You could flip it back over, but you don’t. Why is that, Dana?”
oooooI glared at her.
ooooo“They’re just questions, Dana,” she said soothingly. “Designed to provoke an emotional response. Now I want you to tell me the first thing that comes to mind about … your mother.”

Well, actually, that’s not how it happened. That was from a movie. Just once I’d like to have an interviewer say those things. I know I’ve been tempted, when interviewing somebody myself, to mix it up a little.

Of course, it’s much easier to relax and have a good time when you’re holding all the cards. I was far less comfortable here. My chair, a modern grey mesh fabric one that you might find on the Starship Enterprise, was improperly adjusted, and it was all I could do to keep it from pitching back. Somebody had configured it for lounging, feet up on the desk. Is this a ruse, I wondered, to see if I will modify my environment to best suit me? I’m a guest here; do I dare attempt a complex adjustment?

I tried to relax. I devoted my energies to leaning forward, sitting up straight, making eye contact, and trying to impress this rather severe woman. Not being a professional recruiter, she only pretended to know what to ask, and what to say.

ooooo“Now, the role of this division of TechCorp has nothing to do with the consumer-oriented service that you surely associate it with,” she told me. “It’s kind of difficult to explain. It takes a long time working here to realize exactly what it is we do.”

ooooo“Is it something found in the home?” I asked, helpfully.  No, I didn’t really say this—I only thought it. And once I’d thought of it, I couldn’t think of anything else. So I said nothing. My chair was now swallowing me up completely. I was shrinking, rapidly, approaching the size of a small child.

ooooo“Our products,” she said flatly, “involve high-speed packet network data transfer. We sell to huge companies. Our biggest account is MegaFi. You surely never knew this before, but MegaFi itself is not a corporation. It is a non-profit organization that makes money for banks. It makes gobs of money. And what we do for them, is. . . .” She paused again. “Look,” she said, “I am communicating to you across a vast gulf of ignorance and darkness.”

Okay, that’s not really what she said. That’s from a book. But what she did say, which I can’t precisely remember, had the same effect. At this point it was do or die. I needed to take control of this interview, dammit. So I began to just talk, with little regard to my interlocutor’s opening salvo. Through a series of carefully arranged statements, I gradually tried to insinuate myself into the job, so that eventually my employment at TechCorp would be automatic. Over the next hour, I hoped, I could move right into a discussion about promotion, and maybe even early retirement—ultimately, I could come out of the interview with a handsome severance package.

But she would have none of it. For her part, she continually buried the prospect of my employment deeply within the hypothetical realm. When I gave her my references, she said, “We will contact these people in the event that you happen to make it that far into the interview process.” She went into a cruel discussion of the myriad invisible opponents I was up against, most of them Oxford Rhodes scholars with “F-15 fighter jock” listed under “hobbies” on their résumés. She hammered home the point that I had come late into the game, which was in fact a source of irritation to her because I was dragging out the recruiting process. But eventually, and begrudgingly, she told me to make an appointment to take a written exam designed to evaluate … what? My intelligence? My worth as a human being?

ooooo“Funny you should mention a test,” I remarked. “I dreamed I had to take a test at a Dairy Queen on another planet.”  Actually, I didn’t say this. It’s from a song. But just once I’d like to use that, in context, and my little story here may the best chance I ever have.

I was actually eager to take the test. Not since 1992, when I took my last multiple-choice exam, had I enjoyed the opportunity to undergo such a straightforward and concrete challenge. Since graduating from college, in fact, life has taken on a rather nasty guerrilla-warfare bent, where performance is measured by subtle, person-to-person, tactical coups de grâce instead of by objective test results.

ooooo“You may be expecting something easy,” she warned, “but many people find our test very difficult. If you think this will be a routine ‘do-you-have-a-pulse’ kind of assessment, I think you’re in for a shock. I repeat, it is a very difficult test. Many people have complained. Some become outraged. Some never fully recover from the experience.” She paused. “But you appear to be young and healthy.” She gave me a packet of information about TechCorp, along with a two-page explanation of the exam itself. I took it home and read it. I have it in front of me. I will quote from it.

“Please come prepared....” it begins. “As the interviewing process proceeds you will be asked to take a test designed to measure your ability with numbers and your reasoning and logic skills.” I believed this was right down my alley. I believe I am rational and logical, and those who know me believe, at least, that I have a heart of stone. I looked over the sample questions, and this is one of them:

“Select the next letter in the sequence.

bakrmvmvkr_ 1 2 3 4 5

ooooooooooooa b k l m

The alternate letters in the first part of the series (b,k,m) repeat themselves in reverse in the last part of the series (m,k,_). Therefore, the next letter should be “b”, which is in column 2 of the possible answers.”

The part about “b” being in column 2 of the possible answers made perfect sense. I looked at the number 2, scanned straight down, and indeed “b” was right there. The part about “b” being the right answer, however, gave me more difficulty. True, I have had similar test questions throughout my life, and as a youth was often able to solve them. On “Sesame Street,” or perhaps it was “Electric Company,” a person (or perhaps a clown, or a mime—I don’t remember) would pace back and forth along a row of similar objects, while an unseen singer sang, “One of these things is not like the others/ One of these things does not belong. . . .” Usually the objects were three rabbits and a hare, or three turtles and a tortoise, but sometimes they were more obvious: three beach balls and a basketball. On these latter occasions I solved the riddle even before the mime did.

But this sample test question seemed much, much harder. Perhaps you got the answer, right off. Perhaps you’re smirking a bit, trying to imagine my mental struggle. Perhaps the only confusing thing about the problem for you is deciding how it could have presented me with any difficulty. But I’m just an English major, okay?  Yeah, I know it’s a pattern of letters, from the English alphabet, and yeah, I’m familiar with these letters and can handily recite the alphabet . I could even recite the alphabet backwards if I had to pass a drunk-driving test. But I don’t drink, and I don’t drive, and knowing the alphabet has nothing whatever to do with the solution to the problem. Letters and even words don’t give me a leg up unless they’re written by a long-ago dead British writer like William Blake, okay? My sweet spot is appreciating wonderful, colorful, deeply expressive phrases like “cold hot dog.”  Sequences like “bakrmvmvkr” don’t do a lot for me.

The test description (warning, really) went on to advise that “some people have found that practicing with a standardized test prep book has helped quite a bit.” But the handout they gave me had only half a dozen questions, and with the test looming—it would be first thing the next morning—I had no time to visit bookstores asking for prep books. The test warning might as well say, “Study all you want, but we cannot imagine anything could save you, you miserable pudknocker.”

With the “letter series” problems exemplified above, the test would allow 10 minutes for completing 26 questions. That allows 23 seconds per problem, not counting the time I would spend doubled over in pain. Allowing for about 15 doubled-over seconds per problem, I came to realize that I simply lacked the brain power required to obtain a respectable score. I decided to seek outside assistance.

I strolled down to Swan’s Oyster Depot, and Ralph, the guy behind the counter said, “We got fresh sea scallops on special today. Just $45 for a half-pound. They’re so fresh, we haven’t even caught ‘em yet! Have a seat, it’ll take us ten minutes to haul in the nets. By then we’ll have processed your loan application.”
oooooI shook my head. “Not today, Ralph,” I said.
ooooo“You sure? They’re mighty fresh. God made them just this morning.”
ooooo“No, I need brains today. You got anything smart? An engineer, maybe?”
ooooo“Hey, we got a doctor. Hauled him in this morning. I know, that’s not so fresh, but the price is good. No engineers though. Almost had one, but he figured out how to dismantle our nets. Made off with a lot of bait, too. Have to harpoon him one day. So how about the doctor brains?”

I came home with a small, paper-wrapped bundle of brains. Ralph said he gave me the best part, all left-brain stuff. I booted up my computer, set the brains on my mouse pad, selected “Run” from the “File” menu, then typed “a:\install.” My hard drive chattered for a while, and moments later my intelligence had increased dramatically. I instantly had a new understanding of the world, and I became deeply depressed.

The morning of the test, I showed up early. Nobody was there. What to do? I took a walk around the block, and gave a homeless man a dollar in change. He tried to give me a Street Sheet but I was trying to achieve a total mind vacuum and didn’t need any more information, especially about life on the streets, to gum up my brain. He said, “It’s okay, man, I’m just another of God’s chilluns.” Then another homeless man intentionally stepped in my way and I bumped into him.

ooooo“DO YOU WANNA SEE A FIGHT!?” he cried. “I’LL SHOW YOU A FIGHT, MAN! I’LL SHOW YOU ONE!”

I assured him, politely but firmly, that I did not want to see a fight. He made the offer several more times, and, perhaps for effect, began wringing the neck of a nearby parking meter. It bent like a reed in the wind. When he finished, its neck was broken, its dial said “VIOLATION,” and the man was still yelling, “DO YOU WANNA SEE A FIGHT!?” At this point I noticed he was wearing a rather nice suit, and I wondered if he’d torn it off a guy like me. I extricated myself from the situation somehow, but showed up at the test a frayed bundle of nerves.

I was handed the test booklet. You may raise an eyebrow here at my use of the passive voice: “I was handed the test booklet.” We are taught to use the active voice— “I betook the test booklet”—because the active voice is more powerful. I, however, have deliberately chosen the passive voice here to describe the powerlessness of my position. I was not the master of my destiny, in this room, with my plastic Choice #2 pencil and my two somehow sad pieces of scratch paper. I was to be merely the passive recipient of one and one half hours of intellectual assault. A mental punching bag, if you will.

Tune in next week for the thrilling finale of “The TechCorp Files.”