Bladerunner came out in 1982. I thought it was the future and in many ways, it was. I remembered two things about it principally, apart from being vaguely irritated at cool, intuitive Decker going gooey over what was essentially an interactive blow-up doll.
The first thing, obviously, was Rutger Hauer’s tears in rain speech, about how memories are lost, becoming just another tiny detail of existence. Another thing in the film makes me think more and more that the poor consciousness of Roy Batty the replicant missed the point. Completely.
When Decker is on the trail of a replicant working as an exotic dancer, as reporters used to say when they still made their excuses and left, he discovers something odder than the fact that a robot keeps a robot snake as a pet. They stole photos too. The pictures of a childhood they never had, the assertions of mortality, the detail that verifies in its irrelevance, the substance behind the insubstantiality of someone remembering, or pretending to remember, that once they had a dog or swam in the sea and couldn’t see the bottom or how once in an airplane the moon seemed to be below them through a trick of the light.
One of my robot snake scales was just as tiny. I’d gone to Gloucester for the first time, on business. It was a boiling hot day. On the way back we stopped at a stone pub near a mill bridge over a clear stream. I walked down to it on my own. There were three full-grown trout keeping station against the current, there under the bridge. And on the bridge a tiny kitten, half their length, eyes like saucers, was trying to work-out any possible way of catching them. Or even just one of them.
Now, I don’t think these moments are tears in rain, irrelevances. Now, I think they’re all there is of life that is important. We live in a world where people decide to fly airplanes into buildings, where doctors decide to take a rifle in to work, where £1 billion of public money is used by the government to buy a majority in Parliament, for one Party’s benefit and none of this is really strange or exceptional. But the wonder of that tiny kitten long ago an old cat, that survives. And wonder is always more important. Tears in rain at least sparkle and shine. Those moments are never lost. Nothing never happened.
