Homages

From 1970: Say Easy Rider

William Timberman

This is from the first issue of a two-issue, tabloid-format newsprint magazine Stephen Williamson (no, not the economist) and I published as undergraduates in 1970, and which I long thought had been lost forever. Steve, as it turns out, is — fortunately — more of a packrat than I am, and preserved some copies, so I get to republish it 50 years after its first appearance. I’ve corrected a couple of typos, but otherwise left it as it was, including the abhorrence of contractions which I’ve long since overcome, assorted capitalization and punctuation crimes, and a grating insensitivity to 21st century gender pronoun and racial nomenclature norms, which I’ll just have to live with. We all have a past, no?

If the twentieth century had any essential lesson to teach us, it is this: we are finally on our own. Kings have been dead since the French Revolution. Nietzsche broke the news about God a century ago, and to any perceptive observer it is obvious that the state suffers from a terminal cancer. We are running out of history. What has brought us the concentration camp and the H-Bomb no longer has much to offer us.

For anyone born after 1940, independence is the natural attitude; the illusion of authority has evaporated. Our generation feels free to snicker when the thought police masquerade as destiny, an achievement George Orwell clearly believed to be impossible.  Nevertheless, the baggage of the past has not been as easy to dump as we thought. What began as the Aquarian Age has recently come to look more like a kind of simultaneous rerun of all but the most irrelevant episodes in history. The remnants of the student radical movement have restricted themselves to recovering the nineteenth century millennium, as though they somehow had forgotten that Stalin was the result of the first run-through. People in communes wait patiently for technology and international culture to disappear. What a damn shame it would be if someday their descendents had to fight the Sioux-Blackfoot wars over again!

There is certainly a kink somewhere when a generation with as good an understanding as ours has had of the gap between reality and human perception starts producing astrologers, communists, and subsistence farmers. Given what we know, it makes as much sense as Free Enterprise or the Cold War. I suspect the explanation lies somewhere in the difference between the extent of the possibilities we can see and the amount of personal energy required to realize even the most limited of them. We want a lot, and we can have only a little. Our tendency is to make up the difference by magic. We blame our impotence on a “Power Structure” that is already discredited, and play at revolution. We’re more ready to believe in Tarot cards or the Great Spirit than to live with our natural limitations. We have yet to learn that ending repression does not give anyone supernatural powers, or maintain his innocence.

The issue isn’t whether or not other cultures and ideologies reveal wisdoms ours lacks, but whether we’ve picked up on them for the sake of wisdom or for an easy way out of our own troubles. There is quite a difference between learning from the Indians to respect the ecological balance and believing yourself to be the reincarnation of Crazy Horse. Like practicing astrology seriously or advocating guerrilla warfare, living in tepees in the twentieth century United States amounts to schizophrenia, and it’s dangerous. The bombs and concentration camps will remain, and we won’t be able to see enough of the world that produces them to discover where they are coming from. Chances are we won’t be able to understand even the simplest of things that happen to us from one day to the next.

There is good evidence that this is going down already. The illusions of youth culture or hip culture or whatever are almost as strongly defended as the illusions we call the American Dream. Everybody is hip to what the cops did in Chicago, and says so. With considerably less provocation the Hell’s Angels did a lot of the same at Altamont, and no no seems to notice the similarity, let alone the analogy it implies between us and Mayor Daley.

When we don’t notice, people get hurt, just like they did when the Haight went under and acid visionaries were replaced by needle freaks; just like they did when the Weathermen decided they had a right to crack heads, or Charles Manson decided he was Attila the Hun.

Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper have noticed and they’ve made a fine film about it. I can’t think of a more convincing image of the unpleasantness that can come from parts of the world a man has chosen to ignore than the end of Easy Rider. A lot of people have put it down for being paranoid, but they are missing the point. Of course it’s paranoid — a paranoid dream from beginning to end. That is its strength.

This film, unlike any other I have seen in a long time, openly prefers the psychological reality of experiences to the realistic description of an objective world in which such experiences presumably take place. Nearly everything which happens in Easy Rider is seen as Billy and Wyatt, the two main characters, would see it, and every character except them and possibly their lawyer is as two-dimensional as their understanding of him. I wouldn’t argue that Fonda and Hopper intended to make the film that way, but I would argue that they showed good sense in leaving it that way once it was edited. It sets up the audience beautifully.

Billy and Wyatt are not aware of what is going on around them outside the limits of their perception. Neither is the audience — the film represents Billy and Wyatt’s perception as reality. For those in the audience who belong to our generation the identification is particularly strong. Like Billy and Wyatt, we know that the world is fucked, and that there isn’t much we can do about it. We are on the same trip. Making a big dope deal, buying a beautiful motorcycle, and heading down the road to Mardi Gras appeals to us. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it.

No one discovers what is wrong with it until Billy and Wyatt do themselves. From the second shotgun blast to the silent end of the film, it breaks in a long wave over both the characters and the audience; the horrible surprise of an intrusion from the world outside the myth both are sharing.

What surprises Billy and Wyatt is that the rednecks really are out to get them. What surprises us is the sudden end to the illusion we are into too deeply to back out of in time. The shock of the last scene isn’t the shock of death, but of its opposite; of waking up. When Billy and Wyatt are murdered our fantasies die with them, and for that moment we are uncomfortably exposed to the reality of the theater around us. Psychologically it is akin to being discovered masturbating. The sadness comes in having to stop too soon, not in having to experience someone else’s death. Our sympathy is for ourselves.

Had that been all there was to Easy Rider, identification with the characters, titillating violence for a minute or two, and then a return to our unexciting lives, it would have compared favorably with Goldfinger or Bullitt, but it wouldn’t have had anything to say. The film is important because Fonda and Hopper enclose within it a comment on both the psychological processes involved in identifying too strongly with a myth, and the dangerous consequences which are in store for one who lives his life inside this myth. The danger is not to be taken literally; it isn’t that the rednecks will shoot us down, although that is one possibility. The danger lies in the destruction of our humanity. Being on our own trip isolates us from one another. When finally no one can recognize the real existence of anyone else, just being alive will be danger enough for all of us.

Fonda and Hopper have left to many clues in Easy Rider for us to miss the point, although none are so obvious that they prevent us from making the emotional identification with Billy and Wyatt that gives the film its power. They are there for us to discover in retrospect. After the film is over it remains to us to separate the myth from the reality; to understand what it is that we’ve felt so deeply.

The first hint of what is really going on in the film is, of course, the title. As Fonda has explained it in interviews, easy rider is Southern slang for a pimp — the only one who doen’t have to pay. Responsibility is the price of freedom, deadness is the price of living in a myth — those are the obvious implications.

Again, it is hard to escape the fact that the road Billy and Wyatt are traveling doesn’t lead where they think it does. Instead of ending in Mardi Gras, it ends in death. A night in jail and the murder of their friend the lawyer were warning enough. There were alternate routes, such as that of the rancher who loaned them his tools and fed them. They were even given outright invitations to try another one. As wrapped up in themselves as they were, they were welcome at the commune, and obviously, to at least the whores in New Orleans, they were attractive. What kept them on the move was not really a quest for freedom — possibly just the opposite.

There are reviewers who have pointed out what appears to be another inconsistency. Although it is Billy and Wyatt who introduce him to pot and give him lectures on the evils of society, the lawyer seems a much more well-rounded character than either of them. Whether or not this was the result of better acting on the part of the man who portrayed him, as reviewers have suggested, is not what is important. His presence in the film serves two purposes. First of all, it shows that Billy and Wyatt’s analysis of society is essentially correct. Society is stultifying, and any man who prizes his self-respect would like to break out of it. Hippies don’t bother the lawyer; he recognizes that they have some good ideas. But he does serve also as a kind of contrast to Billy and Wyatt. He is much more firmly rooted in the world than either of them. He feels no need to style himself “Captain America,” but, as the flying saucer tales shows, he is more creative and alive than the two characters for whom freedom is supposedly a specialty.

There are other indications that Billy and Wyatt have a harder time relating to themselves and others than should be true of free men. Wyatt is rebuffed twice by the leader of the commune — once when they are smoking in the abandoned adobe, and later in the commune when he is trying to ball one of the women. It could happen to anyone, but Wyatt doesn’t understand that. He freaks, just as both of them freak later on acid in the graveyard. Despite the jumbled cutting in the graveyard scene, there is solid evidence that both characters have their share of personal demons.

The key to all these indications that Billy and Wyatt are not what they imagine themselves to be lies in the character of the more introspective of the two, Billy. Wyatt is a kind of Sancho Panza — a man interested only in what he can get. Billy is a little more cautious, a little more aware, and consequently a little more stylized, especially as Fonda plays him. His “we blew it” and the image of the burning bike that intrudes on his thoughts provide the context for not only his withdrawn personality but for all the rest of what happens in Easy Rider as well. He begins bit by bit to become aware of what is wrong, but the film ends before he really gets to the heart of it. The rest of the task in dumped in the lap of the audience, where, in fact, it has lain all along.

For those of us who went to this film just to get stoked up on our own innocence and the evil of rednecks and other oppressors, there are a couple of other scenes that remain to be considered. Neither are acted in the usual sense of the word. The first is hardly more than a couple of seconds long, and appears to have been shot in the streets of New Orleans without any prior planning.

Billy is careening down the street during Mardi Gras with an open bottle in his hand, which, in the spirit of things, he offers to a passing black. The look on that man’s face and his gesture of refusal are enough by themselves to sum up the whole peculiar history of the South. His is the classic double-bind. A drunken white has offered him a drink, a drink which other whites might beat him or worse for accepting. Yet, when he turns it down, he must also keep smiling. Otherwise his refusal might be interpreted as an insult to white generosity, also a dangerous offense. Billy doesn’t understand the black’s behavior and blunders on down the street. He is too busy with his own problems.

The other scene takes place in a southern cafe. All those rednecks trading jokes about how people in their county customarily handle “Yankee queers” were real live rednecks, not actors. They were showing off, of course. The movie people indulged them in a little play-acting, and they enjoyed themselves at it, that’s all. Still, there was no script. Just where in hell did they get that long list of epithets and tortures they were tossing back and forth, I wonder.

At that point in the film everyone should wonder. The boundaries between acting and reality are not clearly drawn in Easy Rider, but neither are they in the world of experience. From the black man’s point of view, there must not seem to have been much difference between the man whose dream prevented him from noticing another’s pain, and one whose dream is to inflict pain. One of the corollaries to the central point made in Easy Rider is that the two dreams lie very close together, and the transition between them is as hard to spot as it is frequent.

If that seems hard to believe, get a copy of the January 21st Rolling Stone and look at the picture of Mick Jagger at Altamont. There he stands, with his high-heeled boots, and his knuckles in his mouth, watching four or five Angels butcher a man on the stage ten feet away. It must have been one hell of a rude awakening for the author of Street FIghting Man, and for the other 300,000 people who were watching, too, for that matter.

It is the same kind of awakening that is previewed for us in Easy Rider, one which awaits every one of us, who, considering ourselves beyond the errors of past times, refuse to pay attention to anything but our own dreams. In the twentieth century, we are all being forced to live outside the law. If there is one thing for us to remember, it is this: to live outside the law, you must be honest. (Anybody can say that.)

From 2008: A House Divided

William Timberman

This was written at the invitation of the founder of a Web site which unfortunately never saw the light of day. Waste not, want not, right?

 

A House Divided: Can Independent Thinking Flourish in the No-man’s Land of the American Culture Wars?

When I was asked recently if I thought that our increasingly vicious culture wars were stifling independent thinking in the United States, my answer was an immediate and unqualified no. Now that I’ve had time to consider the question a little more thoroughly, my answer is still no, but I no longer believe in dismissing out of hand the concerns which originally prompted it.

The truth is that human beings, those at any rate with the spirit and the leisure to work at puzzles or dream dreams, are always going to think what they think, regardless of whose agents are looking over their shoulders, or what orthodoxy of the moment is threatening to vilify or imprison them. The real question is whether or not all this thinking can have any lasting effect, beneficial or otherwise, on the civilization which spawns it.

Despite the several centuries which have passed since the first impact of the Enlightenment on our epistemology, this is still an open question. For all the recent furor which they’ve created in the United States, the culture wars declared by the right have in fact been an epiphenomenon, an engineered distraction acting not so much to prevent independent thinking per se, as to prevent that thinking from entering our political discourse, or finding expression in the policy decisions of our government. In that, of course, the right has until very recently been remarkably successful. Its success, however, has come at a price.

That price is blindness. The enemy of conventional wisdom and the status quo, and of its die-hard defenders, has never been the free-thinker, but reality itself. You can imprison the advocates of inconvenient discoveries, but you can’t imprison events. When the Spanish Inquisition institutionalized the search for heretics, and industrialized the lighting of autos da fé all over the country, smart people found a home in Holland, or England, or in the New World, and Spain entered a long decline which persisted, in one form or another, until the death of Franco. More recently, the fan dancers of unfettered capitalism have held not just the usual rubes in thrall, but our policy makers and soi-disant intellectual elites as well. Then, quite unexpectedly for them, reality turned up the house lights and set fire to the fans. Suddenly, we’re once again talking publicly about the responsibility of governments to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common Defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.

Even if you accept, as I do, that politics broadly defined is the only effective instrument for mediating which ideas will become the currency of the realm, and which will be relegated to bric-a-brac in the museums of memory, it’s clear enough that no matter the necessities of human nature which force us to rely on politics for this mediation, there can be no blunter instrument for the purpose, nor any which affords us less comfort in the wielding.

Tyrannies are real enough, after all, and so are the ideologies which give rise to them. Even if you have confidence that they can in the end be overcome, the millions slaughtered and enslaved by them in the 20th century, beginning more than a hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man, must give an honest person at least some pause to question that confidence. George Orwell understood this, and in 1984 presented us not only with a haunting butcher’s bill for the previous half-century’s devotion to armed isms, but also a warning that by adhering to them, we were flirting with an end to history, and not a happy end at that.

I found 1984 profoundly disturbing, but I remain an optimist nevertheless. Orwell was prescient in many ways, but in the end, his inner Jeremiah outmaneuvered his sense of history. No boot, however determined, however well-funded, can stamp on the human face forever. Other boots may in time come along, but they will always have to take their turn, and then, inevitably, pass into oblivion. There is such a thing as the dialectic, after all, even if, after all these years, its nature is still to a great extent a matter of debate.

That debate has interested me ever since I first discovered it as a young man. Even when I was still a child, the dynamics of my family were such that I quickly developed grave doubts about the sufficiency, if not the necessity, of a rational approach to problems, as well as a perpetually nagging curiosity about why what I was told, both by my elders and my peers, was so frequently at variance with my own experience.

Perhaps that is actually why, more than forty years ago, I went to hear a public lecture by Herbert Marcuse on the campus of UC Berkeley. At the time, it was the hottest ticket in town. Ronald Reagan had already accused Marcuse of trying to make communism safe for undergraduates — in the catechism of the right wing, the moral equivalent of dispensing poisoned candy to children — so of course the lecture amphitheater was packed, and not just with those who’d read his books, but also with the rebellious, the curious; all those passionate advocates of generational solidarity who were already fashioning the Sixties into either a revolutionary epoch or a silly season, depending on how you judged the culture wars which were already underway.

I don’t know what any of us expected, but what we got was an elf — a slight, decidedly unheroic looking man talking to several early arrivals in the pit below the stage. Already nearly seventy, he didn’t look it, except for the almost white hair cropped close over his ears. Very professorial, very European, I thought, yet as informal in dress and manner as his audience. Once the last of the late arrivals had arranged themselves around the edges of the room, and the sponsors had managed, with a flurry of hand waving and restrained begging, to quiet the crowd and make their introductions, the old man skipped up the steps to the stage, walked over to the rickety podium, and started to speak.

Most of what he said that evening I no longer remember. I was, in any case, already familiar with much of it from reading Eros and Civilization, and One-Dimensional Man. What I do remember, though, what has in fact stuck in my mind from then until now, was his opening line:

As I often seem to be doing these days, I shall begin with Hegel…and I shall end with…love.

Like Professor Marcuse, I also began with Hegel, and like the good professor, I very much doubt I’ll end up in the promised land. No one should assume, however, that I don’t believe it exists, or that, somehow or other, love will prove the key to getting there. I know very well that independent thinking, and thinkers, aren’t immortal, but they are eternal. All you have to do, if you want confirmation of that seemingly bold assertion, is to stop for a moment and walk away from the megaphones.

From 1994: The Future of Our Discontents

William Timberman

This essay appeared here and there on the Web in the mid-Nineties in slightly different versions — at one point it was even published in translation by an Italian Blade Runner fan site. There are things in it that I’d change if I were writing it today, but since the only point in re-jiggering the parts that seem embarrassing twenty years later would be to fake a prescience I didn’t have then, and don’t now, who would I be fooling?

 

The Future of Our Discontents

The Contributions of Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner
to the Landscapes of the Twenty-First Century

Four towering gas flares roar up in the foreground and drift away over the landscape like the exhaust from some monstrous calliope. In the valley below them, a vast, corroded jewel of a city glitters in the smog-tinted autumn twilight. The year is 2019, and the city is Los Angeles—capital of the Pax Americana and setting for Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s thirty million dollar meditation on the future of post-industrial capitalism.

Scott’s City of Angels isn’t for optimists. His images of things to come are as melancholy and as architectural as Dore’s engravings of Hell, as intensely detailed as a flatworlder’s logic. Yet the darkly eloquent nightmare at the center of his vision is also strangely apolitical—no one is explicitly blamed for the horrors it offers us. I doubt it ever occurred to Scott that anyone would object—not on ideological grounds, at any rate.

So in the summer of 1982, when Blade Runner was first released to theaters, the reaction against it may well have come as something of a surprise. Reviewers pointed inevitably to flaws in the film’s execution, but I suspect that the real difficulty lay in its tone.

Rightly or wrongly, we Americans have always considered our immunity to the historical accidents which plague other people an essential part of our birthright. The decade of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Arab oil embargo had been a depressing ten years for us, and few of us were eager to be reminded of it, especially when we were expected to pay for the privilege. Scott’s problem was this: just when Ronald Reagan was promising to restore American bragging rights, Blade Runner appeared to conjure openly with the demon of false pride. To many moviegoers, the result may have seemed less a prophecy than an exercise in cultural defeatism.

It would be hard to blame them. Blade Runner was—and is—a disturbing film, but it is also an emotionally accurate one. For anyone who continues to harbor doubts about the future of American empire, there is something deeply unsettling about the rain-soaked Los Angeles in which Blade Runner is set, something eerily familiar in its crumbling architecture and punked-out Third World inhabitants. I wonder how many people, picking their way through theater parking lots on a warm June evening in 1982, imagined for a moment that they heard thunder in the air behind them, or looked apprehensively for oriental characters on the exit signs as they started their cars and drove away. I suspect that there were more than a few.

It may have come as unwelcome news to Scott’s investors, but these disoriented moviegoers, and their reactions to Blade Runner—irritation on the one hand, and deja vu on the other—may have been a better guide to its long-term impact than the box office receipts. However much—or little—it grosses, Blade Runner will remain a compelling reminder of just how nasty life in the twenty-first century may eventually become. It shouldn’t be surprising that audiences find it haunting even as they reject it.

The source of their ambivalence is clear enough, after all. We Americans are the inventors of the twentieth century, but we still haven’t found a home in it. Despite our history, and our pretensions to technological superiority over the rest of the world, we are a lot like the victims of the Chinese curse—fated, no matter what our individual desires, to live in times which are a lot more interesting than we would prefer.

Perhaps that is why, in philosophical terms, the second half of the twentieth century has been so devastatingly quiet. The testimony of Heisenberg and Freud is on record in every library, and incidents like Chernobyl or urban gridlock are reported daily in the media, yet the ruling orthodoxy of the post-war era remains unswervingly Newtonian. It understands only cause and effect, problem and solution, and it recognizes only one heresy: anyone who dallies, even for a moment, with the notion that uncertainty might be a permanent feature of human enterprise is automatically persona non grata. Like Socrates, he may be tolerated, but he is never left alone with the children.

The price of this attitude, especially among the orthodox themselves, is a profound and chronic restlessness. The hope that we can find solutions is tempered always by the fear, largely unexpressed, that we may ourselves be part of the problem. We sense that we are facing not one, but two futures: the future of our public allegiances, and that darker future of moral decay, terrorism and nuclear holocaust which occasionally decorates our private nightmares.

Unfortunately, both are based on the same evidence. Whether we like it or not, the choice between them is always an act of faith—which may be why the use of the future as a metaphor for the misgivings of the present has become such a commonplace. It serves the same function in our time as Hell did in Dante’s: it provides us with the excuse—and occasionally the means—to confront what we have all too carefully hidden from ourselves.

And what illuminations does Blade Runner offer? In the story itself, very few. Whether Scott was forced in the end to capitulate to the demands of big-budget Hollywood marketing, or simply held himself aloof from the political implications of his vision, plot and character development in Blade Runner never rise much above the sad conventions of the comic strip and television cop show. It is only in the incidentals that Blade Runner is interesting—the details of set design and lighting, the tight integration of sound track and music; the tantalizing view, in minor characters and in actions taking place at the edges of the frame, of a city in which much more serious business is being transacted than the pursuit and destruction of some assembly-line Prometheus.

If this business is familiar, it should be. In embryonic form, its essential features surround us already. The political and social dominance of so- called “corporate cultures” is a fact; so also is the increasingly neurotic synergy of computers and real-time video which so gleefully confuses our dreams and our waking experiences. If androids seem farfetched, we have only to remember that it has taken less than thirty years for the first tentative experiments in genetic engineering to develop into the industrial technology which makes worldwide headlines today. Whatever the level of our individual understanding, we must all be aware that a sudden environmental or political apocalypse is not the only threat we face.

It is in the light of this awareness, which he clearly shares, that Scott has rebuilt and illuminated the city of Los Angeles for us. We see it as it might look on a late autumn afternoon nineteen years into the coming century: corrupt and essentially ungovernable, the decaying but still powerful queen of a technological civilization which steadfastly refuses to look at either the compass or the clock.

In the foreground, Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer argue whether androids have souls, and whether, having been denied the right to self-determination by no less a figure than their creator himself, they are justified in resorting to mayhem. We scarcely notice Scott in the background, quietly aiming his camera down a narrow alley at the approaching Götterdämmerung.

Scott imagines the end coming, as Eliot did, “not with a bang, but a whimper.” His camera conducts us through the overpopulated ruin of Hollywood and into the downtown fortress headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation, where Eldon Tyrell, its founder and CEO, has embarked on a mission which would impress even Lee Iacocca. With the natural ecology in terminal disarray, the Third World noisily hawking its noodles in the glass-walled canyons below him, and little hope for continued profit in his dominion over either one, Tyrell—one of those superbly educated and superbly callous white men who, for lack of a better word, we agree to call technocrats—has hit upon a radical solution to his dilemma: he will replace every living thing, human beings included, with more tractable models of his own design.

If his solution seems far-fetched, consider what the present century has already accustomed us to: purge trials and personality cults, Mutual Assured Destruction; the technologies of mass production applied to genocide…. Attempts to selectively re-engineer all of Creation are still comfortably beyond the limits of technology, but should a more capable technology someday become available, it isn’t difficult to imagine a future General Motors or Pentagon willing to experiment with it.

The likelihood of such a future, and the moral fatigue which accompanies it, are among the true horrors of modern life. Against that day, the day when Tyrell’s particular gladness comes to pass, the twin ideologies of politics and religion have little to offer us. The future isn’t an ideological problem.

Sadly, it isn’t an aesthetic problem either. Artists often see evil more clearly than the rest of us, but they rarely have any greater power to correct it. In the realm of the senses, they are not so much politicians as historians. What makes their history more interesting than the kind we are taught in school is that sometimes, as in Blade Runner, it has yet to be confirmed by events.

In painting and in literature this is a familiar concept; in film it is still relatively new, and still poorly understood. Film is a powerful medium, but the experiments with form which, for more than a century, have marked the best of the other arts, have yet to excite much interest among professional filmmakers.

There are two reasons for this, I think. The first arises from the economics of film. Unlike painting or writing, filmmaking is not a handicraft. Film is a collaborative, high technology medium, and feature- length works cost far too much to be sold profitably to the individual collector. Such works must be mass-marketed if they are to be marketed at all, which effectively restricts any experiments in form to those which are likely to be tolerated by mass audiences.

The second reason is more subtle. The illusion of control over reality is one of the most seductive attractions of film, not just for audiences, but also for filmmakers themselves. These days, a director with Hollywood financing at his disposal can do just about anything God can do—provided, of course, that his ambition (and imagination) are up to the task. It is only natural that his acolytes—the cameramen, grips and electricians; the make-up and wardrobe and continuity people—should harbor illusions of their own. Sending an antique Rolls Royce over a cliff just to capture a second or two of film is heady stuff, especially when someone is paying you a fabulous amount of money to do it.

Unfortunately, the grandeur and the exhilaration are available only when the film retains some connection, however tenuous, with its theatrical antecedents. Animation, computer-generated imagery, and other seemingly avant-garde graphic forms may be interesting, but they lack the appeal of film as wish-fulfillment theater.

Audiences in particular have very sensitive antennae for this quality—the quality of their own dreams (or nightmares) given palpable form. The reason that a film like Blade Runner can successfully attach itself to an audience’s subconscious has less to do with its technology—the computer-controlled cameras, digital sound sampling, traveling mats, etc.—than with its psychology, a quality relied upon as much in Shakespeare’s plays as it is in any film.

Of course the tools of traditional theater and of film are vastly different. In Shakespeare’s plays, natural language is the only artifice required—it conjures so powerfully by itself that any staging beyond the absolute essentials seems almost a distraction.

The situation in Blade Runner—as in films generally—is reversed: it is the visual environment of the film which carries the weight of the narrative. In Blade Runner this environment is so strongly present, and so richly suggestive, that at times the relatively little dialog which is required to advance the plot seems more a threat to the dramatic illusion than a support for it.

In large part, this is due to the subtlety of Scott’s visual vocabulary. He gives us brief, but detailed glimpses of a world which is a plausible, if not precisely logical, extension of our own, then openly invites us to interpret them.

To take just one example: almost everyone in Blade Runner smokes—the impenetrable tobacco haze is an important visual element in many of the interior scenes. It isn’t clear, in an age when smoking has become anathema, an almost universal symbol of dissipation and self-contempt, what Scott intends by giving it such pride of place in his version of the twenty-first century.

The answer, I think, is that the smoking in Blade Runner is intended as an echo, a reminder that all the poisonous exhalations of a capitalist society are voluntary. The fatal eroticism embodied in the fumes from Rachael’s smoldering cigarette is repeated in the orange skies above Los Angeles, in the continual dark rain which beats along its decaying rooftops and licks at the trash fires in its streets. Consumption pursued as an end in itself, Scott seems to be saying, will lead to the same, slow catastrophe whether it is an individual or an entire society which does the pursuing. The American Dream is, in fact, a nightmare, and it has always been one.

The psychological acuteness in such metaphors is evident, but for those of us who are roughly Scott’s contemporaries, there is a particular irony in the way he applies them.

We are the children of plenty—our own age of innocence began in the national celebration which accompanied the end of World War II. We grew up surrounded and sheltered by the post-war fantasies of the Fifties. According to the folklore of our childhood, it was American know-how, American technology which had brought us our final victory over war and poverty.

I remember articles in the Weekly Reader of my childhood about the industrial benefits of atomic power and the increased farm yields made possible by the invention of DDT and 2-4-D. I also remember the stories my parents let slip about their own lives; the indignities they had suffered during the Depression, their separation from one another during the war years.

For those of us who had the good fortune to be born white, the future held no particular terrors. What scared us was the past which our parents had so narrowly escaped. Until the Vietnam War arrived to provide us with horrors of our own, we were only too happy to join them in fleeing theirs.

For our generation, then, the more the future threatens, the more it resembles the past—and Scott seems to understand this instinctively. In Blade Runner, he presses the Thirties into service again, like the Bogeyman, to cast its long shadow over our hopes. The Mayan Revival is once again the dominant architectural style; the women of all men’s dreams are once again encased in Joan Crawford’s stiff-shouldered exoskeleton. The horrors of Scott’s landscapes turn on a delicate and beautifully original application of McLuhan’s principle of historical simultaneity—the visual artifacts of another era detached from their original context and pressed into service as emotional shorthand in our own. As the founding generation of the Information Age, we are perhaps the first to be conscious of these signals; we are certainly not the last to be vulnerable to the distortions which they can sometimes introduce into our collective memory. In any event, we respond to the language, and Scott speaks it to perfection.

Yet inventive as it is, this psycho-historical sleight-of-hand isn’t the only trick Scott has in his bag. His camera may imagine the future, but it also echoes the present with an accuracy that is often unsettling.

Consider the immigration patterns of the past twenty-five years. Most of us are aware of the Hmong and the Marielitos, of the continual flood across our southern borders. We’ve seen the changed population mix in our cities, especially along the southern rim of the country. Scott takes the trend a step further, imagining a time when all of our imperial chickens have finally come home to roost.

At street level, his Los Angeles is part Ginza and part Decline of the West—home not only to the rubber-clad, German-speaking dwarves who clamber over Deckard’s car looking for parts to pry loose and sell, but also to Gaff, the extraordinary Latino with white eyes who practices Origami and speaks an argot which sounds like an amalgam of Japanese and Indonesian. (Gaff is especially interesting. As I read him, he is the embodiment of that elegant nihilism which hereditary second-class citizenship sometimes produces among the more talented members of minority groups. If James Baldwin had been stripped of the last of his illusions and armed with a license to kill, he might have behaved a lot like Gaff.)

Although we may not yet be able to find exactly these creatures walking the streets of our cities (even in Los Angeles) there is a definite possibility that we may someday have to make a place for them. And if their numbers happen to include a few clones and cyborgs, who will complain? The same people who complain now, probably—”the kind of cop who used to call black men ‘Niggers.’” For the rest of us, what people are made of—then as now—will have little to do with the physical composition of their bodies.

After all, we are Americans, and Scott’s twenty-first century, despite its stylistic kinship with fascist public works, is an American century. He recognizes that Americans—Californians, at any rate—have always made their own decisions, have always flirted with anarchy.

When Chew tells Batty “I just do eyes,” he is testifying to a form of social disintegration which Orwell could never have imagined. Not ideology run amuck, but the implosion of ideology has sent the people in the streets of Scott’s Los Angeles scurrying. They must re-invent themselves daily out of the unstable bits and pieces of a collapsing rationality. Every man in this New Jerusalem is an island, and a floating one at that. Such purpose as exists here isn’t totalitarian—it’s individual, and small. A subcontractor in human eyes fits the logic of such a society perfectly.

And whether we like it or not, we know that Chew speaks for all of us. If things sometimes go wrong, he believes, as we do, that it can’t be our fault—we are responsible only for a piece of the action, not for the whole. Politics is said to be the pride of free men, but in the twentieth century, the free man has learned to avoid all forms of responsibility, politics included. Politics has been reduced to a form of longing, an eloquence in the prayers of the oppressed. We may sympathize with their plight, but we ourselves are longer interested in acting on their behalf. Outside the Third World, the clear and present danger in our era isn’t totalitarianism, it’s chaos—the lack of necessary and sufficient reasons for doing anything at all.

We know this, all of us. We don’t often discuss it, but we know it. Should automobiles someday come equipped with self-contained oxygen systems, and large-scale mining operations be set up in our urban landfills, we’ll have another chance to reassess Scott’s powers of prediction.

In the meantime, we can say only that his contribution to the vocabulary of our future discontents has been taken up by other filmmakers. When we hear petty fences speaking what sounds like Korean in Trouble in Mind, or see petty Ministry of Information hacks in Brazil driving three-wheel Messerschmidt staff cars (ca. 1949) it wouldn’t hurt us to remember who was first to disembark on these shores. Ridley Scott may not be aware of it himself, but he understands our nightmares.

If you doubt it, make your way over Mulholland Drive, or coast down from Griffith Observatory some night when you have nothing better to do. Try to see la Ciudad de Nuestra Señora, Reina de los Angeles without the gas flares, without the winking lights of ground effects spinners above the Harbor Freeway. If you find, as I do, that the present is overlaid by something darker, something more ominous, then you may agree with me that Scott has, in Wim Wenders’ wonderful phrase, “colonized our subconscious.” When all is said and done, this is what has always been expected of artists. We should be grateful that someone still possesses the ancient power.