We are living in a Blade Runner-esque dystopia
As humans inhabiting an anti-human age, the one thing that keeps us going is our need for each other
Last Friday a friend and I went to see Blade Runner 2049 at the Odeon on London’s Tottenham Court Road. We took two of the last seats on the back row, next to a loud Russian couple who were, shall we say, very much in love. There were only two more seats left: one on our left and one on the Russians’ right. An usher asked if we all wouldn’t mind getting up and shifting down a seat to let a couple with the last two tickets sit together. The Russian woman refused. She pointed at the man she would have to sit behind and shouted at the top of her voice: “His head is too big!”
The Russians talked all the way through the film. All. The. Way. Through. I tried to protest, but they thought I was joining in with their discussion. I heard the man say: “Yes, yes. Film makes NO sense.” Which was ironic because Blade Runner 2049 is the most Russian movie ever produced by a Hollywood studio: overlong and uneventful, which might be why it hasn’t soared at the box office. But, boy, is it beautiful. You go to a movie like this not to hear it but see it, to immerse yourself in a futurescape that is alien and yet frighteningly familiar.
The original, 1982 Blade Runner, is about a detective who hunts androids in 2019. He flies his police car through an overcrowded Los Angeles of towerblocks and ceaseless rain. The city is so overgrown it has lost whatever once made it a fixed point in space and time; a titanic projection of a Geisha advertises candy. The scale of the movie’s canvas reflects the theme of alienation. Technology dwarfs and supplants mankind: the Tyrell Corporation is building robots that can’t even tell if they’re synthetic or real. Hence they have to be destroyed.
In the 1982 version, it is the human hero who begins to doubt if he is real or robotic. In the sequel, it is a robot who begins to worry that he might be human. Otherwise, the film picks up in exactly the same universe it left behind, and what’s striking is how far the real world – the world beyond the cinema – has caught up with Blade Runner. Self-driving cars? Check. Robotics? Check. Globalisation? Check. Tech giants running everything? Check. Blade Runner 2049 could be set in London 2017.
Personally, I hate London. Despise it. How could you ever love a city where the poor pay astronomical rents to live four to a damp-filled room, a stone’s throw from the glass palaces of the rich? They have torn down the old capital and rebuilt it in the image of Dubai, a place where no matter what the purpose of a building – library, school, florist – it looks like an airport lounge.
Consumerism is very unimaginative. Go into a Starbucks and take a photo of the counter. Then go to the nearest Starbucks, usually about two shops down, and compare. The same decor, the same food, the exact same number of cupcakes. All foreign workers, too, in our land of open borders. The “No Smoking” signs in the hotels off Oxford Street are written in Arabic. Blade Runner imagined that America would be conquered by the Japanese, but it’s the Gulf States and China that Britain is so desperate to make feel at home. Why the children of rich dictators come here, I’m not quite sure. To see the Queen’s coach roll past Caffé Nero and the Apple Store?
Apple, of course, is the fruit we bit that cost us our soul. The internet was supposed to augment reality but instead has replaced it with addictive fantasies of self-indulgence. In Blade Runner’s version of 2049, it is now unclear where the circuitry ends and the flesh begins. The human characters, lost in a big and lonely world, observe the androids with curiosity and fear. Never mind the question of whether or not robots are human, are they actually, yikes, better than humans? If we gave them freedom they would surely kill us – and who could blame them? Blade Runner confirms my worst fears about AI, that if man invented a human-like robot, the first thing he would do is either have sex with it or torture it. We are not a nice species. We do not deserve nice things.
The robots, on the other hand, will probably be natural conservatives. When our android hero goes home at night, he puts on jazz and cuddles up to a hologram dressed like a Fifties housewife. He is this movie’s High Noon sheriff, the individual struggling to be himself and keep his own noble code of ethics. Over three hours we watch him grapple with the possibility that he might in fact be human – and, not to give anything away, we learn that whether you’re a real boy or not is far less important than doing the right thing.
And that’s how we keep our humanity in an anti-human age: by doing right by others. You may read my screed on London and ask: “If you hate this world so much Tim, why not move away? Throw your phone in a river. Become a hermit.” But when you turn your back on the world, you turn your back on the people in it, too. And when you’re alone, it’s funny how less like yourself you feel. No, we human beings need each other. Our humanity is defined by trying to make the world we share a little bit better.
We could start by making it a criminal offence to talk in cinemas.