Recently Read: Blade Runner 2049

The title above may seem inaccurate to some. They might be asking, “Did he mistype that title?” No. I read the screenplay for Blade Runner 2049, written by Michael Green and Hampton Fancher. I didn’t watch the movie.

Trailers and previews were all I’d seen of this movie prior to my reading. So I had an idea of what the script might be about, but I had no idea of the throughline, or the plot, if you like. Trailers and previews can be deceiving, sometimes even on purpose. The people who make the movie also make the previews. They don’t want you to get the whole movie from a preview, otherwise you wouldn’t pay to see the movie.

So, on reading the screenplay, of course I ran into the same characters you would watching the movie. There’s the main character K, who is a bounty hunter like Deckard of old. He hunts missing replicants for a bounty. He knows he’s a replicant. This is made clear. While the Deckard of old was unsure, K knows.

Deckard also makes an appearance, though his brief visits are mainly only an obstacle for K to overcome on his way to the more dominant plot.

There is Luv, a highly trained replicant who also knows. Luv says, at one point, “I’m the best.” Where have we heard that before?

Then there are a load of side characters like Sapper and Joshi and Ana and Joi and Wallace. Sapper, by the way, is my favorite side character in the screenplay. He seems to have the most interesting backstory that isn’t told. He was in some sort of war, and though from his description, you’d think he was a warrior, it turns out he was a medic. I’d like to hear more about that story.

The screenplay is written professionally well. It gives you the feeling or the mood of the world Philip K. Dick created and mingles it with the world Ridley Scott envisioned.

Some of it might not translate well to film. I can only imagine. Like I said, I haven’t seen the full movie, only clips. Reading the screenplay was immersive, so I give full credit for Drawing Power. I was drawn in like a fly to honey.

Within the screenplay were many silly dialog points which I could see were thrown in for “grit” or “edge”. But if you have to manufacture the edginess with dialog it means you’re lacking in events or conflict. These were brief moments, little hiccups in the screenplay, so I don’t think the writers meant to create hiccups, it just happened. They deserve the benefit of the doubt. Likewise, there were some events, such as the “ghost sex” when Joi and Mariette “join” to please K, which seemed as if the writers ran out of ideas. Earlier, they mentioned K not needing bounty money, so of course at the gratuitous sex scene, you’re wondering what he would need with intercourse. A replicant wouldn’t need most of what humans need. The question is a theme that threads the story from every end. The question can’t be avoided.

When Philip K. Dick wrote his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? he was full of questions, but the one question he claimed drove him to write the novel was this one: What constitutes the authentic human? It only follows that we might wonder: What constitutes the authentic replicant?

Do they need to smoke cigars? Would they even want to? Would they eat junk food? Or, if they ate at all, would they be programmed to eat the most efficient foods? Would they need to breathe? How often would they breathe? How many doctor’s visits would they need? Would they hate the seams on socks like humans do? How would they react in an earthquake? Or a hurricane? The questions are endless.

The screenplay of Blade Runner 2049 skims over the philosophical nature of Philip K. Dick’s original work, but, to be fair, how would a movie ever give decent play to philosophy anyway? This is the major flaw in the myriad attempts to capture Frankenstein on screen. Frankenstein, the novel, in a similar ilk to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, was philosophical at its heart. It just doesn’t translate well to a visual medium.

Despite this obvious truncation of thoughts when translating words to screen, I did enjoy reading the screenplay.

And before I leave you without even summing up the plot, here it is in summary. A new Blade Runner is out finding renegade replicants when he discovers a secret from Rick Deckard’s era. He hunts down the mystery of a possible human/replicant birth and hunts down Deckard as well. The answers he gets are not what he expected.

Although I enjoyed reading the screenplay, the secondary twist at the end threw me off that horse. Or should I say unicorn? I was riding the dream and then the writers basically threw a gimmick in at the end. In my opinion, the first twist was enough. The secondary twist was unnecessary. Maybe they thought the first twist was too obvious, so they added another.

My rating of the screenplay:

  1. Drawing power. . .one star
  2. Interesting. . .one star (I did want to know how it ended)
  3. Offensive factor. . .half star (mildly offensive moments; remember, this is for the screenplay, not the movie)
  4. Range of emotions. . .half star (same mood throughout)
  5. Character factor. . .one star (interesting characters)
  6. Technic/style. . .half star (the secondary twist at the end brought this score down)
  7. Proper length. . .one star

Total score: 5 1/2 stars

Strangeness Anyone?

Generally speaking, they’re all strange. Everyone’s just a fine line of weird from a ball point world.

They’re human? They’re weird.

They have a face? They have “two faces”.

Don’t get caught up in arguing with them, they all think they’re right, even when their facts come from the schizophrenic center. A highball and a hurricane taught them everything they know.

Strange doesn’t cover the disconnect. Weird doesn’t sum up the disarmed reason. Tongues can be tied. Intellects can be knotted. Feelings rule over fallacies. In fact, the greater the feelings, the more fallacious the flow of argument.

Separation of church and state? Somewhat.

Separation of science and emotional state? Never.

Angels of the heart always countered by demons of the mind.

The only way they can “be themselves” is if they have a crowd who thinks like them, dresses like them, breaks the same laws they break.

All of them walk like they have somewhere to go. But who told them to go there? Someone they knew long ago. Weird. Was it not obvious from the start? It’s a clueless mystery. A misty mystification. Tragedy in a plastic party cup.

If everyone’s weirdness is so hard to see, then what’s the matter with you and me?

Nothing. Nothing, it’s really nothing. Keep doing all the things you do and pretend everything is fine. Humans? They don’t want to know about your eccentricities, they’re busy romancing their own. They don’t need new oddities to take the throne.

Everyone’s the king comedian in their own weekend after-school special. Everyone’s the queen bee action figure in their personal stop-motion film. And if that wasn’t confusing enough, they switch roles and at times play the fool, the debutante, the courtier.

If a court had no fool, they didn’t think to find one elsewhere, they tried to fill the position on their own. Before you realize, they split on you, leaving you paying the impound fee.

Here, though, is the greatest benefit of everyone having weirdness in them: everyone has the ability to accept it.

Find yourself stuck paying for someone else’s major mistakes? Pay in carrots. Pay in flamingos. Pay in Pokemon cards. BAM! You didn’t just find a way out, you found a new friend.

Hump Day Help

I enjoy helping people. Recently I received some help on a project I definitely could not have done myself, all alone, little old me. I’d like to pay it forward.

The project I’m talking about here that I needed to accomplish involved replacing only about six feet of flexible line for my fuel delivery system. Sounds easy until you realize the entire fuel tank needed to come off the vehicle. Just like a Drink needs a Mug; Just like a Skull needs a Brain, I needed Help with a capital letter. By the numbers it looked like this:

3 brothers

6 feet of fuel tubing

16 dollars for the tubing

25 bolts and nuts

227 jokes

Totally worth it, especially if you consider one last quantification: an auto shop would have charged 300 dollars for labor on that particular project. And I probably wouldn’t get but one joke out of an auto shop mechanic. Soooo worth it.

How I want to help others is not so much automotive, although I’m not opposed to helping turn a wrench now and then. What I’m thinking of is how I’ve noticed a few people asking for help from the #writingcommunity on Twitter. The requests are here and there, and the assistance is the same—sporadic. Sometimes the questions get answered, and other times they don’t even get noticed. What I’m proposing is to schedule the help sessions to one day. Wednesday. I want to call it “Hump Day Help” and I’ll link it to the writing community with both hashtags, like so: #writingcommunity #humpdayhelp. In this way, it will be more visible and more likely to help those who are new to the community.

This will be helpful to me as well. I’m not saying I will only help people. My first question will be what title to use for my new novel. I’m favoring Fille Fatale, but I wonder if it’s too much French for the reading public. Will they look at the title and make the assumption that the inside is all French as well?

Regardless of the answer to my question, the Hump Day Help will be for those who want to pay it forward also. There are lots of people who feel successful and knowledgable enough to offer advice. They could even use the tag to say, “Here I am, if you need to ask me any questions, start asking.” And I’m sure they will.

Just like my brothers, there are many generous souls out there in the world ready to make a project 227 times better than it would have been without their help.

We Call Louder

Sometimes they don’t answer.

We call a few times.

Then we call louder.

We know they’re out there. We know it’s important that they eat the meal we’ve prepared for them, so we keep calling.

Watch for the signs, you’ll know they’re there too.

Birds suddenly abandoning a perfectly good tree is one sign. Branches snapping is another. If you were in the woods, well, you wouldn’t want to be there, but if you were, you might hear them breathing, and that would be another sign. Your heart beating faster than it ever has would be the final sign before you broke into a fearful run, imagining the claws and snapping jaws reaching for you, the hungered maws and needful paws gaining on you.

You know if you looked back, you couldn’t see them. Despite their size, they blend naturally with the scenery, they blend beautifully with the greenery.

If you did stop and spot one, halt your run, you might swear you were in a children’s story because of how comically large they are. Then again, if you knew what we feed them, and sighted one, then saw how many more were camouflaged and hiding right next to you, you’d realize what kind of story you’re really in.

Empath

Empath.

Isn’t it amazing how one word can spark whole day-long monologs inside you? Or how one word can inspire conversations and debates among you and your friends? Like at the end of the Saturday Night Live skit with Tom Hanks on Black Jeopardy when they say, “Lives That Matter,” and “Doug” has something to say about that.

Kudos to all the players by the way: Contestants Keeley (Sasheer Zamata), Shanice (Leslie Jones) and Doug (Tom Hanks) compete on Black Jeopardy, hosted by Darnell Hayes (Kenan Thompson). My favorite line was when Keeley played by Sasheer Zamata says, “Mmm…I don’t know, you can’t do everything.”

That’s how it happens. You just roll with it. You may or may not even know what you’re talking about, you just start talking, because of that one word. The reason the word empath gets me going is maybe because I read a Clive Barker novel with an empath character in it. I wasn’t enthralled by the character or their ability, though I do remember it. Honestly it sounds like such a ripoff if you ask me, if other ESP is available.

Let’s get the basics down here first. What is an “empath”? Well if it was considered an Extra Sensory Perception, empathy would be the ability to sense others feelings, and feel them yourself. Compare the idea of sympathy. In sympathy you simply agree with someone. You have the same ideas or principles, so you have what’s called sympathy, with no direct links or connections. If you have the same exact feelings as someone, you have empathy. To have literal empathy there has to be a connection. In my opinion, when the majority of people say they have empathy, they really mean they have sympathy. They’re not really linked to someone’s emotional state. They just remember a time they felt the same way and then try to inject themselves in to the other person’s situation. The common person doesn’t go around having empathy. If true empathy were a more common occurrence, there would be far less murder or theft, and a lot less lying. If true empathy were a more common occurrence, there would be fewer meat eaters, far more vegetarians. So there you go: if you like the taste of meat, you better thank God you don’t have empathy.

Another basic concept is telepathy, in which a person can gather the thoughts of others without asking for them. Remember that distinction, because some people get empathy and telepathy confused and mistakenly think that through empathy you would be privileged to know someone’s thoughts. Not so.

Telepathy is for thoughts, empathy is for emotions, sympathy is for agreement.

Sure, if you knew someone’s thoughts, you could guess their emotions, or if you knew their emotions you could work through inference to find their thoughts. People are complex though. You might see a child holding an ice cream cone, a scoop of ice cream on the ground in front of the child, tears in the child’s eyes. If you were tuned in to the child’s feelings, you might sense sadness, but without knowing the child’s thoughts, you might not know the thought prior to the ice cream falling was, “Where is my mommy?” Your inference might be sadness because of the lost ice cream, but you’d be wrong. It was for the lost mommy.

As far as ESP goes, being an empath is not the most appealing perception. Not to me. Like telepathy without a switch to turn it on or off, if empathy was uncontrolled it would quickly become a nuisance. Could you imagine walking around a crowded street with everyone’s emotions passing through you? Ugh! You wouldn’t like crowds much, I bet.

It could be funny though. If you were say, at a hockey game, your team was winning, but you felt the feelings of the other fans—the losing team’s fans—you’d be cheering and booing all at once. Or if you were at a funeral, but you tapped into the guy who didn’t really know the deceased. He’s sitting in the back of the mortuary with an earbud in one ear—and he’s listening to the hockey game through his cell phone.

It could make for great storytelling that’s for sure. I just don’t think it sounds practical in any real life situations. But then that’s a male perspective. Women are more romantic in their approach on life, while men are more pragmatic. If I could see it all through a woman’s eyes, being an empath might have its usefulness.