You had to be creative, but also strategic. In actual fact you had to be ruthless, but you might not know that until you carelessly threw yourself into a situation that you barely escaped from. Then you knew that you had to be deadly serious, or you could end up dead. No one wanted to talk about that, to say it out loud, but it was everywhere: the threat of deadly boyfriends.
When people did talk about it, it was always in the form of a warning, and always with a euphemism: you have to watch out for bad men! But no one could agree on who they were or how to spot them. You had to work it out for yourself.
By the late 90s I learned to have a third-date discussion about “Blade Runner” with prospective boyfriends. You know the bones of the plot, so let’s jump to the marrow, the scene that causes all the trouble: Deckard and Rachel are finally alone in his apartment, after she has saved his life during a brutal street-fight with a Replicant. Deckard is now tending to his injuries as Rachel wanders around his place, looking forlorn and fearful. By this time she knows that she herself is a Replicant, and therefore possibly in mortal danger from Deckard. She believes that he might spare her life if he develops feelings for her. But it’s horribly risky to count on a stranger’s mercy.
How much time do we spend screening men, assessing risk? Supposedly there are warning signs we can look for, neon signals of intent to harm, ex: men who are brutal to each other are more likely to treat you that way. But warning signs aren’t always so obvious. Dangerous men can hide inside safe ones, and come roaring out when you least expect it, after a current of tenderness has already passed between you and your shoulders have relaxed and your eyes have left the exit sign. The fact is that, at least for a while (how long?), you have to stay vigilant. You test, and hope for the best. But it might not be enough.
After Deckard bandages his wounds and grabs a bottle of whiskey, a saxophone enters the movie’s soundtrack. It sings suggestively as he lies down on his bed, while Rachel plays the piano in the other room. He comes to sit beside her on the piano bench, and kisses her cheek with something resembling tenderness. She responds passively, then suddenly changes her mind and gets up to leave. Deckard attempts to grab her arm but misses, and when she hurries to the door he runs up and pounds it with his closed fist.
In LA in the mid-00s I went on a date with a man who wanted me to cut bangs. We sat in a run-down retro diner and his gaze felt colder than the air conditioning. He reached across the sticky table and grabbed a strand of my hair, making snipping motions with his fingers would you do it for me? You’d be my dream girl! He wanted Rachel, Deckard’s obsession. He wanted a girl with big, rolled bangs and a nipped waist in a corset tight enough to make eating unthinkable. I ordered a plate of fries and unbuttoned my jeans. By that time I already knew: the best way to shut down a fetishist is to be your self. Later I heard that the man was involved in the disappearance of a local girl, a brunette with sad eyes and stark bangs. She had completely vanished, goner than gone. I visualized her in the diner with me and my friends, gorging on chicken and milkshakes, safe in the smell of hairspray and fryer grease. Laughing louder than loud.
Once Deckard corners Rachel in the doorway there is a terrible claustrophobic menace in the events that follow. He grabs her and slams her against the wall, and she winces in pain as the saxophone starts up again. Say, ‘kiss me!’ he tells her, say, ‘I want you!’. She repeats these things, looking exhausted but resigned. His face suggests need, contempt, self-disgust and rage, as if he is deeply disturbed by his vulnerability, and blames her for inflaming it. He appears to want to punish her for inspiring his desire. The scene heavily implies that Deckard has complete and rightful ownership over Rachel’s intimate agency, and the angle and the lighting and the saxophone makes that seem inevitable.
In New York City in the 90s I knew some kids who went to film school at NYU*. One of their professors made the whole class study the Blade Runner Apartment Scene and write an essay on it. He called it one of the all-time great seduction scenes, and required them to parse it beat by beat and describe its virtues. Four girls dropped out of his class, and when I asked one of them about it she told me it happened every year. He says it culls the herd, she said, and keeps the hacks away. I wondered obsessively about the women who stayed in that class. Did they know how to leave bad men?
As Deckard and Rachel kiss, her response becomes suddenly hot and feral, like a desperate animal caught in a trap. The intimacy that presumably follows is not shown, but the scene is an obvious precursor to forced closness. The fact that I’ve had to argue this point with men since I was a teenager feels now, as I close in on 50, like a small but angry scar that refuses to lie down on my skin.
For safety, or some illusion of it, I did what I had to do: I steered third-date conversation to “Blade Runner” and the Apartment Scene. Most of the men loved the scene and that made me furious, and I hid my rage and threw them back into the world. The throwing was a privilege that I’ve never forgotten. I didn’t need men for anything. Rachel needed the violent Deckard for protection, a searing irony that no man has ever brought up. Maybe the girl with the stark bangs needed the diner man for safety, or money, or maybe just for an escape from the mundane, an opportunity for pleasure. In that case she would have gone into their encounter feeling thrillingly ablaze in the force of her own desire. She would have felt powerful. But it’s impossible for a woman to claim full intimate agency without being a direct threat to the social order, which makes her vulnerable, and also dangerous.
In the movies, dangerous men are killers and dangerous women get threatened in many different ways. Archetypes are powerful. Art and life are eternally enmeshed, locked in a chaotic embrace that makes the Universe bigger, but also claustrophobic, a mirrored echo chamber full of haunted voices. #MeToo changed everything and nothing. The movement’s work remains ongoing. Where is the girl with the stark bangs, and all the missing girls since then? Did the men who took them pass their boyfriend tests?
This article originally appeared on Aliciadara.substack.com and was syndicated by MediaFeed.org
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Featured Image Credit: Blade Runner / IMDB.