24
Dec
2007
"God is Gonna Kick Your Ass You Infidelic Pagan Scum"
A few parting links, in keeping with the Christmas Spirit:
- The Amazing Virgin Pregnancy, courtesy of Overcoming Bias
- The Gospel According to St. Nicholas, the latest and most edifying of the gnostic gospels, courtesy of Cliff Burns;
- and lastly, by way of some obscure corner of IcanHasCheeseburger that for some mysterious reason hasn’t yet made it to the front page:
…because honestly, combining 2001 with domestic shorthair cats is about as close to the truly divine as I’m ever likely to come.
So as Mr. Garrison sang with such unrepetant gusto: Merry Fucking Christmas. Try to ignore that idiotic pap about Christmas Choirs the CBC is wasting its bandwidth on, and try to survive the season.
(Me, I’ve just introduced my Dad to Blade Runner. Went pretty well. Except he didn’t get the unicorn.)
I don’t know which 2001 cat came first, but I found this one to be even better:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jackszwergold/981554587/
And a Merry Fucking Christmas to you too, sir. And all the best to you and yours through the holidays and into the new year.
Also it goes back a few posts, but that was a nice critique of that Language of God book. I’ll store that one in the arsenal if one of my zealot relatives attempts to drag it out to win an argument.
Me, I’ve just introduced my Dad to Blade Runner.
You know, I tried that once. (My dad, not yours.) Didn’t work at all, damnit.
merry xmas! glad to see the whole concept of this holiday getting shredded for what it is,, total bull@#t,i love that 2001 alternate feline view btw,puts the original to shame hehe -david
Peter, you watch South Park? Nice đ I’m a fan myself (i rank it just below The Simpsons, which is just below Futurama).
But I must confess I can’t stand LOLCats. It symbolizes everything I hate about cats (or, more appropriately, cat owners–who, by and large, seem to be clones of each other in the sense that they like to apotheosize their cats after mistaking feline territoriality and selfishness for intelligence and cleverness, and engage in irritating self-deprication, and assume everyone else thinks it’s funny). I did like one, a photograph of a cat with the caption: Cats: Nature’s Assholes đ
Paradoxically, when actually confronted with a cat, i decay into “whos a pwitty kitty????” over and over again.
Yup. Huge fan of South Park. (Even though my Dad considered the Da Vinci Code parody ep to be “blasphemous”.)
Re: cats, well, all I can say is, I am well aware that all of the behaviours I find so endearingly cute when performed by cats would get any three-year-old human child a quick pitch into the meatgrinder if I had my way. Cats are manipulative furry little sociopaths who have, through some mammalian bambi-syndrome sorcery, rewired their hosts so that we *enjoy* being exploited.
And enjoy it I do.
Cheers to your dad. The unicorn dream thing is stupid on several levels, and Blade Runner is better without it.
If Ridley Scott meant to put a unicorn dream in the original version, and someone prevented him, then they did the movie a service. Sometimes editorial restraints are a good thing.
I disagree. Too many aspects of the movie don’t make sense without Deckard’s replicancy as an element (e.g., how does Batty know Deckard’s name? How come Deckard keeps surviving physical attacks by replicants who can punch through metal with their bare hands? What’s up with Gav?) The unicorn bit merely tips Deckard off to his own nature (and us, I guess.)
Granted, this is a conceit of the movie; the book made no suggestion at all that Deckard was anything but human. And you could argue that the point of the book — i.e., that “humanity” is not an inevitable function of the manufacturing process, and that “real” humans can show less of it than machinery– is weakened if you turn Deckard into product. YMMV. But I thought the movie’s interpretation added new layers to that theme, which was nice because other themes from the book (i.e., the ecoguilt) got glossed over more than I would have liked.
My counter-argument for Deckard’s non-replicancy is here.
In the book, there is a police station filled with replicant policemen, although Deckard himself doesn’t seem to be one. But anyway, one thing I like about Blade Runner was that they didn’t use the same title as the book, which to my mind frees the movie from an obligation to resemble the book. I wish more movies “loosely based on a book” would change the title as a form of truth-in-advertising.
Hmmm. You raise some good points — although I’d argue that Deckard’s mere *survival* of so many replicant assaults implies a far greater toughness than a baseline human could muster. He doesn’t know he’s a replicant, so he can’t avail himself of those abilities; but the resilience of the body persists nonetheless.
I was under the impression that Deckard was not a new police replicant, but one of Batty’s buddies who’d been caught and reprogrammed (a la “Terminator 2”) — thus both sparing a “real” cop the risk of dealing with superhuman perps, and increasing the odds that your boy will be able to even survive such encounters. The fact that Gav was constantly tailing Deckard, keeping an eye on him while staying at a safe distance himself, is consistent with this, as is the fact that Batty knew Deckard’s name. Granted, it’s odd that Batty never actually told Deckard that he was a replicant; and for that matter there’s no reason why the reprogrammed Deckard would even have to keep the same name.
And I take your point about the unicorn. You would have shaken my faith in the Deckard=replicant model, if not for the fact that Scott himself is on record as stating that Deckard is, in fact, a replicant (and that Harrison Ford, ironically, did not know this and denied it for twenty years). Ultimately you gotta go with what the creator says.
That’s a really interesting and motley collection of questions on your website, by the way…
Interestingly, when I saw Rutger Hauer discuss his role and the film in general (he introduced a midnight showing in Montreal when I was living there) he argued that Deckard was an idiot for falling in love with a toaster. (Or maybe he said “toaster oven.”)
Which was funny, since he played a fellow “toaster oven” character with such pathos. (And his discussion of Batty was not devoid of sympathy, either.)
Of course, toaster ovens falling in love with toaster ovens is another thing entirely. But I guess for Hauer, as for Ford, Deckard was a human…
Whatever. I like it ambiguous. I just wish I could have introduced my old man to the film. He feel asleep. He was more of a Kojack/Magnum PI/Charlie’s Angels kind of guy. Oh, man, The Rockford Files! That was his thing.
I’ve been enjoying this blog, by the way… and were I note busy with work, I’d be more caught up on my reading list and enjoying your novels, too…
Man, I loved The Rockford Files! The series, anyway: the latter-day made-for-TV movies kinda sucked.