Apocalypse-Cinema by Szendy Peter; Bishop Will; Weber Samuel

Author:Szendy, Peter; Bishop, Will; Weber, Samuel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2015-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10 Blade Runner, or The Interworlds

Let’s open an eye from the end of the world (of the film).

Or rather: Let’s open it after all, remembering that passage from The World as Will and Representation where Schopenhauer affirms that “the suns and the planets without an eye to see them” are nothing, for “the existence of the whole world still remains dependent on the opening of that first eye, even if it only belonged to an insect.”1

So the world would thus exist only when facing someone, only when it exists for a gaze that opens onto it or that opens it to itself? Could the world then exist, for example, in the way an insect’s eyes constitute it, like in the unforgettable subjective shot from The Fly (Kurt Neumann, 1958), where André sees the face of his wife, Helen, screaming in terror and diffracted through his own eyes that have become the eyes of a fly? Would there be as many worlds as there are eyes? Or even, if it is true that every film constructs a gaze, as many worlds as there are visions or viewings?

The world, Schopenhauer says in sum, was opened with the first eye, whatever it may be, so much so that it will also close with it. But even more radically, we need to think that the world goes out, that it is the end of the world every time an eyelid closes forever, every time that the ultimate fade to black takes place. Death, writes Derrida—and not only the death of a human but that of “every living being (animal, human, or divine)”—“death declares each time the end of the world in totality, the end of every possible world, and each time the end of the world as unique totality, therefore irreplaceable and therefore infinite.”2

In Blade Runner, the replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) is neither animal nor human nor divine. Indeed. But he is nonetheless a mortal creature, and he even seems to have a certain access to his own mortality or finitude, as is attested in these ultimate phrases addressed to Rick Deckard under a torrential rain that is soaking both of them:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.… All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.

When Roy’s eye closes after these words in a blink that the slight slowing or freezing of the shot underlines and discreetly prolongs, a world is thus lost. Drowned.

A world that was not one world but indeed the world, given that it included all worlds: this one, the earthly one, where replicants are prohibited and persecuted; and the other ones, the film’s “off-worlds,” worlds in the margin or at the edge of the world that the advertising vessels suspended above the dystopic 2019 Los Angeles are constantly vaunting as new worlds where one can emigrate, where one can leave to restart and remake one’s life, fleeing a planet Earth that has become uninhabitable. “A

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