I've... seen things you people wouldn't believe...
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-Beams glitter in the dark Near the Tannhäuser Gates.
All those... moments... will be lost in time, Like tears... in... rain.
Time... to die...
Bladerunner cost about $28 million to produce, but only returned some $33 million at the box office. The producers made their money back and pocketed about five million in profits; even so, the film was considered a critical failure upon release.
It was a future-noir art house production, real heady stuff. Instead of spamming all the hot buttons for cash, it was aiming for greatness. After the meteoric success of 1977‘s Alien, director Ridley Scott had only himself to contend with.
Despite its artistic integrity, Bladerunner became recognized as the cinematic landmark that it was only gradually.
Forty years on, it is considered a masterwork of science fiction; one of the best that ever did it.
The words which served as the epigram to this article are spoken by Rutger Hauer’s character at the end of the movie as he is dying in the rain.
This brief speech has gone down as ‘perhaps the most moving death soliloquy in cinema history’, at least according to Mark Rowlands, the critic cited in the Wikipedia article about the aptly-named Tears in the Rain monologue.
Tears in the Rain is perhaps the artistic flourish that seals the package and sends it off-world, but to understand its gravitas, we need to position it in its original context.
Do Androids Dream?
Bladerunner is a film about replicants— artificial humans, replicas of the real thing. The movie is based on the novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) by Philip K. Dick, as acknowledged in the credits:
PKD’s novella was re-issued with some very nice Bladerunner cover art as a companion piece to the film.
Like Bladerunner, Philip K. Dick’s work has aged well.
With it’s distinctive blend of paranoia, psychedelia, weird prescience, and political vitriole, the sci-fi of PKD has remained consistently ahead of the curve.
Innovative and disconcertingly relevant, there aren’t enough nice things I could say about it.
For all that we are edging ever closer to the sociological conditions he had anticipated, the psychadelic era came and went; on an individual basis, people seem less equipped to deal with the ramifications of Philip K. Dick than when the writer died in 1982. This could only mean we’ve regressed.
Then again, Philip K. Dick’s work is probably like all the shit Dungeonposting fucks with: forever a purchase of the lunatic fringe
PKD’s down-to-earth voice makes his work highly accessible, even in an age of failing education standards and eviscerated attention spans. I’m not calling you stupid; I’m saying it’s a pleasure to read. Why not give it a shot?
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ has the same set-up as Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner: Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter who has been given a list of androids to ‘retire’ —‘retire’ being the Bladerunner’s euphemism for android murder — but in the book, the names of the androids come with addresses already attached.
This is critical to Philip K. Dicks dystopian vision: SFPD already knows where the androids are hiding before sending their hired guns after them. This is Full Spectrum Dominance; the Grid that everyone is always talking about. Philip K. Dick immerses us in a fully functional surveillance state.
*Ridley Scott thought the term ‘android ’ would confuse audiences, who would have been familiar with androids like Rem from Logan’s Run. Even today, an android is usually thought of as a computerized or mechanical imitation of a human being.
Logan’s Run was a popular 1977 television series run by CBS that was spun off of a 1976 film of the same name about a post-apocalyptic dystopian future that pretended to be the opposite.
Ridley Scotts daughter had been studying cellular biology at the time and with her input, the Bladerunner director came up with the term ‘replicant’ as a reference to DNA Replication, setting his manufactured humanoids apart from the popular conception of the mechanized android auto-human—
The replicants are like the androids of Philip K. Dick: biologically engineered being that are nearly indistinguishable from organic, womb-grown humans:
Tech Noir
Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner takes Los Angeles as its backdrop, while Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is set in a future-noir San Franscisco.
I guess the LAPD does shit different, because much of the Bladerunner film is taken up with the Hunt.
We shadow Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard as he works the bounty hunter beat in a dark, rainy, and cold Los Angeles doing old-timey detective shit. He sips whiskey neat and bangs smokey-eyed women to the melodramatic imitation saxophones of Vangelis; gets into tiffs with his superiors as well as the occasional street fight; and threatens club owners to get his drinks paid for while gluing together vague hints with his razor-sharp paranoiac future-detective instincts.
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep we get none of this. Like I said, the SFPD runs a tight ship— even if they did somehow manage to lose track of an entire rival police agency, they didn’t have to spend a lot of manpower trying to find out where their escaped androids went.
Stripping away the niceties, Bladerunner is a slug of film-noir sensibilities loaded into a shell of visionary dystopian sci-fi. Indeed, Bladerunner effectively launched the third wave of American film noir by pioneering the ‘Tech Noir’ genre— yet nothing about Deckard’s process is convincingly futuristic. Instead, his methods seem quaint, dangerous, and remarkably inefficient**.
Typically American crime dramas or psychological thrillers, films noir had common themes and plot devices, and many distinctive visual elements. Characters were often conflicted antiheroes, trapped in a difficult situation and making choices out of desperation or nihilistic moral systems. [meanwhile],
‘Neo-noir film directors refer to 'classic noir' in the use of Dutch angles, interplay of light and shadows, unbalanced framing; blurring of the lines between good and bad and right and wrong, and thematic motifs including revenge, paranoia, and alienation.
**Spoken with the benefit of hindsight.
In 1982, wireless technology hadn’t yet gone public. The first home computers had been released in 1977 and in 1982 were still quite rudimentary. Meanwhile, the grim specter of the Cold War cast an iron shadow over the prognostications of every oracle.
Scanning Electron Microscopes for rent in open-air wet markets, electronic devices that respond to voice commands, and a blasted world where the only animals left are artificial probably seemed like totally reasonable predictions for November 2019. Never mind the Orwellian surveillance state, 1982 had a nuclear holocaust to worry about.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep has a different time stamp than Bladerunner: January 3, 1992.
For all the ways the Bladerunner film and PKD’s book missed the mark, there is so much they got right. The first large language model, GPT-1, hit in 2018. It is now 2025, and an entire industry has emerged out of the phenomenon wherein people develop romantic attachments to AI Chatbots. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Deckard found more warmth and validation in the arms of an android than in his marriage bed — while in Bladerunner he fully elopes with a fugitive android girl.
Ever since Jules Verne predicted the submarine, the visionaries of Science Fiction have been remarkably prescient — Accurate but not precise, their oracles are Delphic: useless in the moment and uncanny in hindsight.
Like Meatloaf said in 1977: two out of three ain’t bad.
While Bladerunner christened Tech Noir as a genre, it was an easter egg in the 1984 filmTerminator starring Arnold Schwarzenegger that gave the genre its name — behold, the TechNoir Night Club:
Though the weave and weft of Bladerunner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep are different, they were spun from the same wool: both lead us to consider the implications of humankind trespassing on God’s Lawn by creating artificial consciousness.
Once consciousness has been created, where do we draw the line between ‘real’ and ‘artificial’? What is the responsibility of the creator to the created? Of the created to the creator? What dark forces are we playing with, after all?
A masterpiece of the silent film era, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) preceded works like Bladerunner, Logan’s Run, etc. in anticipating the ethical dilemmas presented by artificial consciousness.
But Lang took it in another direction:
By adding a mephitic layer (Mephitic as in Mephistopheles, the personification of the Devil in Goethe’s 1808 poem Faust), Metropolis cast the problem as a Faustian Bargain.
Speaking of Mephitic Sorcery—
The term Bladerunner occurs nowhere in Philip K. Dick’s work; it is something Ridley Scott and Co. borrowed from experimental novelist and proto-edgelord William S. Burroughs:
Burroughs was a pioneer of the profoundly unsettling. Though he was already in his 40s when he met the young arch-beatniks Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, he outlived both his juniors by a significant margin. By that same token, his life and legacy have waxed in influence while that of the more relatable Beat poets has waned — probably because, while the other Beats were on the bleeding edge of culture, Burroughs spent decades on the bleeding edge of consciousness itself and wrote his wild missives from there.
The obscenity trials surrounding Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl For Carl Solomon (1956) were also aimed at Burroughs’s highly experimental novel Naked Lunch (1959). In a twist of irony the proceedings made counter-cultural icons out of both, though they were already headed that way.
Burroughs was a detective noir magician — and I mean magician literally; the dude was deeply interested in actual, dyed-in-the-wool, spells-and-incantations-to-bend-the-fabric-reality, fucking, sorcery.
Blade Runner: A Movie (1979) is a decidedly unfilmable dystopian sci-fi novel about a for-profit healthcare industry co-authored by William S. Burroughs.
In it, Blade Runners are people who smuggle scalpels and other medical supplies—
I haven’t read Bladerunner: A Movie yet, but I have to ask myself—
Do you think Burroughs anticipated Luigi Mangione?
From what I gathered by reading his short stories collected in Exterminator! (1973), the answer is: absolutely.
Bringing it back:
Bladerunner is a post-apocalyptic Frankenstein set in the shadow of Bennito Mussolini’s Corporate State— that is, in the shadow of a fully-realized, by-the-book, fascist dispensation.
By the time the credits roll, the men who helm the legal apparatus and their cold, calculating science are revealed to be the enemies of love— and in the bladerunners we recognize knights in service to the real monsters of the world.
The replicants win our hearts, attaining the status of martyred heroes. Roy Baty’s Death Soliloquy finalizes this alchemy, breathing life into the manufactured flesh of the replicants by erasing the line between the Nexus-6 models and their human counterparts.
Roy Baty
In the book and the film, Roy Baty is the de facto leader of the androids/replicants:
Rutger Hauer stars as Roy Baty in what would go down as his most recognizable role. Hauer’s name and image have become so tied to it that a recent documentary produced by the late actor’s granddaughter was named what else but… wait for it…
Like Tears in The Rain (2024).
Though Hauer had appeared in dozens of films before Bladerunner, his star reached its zenith after he made Roy Baty one of the most iconic villains in sci-fi history.
Studios wanted a Roy Baty Reprisal, and Rutger Hauer came to specialize in the role of morally ambiguous action hero (e.g. Flesh + Blood (1985), The Hitcher (1986), Wanted: DOA (1986), The Blood of Heroes (1989), Hobo With a Shotgun (2011).
The Roy Baty of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is the Spartacus of a Martian slave revolt; he and a handful of his android ‘friends’ have killed their masters and fled to Earth to escape the grueling conditions on Mars.
I put ‘friends’ in bunny ears because Philip K. Dick’s androids don’t have real feelings for animals or people or each other:
Roy Baty has an aggressive, assertive air of ersatz authority. Given to mystical preoccupations, this android proposed the group escape attempt, underwriting it ideologically with a pretentious fiction as to the sacredness of so-called android "life."
In addition, this android stole, and experimented with, various mind-fusing drugs, claiming when caught that it hoped to promote in androids a group experience similar to that of Mercerism, which it pointed out remains unavailable to androids.’
The account had a pathetic quality,[thought Deckard]. A rough, cold android, hoping to undergo an experience from which, due to a deliberately built-in defect, it remained excluded.
The pseudo-religion of Mercerism is how people remind themselves of their humanity in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
It’s a kind of mechanically induced empathic trance, like hooking your brain up to an MDMA box. Empathy is a quality androids are not known to possess — but Deckard’s reflections above reveal that the android/ empathy short-circuit is a deliberately built-in defect.
How ironic. Humans hook themselves up to an electronic device to get in touch with the empathic response that ostensibly makes them human, while the only thing preventing the androids from experiencing the full range of human emotion is a deliberately attenuated empathy response.
The androids’ lack of empathy doesn’t prevent them from being sensitive to art and beauty. I thought this detail was worth mentioning as it’s one of the first things I noticed in my experiments with ChatGPT: how skillfully it handled beautiful ideas.
The androids of PKD are also prey to a range of classically ‘human’ reflexes, like loneliness, longing, and a desire for autonomy:
Do androids dream? Rick asked himself. Evidently; that's why they occasionally kill their employers and flee here. A better life, without servitude. Like Luba Luft; singing Don Giovanni and Le Nozze instead of toiling across the face of a barren rock-strewn field. On a fundamentally uninhabitable colony world.
Bladerunner tells the same story as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, except it’s different: the replicants have killed their masters and fled to earth, but not for a better life— what they are after is more life*.
*I wanted this to come across as another Goethe reference— according to Herr Carl Vogel, personal physician to the esteemed German poet, Goethe’s last words were ‘Mer Licht!’, or, ‘More Light!‘
It sounds like he just wanted someone to open the damn curtains, but the phrase is
[]... often interpreted as a symbol of [Goethe's] pro-Enlightenment worldview and a desire for knowledge and understanding.
The androids have a four-year lifespan. It’s a technical limitation, something mentioned in passing in the book. The scriptwriters behind Bladerunner seized upon this detail and turned it into the primary axis of the film.
When we are first introduced to Roy Baty, his hand is seizing up; his time is running out, and he knows it. He’s come to earth on very human business; he doesn’t want to die. His entire mission is to figure out how to not.
There is a major difference between Scott’s replicants and Dick’s androids that suggests they aren’t the same thing; that they needed different names:
The androids of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep do weird and unsettling shit, like in the scene where Priss cuts off the legs off a spider with a pair of scissors one by one because she thinks it has too many of them.
In her defense, she is less than four years old; this is the kind of shit children do when they are first probing the boundaries of the world — but John Isidore, a human, is there as a witness. We are privy to his internal monologue as he agonizes over the spider’s creeping death-by-torture. Living spiders are rare — in the world of John Isidore, all living creatures are rare. The scene demonstrates the androids’ non-existent empathy response while doing double duty as a sort of Voigt-Campf Empathy Test for the reader.
The androids of PKD are devoid of empathy, constitutionally unable to experience or express love or compassion, even if they can understand what these qualities might look like.
In the novel, it is explicitly mentioned that leaving a pet in android custody is a death sentence for the animal— the androids’ fundamental lack of emotional warmth or responsiveness make them unfit to care for other living things.
Though the replicants of Bladerunner are cunning and full of menace, they never demonstrate the same passive, scientific cruelty as PKD’s Priss— with them, it’s just the opposite*.
*Unless you think Roy Baty crushing the skull of Eldon Tyrell with his bare hands and then turning his bloodlust on the man who had been trying to help them qualifies as Scientific Cruelty. To me, these look more like crimes of passion perpetrated by a doomed lifeform lashing out against the cage it’s in.
Rising up to kill the masters, the Father, the Maker — was this meant to be oedipal? — But even as Roy Baty leaves a pile of corpses in his wake, he can’t lay hands on God— and there is nothing he can do to divert the inexorable flow of Time. Once again, this is all very human.
What did Eldon Tyrell say about the Nexus-6 model replicants at the beginning of the film?
With one sly easter egg, Bladerunner completely reverses the formula of Phillip K. Dicks spider torture scene.
When Roy Baty settles in to recite his Death Soliloquy he is a half-naked, rain-drenched, and clutching a mourning dove in one hand:
The dove— the symbol of Venus, the symbol of the Company of the Grail in Wolfram Von Eschenbach’s Parzifal, the symbol of the minne— the symbol of love.
Roy doesn’t torture the animal; instead, he spits some sick bars while holding onto it and looking like a barbarous image of Saint Francis.
The moment Roy dies, he relaxes his grip on the dove. It flutters off like a ghost leaving the machine and disappears into the first patch of blue sky we’ve seen in the entire fucking film:
Against the dying light
The androids of Do Androids Dream are quick to forfeit their lives, something Deckard openly laments:
The dark fire waned; the life force oozed out of her, as he had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism - with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it – could never have reconciled itself to.
"I can't stand the way you androids give up," he said savagely. The car now swooped almost to the ground; he had to jerk the wheel toward him to avoid a crash.
Meanwhile, the whole action of Bladerunner revolves around the replicants’ refusal to submit to death. We follow Roy Baty and Company as they …
Do not go gentle into that good night—
But rage, rage against the dying light.
Theres this scene toward the end of the film where Roy sees Pris, his lover and best friend, lying dead in a pool of replicant blood. He loses his shit, sending wolf-like howls echoing through the deserted corridors of the Bradbury:
The next twelve or so minutes of the film are taken up with Roy running around in his underwear and toying with the life of Harrison Ford’s character.
I really hated this scene as a kid; it reminded me of drawn-out, almost agonizing twenty-minute chase scenes in the India Jones franchise (also starring Harrison Ford) except in Bladerunner it’s as over-the-top as it is downright strange.
A grown man in a dilapidated building running around in his underwear and making wolf sounds is some real crackhead shit, and pretty fucking anti-climactic as far as final confrontations go.
The last time I sat through the scene it made me think of the Norse/Germanic Wolf Cult depicted in Robert Eggars’ The Northman (2022):
Eggers’s Wolf Cult is partly based on a passage from the 11th century Norse Volsung Saga wherein the young hero Sigurd and his father put on magic wolf-skins and are transformed into marauding werewolves.
Researchers believe the tale of Sigurd’s lycanthropy recalls a Northern Germanic wolf/warrior cult, known today as the Ulfhednar.
Rutger Hauer being Dutch (see: Northern Germanic) helps to drive home the impression that this is what Ridley Scott was getting at with Roy Baty’s Wolf/ Berserker antics: Roy Baty the Ulfhednar werewolf warrior.
But for Roy, the wolf noises might just sound the depths of his heart’s sorrow—wolves are monogamous creatures, and they mate for life — sometimes choosing to lay down and die rather than carry on living without their bonded partner.
Finale: Tears in The Rain
When at last Roy has Deckard cornered and dangling from a ledge, the replicant does something the androids of PDK’s novel would never dream of: he reaches out to save the life of the man who had been hunting him — the man who killed his lover and all his friends. Does Roy save Deckard’s life just to have someone to deliver the Tears in The Rain Death Soliloquy to?
Here lies Roy Baty: Warrior, Poet, Priest, Strategist, Leader, Lover, Friend— hemmed into moral ambiguity by the grey specter of death.
The final scene of Bladerunner is like the spider scene in the book— another Voigt-Campf test for the audience, only this time precisely articulated to generate empathy for the androids/replicants.
Nothing like the Tears in the Rain Monologue appears anywhere in the novel, but there are moments in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep that resound with the same deep and tragic beauty. I can hear the synthetic saxophones of Vangelis mingling with the smack-smack of acid rain falling on the neon-glazed streets of a future-noir Los Angeles as I read this passage to myself:
"We came back [to Earth]," Pris said, "because nobody should have to live [on Mars].
It wasn't conceived for habitation, at least not within the last billion years. It's so old. You feel it in the stones, the terrible old age.
Anyhow, at first I got drugs from Roy; I lived for that new synthetic pain-killer, that silenizine. And then I met Horst Hartman, who at that time ran a stamp store, rare postage stamps; there's so much time on your hands that you've got to have a hobby, something you can pore over endlessly.And Horst got me interested in pre-colonial fiction."
"You mean old books?"
"Stories written before space travel but about space travel."
"How could there have been stories about space travel before - "
"The writers," Pris said, "made it up."
Tears In The Rain has such a high polish that it becomes a mirror showing us to ourselves. It’s an unforgettable Memento Mori— the deeper I think on it, the deeper it resonates.
Roy Baty roared in triumphant over interplanetary battlefields where servitude and freedom came to grips; and disappeared with all his dubious glory as entropy made the final claim on life’s estate, melting into forgetfulness.
When I die, I’ll stop paying the bill on this website and all my research notes will be scoured from existence. I will take my thoughts down into darkness, dissolving like the war trophies stored in Roy Baty’s memory.
*Memento Mori is a Latin phrase which means ‘remember that you will die’. It’s also the name of a 1992 film loosely based on a 1974 short story by Gabriel Josipovici called “Mobius the Stripper: A Topological Exercise.”
BONUS LEVEL: Android (1982)
Did you know?
There was another film about androids released the same year as Bladerunner:
Based on its advertising copy and release date (October 16, 1982 for Android; June 25, 1982 for Bladerunner), we can guess what the producers of Android were getting at: a B-grade Bladerunner subbing Klaus Kinski for Rutger Hauer.
Klaus Kinski was a Nordo-Germanic Art-House Action Hero from another era. By 1982 his hype had faded, but Kinski’s tumultuous working relationship with director Werner Herzog will forever be the stuff of cinema legend.
Rutger Hauer's Re-Write
I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep from cover to cover just to see if there was anything like the Tears in the Rain Death Soliloquy in it. Specifically, I was looking for references to The Tannhauser Gate. There are none— Hauer’s moving speech and the mysterious Tannhauser Gate are entirely the products of scriptwriters David Webb Peoples and Hampton Fanchers’ genius.
Well, almost.
In the documentary Dangerous Days: The Making of Bladerunner (2007) the screenwriters tell us Hauer significantly modified the speech, while in Hauer’s autobiography he tells us that he merely trimmed the fat and added the closing lines that gave the monologue its name:
‘all these moments will be lost…like tears in the rain’;
Here’s the text from the final draft of the original shooting script according to Wikipedia:
I've seen things... seen things you little people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as magnesium...
I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
All those moments... they'll be gone.
Compare to Hauer’s re-write, the version that ended up in the film:
I've... seen things you people wouldn't believe...
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-Beams glitter in the dark Near the Tannhäuser Gates.
All those... moments... will be lost in time, Like tears... in... rain.
Time... to die...
Allegedly Hauer’s delivery was so moving that members of the cast and crew burst into tears on set.
Here’s a passage from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep which, like the Tears in the Rain Death Soliloquy, reeks of Momento Mori:
[Deckard] wondered if Mozart had had any intuition that the future did not exist, that he had already used up his little time. Maybe I have, too, Rick thought as he watched the rehearsal [of Mozart's 'Magic Flute'] move along.
This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another; finally the name "Mozart" will vanish, the dust will have won. If not on this planet then another. We can evade it awhile.
The Number 42
Rutger Haur died at the age of 75 on July 19, 2019— the same year as the events depicted in Bladerunner— and Philip K. Dick died the same year Bladerunner was released. But wait— the numerology gets even weirder.
Before we get into this, let’s take a moment to appreciate how hilarious it is that Tears In The Rain has its own Wikipedia page. like Ridley Scott, like Harrison Ford , like Philip K. Dick, like Rutger Hauer, like Bladerunner, it’s an icon. The Wikipedia page goes so far as to specify the exact word count of the monologue: 42.
In Douglas Adams’ Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy, the number 42 is the output of the supercomputer Deep Thought after it spends 7.5 million years calculating the ‘Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything’.
In the Holy Bible, there are 42 generations from Abraham to Christ according to Matthew; 42 generations from David to Christ according to Luke; 42 months of famine during the time of Elijah; and the Beast of Revelation is allotted 42 months to spread the blasphemies of the Anti-Christ.
There is a kabbalistic cipher known as ‘gematria’ wherein every letter of the Hebrew alphabet is assigned a numeric value. It’s a literal application of the first line in the first book of the Holy Torah, the famous In the Beginning was the Word. Gematria treats word/number correspondences as the key to revealing the architecture of the universe and the details of G-d’s Plan for humanity on Earth.
Applying the gematric cipher to the number 42, it breaks down into the words:
‘I am that I am’, which some believe to be the true name of God-as-Christ (I AM).
Another Kabbalistic tradition states that 42 is the number through which God created the universe (Rabbi Dr. Hillel Ben David can tell you much, much more about the number 42 in Jewish mysticism here).
How might this relate to Bladerunner?
Fan Theory:
In creating the replicants in Man’s image, Eldon Tyrell, in his Babylonian hubris, usurped the Throne of God the Creator to act as the Heliophant, Gods representative on Earth.
Like all Heliophants, Tyrell’s ability to do so was all the proof anyone needed of Divine Sanction.
God, who had created Man in the Divine Image—
Was Douglas Adams a Kabbalist? What about the writers of the Bladerunner script?
Because Rutger Hauer added eleven words on the spur of the moment and subtracted a few more, the final count of 42 words ends up looking like an accident rather than a kabbalistic encryption device.
Still, Bladerunner has several potent religious and poetic motifs sitting right on the surface that beckon us, like the lady in the wet market with the scanning electron microscope, to lean in for a closer look.
Finest Quality— Superior Workmanship.
Say, pal, just what kind of future is it where women sit in open-air markets with scanning electron microscopes? An iconic one, is what.
Discover more from Dungeonposting
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
One thought on “Bladerunner (1982): Tears In The Rain”