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Damon. Interesting viewpoints, but you lose points for poor memory. It was the Tyrell Corporation, not Lydell. A small mistake, to be sure. However, a true fan boy wouldn't make such a howling boo-boo while waxing on a classic like BR.
Each week, Mania special correspondent Damon Brown, author of Porn & Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and Other Sexy Games Changed Modern Pop Culture, offers his unique take on society, entertainment and other issues of critical concern to Maniacs. You can also find Brown writing about technology, sex, music and video games for Playboy and Spin.
Reason #7: Los Angeles Stays Wet
THE SITUATION: The future Los Angeles will be cold, wet, dark and rainy, not unlike Seattle without the sunshine. Or Vietnam.
WHY IS THIS ON THE LIST?: Los Angeles will have a possibly record-breaking amount of rain by the time Spring 2008 ends. But that’s not the half. From a LA-area newspaper this past month: "It's amazing," said Kela Carbajal, a hair dresser at the Olive Square Barber Shop. "The kids go around grabbing at the snow and throwing it at cars." Come again?
Reason #6: Robots Do Our Dirty Work
THE SITUATION: According to the film: “Replicants used off-world as slave labor, hazardous exploration and colonization of other planets.”
WHY IS THIS ON THE LIST?: Last week the Phoenix Mars Rover successfully landed on the red planet–so now, while sitting in our warm control rooms, we can use the robot to explore Mars until it runs out of juice and/or we get sick of it. Why risk human life? Besides, it can join up with the ‘90s rover Sojourner. Oh, that’s right, Sojourner’s dead. (Don’t tell Wall-E.)
Reason #5: Everything Is in Japanese
THE SITUATION: Offices signs are written in hiragana, katakana and kanji, the three alphabets of Japanese. The primary street food is noodles, and smiling geishas dominate the advertisements.
WHY IS THIS ON THE LIST?: This may be one of the few times Blade Runner shows its age (aside from the ‘80s hair)–the heavy Nippon influence was probably indicative of Japan’s seemingly unstoppable industrial dominance in 1982, when the film was made. Today it’s a little more realistic to think that we’ll be speaking Mandarin in 2019. It takes a nation of billions to hold us back?
Reason #4: Sex with Darryl Hannah
THE SITUATION: Replicants like Pris, played by Darryl Hannah, will be Pleasure Models created for optimum sexual stimulation.
WHY IS THIS ON THE LIST?: In his recent book “Love and Sex with Robots”, professor David Levy writes "Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans, while the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach us more than is in all of the world's published sex manuals combined." Perhaps like the real Darryl Hannah.
Reason #3: Pets: Made to Order!
THE SITUATION: Zhora, the killer exotic dancer played by Joanna Cassidy, does her sexy onstage routine with a live snake. The hero Deckard uses a piece of shed skin to find its owner–as well as to figure out that the snake was also made in a factory.
WHY IS THIS ON THE LIST?: In February, a South Korean company took the first ever known business order for cloning a pet. It’s charging a reported $150,000 to clone a dead pitbull named Booger. Strangely, the necessary live tissue extract was taken from his ear, not his nose.
Reason #2: We Can Make You Remember
THE SITUATION: Replicants only last four years. To keep them from having a human-like fear of death, the Lydell Corporation implants false childhood memories. Deckard reveals this to the replicant Rachael (played by Sean Young) by telling her about memories she’s told no one–which, in reality, were actually generic memories given to her by the corporation.
WHY IS THIS ON THE LIST?: This actually isn’t in the future, but in the past. In 2003, scientists successfully made a duplicate of the hippocampus–the memory part of the brain–and put it on a silicon chip. The publicly stated goal was to restore damaged memory as a result of stroke, Alzheimer’s and similar debilitating attacks on the brain. It would also seem to give these same scientists the ability to give us fresh memories, too, of their own choice. Remember when you signed up for a lifetime of military service on Mars? Of course you do!
Reason #1: Earth Rot
THE SITUATION: Earth is in bad shape–presumably from our centuries of abuse–so new planets, or so-called “Off-worlds,” are being discovered and developed by replicants. The assumption is that Mother Earth is on her last legs.
WHY IS THIS ON THE LIST?: It is impressive to see global warming effects (see reason #7) in a 1982 movie, which itself was based on the 1968 Philip K. Dick “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” The key point here, though, is that people are leaving Earth: Within the next year, megabillionaire Richard Branson plans to have his Virgin Galactic airline flying people into outer space. Did we mention it will cost $200,000 to fly? We can’t help but think the rich guys know something we don’t.
Read Damon’s blog at www.damonbrown.net.
