thornography

About to take a protracted absence from Thornography, writing, Boston, and both Americas, as we fly across the pond on Thursday to meet up with our friends A+R in Arezzo, Italy on Friday.
A+R leave in just a few hours for Milan. They’re going to make their way down the boot, exploring Modena and Bologna on the way. We’ll arrive in Rome a few days later, then train up to Arezzo, in the northeastern corner of Toscano, where we’re all getting rooms at a B&B. From there we’ll explore the city and surrounding towns via day trips. We’ve got a couple things planned, including a full-day cooking class and a bike tour to a vineyard for a tasting and lunch, but mostly we’re all just looking forward to taking it easy in Tuscany for a week. Follow me on twitter (@mmthorn) if you want: I’ll probably post occasional pictures there. Or just check back in a few weeks or so and then I’ll catch you up on everything!

Ciao!

The first time I even heard of the movie known as Blade Runner, I was ten years old and in the backseat of a stationwagon. I’d just gotten picked up by Rebecca’s mom as part of a four-kid carpool I was in. Rebecca’s mom had just seen the movie the night before and wanted to talk about it to the oldest and most intellectually sophisticated person in the car with her at the time, which happened to be yours truly. She had enjoyed the film, but she also frankly disclosed a certain amount of surprise and confusion. It was nothing like Star Wars, Alien, Empire or any of the other big-name sci-fi movies making their way through the movie theaters at that time, the dawn of the big-budget special-effects blockbuster era. She wanted to describe BR to me, but couldn’t, not adequately. This of course drove me mad with a desire to see it.

But my parents were strict about movie ratings, and so, since it was R for Restricted, I didn’t get to see Blade Runner until its television premier in 1986. I didn’t really understand it myself, but, like a lot of movies at that time, I made a mental footnote to watch it again later if I ever had the chance. Thanks to first VHS and then DVD, I’ve since had many chances to watch it. I’ve also watched a lot of Ridley Scott’s other movies, and a lot of movies inspired by Blade Runner. I’ve also read a lot of Philip K. Dick short stories, and watched pretty much every PKD-based movie I can find.

Nothing is really quite like Blade Runner. I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite movie, by any stretch, but it’s probably one of my favorite movies to think about, take apart, and analyze. It’s also one of my favorite movies just to see – it’s such a fantastically beautiful and richly textured movie. I can enjoy it almost as much with the sound off as I can with the sound on. I love its mood, and its moodiness. I love the world that it creates, more than the story or the characters.

I’ve never been able to figure out why I’m so fascinated by certain parts of Blade Runner, or why, on the whole, it seems so different from so many other movies. So imagine my surprise and reserved delight when I discovered that a man named Paul Sammon had written a book in the 90′s called Future Noir: the Making of Blade Runner. Here was a book that, maybe, might just possibly give me a clue as to what’s so different and elusive about this one particular movie. I put the book on my wishlist, but then decided I’d probably never buy it.

Like I said, it’s not my favorite movie. I’m not even sure I can say it’s a terribly strong movie, all told. Harrison Ford himself, the leading man, says it’s one of his least favorite movies he’s ever been involved with. But here’s the thing. When I watch that movie, I feel like it’s brushing up against some kind of ceiling, and if it had just had a little more oomph, strength, speed, brilliance, I don’t know what, it could have, I don’t know, somehow transcended. Transcended what? I don’t know. Become what instead? I also don’t know. All I know is that sometimes I feel like in Blade Runner, Ridley Scott achieved something that might have put that film on the threshold of being something else entirely.

Which makes me sound like a crazy sort of fan. Which I’m definitely not. So I put off buying Future Noir. Because I didn’t want to feed what felt like an embryonic obsession.

Then I completely and totally just happened to run across one used copy of it at the Strand in NYC this past winter. Well. What did you think I would do? I threw my hands up in the air, said what the hell, and bought it. I know a sign when I see it after all.

Now, a couple months later, Future Noir has finally bubbled up the bedside reading stack. I’ve read it almost cover to cover (I skipped the short chapter on how the special effects were done, and a couple of the appendices), and I wanted to write a review, but it’s hard to write a review of a book like this. So even though this blog entry started its life with intention of being a book review, the actual review book is going to be pretty short.

Future Noir mostly does what it sets out to do, tell how BR was made. Sammon goes into great exclusive detail regarding how the rights to the story were acquired, how the screenplay evolved over time, how Scott got involved, and so on. The longest chapter of the book is a scene-by-scene breakdown of the movie, and each scene usually has one or two “behind the scenes” anecdotes that are just the sort of thing you’d hope for from a book like this. Sammon’s obviously a huge fan of the movie, and went to great lengths to get access to some of the people and materials that he did. He’s a true film geek and a true, unapologetic BR fan.

This very fandom, though, is also one of the places where the book falls down a couple times. There’s more space devoted to gushing over how great BR is than there is space devoted to critical analysis or deconstruction. He doesn’t ask hard questions of his interviewees. That’s all ok, though. No one but a fan could have possibly cared enough to write this book.

Also, I have to say, Sammon did a great job in getting himself conversations with almost all the major players involved with the making of BR. The only people he didn’t get any substantial time with were Harrison Ford and Sean Young, the stars. While this may seem like a big omission, he actually does have interview excerpts from so many other big players – writers, producer, director, other actors – you almost don’t notice these two glaring absences. Ah well. I never thought Young did much for the film anyway.

The biggest problem, though, with FN is not anything Sammon had any say over: Future Noir is just really dated at this point. It came out in 1996, fourteen years into the movie’s history, sure, but now that’s less than half way into its 31-year life span. Since then, the so-called Final Cut has been released, the authoritative version, and the only version with Ridley Scott’s full seal of approval. At the time that FN came out, the most authoritative version was the so-called “Director’s Cut”, which was still a compromise between what Scott wanted and what the studio let him get away with.

More significantly, however, Sammon wound up missing everything that the Internet would do for BR, or the plateau to which said Internet would allow fandom of any sort to ascend. Another strip of fabric that’s inevitably missing from Sammon’s otherwise master opus is all the material that got scraped up to serve as “bonus materials” on the various DVD boxed sets, 25th anniversary edition and 30th anniversary Blu-Ray edition. All of these sources probably could have informed FN‘s ultimate direction and scope.

I definitely recommend Future Noir to anyone interested in learning more about Blade Runner. It’s a great place to begin, especially if, like me, you’re trying to decide how much of a fan you want to be. Because, as much as Sammon loves this particular movie, somehow, this book winds up laying out what should be plain to see: it’s just a movie. A movie that happened to come along before it’s time maybe, and maybe a movie that had a creative director behind it who was just coming into the height of his powers, but still for all that, just a movie.

Me? Now that I can see how much of what went into Blade Runner was actually flawed and broken and human, I’m actually more interested in how it, as a work of art, manages to rise above its medium and point to something else.

But that’s another blog entry.

You and I had made our way to a place where many brave adventurers had died. This, we knew, was our first great test. Many who came before us were brighter, stronger, better in many ways than the two of us, and now their bones were piled high around us. Whatever happened in this room, whatever came at us, we knew to be ready for it, knew we couldn’t possibly be ready for it.

It was our bedroom, or something made to look like it, a place like home, but for the corpses and skeletons that surrounded on all sides, mute testifiers and prophets. We were exhausted, it had taken so long for us to get here. Now we were here, and ready and on guard, but we had to sleep too.

I woke first. Had something touched me. Ugh-there it was again, reaching for, sweeping across my face. I lashed out at it, unsure myself if I meant to grab it or push it away. My hands found no purchase. In the dim and broken light of the bedroom window I saw its darker shadow against the darkness of the room, a shape that didn’t make any sense.

It grabbed at me again, and this time when I yelled, for just a second, I could see that the room was full of these shapes. When they heard my fear, they all surged forward for just a second, ready to break cover and descend upon us. They were not ordinary creatures. We’d come here believing all we needed were our wits, our hands, maybe armor, maybe swords. We were so horribly wrong.

Magic was real. It was not the magic of spells and fairy tales. This magic, the only magic, was the kind where logic and reason broke. This was senselessness, chaos and formlessness brought to life. All our worst fears. The realization sunk in like a long skewer in my heart. These weren’t the kinds of things that could bleed, or who made any kind of sense, these were real monsters, come to life out of the darkness itself. Dark, shifting assemblages of claw, tooth, throat, and smoke.

Then I remembered that you had joked that you had one magical ability, one spell in your arsenal, the most useless spell of all. Your spell was Detect Magic. You could see these things, and, more, you could cast the spell on me, and I’d be able to see these things too. Maybe if we could see them, we could fight them!

You were still sleeping despite my shout moments ago. Another something battened against my face then withdrew. I begged you to wake up, I screamed and yelled. You were awake, though. You’d just been pretending to be asleep. You held your eyes fast shut. Open them, I cried. You said no, it was the seeing that gave them shape and brought them forth. No, I insisted, no! We have to see them so we can fight them. That’s how we’ll survive, I insisted, I implored. You had this gift, and we had to use it. No, you insisted, everyone before us had the gift and used it and look at what happened to them. Above all, we must not regard them directly.

What do we do? I asked you, What do we do? You said, eyes still shut tight, you said we had to wake up. We had to wake up or these nightmares would consume us. It was the only way out. But we’re not sleeping, I said. But you said we were and I had to wake up. I didn’t know how to wake up. How do you wake up from the real.

But it wasn’t real. It was just a dream. And I woke up. You slept soundly beside me, in the same room, and we were safe. So wonderfully exhiliratingly safe. Everything was deliciously boring and ordinary. I lay there paralyzed with fear for another second, waited for my adrenalin to subside and my muscles to unclench.

It took me a while to get back to sleep.

This is a Special Limited Edition Thornography Exclusive Guest Post! Thanks and praise be to Andrew L., for taking the time to share his own perspective and thoughts regarding the photo I blogged about in my last entry.

Having considered the beauty of what Matthias wrote, I look at the original photo now as evidence of one thing, maybe the only thing, from my years of college that worked out as I might have hoped.

Going on 20 years of post-college friendship, with hopes for many more years to come!

Loves blew up in scarring shards. Mentors are long dead. Even other friendships have faded, dissolved. Yet look at those smiles!

Fortunes have indeed reversed, and flipped, and ultimately found new root.

Strongly enough that we’re both happily coupled. Now we’re buffered from life’s vagaries not just by each other’s affections but by the love of our respective life partners. And I’m a proud parent with my wife Jill, which feels like Fortune to match any I could ever hope to know.

The original photograph has been with me for close to 20 years. Nearly as long as anything. Returning to it now reminds me of my difficult feelings of that time.

This was the time in my life when I was the most acutely idealistic. And somehow I mostly missed connecting and acting with those with similarly aching hearts around me. There were real opportunities.

I was a face in the crowd at anti-Apartheid protests at Dartmouth. At a protest, I was taken by the boldness of a few south African students who demanded that we confront the actual Trustees over the issue of divestment from South African companies and not merely speechify on the steps of the administration building. The doors to the building were locked. We stormed the lobby of the nearby Hanover Inn since the Trustees were believed to be meeting somewhere within. We all sat on the carpet of the lobby floor. Were we chanting? I only remember the ultimate defeat when the police arrived with threats of arrest. It was little comfort that I was the last of us, alone, to take a deep breath, get up from the padded carpeting, and slink away.

In the buildup to the first Gulf War, I sat in protest meeting after protest meeting in silence, not knowing what to say or do. Others had blocked traffic on the bridge between Hanover and Norwich. When I finally shared with a fellow protester the idea that we should use the pedestrian laws of New Hampshire to our advantage and block traffic right by the Green, visible to all, a protest organizer’s response was one of paranoia about who I might be and why, all of a sudden, I appeared with an idea that might somehow bring dire consequences.

After the Gulf War, I applied for and received an internship with a stipend for travel which enabled me to go to the Kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific. I spent three months in the Kingdom of Tonga, a place I had travelled to with a sense that I needed to help in some small way. I stepped off the plane into a society without homelessness. Without hunger. This left me feeling hopeful that wealth is not necessarily needed for security and happiness. What was I doing there?

And this sense that things in the world were much better than I had expected left me so unprepared for my trip home, when I visited a friend in Pakistan. Among many encounters with extreme poverty in Pakistan, one stands out. While on a brief drive in Lahore, I viewed through the picture frame passenger window of a brand new Honda Accord the shaking hand of a legless man, reaching toward me, begging for anything. I was not able to muster more than a sense of shock for the world we all share.

Back in the US, as my time in college wound down, I felt a deeper need to try to act in the face of the evidence of the time that our destruction of the life support systems of Earth was proceeding too fast, too deep.

That’s what I see when I see the younger me in this photo – the pensiveness and worry with little outlet. I think I was too busy feeling pained about it all. And telling myself the story that no one else around me felt the same.

But there was Matthias. And the pain didn’t cut deeply enough, the judgmentalness didn’t cause sufficient self-destruction, to keep me from appreciating his adventurousness and love.

In 20 years, I’m glad that I’ve mostly followed my heart. I’ve chosen to focus my working life on trying to create a little more kindness in the world. In our family life, Jill and I have been raising our daughter in a way that touches the Earth a little more lightly. Except for the jet travel! And the two automobiles! And the natural gas furnace!

And even if the party’s ending, the oil has peaked, the pie is shrinking, I believe in going through the next 20 years, and the next, and the next(?!), with smiles, with laughter, thinking of Matthias and others I love and who inspire me, rather than with a furrowed brow, imagining there are too few who really care.