454 W 23rd St New York, NY 10011

April 12, 2011

Rule-following is an extremely powerful technique for manipulating things.

Psychology is a form of science that identifies the rules in obedience to which human beings act. Those rules are identified by watching human beings and noting the constancy with which some effect follows some other cause.

A human being who experiences something unpleasant will try to avoid it. That is a simple rule.

These rules can be applied in reverse. An example is found in movies. An unpleasant or frightening situation can be created by forcing a human being to avoid something. This is why the image of a closed door is frightening in a horror movie. The door obstructs the human being’s view of what is beyond it, and this forced avoidance creates an unpleasant experience of anxiety. By exploiting a simple rule, the person making a film can create an experience in the human being who watches it.

Television commercials are a form of rule-following. Portray this, and you will sell that.

The only experience television commercials work to produce is desire. All rules that can be found which describe a human being’s relationship to its desire are used in television commercials.

Another rule is that a human being experiencing desire will try to make itself closer to something. In a television commercial a thing is provided at the same moment that the human being is made to feel desire

The process of creating a television commercial that produces desire can be thought of as a calculation whose only important feature is the clarity of the answer. It does not matter by what rules the answer is derived so long as the answer is desire. This explains the great variety and ingenuity of television commercials. This also explains why those who make television commercials are called ‘creative.’

Creativity is an activity that is thought to be mysterious and beyond understanding. The process by which a television commercial produces desire seems mysterious because it is irrelevant. Because the result of the television commercial is the only thing that is important, those who make them are permitted to think of themselves as creative.

But it is rule-following.

Blade Runner is a movie directed by a man who made many television commercials.

Blade Runner is a movie about artificial human beings that are constructed according to rules. Every step required to make the artificial human beings is known before it is taken, and the artificial human being is the product of following certain rules in a certain order. These artificial human beings are made by following rules in order that the artificial human being will follow rules.

They are made to follow the rule: ‘Work!’

However in Blade Runner the artificial human beings instead begin to desire.

The artificial human beings return to the place where they are made. Where they are from is the thing their desire compels them to approach.

This is also a rule.

An artificial human being whose name is Roy finds the man who followed the rules required to make him. Roy desires a longer life than that which the rules operating inside of him will permit.

Roy was made to do the work of killing other human beings. When the man who made him refuses to provide more life, Roy looks at the rule inside himself that says how to kill a human being and he follows it.

At the end of the movie Roy has trapped the man whose job it is to chase and kill artificial human beings. The rule that tells Roy how to remain alive has defeated the rule in the man that composes his job. Nothing except rule-following has happened.

Up to this point in the movie every character in it has followed rules.

Up to this point in the movie every person who made the movie has followed rules.

The director looked at the rules he learned directing television commercials and used them to bring together the efforts of the people who worked for him: The screenwriter followed rules that made the audience prefer some characters over others, rules that made the audience expect one thing and then made them excited when something unexpected happened instead. The editor, the production designer, the cinematographer, the visual effects supervisor all followed rules that made the audience feel the way the director wanted them to feel. The director braided together the rule-following of the people who worked for him into a bigger rule.

The bigger rule is like the artificial human beings in the movie that were made to follow the rule ‘Work!’

There are now two parallel motions of rule-following: The rules the characters in the movie follow and the rules the people who made the movie followed. In every respect the movie up to this point is no different from a television commercial. In the movie and in a television commercial rules are followed and the required affects are produced. Most movies are just like television commercials.

But Blade Runner isn’t like a television commercial. And this is because of a choice that occurs at the impossible intersection of those parallel motions of rule-following:

In the movie the character Roy decides to break the rule that tells him to kill the man whose job it is to kill him. During the making of the movie the actor who plays Roy decided to break the rule that requires him to speak what the script says. Rutger Hauer decided to speak a line that he created. In the very moment when his character has decided to break a rule, Rutger Hauer also decided to break a rule.

He said:

‘All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.’

In that chiasmatic moment of choice, the film, the character Roy and Rutger Hauer are all absolved of the cynical rule-following that oppresses viewers of commercials. In that moment in time, rules were broken and transcendent humanity rushed in like a flood.

2:47am | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z3yrYy4F4_Kc

(Notes: 54)