Weird Studies/Blade Runner

22 Feb 2022 - 22 Dec 2023
Open in Logseq
    • Unexpected ref to The Selfish Gene (replicants ≡ replicators). They read a great passage which paints genes as agents. highlights the weirdness and frankly sinister overtones.
    • I want to jump up and yell, "A Scanner Darkly" was a much more Dickian film. I don't know, I love the film but I don't identify with it so much, being a more hardcore SF fan? But Bladerunner certainly has its merits and does touch on important PKD themes.
    • "Sometimes the worst curators of a work of art are its creators"
      • in reference to Ridley Scott's adding elements to the later cuts
        • primarily the unicorn that either marks Deckard as a replicant or is some kind of token of a larger, more alive world
        • Some further commentary on unicorn from JFM (Discord):
          • The film is challenging you to believe in magic. It's pushing you to the edge where science fiction bottoms out in fantasy, and fantasy asserts itself as the ground of dream, magic, myth, i.e. reality.... The horn of the unicorn is a middle-finger held at all the cynics, materialists, and ironists of postmodernity.
          • Don't know if that's an accurate depiction of Ridley Scott's thinking but it certainly encapsulates the Weird Studies stance. I'm all of those things (in part) and I feel attacked. I'm asking for it of course by hanging out in their world. My defense – looking for a noncynical version of materialism, a positive version of irony (see A Case for Irony ).
          • I see the unicorn as a direct challenge to the obligatory profession of disbelief and scorn before the possibility that the world may be grounded in the good, that meaning might override all our attempts to deny its existence, that faith and hope are better aligned with the Real than systematic doubt and despair, that culture is more than a function of memetic replication (as Dawkins argued).
    • Serpent and Dove (Serpent is technic/rationalism/mechanism, Dove is some external animating spirit)
    • Around 50:00, discussion of agency and decentering, in context of Jameson, Freud, Ricouer,
      • postmodern decentering is a false-friend to Budddhist no-self.
    • human ≡ freedom to choose the good, escape determinism. also existential suffering
    • Really nice analysis of the noir detective as a kind of actual eye, surveying and traveling through the urban landscape, and as a shamanistic figure that can travel between worlds that are ordinarily separated (high society, street, sordid criminal haunts). Seems almost too obvious but it struck me afresh.
      • Detective as a homeless figure, able to travel the worlds but belonging to none of them (well, he has the traditional dingy office).
        • "his being is mobile", mentions famous crane shot from Touch of Evil
    • Something about the time of the early 80s. Other films exploring replicant monsters, pop songs about being surveilled. "The last analogue chapter of our species". These films all came out right before that cultural shift.