Philip K. Dick on Blade Runner, plus my thoughts
The official Philip K. Dick website has just posted a 1981 letter by Dick, newly released to the public, in which he tells Jeff Walker of the Ladd Company his impressions of Blade Runner. He had just seen a feature about the movie on a TV show. In an interview, Harrison Ford described the movie as, in a word, futurism. The legendary science fiction author more than agreed with him: not science fiction, not fantasy, but futurism on film. Science fiction's New Wave had long since subsided, and the cyberpunk rebellion was still in its infancy (and Blade Runner, along with Judge Dredd, would hugely influence the cyberpunks). The genre was stagnating in 1981. More than he knew at the time, Dick was right when he concluded:
...Blade Runner is going to revolutionize our conceptions of what science fiction is and, more, can be.
Philip K. Dick didn't survive to see the theatrical release of Blade Runner, but he eventually did see a rough cut of the movie in a private screening. He said of it: "I recognized it immediately. It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly." Despite his skepticism of Hollywood, he became Blade Runner's first big fan, and said that the movie and the Dick novel it's based on, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, complement and reinforce each other.
When I saw it in its first release in 1982, I was stunned. And I am still stunned every time I see it, in each improved version. It belongs to the select group of science fiction films that I can say imprinted me, the others being Videodrome, Escape from New York, and Akira. Then in 1988 I read William Gibson's Neuromancer, and the following year I discovered the manga Akira (new Volume 1 edition here) and Appleseed (volumes one, two, three, and four). By the time I started planning the earliest versions of my own (still unproduced) manga, Spanner, my storytelling sensibility was now set in stone. I was a cyberpunk.
Blade Runner is only half science fiction, really, and not technically cyberpunk despite its influence on the nascent subgenre. It's really futurism applied to a neoclassical film noir. There is much homage to noir throughout the film, right down to Sean Young's "Black Dahlia" dress and hairdo. And it possesses the same quality of languid beauty that characterizes the best film noir, particularly Body Heat, which came out the year before. Nicholas Christopher, in his book on film noir, Somewhere in the Night, felt that dreamy quality in one of the noir classics, Out of the Past. I watched it (along with Force of Evil, Touch of Evil, and Laura); however, I had already been spoiled by Blade Runner and Body Heat, so I found it rougher and tougher than the later revivalist films despite their violence.
Blade Runner was not a big success on its first release. It actually flopped. But its popularity slowly grew, through its video releases and many different versions, and it became a cult classic. But it is generally agreed that Blade Runner is one of the greatest science fiction films of all time.
Here's an early trailer for the movie:
...and here's the official movie site, plus other sites: BRMovie.com, the Blade Runner Online Magazine, and the collected reviews at Rotten Tomatoes.
