Blade Runner (Movie)

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    M. Emmet Walsh, ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Knives Out’ Actor, Dies at 88

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    His roles in films like “Knives Out” and “Blade Runner” were sometimes big, sometimes small. But he invariably made a strong impression.M. Emmet Walsh, a paunchy and prolific character actor who was called “the poet of sleaze” by the critic Roger Ebert for his naturalistic portrayals of repellent lowlifes and miscreants, died on Tuesday in St. Albans, a small city in northern Vermont. He was 88. His death, in a hospital, was announced by his manager, Sandy Joseph.The most enduring praise Mr. Walsh received also came from Mr. Ebert: He coined the Stanton-Walsh Rule, which asserted that “no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.”In “Straight Time,” a 1978 film featuring both Mr. Stanton and Mr. Walsh, Mr. Walsh played a patronizing parole officer to Dustin Hoffman’s teetering ex-con. Mr. Walsh’s performance caught the eye of two brothers who aspired to be auteurs and were writing their first feature-film script.The unknown Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the pivotal character of a detective in “Blood Simple” for Mr. Walsh. To their surprise, and despite offering little more in compensation than a per diem stipend, he accepted the role.A performance by Mr. Walsh in “Straight Time” led to a role in “Blood Simple” (1984), the first feature film by Joel and Ethan Coen.River Road Productions/Circle — Sunset Boulevard, via Corbis, via Getty ImagesReviewing “Blood Simple” for The New York Times in 1984, Janet Maslin said that Mr. Walsh had captured “a mischievousness that is perfect for the role.” Writing in Salon on the occasion of the release of Janus Films’ digital restoration in 2016, Andrew O’Hehir praised Mr. Walsh’s portrayal of a “sleazy, giggly and profoundly disturbing private detective.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Five Sci-Fi Classics, One Summer: How 1982 Shaped Our Present

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      Five Sci-Fi Classics, One Summer: How 1982 Shaped Our Present“Blade Runner,” “E.T.,” “Tron,” “The Wrath of Khan” and “The Thing” all arrived that one season 40 years ago to become indelible and influential.The future is now: The photographer Sinna Nasseri captured images of present-day New York City as it might have been predicted by science fiction films of the 1980s. Above, a replica of the DeLorean from “Back to the Future” was on display in Times Square. Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.At the end of Christian Nyby’s 1951 sci-fi chiller “The Thing from Another World” — about an Arctic expedition whose members are stealthily decimated by an accidentally defrosted alien monster — a traumatized journalist takes to the airwaves to deliver an urgent warning. “Watch the skies,” he insists breathlessly, hinting at the possibility of a full-on invasion in the final lines. “Keep looking. Keep watching the skies.”This plea for eagle-eyed vigilance suited the postwar era of Pax Americana, in which economic prosperity was leveraged against a creeping paranoia — of threats coming from above or within. The final lines of movie were prescient about the rise of the American science-fiction film, out of the B-movie trenches in the 1950s and into the firmament of the industry’s A-list several decades later.The peak of this trajectory came in the summer of 1982, in which five authentic genre classics premiered within a one-month span. After its June 4, 1982, opening, “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” set an unexpected record by grossing about $14 million on its first weekend. Seven days later, Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” debuted to $11 million but proved to have stubby, little box office legs, eventually grossing more than half a billion dollars worldwide. June 25 brought the competing releases of Ridley Scott’s ambitious tech-noir thriller “Blade Runner” and John Carpenter’s R-rated remake of “The Thing,” visions several shades darker than “E.T.”; both flopped as a prelude to their future cult devotion. On July 9, Disney’s technologically groundbreaking “Tron,” set in a virtual universe of video-game software, completed the quintet.Not all of these movies were created equal artistically, but taken together, they made a compelling case for the increasing thematic flexibility of their genre. The range of tones and styles on display was remarkable, from family-friendly fantasy to gory horror. Whether giving a dated prime-time space opera new panache or recasting 1940s noir in postmodernist monochrome, the filmmakers (and special-effects technicians) of the summer of ’82 created a sublime season of sci-fi that looks, 40 years later, like the primal scene for many Hollywood blockbusters being made — or remade and remodeled — today. How could five such indelible movies arrive at the same time?Whether the summer of ’82 represented the gentrification of cinematic sci-fi or its artistic apex, the genre’s synthesis of spectacle and sociology had been underway for some time. Following the pulp fictions of the ’50s, if there was one movie that represented a great leap forward for cinematic science fiction, it was Stanley Kubrick’s epically scaled, narratively opaque 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which not only featured a massive, mysterious monolith but also came to resemble one in the eyes of critics and audiences alike.The film’s grandeur was undeniable, and so was its gravitas: It was an epic punctuated with a question mark. Almost a decade later, “Star Wars” used a similar array of special effects to cultivate more weightless sensations. In lieu of Kubrick’s anxious allegory about humans outsmarted and destroyed by their own technology, George Lucas put escapism on the table — “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” — and staged a reassuringly Manichaean battle between good and evil, with very fine aliens on both sides.The same year as “Star Wars,” Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” rekindled the paranoid alien-invasion vibes of the ’50s with an optimistic twist. The film had originally been titled “Watch the Skies” in homage to Nyby’s classic, but it was an invitation to a more benevolent form of stargazing: Its climactic light show was as patriotic as Fourth of July fireworks, with a distinctly countercultural message worthy of Woodstock: Make love, not war (of the worlds).What united “Star Wars” and “Close Encounters,” beyond their makers’ shared sense of genre history (and mechanics), were their direct appeals to both children and the inner children of grown-ups everywhere. In The New Yorker, the influential and acerbic critic Pauline Kael carped that George Lucas was “in the toy business.” Like the scientist at the end of “The Thing From Another World,” she was raising the alarm about what she saw as a powerful, pernicious influence: the infantilization of the mass audience by special-effects spectacle.Yet even Kael submitted to the shamelessly populist charms of “E.T.,” which she described as being “bathed in warmth.” She wrote that the film, about the intimate friendship between a 10-year-old boy and a benign, petlike thing from another world, “reminds you of the goofiest dreams you had as a kid.”What The Times Said About These Five Movies in 1982Card 1 of 5Blade Runner. More

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      Joe Turkel, the Spectral Bartender in ‘The Shining,’ Dies at 94

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      Also memorably seen in “Blade Runner,” he was a favorite among directors looking for someone who could bring zealous professionalism to even the smallest role.Joe Turkel, a gaunt-faced yeoman character actor who appeared in scores of movies but is best known for two of his final performances — as Lloyd the bartender in “The Shining” and Dr. Eldon Tyrell in “Blade Runner” — died on June 27 in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 94.His son Craig Turkel said the death, at a hospital, was caused by liver failure.Mr. Turkel (pronounced ter-KELL) was a favorite among directors looking for someone who could bring zealous professionalism to even the smallest role.In movies like “Hellcats of the Navy” (1957) and “The Sand Pebbles” (1966), he held his own alongside leading men like Ronald Reagan and Steve McQueen. It was often up to Mr. Turkel to provide a subtle but unmistakable plot pivot, using his steely onscreen demeanor and perfectly delivered lines to shift a film’s entire mood.Nowhere was that more true than in the three movies he made for Stanley Kubrick, with whom he formed something of a mutual admiration society. Both men, who were about the same age, had grown up as working-class secular Jews in New York. Both were huge baseball fanatics. And both were perfectionists about their work.Mr. Turkel had a small role in “The Killing,” Mr. Kubrick’s 1956 film about a racetrack robbery, and then returned a year later as a condemned soldier in “Paths of Glory.” In both films, he contrasted a stony stillness with sudden explosions of manic action to convey meaning far beyond his few brief lines.He went on to become a prolific television actor, with roles on popular shows like “Bonanza,” “Ironside” and “Fantasy Island.”He returned to Mr. Kubrick’s service in 1980 for “The Shining,” an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. The story revolves around an author, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), who is hired as the winter caretaker of the secluded, otherwise empty Overlook Hotel and moves there with his family.Under the influence of malevolent supernatural forces, Jack slowly goes crazy. At one point he enters the hotel’s bar, where he finds Lloyd, played by Mr. Turkel. Jack asks for a bourbon, and Lloyd pours him a shot of Jack Daniel’s.Mr. Nicholson dominates their conversation, but it is Mr. Turkel’s ominously stoic presence that shifts the film into a darker register.“In dress and demeanor, he’s the prototypical old-school hotel barman,” Mr. Turkel told The Toronto Star in 2014. “He obviously takes pride in his work and the corruption he enables; most bartenders are stylish and a little bit evil. Poor Lloyd doesn’t know the difference between bourbon and Tennessee whiskey, though.”Joseph Turkel was born on July 15, 1927, in Brooklyn. His father, Benjamin Turkel, was a tailor, and his mother, Gazella (Goldfisher) Turkel, was a homemaker and part-time opera singer.Along with his son Craig, Mr. Turkel is survived by another son, Robert; his brother, David; and two grandchildren. His wife, Anita (Cacciatore) Turkel, died before him.He joined the U.S. merchant marine in 1944 and the Army in 1946. After receiving an honorable discharge, he briefly returned to New York for acting classes before heading to Hollywood in 1947.His first credited role was in “City Across the River” (1949), a film about a program for juvenile delinquents that also featured a young Tony Curtis.His work on “The Shining” brought him to the attention of Ridley Scott, who was casting “Blade Runner,” his adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”He was cast as Dr. Tyrell, the brilliant but haughty founder of a company that produces robots so perfect that they blur the line between human and machine — an uncanniness that leads to Dr. Tyrell’s bloody demise at the hands of one of his creations.Although “Blade Runner” has become one of the most critically acclaimed science fiction films in history, it was originally a box-office dud. Mr. Turkel, having grown tired of grinding through auditions after decades in Hollywood, decided to retire; aside from a few more small TV and film roles, he never acted again.Instead he tried his hand at screenplays (although none of them were produced), became a regular on the fan-convention circuit and wrote a memoir, “The Miseries of Success,” which remains unpublished.“I’ve done some great films,” he told an interviewer for Blade Zone, a “Blade Runner” fan site, in 1999. “I know other actors that have done brilliant films. They still have to go out and audition and meet the producer, director, and please these people no matter what they’ve done. Of course the great big stars don’t do that. But there are great quality actors that do that and they find it demeaning.”Still, he added, “I’ve had a hell of a career.” More

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      Douglas Trumbull, Visual Effects Wizard, Dies at 79

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      His technical savvy was on display in films like “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Star Trek: the Motion Picture,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Blade Runner.”Douglas Trumbull, an audacious visual effects wizard who created memorable moments in a series of blockbuster science-fiction films, including the hallucinogenic sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” in which an astronaut in a pod hurtles through space, died on Monday at a hospital in Albany, N.Y. He was 79.His wife, Julia Trumbull, said the cause was complications of mesothelioma.With colleagues, Mr. Trumbull was nominated for visual effects Oscars for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “Blade Runner” and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” but perhaps his most stunning work came in “2001” — his first big break in motion pictures.He was in his early 20s when Mr. Kubrick hired him as a $400-a-week artist, and his first job was to create graphics for the 16 screens that surround the “eyes” of HAL 9000, the seemingly omniscient computer that controls the Discovery One spacecraft at the center of “2001.”Then, using a process called slit-scan photography, he conceived the trippy five-minute scene in which the astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) soars at hyperspeed in his pod through a phantasmagorical cosmic passageway in the universe.Mr. Trumbull used a motorized camera that tracked to a slit in a rotatable rectangle of sheet metal, behind which he manipulated illuminated art — wedding his ambitious youthful vision to Mr. Kubrick’s.Keir Dulleau in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968). Mr. Trumbull’s first job after being hired by the film’s director, Stanley Kubrick, was to create graphics for the 16 screens that surround the “eyes” of the seemingly omniscient HAL 9000 computer.Warner Bros. via Museum of the Moving Image, New York“It wasn’t about the normal cinematic dynamics of close-ups and over-the-shoulder shots and reversals and conflicts and plot,” Mr. Trumbull told The New York Times in 2012. Mr. Kubrick, he said, “was trying to go into another world of first-person experience.”Over the next half-century, Mr. Trumbull became known as one of the film industry’s most innovative visual effects masters. He used old-school tools like mattes and miniatures to enhance science fiction films before digital effects animation became the industry standard.“He had this ability that I don’t think most people have — to see a final image in his mind and somehow figure out what was needed to get that image on film,” said Gene Kozicki, a visual effects historian and archivist. “Sometimes those images were crazy, like a diaphanous cloud traveling through space heading toward the Enterprise,” the spacecraft in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (1979).For Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), Mr. Trumbull’s team injected white tempera paint into an aquarium filled with a mixture of fresh and salt water to create the ominous clouds that announced the coming of the extraterrestrial mother ship.For Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982), Mr. Trumbull used, among many other things, models and images projected onto blimps and buildings to fashion the look of a bleak, dystopian future Los Angeles.When Philip K. Dick — whose book “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” was adapted into “Blade Runner” — saw a segment of Mr. Trumbull’s visual effects on a local newscast, he recognized them approvingly as “my own interior world,” he told an interviewer shortly before his death in 1982.An image from Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982), for which Mr. Trumbull fashioned the look of a bleak, dystopian future Los Angeles. Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty ImagesFor “Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” Mr. Trumbull oversaw the docking of the shuttle with the Enterprise and Spock’s spacewalk, a wild excursion (partly through a “plasma energy conduit”) that has obvious visual links to “2001.”“I thought it would be fun to just get kind of abstract and make it a fantasy dream sequence in a way, not literal,” he told TrekMovie.com in 2019.In 2012, Mr. Trumbull received the George Sawyer Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his technological contributions to the film industry and the Georges Méliès Award from the Visual Effects Society.Douglas Hunt Trumbull was born in Los Angeles on April 8, 1942. His mother, Marcia (Hunt) Trumbull, was an artist; his father, Don, worked in visual and special effects, most notably on “The Wizard of Oz,” but had gone to work as an engineer in the aircraft industry by the time Douglas was born.His father “never mentioned much about ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ except that he had something to do with the lion’s tail, the apple tree and rigging the flying monkeys,” Douglas Trumbull told VFXV, a magazine devoted to visual effects, in 2018.Growing up, Douglas was a fan of science fiction movies, became fascinated with photography and could build crystal radio sets. After high school he worked for an electrical contracting firm while studying technical illustration at El Camino College in Torrance, Calif.For “Close Encounters,” Mr. Trumbull’s team injected white tempera paint into an aquarium to create the ominous clouds that announced the coming of a U.F.O. Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty ImagesHe took a job with Graphic Films in Los Angeles, where his paintings of space modules and lunar surfaces appeared in documentaries for NASA and the Air Force. He was hired for “2001” after Mr. Kubrick noticed his work on a 15-minute film, “To the Moon and Beyond,” which was produced in Cinerama 360 and exhibited during the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens.After working on “2001,” Mr. Trumbull created space scenes in “Candy” (1968), a comedy based on the novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg; provided visual effects for “The Andromeda Strain” (1971), about a team of scientists trying to contain a deadly alien microorganism; and directed his first film, “Silent Running” (1972), in which botanical life has ended on Earth and plants are kept in a greenhouse on a space station by an ecologist played by Bruce Dern.Although Vincent Canby of The Times called “Silent Running” “simple-minded,” he praised its “beautifully eerie and majestic special effects — particularly its spaceship that looks like horizontal Eiffel Towers attached to gigantic oil tankers.”Mr. Trumbull resuscitated his father’s film career by hiring him for “Silent Running,” “Close Encounters” and “Star Trek.” The senior Trumbull also worked on George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” but his son was too busy for that one.Douglas Trumbull’s affinity for vivid visual effects led him to conceive ways to produce films with a format that more closely approached reality. He created Showscan, a cinematic process in which 70-millimeter film is projected at 60 frames per second (35-millimeter projection is usually at 24 frames per second).He shot part of “Brainstorm” (1983), his second directorial effort, with a Showscan camera. That film — about scientists who devise a system that can record and play a person’s thoughts — is better known for the death of one of its stars, Natalie Wood, during production. Mr. Trumbull fought to complete the film, but it could not be exhibited in Showscan because theaters would not invest in the necessary equipment until all studio films were shot in that format.But developing the Showscan camera earned Mr. Trumbull, Robert Auguste, Geoffrey Williamson and Edmund DiGiulio the Motion Picture Academy’s Scientific and Engineering Award in 1992.Mr. Trumbull in action in 2011, the year he returned to traditional filmmaking after many years of designing theme-park attractions and other projects and working for Imax.Joseph HeckThe experience led him to detour from Hollywood filmmaking and move to the Berkshires, where he worked on projects for the rest of his life. He developed simulator-based attractions like “Back to the Future: The Ride” for Universal Studios Florida, which opened in 1991, and, using Showscan, created “Secrets of the Luxor Pyramid,” a virtual reality experience featuring three films, at the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, in 1993.In 1994, he signed a deal to bring his simulator-ride technology to Imax. He also served for a time as the company’s vice chairman.In addition to his wife, Mr. Trumbull is survived by his daughters, Amy Trumbull and Andromeda Stevens; his stepdaughter, Emily Irwin; his stepsons, John Hobart Culleton, Ethan Culleton and John Vidor; nine grandchildren; one great-granddaughter; his sister, Betsy Hardie; his stepsister, Katharine Trumbull Blank; and his half sisters, Kyle Trumbull-Clark and Mimi Erland. His marriage to Cherry Foster ended in divorce; his marriage to Ann Vidor ended with her death.Mr. Trumbull returned to traditional moviemaking when the director Terrence Malick, a friend, asked him to help on his film “The Tree of Life” (2011). Working as a consultant, Mr. Trumbull helped conjure the kaleidoscopic sequence that depicts the Big Bang and the creation of life on Earth, using chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, carbon dioxide, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics and high speed photography, he told cinematography.com in 2011.“It was a freewheeling opportunity to explore, something that I have found extraordinarily hard to get in the movie business,” he said. “We did things like pour milk through a funnel into a narrow trough and shoot it with a high-speed camera and folded lens, lighting it carefully and using a frame rate that would give the right kind of flow characteristics to look cosmic, galactic, huge and epic.” More

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      A 'Blade Runner' Version of Manhattan

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }At HomeFall in Love: With TenorsConsider: Miniature GroceriesSpend 24 Hours: With Andra DayGet: A Wildlife CameraCredit…John Taggart for The New York TimesAm I in Manhattan? Or Another Sequel to ‘Blade Runner’?Flickering screens, whizzing helicopters and repurposed patches of pavement have transformed the scene.Credit…John Taggart for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 11, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETIf you have been drinking too much while looking at pictures of real life (or at least Instagram life), if you spend more time talking to machines than living creatures, if you’ve been wondering if you’re alive, if you have an itch you can’t scratch, if you think you have a condition called accelerating decrepitude, if you live in a building of empty apartments, there may be a movie that speaks to you, and that movie came out almost 40 years ago. It’s called “Blade Runner.”Since its 1982 debut, “Blade Runner,” set in a phosphorescent, futuristic Los Angeles and directed by Ridley Scott, has tempted fans to see it as coming to life, well, everywhere. The film’s motifs — gorgeously derelict prewar high-rises, the aesthetic influence of Asia’s megacities, massive LED screens — have become visual shorthand for The Future: Down and Out (but Dark and Sexy) Version.Purists insist that it is a Los Angeles movie, but posts tagged #bladerunner linked to places as disparate as Istanbul, Tijuana, Milan, Nairobi and Detroit typically appear on Instagram every 10 minutes or so.Few of those places resemble the movie as much as still mostly locked-down Manhattan, where a starker, lonelier, more class-riven update of the film’s retro-noir mood has taken hold. The filmmakers behind “Blade Runner” originally found inspiration in New York, and that was before the city incarnated its post-apocalyptic setting in which “anyone with the wherewithal has presumably gone away,” as Janet Maslin wrote in 1982. “Only the dregs remain.”A jumbo flashing billboard that was once the CNN logo, near Columbus Circle in Manhattan late in February.Credit…John Taggart for The New York TimesAdrian Benepe, the former New York City Parks Commissioner and current head of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, sees “creeping Blade Runner syndrome” everywhere, from the clogged skies over Manhattan to the subways, which he rides to work every day from his home on the Upper West Side.“They’re empty,” Mr. Benepe said. “I’ve been alone many times at rush hour. It’s eerie as hell.” He also finds the movie prescient in its depiction of a world saturated by intrusive, omnipresent advertising.“Places in New York that used to not have advertising now have ads,” he said. “You can’t get away from it. It’s in the subways, it’s on the streets, it’s on barges. You never stop being assailed.”Giant screens are nothing new, of course. But New York’s streetscape had been permeated as never before with twitchy, adhesively catchy LEDs, a trend that has only accelerated during the pandemic, with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announcing last summer the addition of 9,000 screens broadcasting “Covid-relevant safety information.”Herald Square, now with a neo-noir flair.Credit…John Taggart for The New York Times“There is advertising everywhere, and it’s a bit of sensory overload,” said Ben Kallos, a City Council member who represents Manhattan’s East Side. Mr. Kallos said LinkNYC, the network of 1,800 sidewalk kiosks around the city providing free Wi-Fi as well as block after block of eye-level digital content, “is pushing the boundary” when it comes to “the amount of advertising people are willing to take.”That said, for all its complexity and clutter, New York’s visual environment is carefully calibrated by zoning codes and the desire of advertisers not to trigger associations with images such as the “Blade Runner” signature motif of a geisha’s face beaming down from a hovering blimp, let alone the monolithic Big Brother figure in Apple’s infamous “1984” commercial (also directed by Mr. Scott).Slip-ups happen, however. Last summer, during protests over the killing of George Floyd, marchers who had gathered near Columbus Circle were shocked to see messages from a billboard overhead sternly telling them to go home and “Don’t be a criminal.”“They were telling people that this isn’t what George Floyd would want, things like that,” said Frederick Joseph, a marketing and communications specialist who is also the author of the recently published New York Times best seller “The Black Friend.”Mr. Joseph was marching beneath the 32-foot-high digital sign — the only such billboard facing Central Park — and was shocked to see the messages accompanied by the face of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, along with a misleading Twitter handle. (The Moinian Group, a real estate developer that owns the billboard, did not answer several calls.)“There was a countdown basically saying how much time before you were past curfew,” Mr. Joseph added. “And when it got to like 10 minutes before, people started running. It felt like something out of ‘The Hunger Games,’ or ‘Blade Runner.’”Not all of the resemblances to the movie are nightmarish. The retro-noir look “Blade Runner” is credited with has inspired copycats, including Anthony Bourdain, who before his death planned to open a “Blade Runner”-inspired “Asian night market” on the West Side of Manhattan, and Raf Simons, whose 2018 men’s wear show on a steamy, neon-lit night under the Williamsburg Bridge featured models in monklike cocoon coats carrying clear plastic umbrellas.Indeed, one of the subversive triumphs of “Blade Runner” is making techno-fascist dystopia seductive.“It’s supposed to be terrible, but of course it’s mesmerizing,” said James Sanders, the author of “Celluloid Skyline: New York and the Movies.” Mr. Sanders said that “Blade Runner” originally spoke to a “terror that white middle-class culture was going to be overrun by foreigners.”A helmeted man in bike and other vehicles, whizzing down 32nd Street.Credit…John Taggart for The New York TimesSome parts of Midtown are incontestably gloomy, such as along Lexington Avenue in the 40s, where mannequins seem to outnumber humans, space-helmeted bicyclists swerve around heaps of garbage, and like a jellyfish glowing undersea, any gleam of life only underscores the vacuum.”Just a half-mile south, though, in Manhattan’s Koreatown, the feel is warmer, if slightly edgy, as restaurants have transformed 32nd Street into a vogue-ish outdoor bazaar where you may not feel comfortable unless you’re wearing a neoprene cocoon coat with nozzles for the attachment of heating tubes. It’s not just the diners slurping seolleongtang inside plywood shacks, the cosmetic treatments on offer up glowing stairwells, or the puddles at the diners’ feet (which, although not runoff from acid rain as in “Blade Runner,” may be something worse from nearby Midtown).Scott Geres is the general manager of the Edison Hotel, a Jazz Age showpiece that opened in 1931, when Thomas Edison himself turned on the 26-story building’s lights. Pixelated models’ faces projected from Times Square flood many of its 810 rooms, including the Presidential Suite, where Aaron Judge, the New York Yankees right fielder, spent the 2018 season.Is that the Jolly Green Giant or something more sinister?Credit…John Taggart for The New York TimesFor the last year, Mr. Geres has been one of the few people at the Edison.“For the first month I didn’t leave the building,” said Mr. Geres, 48, who walks up to 25,000 steps a day checking for pipe leaks and fire hazards. “There used to be 5,000 people in this building on a Saturday night. Now it’s just me and one other person on my team.”Mr. Geres said his job is to keep the Edison’s lights flickering behind the plywood shielding windows on the Rum Bar and street-side restaurants. The 700-room Paramount hotel, across West 47th Street, however, is “dark dark,” he said, like so many buildings in Midtown.“Dark dark” is of course the psychic state of much of New York these days, and of Rick Deckard’s mind. In “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” the 1968 novel by Philip K. Dick on which “Blade Runner” is based, Mr. Deckard is tormented by empty apartments — “sometimes he heard them when he was supposed to be asleep.”Childless, communicating via “vidphone,” and drinking himself into oblivion (with Vangelis’s blissfully narcotic score playing in the background, who wouldn’t?), Mr. Deckard spends his time when not hunting fugitive robots — whose vivacity is a rebuke to his own shrunken soul — looking at pictures from before times, specifically, snapshots of possibly imaginary family members.It’s an on-the-nose image of loneliness and lassitude for those “living in the screen bunker,” as the pop psychologist Rob Henderson has called pandemic life. Meanwhile, outside the bunker, intimations of creeping disorder conjure the city of the 1970s, one of the main inspirations for “Blade Runner.”“Places in New York that used to not have advertising now have ads,” said Adrian Benepe, the former New York City Parks commissioner. “You can’t get away from it. It’s in the subways, it’s on the streets, it’s on barges. You never stop being assailed.”Credit…John Taggart for The New York Times“I was spending a lot of time in New York,” Mr. Scott has said of the movie’s filming. “The city back then seemed to be dismantling itself. It was marginally out of control.”At that time, Mr. Scott frequently found himself flying directly to Midtown via a helicopter service from Kennedy Airport that would land atop the former Pan-American (now MetLife) Building straddling Park Avenue. Not long afterward, following a grisly accident, the helicopter service was discontinued.Mr. Benepe sees helicopters as another way “Blade Runner”speaks to the moment.“In ‘Blade Runner’ you have this overhead traffic constantly circling overhead,” he said. “Well, now the ultrawealthy, not only are they no longer in mass transit with us, they’re not even on the roadways. They’re flying in from the Hamptons.”He pointed out that the helicopter charter service Blade recently announced a daily commuter run, set to begin this month, shuttling passengers to Manhattan from Westchester.“Blade Runner”’s class critique is not subtle. A sex worker hunted by Mr. Deckard tries to kill him with his tie. The movie’s arch-villain, the head of an evil biotech corporation, lives at the pinnacle of a Pharaonic temple, and apparently he’s the only character in the movie whose apartment gets sunlight.That home, towering above the city, is as spacious and warm as the other interiors are dismal and claustrophobic. Though, in one of the ways “Blade Runner” seems dated, compared with Pharaonic apartments in Manhattan nowadays, its proportions are not extravagant.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More