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2014-08-15 - 8:35 a.m. I watched Inland Empire again last night. What a great film. The scene where she's the ghost haunting herself. Well, all the scenes really. All the doors, all the stairways, they all lead to the same place with different weather. I re-read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep recently, and it touches a bit on this theme on the interchangeability of women. "Stamped out like bottlecaps," is the phrase used by Pris/Rachael...although in the end Dick's vision is even darker, since much of his work deals with men (and even children) being stamped out in factories. One of the first stories I read by PDK as a child, perhaps the very first, was "The Second Variety." I doubt either one would qualify as much of a feminist, but Dick saw the problem as a universal one, and Lynch has a keen focus on the pressures specific to women that force them into a mold. The film Blade Runner misses this theme or, perhaps, deliberately drops it in the interest of making the film more understandable to audiences that were (still are?) relatively unsophisticated when it comes to viewing (as opposed to reading) SF. Daryl Hannah (Pris) doesn't look like Sean Young (Rachael), and she doesn't act like her either. Pris is, of course, literally not even four years old. Well, nor is Rachael, but in the movie she really doesn't know, and she appears to be an actual individual, whether android or human... There is never really any moment in the film when Rachael looks at Pris and realizes that they are the same and it's only a matter of chance and fate who lives and who dies. Who is pampered and who is a whore. Of course, Rachael is the whore in DADOES, an elite one though on a mission. Some advice Decker received from a colleague when sent out to kill the androids: "Go to bed with her and then kill her." The piggy colleague would phrase it a little more efficiently if the book was written today, but either way. No wonder she's filled with rage.
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