Between Two Blade Runners: Dreampunk's Noir Emotional Ecology

 

The following is an expanded version of a text that was going to be included as part of a zine dedicated to the electronic music subgenre Dreampunk. With that project seemingly having disappeared into the void it's presented here in its extended form. 

It's an irony that screenwriter Hampton Fancher didn't think much of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep when he first read it. Nevertheless, he recognised the story's potential commercial appeal and was attracted to the book's concerns around environmentalism and the implications of mass animal extinction; issues which in the mid-1970s were only just coming to popular consciousness. Another irony was that his original screenplay adaptation of the novel - eventually titled Blade Runner after a short story by William S. Burroughs (glossing the novel by Alan E. Nourse) - envisioned a relatively low budget movie, shot mainly in interiors.

Fancher's genial contribution, however, was in taking the outline of Dick's sci-fi detective story and enveloping it in the universe and sensibility of film noir. That choice, embedded in the film's script through its tortuous gestation and multiple reworkings, would significantly define what I'm calling here Blade Runner's "emotional ecology", which in turn would heavily influence the aesthetic of Dreampunk, as well as setting the template for the 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049.

On the surface it's a straightforward plot; part police procedural, part bounty hunter Western, set in an overpopulated, highly polluted Los Angeles of 2019. The destruction of the environment through resource exploitation and war has resulted in a barely habitable planet which all those with the money to do so have escaped to new lives on the Off-World colonies. Much of the labour needed to sustain this Off-World existence is provided by artificial humanoids called Replicants, manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation; a sort of nightmarish Tesla/Amazon hybrid based out of a city sized pyramid mega-structure on the edge of LA. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is the jaded former police officer drafted in to hunt down a group of state-of-the-art Nexus 6 Replicants led by Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) who have violently broken free of their masters and returned to earth.

Things get more complicated for Deckard after he encounters Rachael (Sean Young) at the Tyrell Corporation; a Replicant that doesn't know she isn't human. Their encounters form the emotional heart of the film, as the traditional noir trope of the femme fatale acts as a stage for an intense meditation on memory and what it means to be human. Just as Rachael cannot reconcile her implanted memories with her status as a Replicant with only a four-year life-span, so Deckard cannot banish his desire for this beautiful but ultimately doomed woman. The long scenes where these tensions play out in Deckard's chaotic apartment, framed by the light flashing in from giant advertising boards and flying 'Spinner' cars outside, are some of most magical in all sci-fi. The lyricism of Ridley Scott's direction and cinematography marries perfectly with the gorgeous blues/electronic score of Vangelis.

None of this would have had half the impact if it weren't for the epoch defining visuals, in particular the very intentional move to make the city environment itself a character in the film. It was Syd Mead, a professional industrial illustrator, who was responsible for much of the city's look. It's yet another irony that the classic elements of a Blade Runner style city; rain, night, smoke, neon signs in Kanji and other East Asian scripts, were born to a considerable degree out of budgetary necessity. Without money to build new sets the street scenes were filmed on the Warner Bros back lot; a basic street front used for decades by the studio, and which without the elements listed above, in the words of Ridley Scott, "looked crap". That rain soaked, neon blurred vista is arguably the film's greatest visual legacy and is replicated in the cover art of countless Dreampunk records from Gates of Siam, Wuso 命, and 2814's Dreampunk classic Birth of a New Day, to name but a few. Unsurprisingly, in a rerun of the protean days of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), Blade Runner's modest budget quickly ballooned under pressure from Scott's visionary world building and the art department's seemingly limitless imagination.

Dreampunk derives at least as much of its aesthetic from the visual world of Blade Runner as it does from the actual sound of the films. The myth of the "Blade Runner Sound" is that it's all cavernous pads and filter sweeps played on a Jupiter 8 synthesiser. In reality Vangelis' score was a remarkable amalgam of electronic, acoustic and sampled sound, the cornerstone of which was a sense of lyricism rooted squarely in jazz and blues. One More Kiss (sung by UK pop back-room figure Don Percival) could be a Cole Porter song. All the key themes revolve around simple meandering melodies, repeated against a backdrop of atmospheric electronic sounds, which, like the rain, smoke and neon lights, frame the action in melancholic introspection. Blade Runner Blues, Rachel's Song and Memories of Green all deploy an intense pathos, the sound of an inner world, which is at odds with popular perception of the score as primarily synthetic and futuristic. 

Cover art for records by 2814, D R O I D R O Y, and Gates of Siam

Listen to a Dreampunk record by 2814, D R O I D R O Y, or Remember and you'll immediately be transported into a world of tense atmospheres, half-heard melodies and discordant rhythms, often saturated in the genre's signature style of layered phasing and reverb. These production techniques, which followed the genre as it developed out of Vaporwave, function almost like an auditory shorthand. In Vaporwave they signalled the depressive hedonism of consumer culture, the dissolution of individuality amid a pharmacologically mediated life of endless self-marketing and hyperreal commercial imagery; not to mention a certain amount of ironic distancing too. Dreampunk, like Blade Runner itself, captures something of this contemporary malaise at the crisis point of the Anthropocene. It's notable that Blade Runner's wholesale importing of a pan-Asian culture into its vision of a futuristic Los Angeles is mirrored in Vaporwave's near obsession with Japanese consumer culture of the 1970s and 80s. Dreampunk develops these themes but does so without the irony, substituting it for a heightened sense of urban alienation. It's music which puts a certain 'lack', a certain 'out-of-joint-ness', front and centre, while at the same time striving for beauty and transcendence. On this interpretation it's obvious why Ridley Scott's bleak world holds such appeal as both canvas and inspiration.

It's a cliché that the film's dark introspective mood was the cause of its limited success at the box office on its release in 1982. Famously the studios were not overjoyed at Scott's brooding masterpiece. And what was worse, it didn't even have a happy ending! As is well known they then intervened to cobble together just such an ending for the theatrical release, which involved Deckard and Rachel implausibly driving off into a verdant landscape (actually composed of unused aerial footage of the Montana countryside recorded for The Shining), seemingly unburdened by the film's previous events; least of all Rachel's soon to expire Nexus 6 lifespan. Harrison Ford was press-ganged into recording a series of voiceovers in response to feedback from preview screenings, where the audience reportedly found the film unintelligible. These and the happy ending were subsequently removed for Ridley Scott's Director's and Final cut versions of the film.

Over the subsequent four decades Blade Runner's cult status and its landmark cinematic style would assure that the sequel, when it finally came in 2017, would not deviate significantly from the template. Ryan Gosling's Officer ‘K’ reprises the role of Blade Runner, with the twist that now it's Replicants who hunt down fellow Replicants, and the world of Blade Runner 2049 is even more screwed up than the original's vision of 2019. Hampton Fancher again supplied the screenplay, this time for Denis Villeneuve, fresh from directing another highbrow sci-fi, Arrival (2016). Much of the first film's basic bounty hunt plot structure is retained, as are the themes around identity and the nature of humanity. Officer K comes to believe that he may be the first child born to a Replicant and soon abandons his search and destroy mission against Deckard in favour of a search for his own origins.

Cultural critic Slavoj Žižek has suggested that one interpretation of Blade Runner is as a story about the rise of class consciousness. Deckard comes to suspect that he himself is a Replicant and as such without Rights and disposable. Even his dreams may be known to the police; hence the meaning of the paper unicorn left outside his apartment by the sinister officer Gaff. In the sequel these socio-political themes are more overt and present an obvious commentary on the contemporary rise of big tech monopolies and the power they increasingly weald over all aspects of our lives. One scene has Officer K visit a slum area outside the city where a so-called "orphanage" serves as a front for child slave labour dismantling old electronics. K himself lives in a crowded, rundown apartment block where he is stigmatized by his neighbours who carve the word "skinjob" - a slur directed at Replicants - into his door. Although he's nominally a police officer, he is required to pass a "baseline test" in order to get paid. The test seems designed to measure a Replicant's mental stability and potential to rebel. In a radicalised version of what many precarious and gig-economy workers face today, failure to make baseline can lead to "retirement".

Industrialist Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), who has taken over the remnants of the Tyrell Corporation is a cold-blooded killer who openly claims that "every advance in human civilization has been off the back of a disposable workforce". Oppressive corporate culture, including the Wallace Corporation using drones to massacre slum dwellers, is one of the film's major themes, which, along with the politics of artificial life are issues more prescient now than ever.

No-where is the question over the impact of technology on our private lives more keenly explored than in officer K's relationship with his holographic companion Joi (Ana de Armas). Joi is an AI program created by the Wallace Corporation as a kind of perfect fantasy girlfriend. At every turn she gives K unfailing support, telling him how special he is and pushing him to pursue his quest to discover his true identity. In the film's most uncanny scene she even hires a sex worker whose body she uses as a substrate, giving K the illusion of actual intimacy with the virtual body of Joi. Gosling does a fine job of looking both aroused and mildly horrified as the features of Joi phase in and out of sync with those of the Replicant sex worker Mariette (Mackenzie Davis).

This hint towards the present-day dominance of the virtual over the physical in what should be our most personal moments is powerfully made. After Joi is destroyed by Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), Wallace's psychotic PA/bodyguard, Officer K encounters a giant interactive pink neon advertisement for the AI on the street, carrying the slogan "Everything you want to hear". In a sort of coming to class consciousness, K shakes off his grief and sets out to rescue Deckard from the hands of the Wallace Corporation and aid the burgeoning Replicant resistance movement.

Despite Villeneuve's admirable commitment to the original film's slow pace there are still considerable differences in tone between the two. Like so many big budget films of recent years it suffers from a degree of what I'll call "epicification”, where the lead character's story becomes intertwined with larger and more power forces on a societal or even universal scale. The inclusion of the Replicant rebellion twist seems more of an afterthought, and much of the police procedural angle which guided the structure of Scott's film is absent. What we get, predictably, is more money thrown around and more explosions. The scale is grander but at the cost of diminishing the intimacy and much of the humanity in the film.

Although the grand cityscape vistas are here in spades, this time round the inhabitants appear totally alienated in their vast towers. The Wallace corporation's building looms over the city almost entirely shrouded in darkness, while the scenes in the junkyard slum make clear that there is no space for nostalgia over Kowloon walled city, or other such edgeland alternative communities. The divide here is hard and unequivocal; you are either inside or outside of society. Dreampunk, on the contrary, sits in the ambiguous spaces opened up by the original film's noir turn, eschewing both violence and 'The Epic'. In Scott's vision of 2019 neither people nor places are quite what they seem. The grand building where JF Sebastian lives is a derelict filled with biomechanical products of his genial imagination. Sebastian himself is a young man made old by a degenerative condition. And the Replicant Leon Kowalski is described in the police briefing as simple and violent, yet he cherishes a set of photographs of his fellow Replicant friends.

As beautiful as Roger Deakins' cinematography for Blade Runner 2049 undoubtedly is, there's nothing that quite matches the in-camera drama of Zhora smashing through shop windows in a desperate attempt to evade Deckard's bullets in the original. The score and sound effects (notably foregrounding the gunshots) perfectly signals the fatalism which is one of the film's key themes.Much of the scene's power is gained by the simple choice to run the sequence in slow motion.

The violence of the scene also points to an uncomfortable element of the Blade Runner universe; while no-one is quite what they seem, the burden of this ambiguity falls hardest upon women. Even fully fleshed out characters like Rachel are doomed from the outset, lacking the ontological stability afforded to most of the males. This tendency is heightened in the 2017 film as not a single female character is able to avoid some level of depreciation, whether in the form of being a mute substrate (as Mariette does for K); being violently killed if you're human or Replicant; or being deleted as happens to Joi. It's unclear whether we should read all this as a dead-eyed comment on the treatment of women in the real world, or if Blade Runner just blindly repeats much of Hollywood's historical debasement of female characters. In any case it might be worth noting the undeniable "broishness" of the Dreampunk scene (still sadly not unusual for electronic music) and some of the carryover of images of women from Vaporwave cover art, which frequently depict Asian woman as submissive, exotic and ephemeral; imagery that mirrors the lack of authentic Being in characters like Joi and Rachel. This is the danger of identifying too strongly with the aesthetics of melancholy, where the work of mourning the lost object (always already lost of course) turns into a mortifying gaze, giving life to the fantasy at the expense of a more radical relationship to the real. 

Labels releasing Dreampunk records have consistently drawn on the imagery of Blade Runner and Cyberpunk more generally. From left to right, promotional art from the Dream Catalogue, Pure Life and Vill4in labels.

 Death scenes are pivotal in both films, and are where they lodge their key messages. At the finale of the 1982 film, Roy Batty, having seen his ambitions of a longer life thwarted, and feeling death approach, spares Deckard's life. What follows is Rutger Hauer's immortal (and partly ad-libbed) speech upon the rooftop: "All those moments will be lost, like tears in rain. Time to die". While in the sequel Officer K comes to understand that he's not the first child born to a Replicant, and after saving Deckard resigns himself to his injuries and his fate. In a sequence that can only be viewed as homage to the death scene of the first film, K lies back, feeling the snow fall upon his bare skin; something real, unlike the programmed reactions of Joi as she "experienced" the rain upon the rooftop of their apartment earlier in the film. It would not be saying too much I think to claim that one of Blade Runner's deepest philosophical truths is that an authentic experience of a free human life is intimately tied to the apprehension of death. For a Replicant, then, in accordance with Montaigne's famous statement, learning to die is learning how not to be a slave.

These themes of pathos, loss, radical self-questioning and fatalism in the face of an indifferent universe, are the bedrock of Blade Runner's noir emotional ecology. They are also the themes which come through most strongly in the drifting melancholy of Dreampunk music, and for which the dark, rain soaked city of neon lights forms the perfect backdrop. 

Some recommended Dreampunk records:

2814 - Birth of a New Day (Dream Catalogue, 2015)

wuso 命 - Lonely Streets (Crystaltone, 2016)

Yoshimi - Tokyo Restricted Area (Dream Catalogue, 2016)

Rashida Prime ‎– Damaged Interface (Bludhoney Records, 2016)

Sangam - Void 003 (Vill4in, 2019)

Cryosauna - Fractured City (Hanging Garden, 2019)

輕描淡寫 X Kuroi Ame ‎– 眼泪含泪  (Pure Life, 2020)

The Wushimi Complex - The Anon Database (Dream Catalogue, 2020)

Gates Of Siam - Eve (Waters End, 2020)

D R O I D R O Y -水族館の夜 (No Problema Tapes, 2020)