I decided pretty early on that I wouldn’t be going to see Blade Runner 2049, long before it was called that, or before Denis Villeneuve was announced to direct it (certainly, one of my “must see” filmmakers in this decade), or before all of it, really.
The decision was twofold. In the first part was a simple philosophical idea, which comes to flower at the end of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (the director’s cut, since everyone is always asking me that). It goes a little like this: Deckard finds some evidence he might be a Replicant. This means he might die in a year or two. He isn’t sure. He’s in love with Rachael – a Replicant. He hears Gaff’s voice in his head, “Too bad she won’t live! But then again who does?” And in what I genuinely think is the finest single moment of performance in Harrison Ford’s long and illustrious career, Deckard nods, takes Rachael’s hand, and leaves the building with her. The elevator doors close.
This isn’t a particularly deep idea, but in the history of cinema (which circumstantially happens to be my favourite art), it is my pick for one of the best expressions of it: you don’t know what you’re going to get, and you don’t know how long you’re going to get it. Make the choice and do the thing your heart tells you to do, because only you can define what your existence is going to mean.
My take on the end of Blade Runner is not only that it works perfectly to communicate that, but the very nature of that communication is dependent on not having a second of time with Deckard after the elevator doors close. (So, again: the director’s cut.) This is basic artistic language working to communicate meaning: the doors close, the screen cuts to black, the story is over. I hope you can understand why a sequel, any sequel, is a troubling proposition in this case: its very existence undoes the formal logic of this single, white-hot moment of great art. There is no “after” Blade Runner. Artistically, there never should be.
My second reason was, perhaps, slightly more morbid: I wanted to see what missing a cultural event would feel like, on the assumption that sooner or later, I will start missing more and more of them.
There will be a Star Wars I don’t see. There will be a Marvel movie I take a pass on. There will be a season of Stranger Things I can’t get around to. Something. Life changes, faculties decline, death comes for us all. I’m describing forces that are (Thor willing) far, far away in the future, but they are part of the deal. You can’t actually be a completist. You’ll never get around to everything.
Let’s face it, for someone in my position, given my interests, given my industry, given my circle of friends and community of peers, skipping out on Blade Runner 2 is a big deal. It’s not a huge deal, but it is big. It is intentionally omitting oneself from a fairly significant conversation for a period of time, and (from my experience this year), it’s also a risk of not knowing exactly how significant a conversation you’re missing, and how long you will need to excuse yourself from it.
In this regard, 2049 stood me in surprisingly good stead. I was halfway hoping the movie would be released to terrible reviews, and thereby remove from me the burden of feeling like I’d missed a great Villeneuve film, regardless of its franchise (no such luck), but I got the next best thing: Blade Runner 2049 tanked. It came and went. Film geeks geeked out about it for a week or so, but it didn’t change the cultural landscape, won’t win the Oscar for Best Picture, didn’t augur a new generation of filmmaking aesthetics that will define how movies are made for the rest of my life. Hey, it still might – the original Blade Runner did a lot of these things, long after it, too, tanked – but let’s officially call it unlikely. The original Blade Runner did all that in a vastly different era of its art form, and in a vastly different marketplace for this kind of commodity. I may be wrong, but I doubt we’ll be namechecking Blade Runner 2049 in 2049, or even in 2019.
I weathered the storm without even having to resort to a panicked watch of Blade Runner at midnight on opening weekend. I downloaded Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch’s 2049 score and blissed out a couple of times, the Phillips lamps tuned pink and blue, the SONOS Playbar pounding. I saw a lot of gifs float past me on Tumblr for a week or two, but – with the same blurred-eye deep focus that gets me past 280-character tweets on Twitter – I didn’t really take them in. I think I’m aware there’s a giant naked purple woman in Blade Runner 2049, and I think Ryan Gosling is in love with her. But I don’t know.
My major ambition would be to do this again for Solo: A Star Wars Story next spring, but I know I’m going to fail there. I certainly have no desire to see that movie, but at this point, any Star Wars is the kind of cultural reference point I’m simply incapable of building my day-to-day without. That’s halfway a joke, and halfway not. Besides, I’ll see it with my brother, and I am never not doing that, for as long as he and I are both alive and relatively capable.
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