10:30 bus

[vaneramos]

Gardiner Expressway, Saturday afternoon


This morning university students returning to Guelph and Waterloo were lined up across Toronto bus terminal waiting to board. I encountered the same problem on a Monday morning several weeks ago, but that time everyone got onboard; today I was lucky to get a seat. From now on I must remember to avoid the 10:30 bus at the beginning of the week. I've seen Greyhound call a second coach to carry excess passengers, but I'd rather avoid the uncertainty and travel at a quieter time when I can have two seats to myself.

To add to the drama, four or five middle-aged tourists had an altercation with the driver. One man approached yelling and waving his ticket just as I reached the head of the line, but by then the driver just laughed and ignored him. It was unclear whether they held invalid tickets or had attempted to cut into line.

On the bus I knitted a few more rows of my slipper, then launched into reading Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the 1968 inspiration for Blade Runner. After the cyber-paradise of Snow Crash, it's amusing to discover android chasers keep their information in paper files.

Comments

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

Have you ever seen Blade Runner? I have always thought it was one of the most important films of my lifetime, but Daniel saw it and it didn't make much of an impression. WHich makes me wonder if it's a generational thing?

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

Does Logan's Run count as dark? LOL

The sheer realism of it is what impressed me. A real attempt at projecting the future, rather than simple fantasies. When I go down to the Mel Lastman Memorial at Yonge & Dundas, I can't help seeing it in terms of Bladerunner.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

I couldn't relate to it the first time I saw it ten years ago as an evangelical Christian; it was too dark. It made more of an impression when I saw it recently. I'm interested to know why it seems so important to you. It may be important because of its influence on the sci-fi genre, the moral questions it raises about technology, and the outlook it presents for the future. The response probably depends on one's worldview, and how seriously you take sci-fi.

The first few chapters have begun an intriguing thread relating to a new, fictional religion, Mercerism. I don't remember anything about that in Blade Runner. I wonder whether this is a Hollywoodism: editing out the idea of a popular religion completely replacing Christianity. Sci-fi on the screen tends to be pretty antiseptic with respect to belief systems.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Ha, you've somewhat answered questions I asked in my comment! It probably would have struck me more significantly if I had seen it when it came out rather than for the first time in the 1990s.

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

There were a few "dark" elements here and there in Logan's Run, notably the condition of the youngsters and teens in the city's hellion/badlands, but there was a lot of 70s camp mixed in.

The first Alien film may be a better example of the transition to "grunge" sci-fi.

Still, I'm going to echo the likelihood that Blade Runner's appeal is generational. Daniel is of an age to have seen mostly things that were inspired by it. It's often the fate of groundbreaking landmarks to be so thoroughly re-appropriated that nobody realizes there was a "first moment" for some of their ideas or styles.

Nearly every moody music video of the 1980s, for example, borrowed the visual metaphor of light streaming through large rotating air fans and mist or fog. While Blade Runner may not have been the first or only sci-fi film to use that trope, it was certainly AMONG the first, and arguably one of the most visually persuasive. Ridley Scott, the director, had a background in advertising and commercials, and brought some of that sensibility to his films; many early video directors came from the same background.

Even as late as 1989, the directors for Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" videos were stealing very directly from Blade Runner. But if you grew up on Janet Jackson and go back and see Blade Runner, it could occur to you "what's this tired bullshit?"

And these days, you can hardly get AWAY from "moody, dark, depressing, grungy" sci-fi.

It's like the joke about the guy who goes to see Hamlet for the first time because he's heard Shakespeare was such a great writer, and comes back pissed. "Great writer? That guy was such a hack! He just strung cliches together! 'Neither a borrower nor a lender be'! 'To thine own self be true'! 'To be or not to be'! I feel cheated, what an overrated piece of crap!"

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

The Blade Runner DVDs are notorious for their horrible quality, partly because they were among the earliest DVD releases. Last I knew (and a quick troll of Amazon seems to confirm this), the better releases that have been promised for years are still held up in legal wrangling.

I think the DVD release is the "director's cut".

I'm actually a fan of the "original" release, partly because the voiceover narration (though often grating) is a great example of how trying to force a story into a Hollywood arc starts to expose some of the strange assumptions that even better filmmakers get into ... like the idea that you can have a Tokyo-influenced Los Angeles just 14 years from now that contains, like, TWO entire black people, and yet make a comparison between extremely Caucasian replicants and "slaves" with a perfectly straight face, as if the disappearance of African descendants from future America were just one of those things. It's a marvelous little example of how deep racism runs in US America that even a very thoughtful film can get into some truly bizarre race politics.

The director's cut is more streamlined and exposes its own structural flaws a little less readily. It also contains the famous "unicorn dream sequence" which strongly implies that Deckard himself is a replicant. Or which implies that Ridley Scott was already doing pre-production design for Legend.

No, I haven't spent ANY time over the years thinking about this film.

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

If you don't get copied on my replies to Bill and Bruno, you might find them interesting.

Philip Dick was reported to have HATED the first draft of the Blade Runner screenplay. And to have *liked* the later drafts and to have been impressed with the production when he visited the set. He died shortly before its theatrical release, as I recall.

Dick was typically concerned with issues of perception/reality/madness and with empathy. I haven't read "Do Androids Dream" in years ... as I recall, the argument in that book is that androids are ineffably alien, indeed evil, because they cannot empathize, ever. The film inverts this schema: androids are ineffably human because they CAN and DO learn to empathize.

Extra Credit

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

Now: have you read The Man In The High Castle? Because one of the googlisms you can do on me is related to that book:

http://www.nineroses.com/pkd/tmithcnf.html

For extra-extra credit, my thoughts in that article are inspired partly by one of djjo's favorite author's thoughts: Ursula Le Guin is the one who pointed me at the depth of High Castle's humanistic morality.

[mattcallow.livejournal.com]

That's a terrific photograph...

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

I encountered the beginning of that argument today in chapter three and thought, "What's with that?"

So far Dick has posited not that androids are ineffably alien, but that they're inherently predatory, like a spider, cat or owl.

Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet.

The character thought empathy would interfere with a predator's capacity to hunt.

That's ridiculous. A predator can empathize. The religious beliefs of most hunter societies illustrate that clearly. It's arguable that hunting requires great understanding for the prey, and that Western society is dangerously removed from that way of thinking.

Dick's character goes on to suggest that killing violates the "rule of life" and is inherently evil. As a biologist I consider that ridiculous, too. This is where I utterly disagree with moral arguments for vegetarianism.

I hoped this passage was intended to be ironic: the author portraying the character as pathetically naive, and that in the course of the story he would be disillusioned, like the protagonist in Blade Runner. If it turns out the way you remember it, I'm going to be disappointed.

Re: Extra Credit

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

I haven't read it, and in case I decide to, I'm going to avoid reading the article, too. ;-)

Re: Extra Credit

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Um, you may have forgotten that LeGuin is my favourite fiction writer.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

And these days, you can hardly get AWAY from "moody, dark, depressing, grungy" sci-fi.

I agree with that, in fact it's arguable that many people's perceptions of the future have been shaped by trends in this genre.

Wow I like that shot.

[ranjtheobscure.livejournal.com]

And Phillip K. Dick... well, I love to read him, but generally only with tin foil around my head...

Re: Wow I like that shot.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thanks, and I might have to follow your example there.

[ubermunkey.livejournal.com]

Great Book.
I loved that wacked book, dark and yet inspirational.

lovemunkey

ps great shot

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thanks, lovemunkey.

I'm having a hard time with this book. Its inconsistencies and contrivances are driving me around the bend. But I appreciate it was a ground-breaking work.

Cheers,
Van