One of the many, many podcasts I listen to is Slice of Sci Fi. It’s a great podcast full of discussion about upcoming science fiction movies and TV shows, etc. In the most recent episode, there was some discussion about the up coming release of yet another cut of Blade Runner to celebrate the visionary film’s 25th anniversary.
Cool! The new cut includes some minor edits to lengths of some scenes and includes two reshot scenes.
But the real news on the Slice of Sci Fi show was that Ridley Scott, the director, referred to Deckard as a replicant at the 2007 ComiCon, apparently settling the long debate about this issue. Well, that’s big news if true due to the long drawn out debates among film buffs. The folks on Slice of Sci Fi went on and on about this and I was excited about. “Aha,” I thought to myself, “fodder for Stuck In Traffic!”
So this afternoon, I started writing a post about how I felt about this revelation. A post which I eventually had to trash for reasons I’ll discuss in a minute. But for the record. I have long believed that in a good movie, every scene is critical to the movie and is required to move the story forward. Anton Chekhov, once said that if there is a gun on the wall in the first part of the play, it is certain to fire off before the last curtain, or something close to that. So the scene in Blade Runner where Deckard is drinking heavily and contemplating a series of photographs on his piano, he has a flash of a dream about a unicorn. There’s no other reference to this throughout the movie until the very end when he finds a tiny origami unicorn outside his apartment put there by his police handler.
On one level this means that the police knew where the last replicant was and they chose not to kill her and let her have a life with Deckart, short though it may be. But the significance of it being a unicorn must be explained. A movie this well crafted wouldn’t accidently have to referencesto unicorns and make them be coincidental. I had to conclude that the only explanation was that Deckard is a replicant. But I think the whole point of the movie is that the line between replicants and humans had been thoroughly blurred. I’d prefer that there be some ambiguity in whether or not Deckard is a human or a replicant.
I was furiously composing my analysis about this and I decided that I really needed to cite the Ridley quote for the article, so I could prove that the issue had been settled once and for all. Off to Google-land I went. I threw in a few choice key words and immediately came up with a a sci-fi channel interview. And I was reading through the interview and sure enough, there’s the quote from Ridley Scott. Cool! But as I read through the rest of the article, there were all these references to movies being “in production” which had been out for a long time and then it hit me like a on of bricks. Sure enough. The article was from way back in 2002! I did a little more digging and stumbled across a Wikipedia entry about Blade Runner. There I found out that yes, this information had been in general circulation since at least 2002 and possibly earlier.
Furthermore, I discovered that other people close to the film, notably the screen writer have continued to insist that Deckard is a human.
I could go on about the debate, but I won’t. I read the entier Wikipedia entry and many of the cited references. When I was done, I couldn’t think of a single thing to add to the debate that hadn’t already been said much better than I could.
But the real conclusion I got from this is THANK GOD I DID SOME FACT CHECKING. I’m so glad I decided it was important to include a hard citation to the original claim. If I had not done that, I would have posted a headline to the effect of “It’s Official: Deckard is a Replicant!” and touted it as real news in the scifi world. And no doubt I would have been corrected on this point within 10 minutes of posting it and I’d be really really embarrassed to have rushed the news to print without doing some fact checking.
I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this. There’s been a spate of news stories recently, especially about the Iraq war that have turned out to be total fabrications. The most recent being The New Republic’s publishing of accounts from an Iraqi soldier about brutal, salacious stories from the front lines that have been debunked. My favorite analysis of this story is over at The Big Lizard’s Blog. Explaining all the threads in a story is important. It’s important in a fiction story. It’s imporant in a news story as well. Citing your sources so they can be verified is important. It’s important in scientific research and it’s important in journalism. Fact checking is important.