Noir-fi and the Power of Great Fiction

I think Blade Runner may have changed my life, or at least, changed how I thought about fiction. The first time I saw it was not really anything special. I wasn't at a theater on a rainy evening, and it would be physically impossible for me to be there opening night. I just saw it on the computer one day, back when I was around 13 or 14.

A lot of people talk about how Star War changed their view on everything, and while that may have very well been the case with me, I had seen and absorbed Star Wars all my life, all the episodes, action figures, games, everything. But when I saw Blade Runner, I felt like I saw something I never had before. The kinds of stories I knew I could now tell, or even absorb, had changed.

I thought it was just about the ships, the blasters, the lasers and droids. But after seeing Blade Runner I knew fiction could be more than the sum of its parts. It wasn't just the universe, it could be a specific story in that universe, and it could be gut-wrenching and terrifying and moving.

I was taught for a very long time that science fiction and fantasy were never ever to be taken as seriously as period pieces or modern dramas or classic fiction.

Blade runner taught me how wrong that idea was.

I had found the holy grail and I didn't even know I was looking for it at the time. Blade Runner taught me that you don't need to hold the laser pistol up to the screen so the audience can see it's a blaster pistol, you don't need a wide shot of the ship landing because wow look at that it's a space ship. You can certainly do all these things, but you can also have a story about mortality, more poignant than any modern drama you'd seen in the subject. To see characters stepping outside of the confines my mind was putting them in, the moral boxes I had been taught everything was about. It wasn't good vs evil, it wasn't science fiction for science fiction's sake, it wasn't Star Wars, it wasn't Star Trek.

It was Roy Batty, an android moments from his own death by expiration date, saving a man who was trying to kill him.

Blade Runner was a very real, gritty universe, both in the book and on the screen, but it was more than that for both, it told me that creative fiction outside of our reality could tell stories that weren't just about themselves, not just about the morality of the characters we see, not just about good vs evil, but about our mortality itself.