The Replicant Real
“I think I swallowed a bug,” Brando announces. He had. And I had. There was no difference, in those looping late-night moments, between what was happening on the screen behind my eyelids or in front of them. Apocalypse Now had crossed the blood brain barrier of the symbolic and fictional real, just as The Day After had done, and Blade Runner would eventually do in the looping future of itself that has lasted until precisely now.
In the first installment of a two-part essay, Jeff Wood considers how we arrived at our hall-of-mirrors world through an exploration of film and television.