Disbelief and Disjointment

I kept thinking again and again while watching Blade Runner 2049, the more we model these kinds of dystopias, the more they happen, and closes the gap between suspension of disbelief and plausible scenarios played out in memory locations in the brain.

When you strip away all the disbelief suspended, the visual cliches and the flying cars and yellow miasmas, you feel no better about the world. But should you? The best dystopian films scare you then give you hope because there are always at least two possible outcomes.

What do people believe before they enter a theater to have their disbelief suspended? The strongest belief is in the power of film to show us what is believable, then our collective minds get to work on that.

There is beautiful eye-candy in the film, especially the caustic reflections (shot at a Louis Khan building perhaps?) and the holographic Vegas performance of Elvis, replete with network drop-outs, the great brutalist and art deco architecture (in Hungary), that is in itself sometimes a by-product of Sci-Fi.

The score tries too hard to pay homage to Vangelis and sounds like mostly a loud wood chipper outside your window, with very few breaks for something melodic, harmonic or compellingly rhythmic. The Sci-Fi cliche you can always use is some type of saw-tooth wave with huge low-end, as that is the closest you can get to electronic hum. (All Sci-Fi films probably need this kind of stridently sharp sound.)

I still like this little meditation from the book Astonish Yourself... when I see dystopian films:

Number 74: Leave the Cinema in the Daytime
Duration: About 90 minutes
Effect: Disjointed

The cinema has emptied you of your current preoccupations and filled you with its images. It has washed you of time and its uniformity. You reach the corridor or staircase that leads outside. Under the lights, you recover some portion of the normal world. But as yet it's only a passage, a moment of transition. And then you open the door. Outside, it's sunny. You have forgotten that. Totally. You wonder how it's possible, not your forgetting, but this daylight. EXT, day. It wasn't in the script. It ought to be dark outside. As it usually is, with the rare passersby, the speeding taxis, and the shop windows all dark. But no. It's very bright, and it hurts your eyes a bit...For you, duration has become distended. It has made a large pocket that has contained the plot of the film, its landscapes, your emotions, and perhaps whole lifetimes. Fairly quickly, the whole question fades and then disappears. But only by neglect or distraction. It is never really settled.

The yellow miasmas turn to bright warm sunlight--and a sense of hope.