Well, you’re in good company. The impulse to tinker is universal. So universal, that some people make vast fortunes just so they’ll have the ability to tinker endlessly. People like, for example, George Lucas.

I don’t need to belabor this point too much, other than to perhaps mention that George’s newest release of the original Star Wars trilogy contains MORE changes that do nothing substantive and occasionally undermine the original work’s dramatic power. You know, just like the last four times he’s released them. The movies people know and love, the original ones made way back when? They’ll never see the light of day again, at least until George dies.

His inability to resist indulging his tinker’s urge has had three basic effects on the world:
1) It has utterly arrested George’s creative growth. In the 70s, George was a growing creative force. He got better with every film. He was experimental. He was thoughtful. Whether he was writing or producing he turned out superior products, and he never sat still. Through the 80s, he came into his own as a producer, giving us great popcorn films (Indiana Jones and Willow), sharp-tongued comedies (Radioland Murders), and some really kick-ass breakthroughs in craft and technology for films and theme parks alike. In the late 80s and early 1990s, he created Pixar, then had the sense to let it go to make its way in the world. He produced The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which were superior in many ways to the Indiana Jones films. George Lucas wasn’t just Francis Ford Coppola’s golden boy, he was THE golden boy, and he did it on his own, as a maverick, outside the studio system.

Where’s that growth now? Where’s the energy, the expansion? It’s all gone into the tinkering. Everything stopped and slammed into reverse when he dug Star Wars out and started rewriting it. And since then, his creative chops and the quality and appeal of his work have gone solidly downhill.

2) It’s deprived his industry of one of the finest producers in the world, full stop. When George is doing Star Wars, George is not doing the noir films, the mythology films, the art films, and the TV shows that he’s been talking about in interviews since the 1970s.

3) It’s rewritten a big piece of American cinematic history. The Star Wars films that (along with Jaws) changed the entire business structure of the film industry, that created modern fantasy cinema, that kickstarted the digital revolution, and that launched the career of Harrison Ford? They’re gone. We don’t get to see them anymore. Oh, and George’s other films–like THX-1138 and American Graffiti–they’ve been revised too. Nonsensically. We don’t get to see those either, even though they also became important cultural touchstones (Graffiti much moreso than THX, granted).

— — —

So, this is just me griping, right?

Well, no. This is me jumping up and down with a big sign pointing at George and saying “SEE? Heinlein was right!” The most important (and most controversial) of Heinlein’s rules of professional writing is:

You must not rewrite, except to editorial order. With Ellison’s addendum being And then only if you agree.

That rule is there to remind you not to turn into George Lucas. Rewriting a finished piece (I’m talking rewriting, not doing the normal copy edits, continuity tweaks, and fact checks that you do as part of the writing process) is the road to nowhere. It most often results in bad work, for a very simple reason, as exemplified by the post-1997 George Lucas corpus:

Writers are not competent to tinker with their own work.

With recent work, it’s because they’re too close to see what might be broken–this is why we have beta readers and editors. It’s also because, living with our own voice all the time, we don’t understand what makes it special.

But what about an old book that you’re wanting to bring up to date and/or perfect, as George keeps trying to do?

In that case, you’re not competent to do that either. And there’s a very good reason why:

That book (film, whatever) came from a person that doesn’t exist anymore. You wrote it at a different time in your life, when you had different concerns, and different skills. You don’t have access to that creative headspace anymore, and you’re very unlikely to be able to actually improve one aspect of the book without completely fucking up another aspect.

Now, if you’ve got a book like that that you REALLY want to redo, don’t rewrite it. Reboot it. Pick your favorite scene, or idea, or handful of characters and rewrite it from scratch. Don’t just rework the style, give it a new coat of paint, or try to do a new draft. Don’t even touch the old document. Start with a blank page. Do what’s called in Television a “reboot” or a “re-imagining.” It’s always possible that the first time you wrote the book you were too ambitious, tried to do things you weren’t close to being ready for. Books like that might do well with a reboot.

But do it going FORWARD. Don’t do it looking back. You’re not updating an old work when you do this, you’re reincarnating it. Make it new, and stretch yourself. Let the storyline go different places than the original. Let it surprise you.

Or, better yet, leave your old books alone. Treat them like they were written by another person. Leave then on the market, learn from them, and move on to the next story. Work on doing better this time what you did poorly last time, and work on that improvement every time.

Growth comes from moving forward, not moving backward. Tinkering is moving backwards, and it moves your creative growth backwards. You don’t want to wind up on this path. No matter how brilliant you are, you can get stuck in your own creative swamp. And if you wallow there long enough, that’s where you’ll die.

Just ask George.

But this show isn’t drama–it’s essentially a game show. Another foray into the genre–reality TV–which the Brits perfected and which is by far my least favorite form of entertainment, as it’s neither reality nor does it frequently feature anything interesting enough to be worthy of display on a television screen. But I digress.

So, what is this amazing, magical show?

Well, you’re not going to believe me, but it’s actually a magic show. It’s called Penn & Teller: Fool Us.

The concept is pretty simple:
Contestants do a single stage magic routine in front of a studio audience that includes magicians Penn & Teller. If Penn & Teller can’t figure out how the trick was done, and describe it to the contestant, that contestant wins. The prize?

They get to open for Penn & Teller in Las Vegas.

Okay, So What’s The Big Deal?

But this isn’t just a pedestrian game show. Or a pedestrian reality TV show. Or even a run-of-the-mill magic show. This is something else again. To explain, let me recast in tribal terms:

The two most renowned old warriors in a village announce that it’s time for a new generation to rise up and come into their own. They put the call out far and wide to all the neighboring villages, and stage a competition. “We have grown weary of hunting, having long since mastered all we learned in our youth. We are weary of teaching, for we have taught all we know.” they say. “Anyone who can teach us a new technique, a new art for hunting, they shall lead the next hunt.”

Young hunters, at the peak of their creativity and ambition, bring their best skills from all across the countryside. They display their best work, and when sometimes one of them is so groundbreaking that the old masters have never seen it before, the masters bring them into their party. Sometimes, there are no new techniques, but the demonstration has such finesse that the masters are astounded and envious, and sincere about their awe in the face of mastery as great as–or greater than–their own.

And so we have in this dynamic all the things that are best about human nature: community, mentorship, maturity, non-destructive competition, the transfer of knowledge between the generations (which is the substance of culture), hard work, virtuosity, the appetite for learning, the appetite for–and display of–wonder, and the application of close examination and critical thinking.

Intelligence, mentorship, love of a shared culture, community, and all of it wrapped up in a candy coating of witty banter and smart comedy.

Folks, truly, it doesn’t get any better than this. It can’t. Because this is the best of what we are, in microcosm.

Also, they’re fun to rant about.

So, for the first entry in this series: Plots that depend on thinly-justified character derailment.

1) Characters act out of character because an alien took them over
Invariably, the “acting out of character” is so obvious that a blind macaque could spot it at a hundred yards, and yet their friends never notice until it’s convenient for the plot. Also, see #5

2) Characters act out of character because a virus is running rampant
There are viruses that do this. Recent research suggests that a virus might even be responsible for schizophrenia. However, such viruses aren’t cured by a quick zap by the magic thingamajig. They don’t cause the most plot-convenient conflict. And people don’t magically forgive injuries done to them by a virus-maddened former-friend who’s now trying to kill them, steal their spouses, and sexually molest their pet parakeets.

3) Characters act out of character because a computer replaced them with a hologram.
Really, guys, is this the best you can do? A computer wants to feel what it’s like to be human so it takes over someone’s life? Again? Didn’t I see this on every other SF show ever produced? And didn’t it really suck then too?

4) Characters act out of character because someone stole their DNA.
Because, really, if you were jealous of someone’s life, you couldn’t think of a better way to get petty vengence than by putting your body through a painful and likely fatal mutagenic process just so you could attempt to pass for them and kiss their significant other? Whatever happened to framing someone for murder, besmirching their character, or doing something else that might,for example, leave you alive and able to feast on the spoils of your victory instead of dying a horrible death at the hands of your own experiment? Or worse, getting contrived forgiveness after everyone you just greviously wronged manages to save your sorry ass from your own blinding stupidity?

5) Characters act out of character because someone stole their body/swapped bodies with them.

The personality exists in the brain, which is part of the body. If you’re going to swap bodies, you’re going to have to do a brain transplant. If, in your fictional universe, there is an immaterial soul that carries the personality, is it really going to sit around defenseless while you try to redirect it into another body by clever manipulation of television antennae (or the functional equivalent)? If your soul is so fragile that it’s vulnerable to anything nearly as flimsy as the Mcguffin’s in Science Fiction, then having one is clearly overrated in the first place–or your fictional universe would have fallent to pieces at the drop of the hat far before the time when your story takes place.
This story is dead, really. Heinlein did this one first, and best, with The Puppet Masters. The rip-off, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, was almost as good. When something’s been done as good as it can be done, you just stop. Period. In both cases, these worked because they paid attention to the way human anatomy, physiology, and psychology work: The Puppet Masters hijacked the nervous system but left the original personality intact, while the Body Snatchers made a cosmetic copy of the body and killed the original person off while they slept, but copied over memories to avoid confusion.

6) Characters act out of character because an imaginary scientific anomoly is driving people crazy
Because, in real life, when astronauts go through the Van Allen belt, or walk on different planets, or breathe a different oxygen mixture, or look at the sun without sunglasses, or get exposed to radiation, or inadvertently eat bad food, they always go on a psychotic killing rampage or a nymphomanicial sex bender or feel the irrepressible urge to reconfigure their equipment to enable an alien invasion.

7) Characters act out of character because of an external influence because it’s the only way to get the characters to have sex.
Because we all know that post-pubescent and otherwise apparently mature adults (particularly unrealistically attractive single ones who are constantly flirting), never, ever have sex with anybody–and if they do, they’re completely embarassed and self-conscious for several episodes, unless they can claim that an alien plague made them do it.

Characters act out of character because the plot requires them to be uncharictaristically stupid.
Because really, where’s the drama potential in a cast of highly intelligent, eccentric characters with opposing interests and differing vaules all being forced to work together (i.e. the plot of every series drama ever written)? You could never get conflict out of that. What you really need is for someone to accidentally lick an experimental battery and decide to take over the world.

9) Characters act out of character because it’s the only way to generate enough conflict to keep the story interesting.
See #8, but remove the experimental battery justification.

10) Characters act out of character for any bullshit reason involving made-up science, magic, violations of the laws of physics, or an insult to the viewer’s intelligence.
Granted, this would kill over 90% of all televised science fiction, but you can’t make an omlette without killing a few writers.

For this weekend’s foray into steampunkiness, I ordered my outfit for Steamcon. It should be quite dapper.

Now, on to Steamboy.

At first blush, this is a gorgeous film. The artwork is fabulous, the sense of form and movement is spectacular. I’m not actually a big anime fan, but the previews made this movie look gorgeous – a cut above the usual anime standard in terms of visuals and in terms of story, and “Anime Steampunk” seemed a combination just weird enough to be interesting. Besides, these were the guys who did Akira, which was gorgeous.

As the film got rolling, I began to think that Anime Steampunk was a more sensible combination than I thought at first. If there’s one thing that Anime is spectacular with, it’s rendering scenery, and the Victorian London setting, complete with steam-powered giant power plants, gave this film a rich, palpable atmosphere from frame one. Inasmuch as Steampunk is a style, this film must be a perfect example.

The first act of the film was very promising, beginning with a provocative teaser about mineral water miners and moving straight into the story of a young boy – the oldest son of the Steam family – who wishes he could be off sharing adventures in engineering and scientific discovery with his father and grandfather, both of whom are great inventors.

Like The Rocketeer, this film sits in the retro-scifi corner of steampunk, where speculation is made upon technologies known to exist at the time, and Steamboy does a good job of sitting in that genre. The corners of the world are filled up by background (and sometimes foreground) elements of the world of the time – wanted posters for Jack The Ripper, a piece of the plot featuring the crystal palace of the Great Exposition. Sure, the two events weren’t quite contemporaneous, but they still tickle the cockles of a history geek’s heart. The historical flavor is a little bit tongue-in-cheek, dotting its landscape with family names like “Steam” and character names like Scarlet O’Hara and Robert Stephenson (both meant to evoke the flavor of the era rather than stand in for the historical or fictional personages), and this added to the charm of the first act.

Now, you may be asking yourself why I keep referring to the first act?

The reason is that the first act presents a glorious film opening, filled with well-realized characters inhabiting a well-developed world. At the end of the first act, the writers even go in for a bit of intellectual sophistication, explaining the film’s McGuffin in very sharp, intelligent, layman-accessible language that is for the most part fully compatible with the mechanics and operations of steam power (so long as you ignore a couple little thermodynamics issues which are, honestly, very minor).

The story takes a hard left turn into idiocy at the beginning of the second act, and from there it’s all down hill. By the end of act three the film’s initial glory is largely lost, and aside from a few really creative moments and ideas the viewer is mostly left with a large, steaming pile of incoherent dog shit. If you’ve been reading this blog or listening to my podcasts for any appreciable length of time, you’ll recognize this as an uncharacteristically disparaging statement, so let me explain:

The central point around the story turns is the destructive uses of science. Essentially, there is an evil, warmongering charitable foundation which funds research in order to keep the defense contractor that created the foundation in business. The Steam family has been retained by them to create the ultimate steam-power capacitor, something that allows for unimaginably high pressures. The Steam family inventors laughably believe that the purpose of this research is to create a children’s theme park to bring delight and happiness to all children, and when this turns out to be only the tip of a larger industrial iceberg, Father Steam decides to sabotage the project, while Son Steam decides to carry on. Grandson Steam, at the age of about 10, winds up being the moral arbiter of this conflict.

During the course of the film we, the unfortunate viewers, are subjected to long-winded idiotic preachments that hammer home the following points:

All profit motives are evil (in so many words)

Trackless steam engines operating as battle tanks will mean the end of the idyllic, non-exploitative Victorian civilization.

The true purpose of science is to make the world peaceful by making children happy.

True science cannot coexist with any kind of business interests.

And endless rehashings of that sort from one angle or another.

Please bear in mind that we’re not talking about one or two stray lines, or ideas being floated for consideration, we are talking about pages of dialog of Grandfather Steam ranting to Grandson Steam. To reinforce the point, midway through the third act the O’Hara corporation deploys steam-powered cybermen to terrorize, maim, and kill everyone at the Great Exposition (because, as we all know, technologists are so evil that they can’t let a little thing like having the greatest military in the world shoot them out of the sky stand in the way of securing a military contract with the Grand Sultan of Arabia).

You think that’s bad? I promise, I’m being kind. Everything that this film started out with in terms of craft and intellectual sophistication get pissed away in the second and third act in an attempt to create the perfect lesson in Marxism for first graders (complete with the triumph of the steam-powered children’s amusement park at the end). It’s an insulting, stupid, depressing piece of crap – and all the more ironic for coming out of the wealthiest film studio in Japan, a nation of technocrats.

I’ve made no secret that I have no great love for either Marxism or Merchantilism, that I think they’re both destructive ideologies that are, in the end, highly destructive to both individuals and culture. That doesn’t mean that these ideas shouldn’t be discussed, or even encouraged, in films. A number of my favorite films have a strong anti-capitalist and/or anti-technological flavor (Blade Runner chief among them, but certainly not standing alone). But the difference between Steamboy and intelligent treatments of the same subject matter is as broad as the difference between Michael Parenti and Michael Moore. The socialist and progressive traditions in Victorian and Edwardian culture gave shelter to ideas that turned out to be deeply destructive (Eugenics and the Temperence movement chief among them), but it also achieved noble articulation from the pens of thinkers and authors such as H.G. Wells, Betrand Russel, and Jules Verne, who understood the complexities of a developing industrial society and had genuine concern for both the plight of the underclasses and the dispensation of the enormous industrial power that humanity suddenly possessed.

Steamboy is well within the Victorian intellectual tradition in its starry-eyed idealism about science for the sake of science, and in its distrust of capitalism. However its articulation of these concepts is heavy handed, moronic, insulting, and embarrassing. That its writers were so incompetent that they had to preach in platitudes rather than unfolding their ideas through dramatic narratives is the classic hallmark of all self-important bad art.

What’s the first thing you learn in creative writing class? Show, don’t tell.

Steamboy is a failure on every artistic level for this reason. But damn, the first twenty minutes sure are a feast for the geek in me.

As for the steampunky goodness. Today, I’m watching The Brother’s Grimm .

I’m typing as I go along, but not posting until I’m done with the film. Overall, it’s a strange blend of the very good, the irritating, and the really dumb. Let’s start with the good:

The concept is very, very clever. The eponymous Brothers Grimm, hard pressed for cash, parlay their knowledge of Bavarian folklore into a career as ghostbusting con artists. This works pretty well until the Napoleonic army decides to co-opt their skills to eliminate superstition in a difficult-to-conquer village.

In the course of their adventures, where they encounter real enchantment, the story skillfully weaves together the grimmest of Grimm with very well-timed references to the rest of the mythological and medieval worlds. It’s not just Rapunzel here, it’s The Lady of Shallot . It’s the wicked queen from Snow White . It’s Jack in the Beanstalk and Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretal. It’s chalk full of echoes of the Countess Elizabeth Bathory. It’s Alice in Wonderland . There are shamanic rituals underlying it all – from licking the toad to participate in the wisdom of the forest spirits (originated because of the hallucinogenic excretions on the skins of some frogs), to the Corn King rituals, to the Sacred Kingship, to the Pied Piper. This movie is neck-deep in multiple layers of melded mythologies that marry magnificently, while still preserving the original notions that underlay them. The author of this screenplay didn’t just lift the surface of the old stories, he plumbed the guts of them, too.

In a lot of ways it’s a perfect monomythologist’s fable, beautifully rendered, and lots of fun. It *almost* gets to be a faerie tale in its own rite, but it falls short of other recent masterpieces like Pan’s Labrynth, in part because it doesn’t take the integrity of its own universe seriously.

Gilliam, naturally, makes amazing, glorious use of the grotesque – and like the old faerie stories, he takes the grotesque realities of the everyday and gives them the odd prod and twist here and there to bring out the inherent horror implicit in a world where life depends upon death to continue. Although Peter Jackson and Guillermo Del Toro do give Gilliam a run for his money, I don’t think anybody does this better at the moment – certainly not Tim Burton, who currently is the only other serious contender for the directorial title of "Master of the Fantasy Macabre." Where Burton’s works are slick, well packaged angsty goth bullshit, Gilliam (and his latter-day acolytes Jackson and Del Toro) knows how to get at the heart of terror and darkness. He actually understands why the Romantics (like Shelley, Byron, and Poe) put terror on the same level as rapture in their reckoning of the sublime.

The bad:

As is probably to be expected with Gilliam, the film has its rather irritating and none-too-subtle subtext. His glory days of the Trilogy of Man (Time Bandits , Brazil, Baron Münchhausen ), and The Fisher King , seem forgotten here. He’s carried forward his reflexive anti-modernism, his concerns about the mechanized world draining people of humanity until they have to enter the land of magic in order to find their love of life once again. It’s an old trope, and one of the most effective ones out there. If you want to read up on some of its history, check out The Golden Bough on "The Sacred Kingship" (come to think about it, there’s a good Wikipedia article on the subject too). But where once his films were complicated, this one is pretty simplistic. The bad guys are the ones with machines, the fools are all skeptical thinkers, scientifically minded – and he lays it on pretty damn thick, to the point where just about any scene the skeptical general shows up, he’s torturing some poor sod with Rube Goldberg versions of kitchen appliances.

It’s not the attitude I object to – although I’m definitely a modernist, I enjoy quite a lot of art that turns on romanticism or critiquing modernity. It’s more that I know Gilliam to be capable of so much better. I’m thinking particularly of the battle at the end of Time Bandits here, where when the bandits bring war machines from all ages against Satan and then can’t make them work against him. When one complains "I can’t control them!" Satan replies "Of course not, you stupid man, I control them." The blend of camp humor and relentless critique of every sort of authority (parental, governmental, divine, infernal, military, social, intellectual) make that obvious, throwaway joke truly chilling.

Throughout The Brothers Grimm I found myself wishing for that old Gilliam, the one who really was a punk in the classical sense, pushing back against all prescriptions that oppress the soul of man rather than one who uses tropes he helped create in order to pick on obvious, boring kinds of authority and orthodoxy. In short, there’s nothing truly challenging in this film – it’s all attitude and no substance. More "steam" than "punk."

In the end, we have in The Brothers Grimm a simplistic, even dishonest, casting of the conflict between modernism and primitivism, and it fails to satisfy the itches it scratches.

The stupid:

There are a lot of little false steps here and there. For example, I know Steampunk works by melding modern sensibilities, but a 19th century German – even one from the city – would not vomit at the sight of a rabbit being skinned (though I have to give kudos to Gilliam for using a real rabbit). They wouldn’t panic at the sight of beetles. There’s a lot in this movie that they might plausibly have found offputting – but I’m sorry, those ain’t among them. Over and over again, the movie is put off-pace by little sour notes like these.

Overall impression:

Though the "punk" part of steampunk here is more juvenile than a lot of Gilliam’s previous work, the style is beautiful (as his work always is) and the story is engaging. The acting is wonderful – good enough to cover the deficiencies in the script and make for a fun evening. In many ways, this film is what Sleepy Hollow should have been – clever, engaging, full of fun culture references and with a proper understanding of its source mythology, rather than a thinly veiled Freudian/neopagan evangelism tract with nothing below its sexy surface. It also helps that the source material – the myths collected by The Brothers Grimm – honestly were pagan folklore from a superstitious world, rather than a satire making fun of superstition (as the original The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was). It’s the author in me – I hate remakes that plunder, rape, and pervert the original story to make a preachy point exactly contrary to the story they’re attempting to "present." Burton is worse at this than Disney. Gilliam has the decency to respect his source material, and the result is watchable fun with beatiful moments, but not his best work.

Next up on the Stempunk menu: The Japanese Anime film Steamboy

So, this week, in between evaluating the Trinity Indamixx (initial impressions – favorable but with caveats), which I’m blogging on right now using an external keyboard (I could seriously get addicted to this thing), I learn all about Steampunk Films!

But back to the steampunkiness. I really enjoyed Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Yeah, I know, I know. It’s preachy and shallow and far too didactic for anyone’s own good. You know what? So was Narnia, but most of the people that go around slagging Pullman off are Christians who are blind to how preachy and simplistic Narnia is, while they find Pullman’s universe frightening and subversive.

The fact is that the books were preachy, but they were hardly shallow. They were gloriously imaginative, and they were appropriately geared for preteens (which, if you don’t remember from the books you read as a kid, means heavy-handedness is important. This is a demographic that’s exploring big ideas in a big way, for the first time). Like the Narnia books, these stories deal with big ideas in a bold, almost tacky way. Unlike Narnia, Pullman waited to write his saga until he was a mature author, so his stories are better, his metaphors more sophisticated, and his style more consistent. The other thing that bears mentioning is that Materials is actually a fully developed fantasy, while Narnia is, by Lewis’ own admission, a hybrid of allegory and beast fable. Because of this, the worst of Materials compares well with the best of Narnia, from an adult perspective. From a child’s perspective, both are packed with wonder and terror and the glory of life in the finest coming-of-age tradition.

But I digress…

For the movie, they sanitized the idealogical content for mass audiences, but they did not neuter it. There’s still a goodly amount here to engender a lot of discussion. Visually, the film’s a stunner. Given the production team I should have expected that, but honestly I’m surprised. Steampunk in all the right ways, the world is gloriously visualized. The depth of the grandeur in the world really comes through. The adaptation is well-penned, the acting above par, and – best of all for my purposes – it’s deeply immersive. The particle physics, the alethiometer, the daemons, the bears, the dirigibles, the brass machinery, mostly plausibly rendered with just a touch of the fantastic. Also, for my purposes, it was a good place to start. It’s shot through with the steampunk ethos of individualism, distrust for authority, ubermenschen, and situational ethics.

It’s a damn shame that small minded bigoted activists like the ones at the American Family Association managed to propagandize this film out of business. It would have been great to see the rest of these films – now I daresay they will never be produced. More than that, watching these films next to the Narnia films would have given a lot of opportunity for children to explore the big questions both series raise in unique ways. And, where Materials is concerned, since the entire conceit of the story relies upon particle physics and string theory, it could be a great conversation starter for other big ideas full of wonder.

So, there we are. Steampunk education part 1 complete. Part two coming soon!

This is supposed to be my professional blog, not so much a place for me to do art criticism, and I really should be working, but what the hell.

As a person moves through life, one encounters a handful of artworks that stand out. You can come back to them time and again and never exhaust them. I don’t mean things like The Princess Bride or Star Wars – fun movies that wear exceptionally well, that you can play with and play along with and feel like a kid again. I mean more the adult artworks that serve as symbolic wells and sources of contemplation – they hold up a mirror to the audience, sometimes a social one, sometimes a personal one, sometimes a spiritual or philosophical one, and every time you see something different. These are the kinds of stories, poems, or images that Tolkien was talking about when he said “Like a child’s clothes, books should leave room for growth. Unlike clothes, they should encourage it.”

Blade Runner is one of those artworks that has cropped up again and again over the course of my life. And why not? It has everything – it’s a noir detective story set in a dystopic future, so for a kid who grew up on Humphrey Bogart films and Star Wars, what wasn’t to like? I loved it as a teenager, then in college as I started learning about how symbolism – often subconcsious – works and connect to philosophy and cultural memory. It made for great material writing theses in school, and when I went on years later to learn filmmaking I studied the process that led to the creation of Blade Runner extensively – not to copy the aesthetic (which everyone has done since MTV started), but because Blade Runner was released remarkably unfinished. By any standards, it was a half finished film, full of flaws, but it still worked. The writing was layered and thoughtful, and it was one of the few films of its era to get away with being an “ideas” film because it did what good art – and particularly good science fiction – is supposed to do. It raised issues, it asked questions, and it always resisted the temptation to offer easy answers and easy ways out, and a lot of the issues it raises are either timeless questions about humanity and related to the human condition or are very precient issues about bioethics like we’re dealing with today with the advent of stem cells and actual honest-to-godlessness cloning.

And, of course, it’s gloriously ambiguous. It’s a two hour ride through unanswered questions – it is a Nietzsche-esque story a bout the death of God and the apotheosis of Man? Is it a Gnostic story about the redeemed redeemer, as The Matrix would later attempt to be with far less subtlety? Is it a cautionary tale about big-brotherism disguised as commerce?

It’s all of these things, of course, depending on the angle you approach the film from, and you see different pieces of it at different places in life.

So, is a lifelong love of this film enough to make the Final Cut worth buying? Particularly when most fans have copies of various versions of the film already? For my money, it’s a resounding yes. The Final Cut version finishes a film that never got finished. It’s shorter, tighter, more brutal and upsetting, it’s truer to the spirit of Philip K. Dick, the man who wrote the book upon which the film is based, and its relative brevity make the film a lot more powerful. I’ve seen the other cuts of the film totaling over thirty times, and the Final Cut is by far and away the best for a lot of very subtle reasons. If you’re studying film, or into making films, the collection of all the different versions together is a must have. If you’re interested in food for thought, a meditation, Blade Runner is a film that bears close scrutiny.

I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did.