pretending to be a terrorist in order to get the FBI to cut off the power). One viewing of Die Hard and you’ll be bouncing from your bed, hiding your detonators and yelling ‘Yippie-ki-yay, melon farmers!’ You’ll be back at work by morning.
Feel-good factor
KEEP TAKING THE HAPPY PILLS
A Clinical Examination
There’s an old showbiz adage which states that the key to success is to leave an audience wanting more. In movie circles, this has been refined to read ‘leave the audience wanting nothing more’ – to satiate their desires so thoroughly that viewers will leave the cinema on a euphoric high, ready to tell all their friends how fabulous the movie they just saw made them feel. In practical terms, this means ‘leave ’em smiling’ – no matter how grim or downbeat the preceding drama may have been, all will be well if the final reel closes with a life-affirming hug or a pulse-quickening freeze-frame.
The idea that what audiences really want from movies is to make them feel happy, positive, and upbeat is as old as the hills. There’s also nothing new about film-makers giving their audiences exactly what they think they want; as the racy compendium The Good Old Naughty Days (2002) proves, the birth of moving pictures predates the birth of moving pornography by about five minutes – a clear example of early ‘market driven’ movie-making. Yet the idea that the only guarantee of success is to leave viewers ‘feeling good’ has long been a bone of contention, with directors and producers regularly butting heads over the benefits (or otherwise) of ensuring that everything ends happily ever after.
As a case study, let’s look at Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), now widely considered to be one of the most important and innovative science fiction movies of the late twentieth century. Based on a short novel by Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) Blade Runner portrays a dystopian future in which ‘replicants’ rebel against their human creators and demand ‘more life’ when faced with inbuilt obsolescence. The screenplay, written (separately, initially) by Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples, casts android-hunter Rick Deckard as a noirish assassin despatched to track down and eliminate rogue replicants, one of whom he falls in love with. In a classic Romeo and Juliet-style twist, Deckard becomes besotted with the android Rachael, despite knowing that her existence is terminal, and her future finite. As an associate tauntingly tells him, ‘It’s too bad she won’t live, but then again, who does?’
As originally conceived by director Scott, who had previously scored both critical and financial success with his stylish sci-fi shocker Alien (1979), the film was a dark parable about forthcoming ‘dangerous days’ – a discussion of the nature of so-called ‘artificial’ intelligence, and a foreboding look at the potential obsolescence of humanity itself. Unsurprisingly, the story was low on feel-good laughs; set in a desolate near-future besieged by acid rain and advertisements for ‘Off-World’ colonies (an alternative to the misery of Earth), Blade Runner was designed to unsettle its audience, to leave them pondering the mysteries of their humanity while dazzling them with all-too-believable snapshots of a disturbingly plausible future.
For the title role of Deckard, Scott cast Harrison Ford, still hot from the sci-fi success of Star Wars (1977), which had introduced a new generation of viewers to the crowd-pleasing thrills of a Buck Rogers serial. From the outset, Scott and Ford were at loggerheads, the actor believing that his director was more interested in lighting a shot than in engaging with his cast. In 2000, Scott explained to Dr Kermode that ‘I was not given then to spending a lot of time on explanation and stroking. I’ve got too much to do to get what I want, because I have a performance as well.’ Indeed, it wasn’t until the days of Thelma & Louise (1991) that Scott would begin to be considered an ‘actor’s director’, the visual style of his early films apparently taking precedence over his interaction with the performers.
One of the key disagreements between Scott and Ford was the true nature of Deckard’s character. Although it was never made explicit in the original script, Scott had become obsessed with the idea that Deckard was himself an android, a replicant hunting his own kind, with no knowledge of his own artificial nature.
This tantalising idea is not quite as groundbreaking as it sounds. A robot hater turns out to be a robot himself at the end of The Creation of the Humanoids (1962), and many other stories, films and TV episodes have the same twist – including ‘Demon With a Glass Hand’ (The Outer Limits, 1964), which was filmed in the Bradbury Building, just like Blade Runner. In fact, the theme of Deckard’s artificiality (which is not present in Dick’s source) had been introduced accidentally by the screenwriters, who had misunderstood each other’s rewrites – both have credited the other with coming up with the idea, as is evidenced in Dr Kermode’s 2000 documentary, On the Edge of Blade Runner. For Scott, this was a eureka moment, a way to crack the enigma of Dick’s source and cut to the heart of the story’s central man-vs.-machine dichotomy. Indeed, it proved a talismanic riddle in his original cut of Blade Runner, which ended with Deckard and Rachael (Sean Young) exiting into the darkness of an uncertain future, her death assured, his implied . . .
Artistically, this ending made perfect sense. But having spent tens of millions of dollars funding Scott’s ever-expanding epic, financiers wanted to be certain that the finished film would go down well with the same audiences who had whooped and cheered at Harrison’s Han Solo role in Star Wars. Test cards from early preview screenings, however, revealed that viewers were both depressed and confused; depressed by the downbeat nature of the story, and confused by the twists and turns of the plot, which seemed to them utterly incomprehensible.
Worried that the movie was going to sink, the film-makers embarked upon hasty recuts, adding an explanatory voice-over (a generic concession which had its roots in early script drafts), removing Deckard’s inhuman origins, and – most ridiculously – concocting an utterly stupid happy ending in which Rachael is granted a new lease of life and the lovers escape into unpolluted nature to live happily ever after. Calling upon the assistance of Stanley Kubrick, Scott used out-take footage from the opening sequence of The Shining (1980) to conjure up an entirely new finale featuring shots of rolling hills, over which Deckard and Rachael’s triumph over all odds could be played. In this new version, Blade Runner ends on an unambiguously upbeat note, the lovers united for ever despite the previous action which had made absolutely clear that no such resolution could ever be reached.
The new ending was utter baloney, but as far as the test cards were concerned it was what the audience wanted, and that was that.
As it turned out, most audiences didn’t want Blade Runner, with or without its new happy ending. During its first-run theatrical release the movie spectacularly failed to recoup its extravagant costs, leaving its financiers in the red, and leaving Scott with the stigma of having helmed an expensive flop.
It wasn’t until some years later, when an earlier cut of Blade Runner was screened (almost by accident) to an adoring audience, that Scott’s prophetic instincts were proved right. Reissued in variously recut forms (the ‘Director’s Cut’ and so-called ‘Final Cut’) Blade Runner became a belated cult hit, praised by fans for its bleak, uncompromising tone and hailed by critics as one of the most important genre movies of the decade. Today, it is almost impossible to watch a big-budget sci-fi movie without seeing Scott’s trademark fingerprints everywhere you look. Just as 2001 changed the look and feel of sci-fi for a generation, so Blade Runner became the creative font from which all future fantasies would
