(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
I remember well the first time I saw Blade Runner. There wasn't much I knew about the film, but I had seen pictures of it in a science-fiction lexicon – this was before the time of the internet – and had turned a bit on the author Philip K. Dick. The little adults we were, my friend Anders and I, sat ready to read film historical references when the movie began. But as Vangelis' soaring tones swirled across the landscape – intimate, yet majestic at the same time – we soon forgot our film nerd ambitions. Big flames burst out of the cityscape – I don't know where they came from, but they were effective there is no doubt. This was a different world from the ones I knew from similar films, and it was precisely what struck me most, both then and now: that it seemed so accomplished in its mix of futuristic vehicles, Asian characters, floating cars, singing geisha and a never-ending film-noir rain.
Huge rooms are crossed in every direction; a world of rain and fog, floating cars and restless souls on foot.
The human condition. I never forgot the movie and have seen it many times since, in different versions. When it became known that Denis Villeneuve would be directing the one who recently had the premiere, hope flared up: Villeneuve is one of the really interesting directors in the world right now, most of all because he has a vision in his films. There is a desire in them to investigate something that seems sincere, and which often results in striking images – allegories closest – to human conditions.
There are two red threads in both films that particularly concerned me, namely the questions what a human being is og what makes us human. The movies move in a universe where it is difficult to distinguish between real and factory-produced people, so-called replicants. When can we really notice the difference, purely biologically, of these species, the natural and the created? The answer to this seems to be minner - and thus also that it is our memories that make us who we are.
Our own story. I Blade Runner from 1982, Deckard (Harrison Ford) dreams of a unicorn, and the next day, just such a creature, made by his boss Tyrant, appears outside his door. Several have pointed out that this is proof that Deckard is a replicant – that Tyrant has probably read his memory. In my eyes, it is rather a picture of how the inner life binds us together with the outer world and how a personal story is connected with a common story. Because there is nothing outside of ourselves that can assure us of who we are – if we rely too much on documents or externalities, we push the story of ourselves into the hands of others.
There is always an uncertainty associated with memories; they are volatile and intangible in nature. But becoming a human being is about placing the memories in a coherent self-narrative – where what you remember becomes part of who you are, who you have been and who you can become. It is in the way we tell our story that we find the connection between the memories – not in public registers, nor in other people's stories about us.
The context of memories. There is a similar scene in Blade Runner 2049, where K (Ryan Gosling) remembers a scene from his childhood: He runs through an industrial area with a group of boys behind him. In his hand he has a wooden horse – it is the one they want. When he realizes that he does not want to get away, he hides the horse in an old incinerator. When he visits Deckard's old boss Tyrant to hear from him about something completely different, Tyrant suddenly puts a small origami horse on the table. Through this detail the two are linked Blade Runnerthe movies together.
The scene is in many ways a key to the question of identity in both the first and the second film, because again there is doubt as to whether this actually happened as rodent K, or Joe, as his hologram girlfriend calls him. Because he refuses to accept that the horse was planted there by anyone other than himself, he manages to place the memory in his own self-history. This is how he creates a connection between his old and present self – not because the horse itself solves the problem, but because the examination of the connections between past and present leads him to connections below the immediate surface. As a police officer, he has access to public registers, and the story of his identity is also embedded in the memories of others. But K does not give up – and in the end he sees the network of connections three forward. Not only between the wooden horse in his supposed past and present, but also between everything else that has happened – and continues to happen.
The totality of the details. There are few films that give such a clear picture of the city's size as Blade Runner: the lonely man in the masses, in the enormous and chaotic urban landscape. But in fact this becomes even clearer in Villeneuve's film: the man who wanders through colossal geographies – here and there in the majestic urban landscapes. Huge rooms are crossed in all directions; a world of rain and fog, hovering cars and restless souls on foot. It strikes me how it is still the intimacy that the microscopic things evoke that makes things stick together in Blade Runneruniverse. It is in the details that the whole emerges: a wooden wooden horse or a unicorn of matches.
These little figures remind me of Rosebud in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. As a child, Kane was deprived of her parents, and then a sledge with the word "Rosebud" on it also disappeared. When Kane later – after having an almost mythical success as a media magnate – fills up layer upon layer with endless amounts of museum objects, it is still the last word he utters on his deathbed. "Rosebud" – it was the childhood memory, it was the sledge he left, which was closest to who he was.
