Reaction videos/reviews on YouTube are an oddity I really try to avoid (clearly, most are simply monstrous, evidently staged) and I absolutely cannot fathom people’s fascination with them, I mean why would anyone want to watch someone else watch a movie? So yeah, don’t worry, you’re never likely to see my mug on your screen anytime, ever, I promise, but I did stumble upon one such reaction video in which two guys watched Blade Runner for the first time. Naturally, I was curious about what young turks of a new generation might take from my old favourite film watching it for the first time. Out of respect I won’t mention the guys by name or link to the video in question, but I was quite taken aback by one of them totally misreading the film in a way I didn’t think possible. He seemed to think the photo Rachel dropped in Deckard’s apartment (“Its me, with my mother”) was the same photo Deckard puts in his Esper to ‘see’ inside Leon’s apartment and get the clue to Zhora, which set the guy off thinking Rachel was one of the four Replicants. On the one hand, I was thinking PAY ATTENTION TO THE GODDAM MOVIE and on the other I was just blown away by someone even thinking/seeing that. It bugged me for days. Just so bizarre.
So anyway, this makes me wonder, when people watch movies, do they really WATCH the movie?
the ghost of 82 