The very first time I saw Blade
Runner it turned out to be a whole drag. Nevertheless, maybe because Harrison
Ford was starring or just because I expected lightsabers to appear from those
unconventional umbrella sticks, I resisted until the irresistible ending to
discover inside me a dispairing feeling of having failed to appreciate a work
of art and a philosophical answer to many of my deep questions.
Perhaps I was too young to reckon
the film in its entire value. It was the year 1982 when the movie was released,
therefore I must have watched it on TV by 1984 or so. Eleven years old is not,
I’m afraid, the best age to see and understand such a complex narrative.
In any case, being much older
now, I still think Blade Runner is a descriptive work where almost nothing
happens –with the exception of brief action scenes– whose aesthetics is inherited
from Metropolis to Star Wars through Star Trek and all the big hits of the
science-fiction genre. It lacks the narrative rhythm one would expect from a
great futuristic swashbuckling soap opera –and don’t get me wrong, I love Once
upon a time in the West, the paradigm of slow motion spaghetti– or the plain
dichotomy between good and evil.
In a sense, Blade Runner is a
perverted version of Star Wars. Just from the title the audience has a vague
notion of the pure heroic main character from George Lucas’s masterpiece, Luke
Skywalker. Unlike the Jedi knight, who walks through the big starred black, Blade
Runner’s Rick Deckard rushes next to the precipice instead. The last hope Ford
represents is covered with a mantle of antiheroism, and brilliant lights and
neons appear in Ridley Scott’s film with a layer of filth while the acid rain
pervades everything. Characters are ambiguous to death and the pace slows down
to film noir detail. Blade Runner is not a sci-fi movie; it’s a hard-boiled
detective plot with a voice-over, lights all around and Vangelis soundtrack to
add some solemnity.
But it’s not the huge
reminiscences of a distorted galaxy far, far away, or the distopian reminder of
an Earth phagocyted by its human inhabitants what trapped me forever. It was,
like to the average spectator, the ultimate verses from a superb Rutger Hauer /
Roy Batty, a soliloquy worthy of the best Shakespeare, an epitaph of a
mysterious eternity just scarcely glimpsed.
Any half devotee of Blade Runner
would recited the quote parrot-fashion, but for those not so freak so as to
remember every single comma, let’s copy and paste them from wikipedia:
“I've... seen things... you
people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; I
watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate... All those...
moments... will be lost, in time, like tears... in... rain. Time... to die.”
These words were not genuine from
Hauer; at least, not entirely. He adapted the original script cutting off some
redundant and not very related-to-the-topic depictions. The result is, anyway,
incontestable. Maybe because of the things they avoid to say rather than what
they evoke.
I don’t know you, but I, when
hearing those definite regrets, thought of an unseen world of wonder, of pieces
to fit in a personal puzzle, of philosophical questions and their impossible
answers solved right before me. I had heard of Tannhauser before. It was a
blatant double-headed long-tusked imitation of Alien, the eighth passenger on the windowsill of a god-knows-what
in the inside of a picture card album. The info was clumpsily developed from
Ridley Scott’s film’s Roy Batty’s allusion, but to a child it proved to be
imagination-inspiring.
I have sought Tannhauser in many
other occasions, reaching nowhere. I have heard of Wagner’s opera but I resist
to admit there’s nothing else but a powerful knight or a German poet. If we recall
our ancient dreams and desires up to the point of believing them true above the
real thing, Tannhauser must be a sort of sacred guardian, whatever
extraterrestrial it may be, who prevents mortals to discover the truth beyond
the eternal questions of the human existence: Is there anything else? Are we
alone in the universe? Is death the end or just a deceiving starting point to
infinite worlds, strange beings, wonders we never dare to dream of? Is life a
motorway to disappointment? Can imagination prove stronger than sore truth?
Showing more than some verses of an
unbound unreality could have been disastrous por the success of the film as a
cult movie, since it didn’t earn much in the ticket office, but every fan of
Blade Runner is still waiting for something going far beyond Rutger Hauer chant
to impossible galaxies, unbelievable creatures and mystic adventures where
philosophy would meet for sure the limits of mankind’s plenitude.
As U2 said once and repeat every
gig, I still haven’t found what I’m looking for, but Blade Runner showed me –as
if it were Lancelot of the Lake glimpsing an existentialist Holy Grail– a flash
of eternal wisdom in the shadows of our own
essence. Perhaps we poor humans are not ready for more.