I thought Blade Runner was boring until I moved to Los Angeles

I first watched Blade Runner on a cold, unremarkable February night in Brooklyn. I believe it was The Final Cut. I was 26 years old. The mid-twenties is when white men who own at least 1 Vampire Weekend album become very passionate about very generic things: craft beers, vinyl records, improv. Blade Runner falls pretty snugly amongst those things. The film itself is far from generic (if you ask me). But it’s the fandom surrounding it that can usually elicit an eye roll.

Depending on whom you ask, Blade Runner is one of the greatest science fiction films ever made or it’s the most overrated and boring. Based (loosely) on the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep?, Blade Runner is set in 2019 and follows Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a hardboiled, cynical detective whose expertise is finding and killing replicants — android slave labor that look, feel, and sound like human beings; they even have acquired memories programmed into them by The Tyrell Corporation — their powerful manufacturer. Built to be subservient, replicants’ major design flaw is self-actualization — realizing their free will — and when they begin to question their existence, or turn murderous on their masters, that’s where Deckard comes in.

Dick’s original story took place in a series of apartments, but the film’s director, Ridley Scott, had a much more ambitious, sprawling vision for the film version. Movie going audiences of 1982 beheld a dark, hypnotic dystopia, set in Los Angeles. Meant as an homage to film noir, Scott’s film mixed Raymond Chandler with Frank Miller and featured the guy who played Han Solo and Indiana Jones often aloof or drunk, pondering the deeper questions of human existence: man playing God, the true value of life, and the moral grey area of making a robot feel like a human only to remind it that it is — and always will be — property.

In short: no one wanted to watch this movie in 1982. It flopped during its original release, but gained cult status and appreciation through home video and its subsequent re-cut versions. For all of Blade Runner’s heady qualities and beautiful production design, it moves at the same speed of paint drying. The script doesn’t quite go where you think it’ll go. And the film’s ending is maddeningly obtuse. All of these things were why on that cold, unremarkable February night in Brooklyn — as I watched the credits rolled — I thought “Meh.” Being 26, white, a man, and an owner of Vampire Weekend’s Vampire Weekend, I shrugged my shoulders at the film and decided to buy more Tom Waits albums instead.

Over the years, I gave Blade Runner a few more shots, but nothing clicked. On my first birthday in L.A., I bought the Blu-Ray but just to arbitrarily own it. I got what it was going for, but why did it have to be so slow? It’s a film that is so beautiful to look at, but feels like a vacuum. When you first watch it, you feel as if you’re being pinned against a cold, cement wall — something smooth to the touch and yet unforgiving in its own power. That wall doesn’t care if you are happy or sad, it simply shows you what it is, and you can choose to relax against it or squirm until every muscle in your body gives up to it. Again, it’s easy to label that feeling as “boring”, or “pretentious”, even “overwrought”.

Then something changed in October 2014.

I was working in food delivery after an assistant job fell through and stalling on my book, The Survivalist. After being in L.A. for 2 years, I had little to show for my time. Furthermore, I was struggling to come up with anything to write about while I ignored my book. I found myself wondering what the hell I was doing out here. Los Angeles is one of those places where you can become adrift very quickly. In spite of all the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, daily life requires a good amount of stimulation to stave off depression. If you don’t have a place to be or a job to do, L.A.’s wide-open spaces will swallow you whole. You can live anywhere in this sprawling city, and it’ll still be deathly silent after the sun goes down. The quiet serenity that drifts in its atmosphere belies the God Knows What happening behind its endless closed doors to its innumerable quaint houses.

I bought tickets to see Blade Runner at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, thinking it’d be a cool venue to see a flick I had mild interest in. After trying fruitlessly to find a date, I took a friend, and we split a bag of Goldfish crackers as we watched Harrison Ford listlessly slurp noodles somewhere in Little Tokyo before the wise-ass cackle of Edward James Olmos looks him up for “one last blade runner job”. Before the film’s start, the screening’s curator introduced it as “our movie” which got a roar of approval from fans dressed as Daryl Hannah’s character, Pris, “This movie is the definitive Los Angeles movie!”

There’s something about seeing Blade Runner on a big screen. In our current on-demand age, we forget that film is meant to be big. As my friend and I sat beneath a rain-soaked Roy Batty, clutching his dove and soliloquizing with God’s confidence at Deckard in the film’s finale, I found myself lost in Blade Runner’s unflinching cruel beauty. The Final Cut color corrected the film to bring up the warmer hues of human skin tones, but cool the blues and blacks of the film’s background. The film’s lack of light played like a live action Edward Hopper painting. It was during this viewing that I finally picked up that there are no rich or powerful figures — save for David Tyrrell — anywhere in the movie. If you have money in the film’s world, you abandoned Earth long ago for the Outer World Colonies: leaving your depleted, dried out home planet to the poor and blue collar to still inhabit.

Furthermore, Blade Runner is set entirely in Downtown Los Angeles, a long neglected section of the city. Since the 1970s, Downtown had struggled to find its footing with the rest of L.A.’s glossy façade. Still home to banks, law firms, and a jewelry district, Downtown was also known for its high crime rate and urban blight. Skid Row is also part of Downtown: the city’s designated, heavily policed “homeless neighborhood” that houses innumerable tent cities. Today, of course, real estate developers are now trying to re-invent Downtown as “DTLA” (I call it “little Manhattan”). Some developers even have the gall to try and gentrify Skid Row, showing the unending dismissal the city has always bestowed on its most unfortunate. I could see why Ridley Scott thought Downtown the perfect place to set his film about what it truly is to be human.

But at its center, I found some empathy with Rick Deckard, a man who lives his life with plenty of numbness. Like him, I was getting tired of being stuck in the same place. And no matter how hard I tried it didn’t seem to amount to anything. Like so many people, I had shown up in L.A. with a dream and was trying to make it work. But every step forward seemed to yield diminished returns or a random obstacle, and I found myself questioning the point of the effort. And when left alone with my own thoughts, plenty of things I didn’t want to accept or think about presented themselves.

And that’s why, I believe, Blade Runner is the tough pill it is on first watch. The film’s slow pace is meant to leave the audience with time to think, to consider what they actually see, and to ask itself if any part of Deckard’s mission seems fair or just. Beneath the movie’s awe-inspiring design is a rudimentary story about a man employed by a very broken system; and there’s nothing he feels he can do about it — confined to a part of Los Angeles long forgotten by its citizens, stuck on Earth while so many lucky ones have run away.

Today, I count Blade Runner as one of my favorite films, even with its flaws. To me, it is the definitive Los Angeles movie. Plenty of Angelenos will disagree with me and cite all the things that make this city great: the food, the baseball, the beaches, the legal marijuana. They just won’t get what I think is so L.A. about such a dark movie.

But that’s the thing about Los Angeles: perception is everything. Survival is all about telling yourself what you want to hear, even as you’re pinned up against that cold, cement wall — relaxing into its surface or squirming to push away.