June 27, 1982 [Blade Runner, The Thing]

After seeing Blade Runner and The Thing, I'm not sure I want to hear the answer to the Shakespearean question, "Am not I your Rosalind?" Philip Kaufman's recent remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers certainly didn't mind asking, had his lovers disguise and conquer as they liked--and his answer was an accusatory screech; but these movies, despite all their crazy-cool extravagances (John Carpenter's perhaps even more so, leading one character to gape and exclaim the same exasperated incredulity of the audience), make the walls of uncertainty close in on us, paranoia not perfect awareness but a maze without an exit.

Ridley Scott makes us side with the replicants--and once we do, we can never turn back, we want everyone to be robots, we want nothing more to do with people. In The Thing we just get cold--the dwindling humanity also sick of each other, ready to see monsters and be done with it. And even though Kurt Russell--wearing the single greatest hat in the history of cinema since Chaplin's--enjoys himself immensely as the closest Thing in the room to John Wayne, he also ends up in the same befuddled heap--although Mac saw it coming before the movie began, always more than willing to admit, "Trust's a tough thing to come by these days."

And of course both movies hammer at this--and leave only one glimmer of what passes here for hope: Life is short. That's as cold as the last few minutes of The Thing, hunkered down for the last nasty shock--but Deckard in Blade Runner (Harrison Ford jumping at the opportunity to do Philip Marlowe, the last decent fellow in the room with a gun) kicks open the door, braces for the chill, and runs.