Last Friday I was laid off due to the economy,
so I bought 18 beers and watched the movie Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis
Villeneuve). I started watching this movie at 2am, a point by which I had drank
a considerable number of my 18 beers, such that drinking further beers during
the 2hr43 minute duration of this movie was difficult. The movie’s atmosphere
was rain-washed and moody in a way that reminded me of driving to McDonald’s
late at night. During the opening scenes, it struck me how masterfully cool the
phrase ‘blade runner’ is, a term referring to the job of hunting down replicant
androids hiding as humans, and I felt a desire bloom within my unemployed
essence to find a similar occupation, one where I could also be cool and
rain-washed. However, the real-world equivalent of robot detective is just a
cop, I gradually realized, and my fantasy of fighting robots to the death in a
deluge of neon-soaked rain was kind of marred with competing visions of
mundane policework, minor traffic infractions. This got me thinking about
physical fitness and how in high school I was mocked in the locker room for my
hairy ass. My ass, as it was determined by peer consensus, had too much hair on
it, such that it was less like the ass of a high schooler and more like a
monkey’s ass, in the opinion of my classmates, it was like the ass of a
mindless, thrashing animal, the ass of a species that has not developed society
or conscious thought. It’s been a decade since I graduated high school. I’m
unemployed, I have no future or prospects. As I continued to watch this movie,
I kept thinking about how this was basically a three hour-long movie. I’d
started at 2am and drank a lot of beers, I didn’t know if I could or should
finish this movie. I was having mild, whimpering thoughts like ‘oh nnno… no…’
and ‘three-hour long movie…Jesus Christ…that’s too long of a movie..’. The lead
actor of Blade Runner 2049 is Ryan Gosling, who to me has a reputation
of fulfilling male fantasies of stoic autism. Even though in this movie Ryan
Gosling is supposed to be a robot, I continually caught myself relating to him.
I’d think ‘he’s just like me’ during yet another scene of Ryan Gosling driving
through neon-soaked rain. Ryan Gosling grappling with the existential
ramifications of being programmed with a false childhood is just like losing
your job and drinking 18 beers. It’s just like driving to McDonald’s in the
rain. I didn’t like this movie’s portrayal of advertising. In the future, this
movie argues, advertisements will be building-sized holograms, they’ll be
projected into the night sky, they’ll play in the urinal you’re attempting to
piss in. Actually, though, I think advertising’s modern problem is that it’s ever-internal.
It is the square of your phone, it’s a personalized YouTube notification, it is
your most private and dark pocket. The McRib is back. The McRib is always back,
it seems, the shambling corpse of it. There is something dark as a church’s
shadows, maybe, about naming a fast food product after the rib, the most
cathedral-like part of man. Ryan Gosling has a computer girlfriend in this
movie, his girlfriend is like, she is the computer, but he puts her on a chip
and so she’s a hologram that can walk around with him while he does police
stuff. This strikes me as another incorrect futurist cultural ‘take’ from this
movie. It seems a lot of people want to argue that the modern incel substitutes
the girlfriend with the computer, but I disagree: the incel goes to the
computer because of a lack, because there is no girlfriend; the computer is
less of an escape than it is a trapdoor, a fall into ever-deeper, no girlfriend
darkness. The entire first two hours of this movie seemed comically extraneous
to me, in terms of tangible plot details and development. Three hours, that’s
too many hours for a movie. Eventually Ryan Gosling finds Han Solo from Star
Wars who is also the first blade runner guy from the first movie. There’s an
essential plot point—I think this whole movie is happening because Han Solo
fucked a robot? I felt confused by the thematic messaging of this. What are we,
as an audience, learning here? Fucking robots is bad? You can’t fuck your
phone. This is supposed to explore the boundary of humanism or, whatever…I don’t
know…in high school they said I had ape ass. They said I had the hairy ass of
an ape. The movie ends with the Ryan Gosling robot defeating a woman-robot in combat and then subsequently drowning her to death. Critiques aside, I still do genuinely think this movie
is one of the most accurate portrayals of ‘the future’ I’ve seen, in that the
future is still, to this day, the neon lights of a McDonald’s seen through a
sheet of rain, it is abandoned mall parking lots. This was a good movie about
me being unemployed and drinking 18 beers.
