November 15, 2009

Depth on Screen

Posted in Film, Philosophy at 6:59 pm by Paul Sagar

Just a quick blog, partly to move my somewhat confused (and confusing) thoughts about Jon Cruddas’ communitarianism further down the home page.

Last night I watched Blade Runner for the umpteenth time. Now, I’ve long suspected that this film manages to capture and explore some pretty profound themes, in a way that escapes all but the greatest literature and stage drama. Most people would scoff at that, but I really think their wrong.

In particular, the character Roy Batty’s final lines (which I think can almost be considered as soliloquy) always strike me as not only deeply moving, but as relaying something truly significant and insightful about the nature of life and death:

“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 Tannhauser Gate.

All those moments will be lost in time. Like tears in rain.

Time to die.”

Rendering this to text alone loses a great deal from the actual delivery by Rutger Hauer. So you really should watch it for yourselves (and not just on YouTube; you won’t understand the full impact unless you’ve watched the whole film first).

However, until last night I could never put my thoughts together about why Blade Runner managed to achieve something quite special, or how to explain that it constitutes so much more than “just a film”. Then I remembered Stephen Mulhall did an excellent podcast about the philosophy of Blade Runner, so I went a-Googling to see if he’d written anything more substantive about it.

And it turns out he has. This is compulsory reading, not just for anybody who actually wants to understand why Blade Runner is up there with the greatest literature and drama, but for anybody who would like to find better ways to think about what it is to be human, and what it is to live and die.

To bad you won’t live. But then again, who does?

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