Seeing Blade Runner was a signal event in my life. Not because it was the first “R”-rated movie I’d ever seen, even if that humid afternoon marked a rite of teen initiation. But rather because of the scene in which Deckard takes photos back to his apartment to screen them for further clues to the replicants’ whereabouts and intentions. He settles in a chair, and with drink in hand, proceeds to insert the photo into a device, which then projects the photo’s image onto a tv-like screen. That’s a clunky description, I know, but it does capture the movement I’m attempting to track from one form of representation (photography) to another (its projection). “Enhance,” he says, before calling out a series of numbers to specify direction and degree, “enhance.” I hesitate to call that movement progression, even if it does move Deckard forward in his investigation. And that is because, as perhaps a reader familiar with the film will remember, the photo’s image turns out to do something images can’t quite do: it shows an interior, and then another, and then another.
Deckard follows the photo image from a room to a hallway, to another room, and to still another, a bathroom. The sense one gets watching this movement is of increasing interiority. It seems as if there will always be yet another room. The trick is, these are spaces that the photo itself does not represent, so they are, in some ways, fantasies of the device that it has inferred from the photo.