By Des Barry.
Torrential rain and flickering neon, pedestrians of miscellaneous ethnicities bump umbrellas, struggle through tight alleyways between a downmarket electronics store and a line of crowded street-food stalls. Seated at the counter of a sushi bar, close-up on his face and open shoulders, an unnamed man in a noir-style classic trench coat rubs the splinters off his chopsticks. Behind his right shoulder appears a uniformed torso with a police badge pinned to a bulky stab-vest. The cop has a deep bass voice:
—Hey, idi-wa.
The man in the trench coat leans toward the uniformed cop. Looks up at him. A male torso in a yellow vest, black-and-white chequered bow-tie at the collar of a pale blue shirt, appears above the diner’s left shoulder.
—M’sieu, aduanon koverhsim angam bitte.
The diner waves over the Japanese Sushi Master. It’s a casual gesture as if in need of a translation for the hybrid street argot.
—He say you under arrest, Mr Deckard.
Deckard waves his chopsticks around, turns his face up to his left, replies to the plainclothes cop through a mouthful of noodles.
—You got the wrong guy, pal.
Under a narrow-brimmed trilby with a fancy cloth hatband, the pockmarked face of the plainclothes cop appears in close-up. He has startling blue eyes. He smiles through black moustache and goatee.
—Lo fa, ne-ko shima, de va-ja Blade… Blade Runner.
The Sushi Master translates.
—He say you Blade Runner.
Minute 9 is the first time the name Deckard is spoken, the first time the words Blade Runner are heard. Name and assignation.
At the counter, Deckard shovels in another mouthful of noodles.
—Tell him I’m eating.
The plainclothes cop insists.
—Captain Bryant to ka, me ni omae yo.
Deckard understands the street argot well enough.
—Bryant, huh?
—Hai!
The last word from the Sushi Master.
Cut to the uniformed cop hurrying Deckard through the flashing lights of the rain-washed alleyways. The plainclothes cop is at Deckard’s back. They weave through the crowds and bobbing umbrellas. Deckard climbs through the open door of a police spinner.
If Minute 9 is the first time we hear the names Deckard and Blade Runner, it’s also the first time we meet the plainclothes cop who will play a key role in LAPD surveillance of Deckard — and in the changed emphasis of four subsequent versions of Blade Runner released over the next twenty-five years.
In Minute 10 of the original studio release with Deckard’s voiceover, we find out the plainclothes cop’s name, and the name of the language he speaks:
| Deckard: | The charmer’s name was Gaff. I’d seen him around. Bryant must have upped him to the Blade Runner unit. That gibberish he talked was City-speak, guttertalk, a mishmash of Japanese, Spanish, German, what have you. I didn’t really need a translator. I knew the lingo, every good cop did. But I wasn’t going to make it easier for him. |
With the voiceover excised from The Director’s Cut, we don’t hear the cop’s name in that version until Minute 58. Deckard has just killed Zhora in a shopping arcade, the first of the four replicants he’s been told to ‘retire.’ Gaff appears at the scene and steers Deckard back through the carnage and broken glass to the waiting Bryant streetside. Bryant is full of admiration for Deckard’s work:
| Bryant: | You could learn from this guy, Gaff. He’s a god damn one-man slaughter house. That’s what he is. Four more to go. Come on, Gaff, let’s go. |
| Deckard: | Three. There’s three to go. |
| Bryant: | There’s four. That— That skin job that you V-K’ed at the Tyrell Corporation, Rachael. Disappeared. Vanished. Didn’t even know she was a replicant. Something to do with a brain implant says Tyrell. Come on Gaff. Drink some for me, pal. |
If Gaff plays a more crucial role in The Director’s Cut than in the original studio version, it’s not that he has more dialogue to deliver. Thanks to the inclusion of a dream scene that arises within Deckard’s psyche, the appearance of Gaff’s final origami sculpture — as Deckard and Rachael try to make their final escape — takes on a potentially more significant meaning. Enough has been written in conjecture elsewhere about the significance of each of Gaff’s origami works but it must be acknowledged that towards the end of The Director’s Cut, his unicorn sculpture raises a crucial questioning of our perception of Deckard that we’ve assumed until this point in the story.
It was the original version of Blade Runner that I saw in the Cinema Pasquino in Trastevere, Rome, in November 1982. The Pasquino showed movies in English every Monday night. On that particular night, I was in the cinema alone after a painful split-up with a woman with whom I was still deeply in love. The story between Deckard and Rachael felt particularly poignant. After only four months in the city that had become my home, I was already living in a location marked by loss. That night I needed the solace of noir and to hear dialogue in English, my native language, to ease the cacophony in my head of as-yet-unfamiliar Italian. Alone in an old Roman cinema, the screen lit up, the opening credits named the producers, actors, composer, writers and director. The movie title appears, red on a black background.
Blade Runner
A scrolling text, white on black, appears…
Early in the 21st Century, THE TYRELL CORPORATION advanced robot evolution into the NEXUS phase — a being virtually identical to a human — known as a Replicant… After a bloody mutiny by a NEXUS 6 combat team in an Off-World colony, Replicants were declared illegal on earth — under penalty of death. Special police squads — BLADE RUNNER UNITS — had orders to shoot to kill, upon detection, any trespassing Replicant. This was not called execution. It was called retirement.
Los Angeles 2019
Except, of course, that Los Angeles won’t be as predicted, as we came to find out.
I haven’t been in Los Angeles since the cusp of the millennium 1999/2000. I ate with some friends in a restaurant in Korea Town. When we asked the Korean waiter for water, he didn’t understand what we wanted. When we asked for agua he nodded and brought the glasses and a jug right away. However polyglot our cities, we’re still a long way from the evolution of cross-fertilised street languages, although each generation has its linguistic twists — Beats, Hippies, Punks, Hip Hop, textspeak. Part of the genius of Blade Runner is that it had already imagined a complete hybrid — City-speak — in Minute 9.
In Minute 8, the as yet unnamed Blade Runner, Deckard, speaks English while behind the counter the Sushi Master speaks Japanese. In Minute 9 we first hear the hybrid language from Gaff, the plainclothes cop. When I searched out the source for City-speak, I came across a website called www.trussel.com which has the full script of the original Blade Runner. A note identifies the language as a mixture of French, Hungarian, German and ungrammatical Japanese. Edward James Olmos — who plays Gaff — has been credited with providing linguistic material for City-speak in cooperation with Ridley Scott.
Now I live in another Pacific Rim city with a mixed — but not identical — ethnic make-up. It’s only 2023 — not so far from 2019 — but when I walk the streets of Naarm/Melbourne, the streets of Chinatown in the early evening winter darkness, umbrellaed under the steady rain and the flashing neon, with electric delivery bikes weaving crazily through the foot traffic, I get regular flashes of scenes from Blade Runner. I hear Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, English, various versions of South American and European Spanish, French, Italian, Indonesian, versions of Arabic and African languages; and on more formal occasions Woiwurrung, the local Indigenous language. Languages mixed with English insertions, yes, but no hybrid language. Not yet. But I can imagine it coming.
The future world predicted by Blade Runner in 1982 is not exactly how the world was in 2019, nor how the world is in 2023, but we are already witnessing the reification of the dilemmas the film makes apparent in the fields of cybersex, surveillance and modern warfare.
Blade Runner’s Minute 9 marks the moment that locks in the fate of Deckard and the replicants that he hunts; and the replicant Rachael with whom he falls in love. It is the pivotal moment when Deckard is braced by Gaff and is forced into resuming his once-abandoned role as executioner of replicants. By the end of The Director’s Cut, the question arises as to whether Deckard is an executioner of replicants, or a replicant who has become an executioner of his own kind. Minute 9 contains the seeds of the intertwined interactions of Deckard, Gaff and Rachael that will unfold into the happy-ever-after ending of the 1982 version of Blade Runner — and more importantly — twenty-five years later — the seeds remain present for the darker and more ‘truthful’ ambiguous end.
Previous essays in the Minute 9 series curated by Nicholas Rombes:
1. Nicholas Rombes
2. Alex Zamalin
3. Grant Maierhofer
4. Emma Jones
5. Des Barry
6. Lindsay Lerman
7. Joshua Glenn
8. Jessica Sequeiro.
9. Christine Hume
10. Jeff Wood
11. Alexander B. Joy
To pitch a submission, contact Nicholas Rombes at nrombesudm@gmail.com
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Des Barry lives in Melbourne. He’s published three novels with Jonathan Cape: The Chivalry of Crime, A Bloody Good Friday and Cressida’s Bed. His thesis called The Escape of the Imaginary Author analyses his alter-ego David Enrique Spellman, the author/coordinator of the multi-platform novel Far South (Serpent’s Tail). His shorter prose has been in The New Yorker, Granta, 3:AM Magazine and anthologies including Sea Stories, Wales Half Welsh and London Noir. His first novel, The Chivalry of Crime, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. He tweets from @farsouthproject.
