Wildfires are raging in California. nothing new. In a way, we’re used to these disaster stories that are now part of the calendar like, say, hurricane season or floods.
However, the current bushfires in the greater San Francisco area present us with amazing new images: a city painted in a red sky as if the city itself was on fire. Several of them made a direct link with the photos taken for the movie. Blade Runner 2049Directed by Denis Villeneuve. We could even find a video showing a bunch of photos taken in San Francisco with the movie soundtrack by Hans Zimmer, Benjamin Walfish: The effect is immediate, and it should be wrong.
So, gathered globally around our screens, in a way that is still confined within a planetary pandemic, are we living our science fiction?
the movie Blade Runner 2049 It tells the story of a cyborg who tries to reconcile his existence with his universe by fulfilling his role, mission, and work i.e. eliminating his cyborg, which is considered prohibited.
Today, we have to admit that we ourselves are in a similar situation.
Faced with the inevitable sight of destroying our habitat, we try as much as possible to reconcile our existence through our own accomplishments: my job, my family, and my routine. Wildfires in the Greater San Francisco area, Mecca for Western technological development – whatever should make our lives more convenient – is not without irony: we are currently destroying our environment in favor of our technological development, at the expense of humankind.
San Francisco, like many other large cities in California, but also around the world (we just have to think of tents on Montreal’s Notre Dame Street), has seen a new social class grow for several years. Roaming at the same rate as the enrichment of the big elites.
Between the two, there is an increasingly large middle class that is not serving better: average household debt as well as lack of access to property, while praising the advantages of telecommuting as people pay to limit the idea of ​​housing in the workplace, making more and more workers more Slaves to their ambitious reality.
In a scene from the movie Blade Runner 2049, Cyborg meets a giant naked hologram in the image of his life partner (also hologram), with whom he lives a clean, even conventionally nuclear life. This hologram, which appears to be only his cell, promises to tell him everything he wants to hear, and what he wants to see. A completely destructive, bloody, cyborg testifies to his super-realism: he is not a human being, his life is not human, his desires are not human, his life partner and his feelings are not human; It is not the same, it is completely different, even if it is bleeding.
Just like a cyborg, facing the scene of the destruction of our environment, even when we put music on it from a science fiction story onto images of our reality, can we fully realize our place? From our actions? Are these images not possible thanks to the technological development, which is almost anthropomorphic, which is exactly the origin of our (construction)?
We are currently leaving a world that will soon become old for us, for better or worse: we no longer live in science fiction, we are generally heading into a new era of reality science and all of this unfolds not only in the foreground of our eyes, but above all voluntarily.
When the cyborg realizes, after his encounter with the hologram, the following words echo through him: “Death for a just cause is the most human thing.” “
It remains to be seen whether we consider ourselves fair.
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