Backstories: "Blame and Blade Runner"
A partial tribute to my best friend, the late Paul Mears, part one of several
(Backstory the First: The reason things have been quiet on the newsletter front lies with the loss of my oldest and dearest friend Paul Mears, who died on July 11. It’s exceedingly hard to describe how hard this hit: we had been friends for nearly 45 years, and just trying to collect a greatest hits of our exploits is both time-consuming and exceedingly painful. This is one of two Backstory installments to help fill in gaps in the main essay, as we almost literally changed history a couple of times, and the final eulogy comes out when it’s damn good and ready.)
(Backstory the Second: This essay previously appeared, in a shorter form, for the long-defunct newsletter The Hell’s Half-Acre Herald, running between 1998 and 2002. This earlier version was then reprinted in the collection The Savage Pen of Onan: The “Best” of the Hell’s Half-Acre Herald, published by Fantastic Books in 2009. This version was commissioned for the Web site I09 in 2010 by then-editor Charlie Jane Anders, where it never saw print because, quote, “I forgot,” and it apparently cut into I09’s daily “Top TV Shows With The Word ‘Firefly’ In the Title” listicles. So be it: I had little problem with her incessantly jamming her metaphorical tongue so far up Cory Doctorow’s ass that he had permanent calluses on the backs of his eyeballs. I was just tired of listening to the slurping.)
It's all my fault.
All of it. It's all my fault. Bill Gates is my fault. So are Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos. Matt Drudge and Harry Knowles are my fault. If not for my lack of action, we'd never have been subjected to the movie Hackers, or Godzilla (American version) screen savers, or to the acronym "B2B". We wouldn't have Faith Popcorn’s pie-in-the-sky freeform association blathering about technology to any corporation willing to pay her fee, and we wouldn't have had a decade of Bruce Sterling cornering people and screaming "It's on the Viridian List! Have I mentioned the Viridian List?!" every fifteen seconds. We wouldn't have Wired, and we wouldn't have the "Norm MacDonald For Dummies" books. We wouldn't have millions of greedhead bottom-of-the-class business majors masturbating like caged apes every five minutes about the latest tech fad. We'd have been spared America Online, the Microsoft Network, Facebook, The Onion, and Napster.
In short, the world would have been a much nicer place. Just think about it: a world where nobody outside of that Burger King in downtown San Francisco would ever have heard of R.U. Sirius. Doesn't that just make the heart sing? This is why I must pay for my crimes, by omission, against humanity.
Here's one for all of you alternate history buffs out there. Never mind wondering about the outcome of the great Communist Revolution happening in the US instead of Russia or on the Dutch taking custody of New Zealand instead of the British. The real changes to the stream of history usually happen thanks to tiny developments, and I was at the nexus point of a beaut. I had the opportunity to see Blade Runner at just the right time.
Through the weekend of March 5, 1982, both of the newspapers in Dallas, Texas ran a huge full-page ad for a sneak preview of an unnamed movie "by the director of Alien," but with no other information. The ad featured Harrison Ford and Sean Young (who at that time was pretty much unknown aside from her supporting role in Stripes), but nothing else other than the time for the screening: 8:00 P.M. that Saturday at the NorthPark I and II in Dallas. To most people in the area, this meant absolutely nothing, other than that Ford had a new film coming out. To one teenager in the suburban hellpit of Lewisville, Texas, it meant everything, although he had no idea at that time.
See, the Ladd Corporation, the company that financed Blade Runner, had decided to screen what was then the final cut of Ridley Scott's opus in Dallas to get an idea of how Middle America would take to it. After all, it had a very strange name, and while Harrison Ford was well known thanks to Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Star Wars films, the executives apparently worried that his appeal might not carry over into something as esoteric as this. This wasn't to mention the problems with adapting a Philip K. Dick novel for the screen. Ergo, the corporation scheduled a screening for the NorthPark, THE place to see preview screenings in the Southwest US, with the idea of scoping out the audience. Remember, these were the days before dozens of advance screenings to ascertain the bankability of a movie, and way before the days when some dolt at Ain't It Cool News would leak reports of the screening all over the planet. (There are days when I miss the days before the Internet.) As an added feature, unbeknownst to anybody, both Ford and Scott were in the audience, watching the audience's reaction. (In fact, after the screening, Ford signed into his Dallas hotel room as “Rick Deckard”. How’s that for obscure?)
At the time, none of this was known to me: I was some snotty brat in north Texas who had vague delusions of being a writer but no idea as where to start, and considering that Dallas might as well have been in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud for all of its accessibility, the attraction of getting out of Lewisville was intoxicating. I'd already read Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Alan Nourse's The Blade Runner, so I had some vague idea of what the film was going to be about. Best of all, I was addicted to Alien, so I had to see this movie. I told my then and now best friend, Paul Mears (who still hasn't given me a full-immersion baptism in a deep fat fryer, so I guess I don't annoy him quite as badly as I think), about the film, and he decided that we had to see it, too.
These days, I have a lot of sympathy for the neighborhood kids, being at the age where they want to do something more than watch television but too young to get a job and get a driver's license, because that was my situation in '82. Technically, my family at that time lived in Flower Mound, a burb that existed on the maps but consisted of little more than cattle pastures, bedroom suburbs, and Baptist churches baking in the summer heat. Even by bicycle, Lewisville was a half-hour away, and Dallas was impossibly far sans automobile, so I did the only rational thing: I asked my parents for a ride.
At the time, my parents were wont to making trips to Dallas for dinner and a movie every weekend, and seeing as how I had no way of getting a driver's license in a day, I figured that I could ask for a ride for the both of us to the NorthPark "if you're going that way." It seemed reasonable: if I had to, I could walk back, because the movie was worth it, right? I had enough money to cover the tickets and even the gas expended: all I needed was the ride. "You aren't going near the NorthPark tomorrow night, are you?"
Naturally, the answer was "no". I persisted. "Are you sure? I mean, I can walk back if I have to, so you could just drop me off, and I could walk back…"
“No.”
“What if you dropped me off at the nearest point, and I walk the rest of the way?”
“NO.”
Every entreaty was met with a sigh of "Will this damn kid lay off for a minute?", and that was understandable, because I could be a half-track child if given the opportunity. I still kept up, and when the final "no, we’re not going anywhere near there" came at 3:00 Saturday, I relayed the issue to Paul, and he started working over his parents. In both cases, it was a resounding defeat, and so we decided to concede the war and camp out at my place, both swearing that when we grew up and had access to transport, Things Would Be Different.
About an hour after my parents took off to their runabout, they suddenly came back. When I asked why they were back after only an hour, instead of the four or so that would have allowed us to watch a duet of Cheech and Chong films without parental interruption, my parents explained "We went out to see that preview, but it was already sold out." My dad’s response: “You didn’t need to see it anyway.”
That was the personal world-changing moment for me, because that’s when I finally learned that if you really want to do something, you can’t depend upon anybody else. For years, I blamed them both for that little cowpat in my self-esteem, but that was then. As John Waters likes to point out, one of the aspects of growing up is getting the ability to stop blaming your parents for everything, and besides, it was my fault Paul and I didn't go. If I had really wanted to see Blade Runner, I would have figured out some cunning plan to get my way, and Mears and I would have been at the NorthPark screening. And at that point, the universe would have been Different.
In our reality, the NorthPark screening of Blade Runner was a failure. Most of the audience was showing up to see Harrison Ford (on screen; nobody knew he was in the audience at that time), and being a typical Dallas audience of Southern Methodist University cokeheads who needed the plot of Raiders explained to them, they were completely lost. Nearly half of the response cards received by Ladd apparently said some variation of “Brilliant” or “Finally, a good science fiction movie.” With barely more than half, though, the dingbats whined that "I couldn't figure out what was going on", and that led to a call for a drastic rethinking of the film. Instead of being released in May 1982, Blade Runner hit the screens at the end of July, with truncated scenes, a hastily-shot happy ending, and the much-maligned monologue explaining everything. (Ford admitted last year that he so detested the idea of the monologue that he deliberately kept it as monotone as possible, and artist Phil Foglio mocked that with a cartoon that suggested that Ford got into character by whispering "Sssh. Be vewy, vewy qwiet. I'm hunting wepwicants!") After a summer with more big-budget genre releases than any other up to that point, Blade Runner quickly disappeared: everyone was still on a high from E.T., and nobody wanted to see a science fiction film that was (gasp) downbeat.
Well, we all know that story. The film caught on with an audience via video, one of the first films to do so, and it rapidly built up word of mouth. At the same time, the story about Ridley Scott's version kept leaking out, leading to the release of the first of many director's cuts in 1992. These days, any original material from the film is worth a small fortune: in the early Nineties, one of the only two draws for a club in Dallas’s Exposition Park called the State Bar was the original model of the blimp from the film over the bar, still in excellent condition, and that blimp brought in customers from all over the country. (The other draw was for its incredible Memphis-style batter fries, but that’s another story.) That's what happened in our universe.
Now, let's rewind the timeline just a little bit. Let's say that Mears and I were able to make that screening, with the only way we'd make the trip past the ushers being that the film wasn't formally rated yet (after all, at the time, "R"-rated films supposedly banned everyone under the age of 16 without parent or guardian), and our two audience response cards were enough to tip the balance over to Ladd releasing the film "as is." Implausible, but it could have happened. Because of that consensus, Blade Runner makes its May release date, and it's seen by a crowd ready for the summer movie season instead of one burned out on new big-budget projects out each week. Here's where everything goes drastically awry.
The late spring of 1982 was a particularly pathetic time for filmgoing, so even utter garbage was selling quite well to the folks who were hyped up for the big films promised. While everyone was waiting for E.T., Star Trek II, and even Annie, they felt no compunctions about paying to see The Sword and the Sorcerer, Conan the Barbarian, and Paul Schrader's remake of Cat People. With this audience, nobody would see anything wrong with taking a chance on a new film from an obscure source, and, in this new universe, Blade Runner becomes a minor hit. Not E.T.-level, but still big enough that the film makes back its negative cost and people start mumbling about sequels. And that's the absolute worst thing that could have happened to it.
A midlist success in Hollywood, even back in those rarified days, is the kiss of death as far as posterity is concerned. Even though they're already doing well, the big successes keep getting the hype, particularly in the "#1 Movie of the Weekend!" ads in Variety and every mainstream film review source on the planet, as everyone tries to keep the momentum going. When they finally hit video and cable, the automatic predicate is "Hey, it was a huge hit!" If the film bombs, then the studio tries to recoup its losses through cable and video sales, and in the case of films that bombed through no fault of their own, they have enough time to build up word of mouth, and they become cult films. (The Cynic's Dictionary by Rick Bayan defines "cult movie" as "any film seen fifty times by about that many people", and I see no reason to dispute this assessment.) If the film falls right down the middle, nobody expends effort one way or another, and it becomes a footnote in Hollywood history. Quick: can you name any of the other midlist films of 1982? How about 1987, if that'll make things any easier?
Now, a midlist success for Blade Runner already changes the universe: Terry Gilliam couldn't get Brazil its financing for years because executives at Twentieth Century Fox compared it to Blade Runner, and nobody in an executive position wants to be seen developing a film compared to a failure. In this universe, though, not only does Brazil come out in 1984 through Twentieth, but enough edgy science fiction gets the nod that things get rather weird in the movie industry for a bit. However, instead of turning edgy SF into a cult experience, it goes mainstream, where it lasts until the newest flavor is discovered and the sheep move on.
The other aspect, and this is the critical one, is the influence upon literature. William Gibson is oft-quoted as saying that he originally planned to stop work on his novel Neuromancer after seeing Blade Runner, because the film tapped into the dystopia he was trying to describe in the novel. In our new universe, he either dumps it right then, or he finishes it, and all anyone can say to him is "Oh, so we saw Blade Runner, did we?"
This is one of the critical points. To mutilate a quote attributed to Bette Midler, Gibson didn't create the subgenre of cyberpunk, but he helped bring it to its current state of popularity. He did so not only by emphasizing the cyber over the punk in Neuromancer, but also by making computer programmers sexy. The book certainly didn't take off in the States at first, but it did well enough in England that it not only received the Hugo nomination for "Best Novel", but actually won in a race handicapped to Jerry Pournelle. Because of that, it suddenly became required reading for an entire generation of science fiction readers who also had access to affordable computers, and the idea of an interlinked Matrix of computers was addictive. Better yet, when they discovered that such a network existed, they naturally did everything they could to play with it, and when the World Wide Web went public, they were at the crest of that strange and terrible wave.
Well, that was here. In our new universe, Gibson is still a barely known SF writer in 1982, so when people go looking for science fiction "just like what I saw in Blade Runner", they end up grabbing up John Shirley and Rudy Rucker and Phil Dick. K.W. Jeter's Dr. Adder comes out in print two years earlier than it did in our world, and that humdinger fries a lot of synapses, but changes others. As anyone familiar with chaos theory will tell you, trying to predict what would have happened even a year or two later would be nearly impossible, but exposure of all of that literature on the crowd with first access to the technology to make it happen would have been extremely interesting. Although Gibson kept stressing in his Sprawl novels that the people who abused trusts usually came to a messy end, it never kept his readers from equating computer access to power in the real world, and although we had computer crackers causing mischief long before 1982, cracker exploits didn't gain that cachet of sexiness until after Neuromancer. In the process, Gibson's novels became porn for an obscene number of prats obsessed with linking to the aether and leaving the flesh behind because they couldn't get laid in Tijuana with $100 bills stuck in their jockstraps.
Predicting the future is impossible, but just follow some of the possible trends with the new Blade Runner. Without the babbling about the possibilities of the Internet, the Web could have remained a research tool well into 2000, or it could have opened up early, and the big tech boom happening just before the Persian Gulf War. John Shirley and Richard Kadrey become the talking heads on the evening news whenever technology issues come up, and up-and-coming gonzo authors such as Pat Cadigan, Ernest Hogan, and Misha Nogha become overnight hits. Bill Gates would still be a millionaire from Microsoft, but if the Web came too late, sales of Windows 95 wouldn't have been quite so fervent for those wanting to get online. If it came earlier, the new broadband technologies available by 1995 would allow Steve Jobs and Pixar to bypass standard distribution channels and release Toy Story directly online. Seattle never would have had the massive crunches inflicted upon it by Boeing layoffs in the Early Nineties, and thus Kurt Cobain never would have found a willing audience for his whines about how bad life was.
There's the rub. Life may have been better, but life may have been worse, too. Sure, a successful Blade Runner screening would have prevented a world of Mondo 2000, Geocities, and Billy Idol’s “Cyberpunk” album, but we probably wouldn't have had iTunes and YouTube in their current forms, either. Some things may never change, but the faces probably will, and other permutations probably never would happen without the exact right set of circumstances. Sure, life is inevitable under the right conditions, but just try to tell me that the British punk movement (or semi-movement, depending upon whom you talk to) could have happened at any time other than the late 1970s.
The first song of the Butthole Surfers album Locust Abortion Technician, “Sweat Loaf,” features the moral for this story: "It's better to regret something you've done than something you haven't done. And by the way, if you see your mother, tell her SATAN SATAN SATAN!" Although the experience might lead to pain, death, or terminal embarrassment, go ahead and push that envelope rather than whimper and whine about what could have been. I sat back and wimped out, and now I have to deal with the fact that I'm indirectly responsible for Cory Doctorow endlessly chirruping “Open source! Creative Commons! Copyleft! Humperdoo!”
Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.