BLADE RUNNER AND LOST IN TRANSLATION
Chaos, Order, and Transformation
by Martin Higgins
Commentary on this Artifice article: https://the-artifice.com/illuminated-landscapes-city-blade-runner-lost-in-translation/
L.J.’s exploration of neon’s crucial role in fully developing the characters of Deckard, Batty, Bob, and Charlotte is most informative and perceptive. The moods evoked by glaring, subdued, flashing, and flickering neons have added greatly to cinematography’s visual lexicon. Neon’s cold light gives each color an unearthly glow.
Vaportube pawn shop and payday loan signs suggest desperation and poverty. Dive bars lined with neon beer signs bathe drinkers in a seductive, albeit unseemly ambiance. Flickering motel vacancy signs signal short-term, illicit trysts. As L.J. has posited, neon can be a formidable onscreen enhancement.
I believe there is another effect of such overpowering illumination when combined with a chaotic environment, be it the layer-upon-layer stacking of a future city’s clash of cultures, or a modern overloading of a city’s entertainment and tourist sector.
Having seen four versions of Blade Runner and multiple viewings of Lost in Translation, I am at once taken by the notion of impending change in both stories. Both share dazzling-to-the-point-of-chaotic lighting elements, teeming populations, and the search for human emotion or lack of it.
Aside from being hypnotic in their own right, the profusion of lights and signs present a soul-stirring chaos – suggesting the Jungian premise that Change is precipitated by, and optimally an adaptation to, Chaos – whether accidental or deliberately fabricated for or by the protagonists. The desired goal is to straddle Order and Chaos through Change.
So we examine a Paid Gunner and people Lost in Transition.
At the outset, Deckard, Harris, and Charlotte are clearly in stasis, i.e., overwhelming order – Deckard is settled into his alcoholic retirement after assassinating errant replicants, Harris is enduring an unfortunate career hiatus with drink and low-status ad work, and philosophy graduate, Charlotte, is emotionally numbed by her relegation to being merely a tag-along spouse.
This unrewarding stability, wherein life’s excitements and disappointments have equal yet opposing weight, inevitably produces boredom and dissatisfaction. Reluctantly, they each embrace chaos. Deckard returns to hunting violent replicants; Bob and Charlotte betray their spouses and form a spiritual bond. The characters strive to understand who they can be since they are no longer satisfied to be what they had become.
“They don’t advertise for killers in the newspaper. That was my profession. Ex-cop. Ex-blade runner. Ex-killer.” – Rick Deckard
“I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be.” – Charlotte
“You’ll figure that out. The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you.” – Bob Harris
All three situations are recognizable to audiences as extreme variants of mid-life crisis/early retirement/marriage-gone-cold re-assessment of one’s desires, goals, and capabilities.
Blade Runner’s gritty, retrofitted Los Angeles and Tokyo’s kitschy, Vegas-on-amphetamines, optical overkill – e.g., Shinjuku-Kabukicho and Shibuya – are intoxicating, experience cauldrons where one struggles to maintain cultural and conceptual equilibrium. Deckard’s crowded streets, biotech-savvy Egyptian and Asian shopkeepers, and preternatural, exotic “reptile dancer” are dystopian extensions of Bob and Charlotte’s embrace amidst a bustling street crowd to share a final, intimate moment, their mad chase through the color-splashed Pachinko Palace, and sensual nightclub socializing under huge, fluorescing, jellyfish-like globes.
“In all chaos, there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.” – Carl Jung
The establishing urban landscape shots in Blade Runner are highlighted by huge, flashing plumes of roiling burn-off gas stacks atop skyscrapers (possibly the discharge human-produced methane from urban sewage?) allude to an eruption of underground, volcanic forces; geothermal spewing that portends destruction – an upheaval is coming and it involves a man who may be a replicant hunter, unaware that he is programmed to destroy his own kind.
Perhaps these rooftop flames prefigure a phoenix… or pyre.
Deckard searches for non-human androids becoming aware of their short, pre-destined lifespans, while detached Harris searches for his fully-human self – lost in his stalled career and perfunctory marriage. Charlotte longs for the attention and recognition she deserves as an educated, sensual woman. Bob and Charlotte find in each other kinship, as Deckard does when he is saved by a dying Roy Batty. As L.J. notes, the lighting in both films serves as needed atmospheric backdrops as Chaos/Change apotheosis takes place – as well as a visual inducement for the audience to vicariously participate in these self-realizations.
“You’re probably just having a mid-life crisis. Did you buy a Porsche yet?” – Charlotte
We seek change without effort until the desire to effect the change finally requires our embrace of that will cause disorder and, optimally, the re-imposition of new, situation-appropriate order. That is how we navigate change, and our environments – both natural and man-made – to stimulate re-invention.
Bathed in chaos – optical, intellectual, and emotional – all three are changed, and the lesson-learned is that life can only be fulfilling in the present. The past is a scatter of posed photos and lonely marriage beds.
The future, for those who wish to shape it, is a continual progression of choices to meet chaos and its power to produce change.
- end -
copyright mjh 2017
all rights reserved
Vaportube pawn shop and payday loan signs suggest desperation and poverty. Dive bars lined with neon beer signs bathe drinkers in a seductive, albeit unseemly ambiance. Flickering motel vacancy signs signal short-term, illicit trysts. As L.J. has posited, neon can be a formidable onscreen enhancement.
I believe there is another effect of such overpowering illumination when combined with a chaotic environment, be it the layer-upon-layer stacking of a future city’s clash of cultures, or a modern overloading of a city’s entertainment and tourist sector.
Having seen four versions of Blade Runner and multiple viewings of Lost in Translation, I am at once taken by the notion of impending change in both stories. Both share dazzling-to-the-point-of-chaotic lighting elements, teeming populations, and the search for human emotion or lack of it.
Aside from being hypnotic in their own right, the profusion of lights and signs present a soul-stirring chaos – suggesting the Jungian premise that Change is precipitated by, and optimally an adaptation to, Chaos – whether accidental or deliberately fabricated for or by the protagonists. The desired goal is to straddle Order and Chaos through Change.
So we examine a Paid Gunner and people Lost in Transition.
At the outset, Deckard, Harris, and Charlotte are clearly in stasis, i.e., overwhelming order – Deckard is settled into his alcoholic retirement after assassinating errant replicants, Harris is enduring an unfortunate career hiatus with drink and low-status ad work, and philosophy graduate, Charlotte, is emotionally numbed by her relegation to being merely a tag-along spouse.
This unrewarding stability, wherein life’s excitements and disappointments have equal yet opposing weight, inevitably produces boredom and dissatisfaction. Reluctantly, they each embrace chaos. Deckard returns to hunting violent replicants; Bob and Charlotte betray their spouses and form a spiritual bond. The characters strive to understand who they can be since they are no longer satisfied to be what they had become.
“They don’t advertise for killers in the newspaper. That was my profession. Ex-cop. Ex-blade runner. Ex-killer.” – Rick Deckard
“I just don’t know what I’m supposed to be.” – Charlotte
“You’ll figure that out. The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you.” – Bob Harris
All three situations are recognizable to audiences as extreme variants of mid-life crisis/early retirement/marriage-gone-cold re-assessment of one’s desires, goals, and capabilities.
Blade Runner’s gritty, retrofitted Los Angeles and Tokyo’s kitschy, Vegas-on-amphetamines, optical overkill – e.g., Shinjuku-Kabukicho and Shibuya – are intoxicating, experience cauldrons where one struggles to maintain cultural and conceptual equilibrium. Deckard’s crowded streets, biotech-savvy Egyptian and Asian shopkeepers, and preternatural, exotic “reptile dancer” are dystopian extensions of Bob and Charlotte’s embrace amidst a bustling street crowd to share a final, intimate moment, their mad chase through the color-splashed Pachinko Palace, and sensual nightclub socializing under huge, fluorescing, jellyfish-like globes.
“In all chaos, there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.” – Carl Jung
The establishing urban landscape shots in Blade Runner are highlighted by huge, flashing plumes of roiling burn-off gas stacks atop skyscrapers (possibly the discharge human-produced methane from urban sewage?) allude to an eruption of underground, volcanic forces; geothermal spewing that portends destruction – an upheaval is coming and it involves a man who may be a replicant hunter, unaware that he is programmed to destroy his own kind.
Perhaps these rooftop flames prefigure a phoenix… or pyre.
Deckard searches for non-human androids becoming aware of their short, pre-destined lifespans, while detached Harris searches for his fully-human self – lost in his stalled career and perfunctory marriage. Charlotte longs for the attention and recognition she deserves as an educated, sensual woman. Bob and Charlotte find in each other kinship, as Deckard does when he is saved by a dying Roy Batty. As L.J. notes, the lighting in both films serves as needed atmospheric backdrops as Chaos/Change apotheosis takes place – as well as a visual inducement for the audience to vicariously participate in these self-realizations.
“You’re probably just having a mid-life crisis. Did you buy a Porsche yet?” – Charlotte
We seek change without effort until the desire to effect the change finally requires our embrace of that will cause disorder and, optimally, the re-imposition of new, situation-appropriate order. That is how we navigate change, and our environments – both natural and man-made – to stimulate re-invention.
Bathed in chaos – optical, intellectual, and emotional – all three are changed, and the lesson-learned is that life can only be fulfilling in the present. The past is a scatter of posed photos and lonely marriage beds.
The future, for those who wish to shape it, is a continual progression of choices to meet chaos and its power to produce change.
- end -
copyright mjh 2017
all rights reserved
