“I’m not in the business. I am the business.”          

       When you watch a movie dozens of times, you have the leisure, or perhaps the responsibility, to note certain elements that the one-time viewer could never pick up. It is important to make this repetitious, if not compulsive, activity seem somehow fruitful. If you were to play a favorite song for a friend, a tune you’ve long since dedicated to memory, the temptation is to make informed suggestions: “Listen just to the drums this time, they’re so perfect,” or, “Notice how the strings come in here, and how the cello lingers on that single note.” But really, those watching or listening along with you are unlikely to be led so simply to your time-earned perception, or to receive the same degree of pleasure as you, or really to care at all. You have the benefit of a refined sense of all the things you’ve noticed, unraveled, and mulled over. You are privy to that rare air breathed only after all those hours—perhaps a few too many hours—watching the same bit of film or listening to the same few minutes of music. And you cannot help yourself. You want to, and forgive the phrase (you will learn why later), evangelize.

       Blade Runner is the movie that I have watched a hundred times (that’s a conservative estimate), and I still take any excuse to thrill over it, even if I have to suffer through commercials and the better part of a Sunday afternoon. The movie, based on a Philip K. Dick novel, named for a screenplay by William S. Burroughs (the plot of which was unrelated), and written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, concerns the adventures of Rick Deckard, a Blade Runner, off the job but called back into action to do what Blade Runners do: kill robots. It is Los Angeles and it is 2019, so these are very advanced robots, called Replicants, and they mimic humans to such an extreme degree that advanced skills and equipment are needed to differentiate the two. Deckard, played by a still-potent Harrison Ford, follows leads, finds and kills a few Replicants, while the Replicants themselves, we learn, are on a crusade to convince their creator, one Tyrell, to grant them eternal life. They get close to the mega-mogul through his apprentice and chess partner, J.F. Sebastian. The alpha Replicant, Roy Batty, played by Rutger Hauer, is a fierce, poetry-spouting monolith who confronts and kills Tyrell. Along the way, Deckard falls in love with an even more advanced Replicant, Rachael, and subsequently begins to question his own humanity. He finally tracks down and battles Roy, who bests Deckard but saves his life before himself dying, his pre-ordained robotic lifespan conveniently (for drama’s sake) at an end. But there’s one more thing: Deckard has been asked to kill Rachael too. They make a run for it.

       I adore all the wonderful minutiae one notes from repeated watchings. It’s there in the scripting, set design and production; Roy’s brilliant intentional misquote of William Blake; the use of Frank Lloyd Wright’s great Ennis House for some shots of Deckard’s apartment or the Bradbury Building for other scenes; the search for meaning when, at liftoff, the computer screen on the spinner, a flying police car, flashes “PURGE;” the machine that looks into photographs, like around corners in three dimensions, called the Esper, as in Extra-sensory-perception-er, and how that’s a nod to Isaac Asimov; the chess game played between Tyrell and Sebastian being the legendary “Immortal” game of 1851 between Andersson and Kieseritzky. There’s still the fast paced action built into the noir detective story at the heart of the film, the shoot-‘em-up good times of a really excellent action movie. Then there’s the great mass of critical theory that appears to be filtered through the narrative, particularly the way in which the concepts of Hegel and Fredric Jameson are woven subtly into the script. Robots! Shooting! Chess! Sci-Fi! Late Capitalism! I can be many kinds of geek at once!

       BLADE RUNNER was released in 1982, just two weeks after the debut of E.T. After first weekend sales of a little more than $6 million, it took a nose-dive into oblivion, or so it seemed until it started popping up as a late night movie on television, becoming a cult favorite. Of course cult success doesn’t do much good to a studio out $28 million, especially when that amount was more than matched by a weird little big-headed, Reeses Pieces-loving alien who happened to work for another studio. Warner blamed Blade Runner for being too complex, too violent and gloomy, and mostly for not being cute enough. Executives didn’t think to blame themselves for the cheesy voice-over and happy ending tacked onto the film after test screenings. No one could sell it to the masses because it’s not a mass film. It’s visionary.

       I was always drawn to the severe, unstable society portrayed in the movie, but in the past few years, watching every few months, the soundtrack music of composer Vangelis has come into high relief. Before, the score had seemed merely inoffensive, not worthy of real notice when there was so much else to see and listen for. Or perhaps I was concerned about stepping through the proverbial looking glass, or getting on the proverbial great glass elevator, or just nerding out in ways I might not be able to recover from (having to do with proverbial glass). For there exists here a disconnect—a most troubling one—that I must lay bare. Like a lot of boys with nerdy tendencies, who had no one to make out with during the formative years, I developed an outsized and possibly unhealthy obsession with music that I maintain to this day. In other words: I am a music geek.

       The name Vangelis is a powerful word for me and my kind. It is perhaps second only to John Tesh in its ability to strike fear into the hearts of true record freaks and music geeks. It calls to mind all the worst excesses of that most horrific of genres which rock has spawned: New Age. Of course, this doesn’t just go for music geeks; most regular people understand the fact that new age music is utter crap, that it’s torture, that it’s drivel, that it may even be malevolent. The recent trend of resurrecting progressive rock bands like Hawkwind or King Crimson or even Yes, as well as the hipper trend of rediscovering kraut-rock bands like Amon Düül and Harmonium, is unlikely to follow these genres to their ultimate New Age end. Sure, you may flirt with New Age as your prog-rock obsessions become, it would seem, stifling, but you just flirt with the outskirts of New Age, with the odd Tangerine Dream or Gong album that has some alright jams, and you avoid the wonky, gooey stuff. But the gooey stuff, oh, that’s Vangelis to a tee. We’re talking about the guy who penned the theme to Chariots of Fire. It’s all goo all the time. Noodly, cheesy goo.

       Yet the score for Blade Runner is one of the most sublime works of music I know.