Monday, December 11, 2006
I'm Not In The Business; I Am The Business
I was reading a string of interesting articles on hipsterism, semiotics, and science fiction, and it occurred to me that Blade Runner is about hipsters. It takes as its central theme the anxiety about being a real person instead of one of those machines manufactured by the megacorporations; someone with real hopes and dreams and feelings, not implanted memories of spider cannibalism and mass-produced dreams of unicorns running through streams; someone who can make his own decisions, who will not age and die before his time; who, in other words, is free.
But of course, as the film tells us in its final scene, we are all replicants. We will all get old and die before we know what is happening to us. We will all believe that our dreams and decisions are our own even as we dance to the tune of the corporate taste-makers. The only hope for salvation is laid out for us by Roy Batty, the war veteran and terrorist whose deicide -- the murder of his corporate father -- gives him no peace, but who finds relief when he saves the life of his brother/hunter Deckard: Roy asks us to embrace our mortality and our synthetic origins and to celebrate the experiences we have, no matter how they are mediated by the manufactured prison that is our flesh. "You wouldn't believe the things I've seen with your eyes": can anyone come up with a better retort to a media-military-industrial complex so smugly self-assured in its ability to manufacture our every lived experience from birth to death? The quest for authenticity does not lie outside the constraints of the market -- if we've learned one thing since the sixties, it should be that "market" and "culture" are the same thing -- but rather within its constraints. Every moment of our lives, no matter how banal or "mainstream", can be authentic if we are mindful of our actions and experiences, if we look for the sublime in the horrific and the commonplace. (At least, that's the conclusion that the Buddhist in me draws from the film; my inner nihilist, not so much.)
The replicant condition is a magnification of the human one - they are "more human than human". The hipster obsession with authenticity, with individuality, and with eternal youth (see this great article by Adam Sternbergh on Grups) is magnified by the image of the replicant. "It's too bad she won't live... but then again, who does?" In other words, as my girlfriend's buddy told her during her first year of law school: you can't be indie forever.
Seen through this lens, the movie's little zen tidbits offer a path out of the mazelike tangle of hipsterism and consumerism, or at least a birds-eye view of the predicament. Rachel's disillusionmant about her individuality is the same dread we all face when that great little band I discovered shows up on VH1; her illusion of agency crumbles, as she realizes that she is not a maker of commodities, or even a consumer of commodities, but that she is herself a commodity. The Blade Runner is revealed as the demographer, the marketing guru, the corporate lackey employing his Voight-Kampff Test to segment the market and to tell his subjects who they are and what they desire. And Roy's final meditation on the irreducible tragedy of our own slavery suggests that, in the end, the only real meaning we can hope for is a bit of compassion toward our fellow slaves -- a recognition of "kinship", as he calls it when he grasps Deckard's hand -- and an honest recognition of our situation:
But of course, as the film tells us in its final scene, we are all replicants. We will all get old and die before we know what is happening to us. We will all believe that our dreams and decisions are our own even as we dance to the tune of the corporate taste-makers. The only hope for salvation is laid out for us by Roy Batty, the war veteran and terrorist whose deicide -- the murder of his corporate father -- gives him no peace, but who finds relief when he saves the life of his brother/hunter Deckard: Roy asks us to embrace our mortality and our synthetic origins and to celebrate the experiences we have, no matter how they are mediated by the manufactured prison that is our flesh. "You wouldn't believe the things I've seen with your eyes": can anyone come up with a better retort to a media-military-industrial complex so smugly self-assured in its ability to manufacture our every lived experience from birth to death? The quest for authenticity does not lie outside the constraints of the market -- if we've learned one thing since the sixties, it should be that "market" and "culture" are the same thing -- but rather within its constraints. Every moment of our lives, no matter how banal or "mainstream", can be authentic if we are mindful of our actions and experiences, if we look for the sublime in the horrific and the commonplace. (At least, that's the conclusion that the Buddhist in me draws from the film; my inner nihilist, not so much.)
The replicant condition is a magnification of the human one - they are "more human than human". The hipster obsession with authenticity, with individuality, and with eternal youth (see this great article by Adam Sternbergh on Grups) is magnified by the image of the replicant. "It's too bad she won't live... but then again, who does?" In other words, as my girlfriend's buddy told her during her first year of law school: you can't be indie forever.
Seen through this lens, the movie's little zen tidbits offer a path out of the mazelike tangle of hipsterism and consumerism, or at least a birds-eye view of the predicament. Rachel's disillusionmant about her individuality is the same dread we all face when that great little band I discovered shows up on VH1; her illusion of agency crumbles, as she realizes that she is not a maker of commodities, or even a consumer of commodities, but that she is herself a commodity. The Blade Runner is revealed as the demographer, the marketing guru, the corporate lackey employing his Voight-Kampff Test to segment the market and to tell his subjects who they are and what they desire. And Roy's final meditation on the irreducible tragedy of our own slavery suggests that, in the end, the only real meaning we can hope for is a bit of compassion toward our fellow slaves -- a recognition of "kinship", as he calls it when he grasps Deckard's hand -- and an honest recognition of our situation:
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain.
