THAT KISS
Blade Runner (1982)
Wait! What?
Margot Albrecht’s Column.
It’s 1982. I’m sixteen. I’m cocooned in the amniotic darkness of The Cinema; my safe place. I can’t remember what I was wearing—it was forty years ago—but I can take a punt; it would have been high-waisted, stonewashed jeans and a tucked-in baggy T-shirt. Maybe the one with the print of a Native American elder in a resplendent feathered headdress, but back then, decades before notions of cultural appropriation were mainlined, I would have referred to him as a ‘Red Indian’ and was oblivious to the plight of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. I was oblivious to a lot.
As I sat in my own personal cloud of musky Impulse Body Spray, passively smoking under the fog of communal cigarette smoke, my still-forming mind was about to be BLOWN by Ridley Scott’s sci-fi noir Blade Runner, adapted from Philip K Dick’s 1968 novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Unsurprisingly, Dick’s Electric Sheep was nowhere on my cultural radar, and it would, in fact, be years before I sat down and read Blade Runner’s original source material. All I was aware of, right then, was the complete sensory overload of the movie’s opening titles . . the aural assault of Vangelis’ evocative synth . . . the visual awe of an acid-rain drenched, cyberpunk, dystopian LA, with high-rise neon billboards, advertising blimps and flying cars. I’d not experienced such a visceral reaction to a movie since the Star Wars opening crawl text, accompanied by John Williams’ iconic space opera score.
I left the cinema, changed. Blade Runner was now my indisputable ‘all-time favourite’ movie. And long was its reign, in all its iterations and multiple cuts (though, like a hatchling duck, I remained imprinted on the first version, with the cheesy noir-detective voiceover and crowd-pleasing happy ending). That was, until 2020; the first semester of my first year as a first time Uni student.
Forty years after my first life-altering encounter with Blade Runner, cue an eye-forcibly-prized-open exchange with a forthright young student in Nick Prescott’s “Intro to the Creative Arts” topic, where Philip K Dick, and subsequent adaptations of his work, were up for debate.
As the discussions opened, I had the warm fuzzies that arise from having confidence in one’s subject. I considered myself a Blade Runner aficionado and, as such, felt empowered to rave about the absolute brilliance of this celluloid masterpiece. And what about that kiss? The one where Harrison Ford’s Deckard (a mercenary ‘blade runner’ cop who hunts down and ‘retires’ renegade replicants) forces Rachael (his replicant-who-doesn’t-know-she’s-a-replicant love interest) to kiss him. I mean, he’s helping her, right? To get in touch with her, uh, humanity?
With unadulterated conviction, I proclaimed it to be the best cinematic kiss EVER.
My observation was met with . . . crickets.
I’d emitted a clanger. But what? I was baffled until one lone voice piped up from the silent abyss to call me out. She said, ‘It’s a bit, rapey, Margot.’
Wait! What?
A bit rapey? I was in an emotional tailspin. I muttered something puerile like ‘Oh, there must be something wrong with me.’ And sulked for the rest of the tute.
But I could not unhear it.
I knew I had to watch Blade Runner again but through an ethical 21st century lens.
Filtered through my ‘new’ eyes, here’s how the scene now plays out. Harrison Ford’s broodingly handsome Deckard and Sean Young’s perfectly gorgeous Rachael are at the piano in Deckard’s bach-pad. Deckard makes a move on Rachael. She spurns his uninvited kiss and races to the apartment door, yanks it open and Deckard steps in front of her and slams the door shut with his fist.
Wait! What?
He slams it shut WITH HIS FIST!
That had never registered with me before. Then he grabs her and forcibly slams her up against the window blinds.
He GRABS and SLAMS her.
Woah. I could not unsee it.
He orders her to kiss him. She resists. He badgers her until she says yes. Then they kiss, passionately (which is the bit that became lodged in my pubescent brain all those years ago) but now I just kept thinking of the whole ‘when a woman says “no” she actually means ‘yes’’ dating culture of my generation and, thanks to the #MeToo movement, I had, in my fifties, finally been equipped with the language to label every unwanted sexual encounter I’d been subjected to from my girlhood onwards. Now I know that the best kiss EVER, between Deckard and Rachael, might well be labelled: coercion. Or, in the words of my fellow student, ‘a bit rapey.’
Has my awakening permanently sullied Blade Runner for me? Not exactly. I still love it, but in the way you love a Grandma who persists in using culturally insensitive language; they are too old to change. So, yeah, I can still love Blade Runner, in context, but just don’t get me started on Ridley’s sexualised killings of Zhora and Pris!
I’d love to hear about your own Wait! What? moments, be it a favourite movie, game, book, celebrity, etc., where your perception has been altered by your own awakening.
Contact us! Send Margot your thoughts via our email empiretimes@flinders.edu.au, @empire.times on Instagram, or @empire times on Facebook.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article has been reuploaded and was originally published in 2023.