rasx() Screenshots: Shots out at Sci-Fi Slavery
Rutger Hauer as the Dying Gaul
Trust me. When you are faced with the task of introducing the African history of American slavery to new-millennium students of color, you should start with this image of Rutger Hauer from Ridley Scott’s art-direction masterpiece, Blade Runner (The Director’s Cut). Just watch a clip from the study, A Girl Like Me, by Kiri Davis and you should have no problem beginning to accept the horrible truth that American young people of the new millennium are still conditioned to have more sympathy for European-identified symbols than any African identification.
Many readers who know how well Africa moves under oppression will immediately intuit the voodoo-Santería-syncretism of my suggestion here: this is a “white man” telling the American viewing audience (supposedly suspending reality in a science fiction fantasy) that he is a slave. He says to live in fear, “That’s what it is to be a slave.” Easily—trust me—easily it might be the first time in their American lives that a young (or, sadly, an older) viewing audience would even begin to think in a non-defensive emotional manner about real American slavery—in spite of the stellar career of a Louis Gosset Jr. or an Ester Rolle. Future songs like Blade Runner can catch white people of all skin colors off guard—even Ridley Scott himself can claim ignorance about what he is doing here in the rasx() context!
Having heard hours of interviews and commentary tracks with Ridley Scott (especially the three-hour feature in Blade Runner—The Final Cut), I am certain that he steers clear of even mentioning why Rutger Hauer uttered the word “slave.” At best you should do well to get a master of visualization arts like Ridley—the guy who shot over two-and-a-half thousand commercials—to compare the Rutger Hauer death scene in Blade Runner with the European art-history classic Dying Gaul (Galata Morente). But this discussion would help our young, nascent African history students as they now have the opportunity to understand that American slavery was not built for Black people—but it comes from a long Indo-European tradition (an “innovation” often emulated in post-Old-Kingdom Africa itself).
There is even more power in using the imagery of Blade Runner to talk about American slavery: this is a story set in the future and it does an excellent job seductively insinuating that something supposedly so barbaric and retro as slavery can exist in a “high-tech,” “brave,” “new” Indo-European world. It prevents the American escapist from dismissing slavery with a quip like, “That was then—this is now…” It makes slavery glimmer just behind the scenes of a pop cultural white world. It is no accident that a pop-artist like Tricky would use a sample from Blade Runner to enhance memories of his mother (who committed suicide when he was a child) in a song called “Aftermath” from the classic “trip-hop” album, Maxinquaye (a compression of his mother’s name, Maxine Quaye). Tricky samples Leon, played by the late Brion James. Just before the slave Leon shoots the Voight-Kampff cop trying to catch him, Leon says, “Let me tell you about my mother.”
I am flippantly certain that Tricky used that sample because he identifies with what Leon represents. Leon represents a man without a “real” past. Leon is a fabrication of his European masters—a replicant, a facsimile of a real (white) man. Tricky knows very well that he would “lose his audience” to just come out and confront these “complex issues.” So he turns to voodoo and samples Blade Runner.
Note: this Blog post is a segment from a series of posts under the title, “rasx() Screenshots: Shots out at Sci-Fi Slavery,” this follows the previous entry on Friday, January 18th, 2008 here in the kinté space!