I’m hardly the first to do this sort of thing, but here goes:
I’m showing one of my classes a bit of Blade Runner this morning. I think of Blade Runner, which came out in 1982, when I was nine, as a recent film, more or less. It is 27 years old.
When I went to college, these films were 27 years old. They might as well have been the Dead Sea Scrolls.
This reality hit home when I noticed that the year of Blade Runner‘s dystopian future is 2019. As in, a year in which I hope I’ll still have my current car.
3 Comments
Fred Beukema · October 5, 2009 at 4:18 pm
The last time I watched Blade Runner, I did a little math, and realized that if Rick Deckard was the same “age” in the movie that Harrison Ford was at the time of its release, then Deckard was “born” the same year I was. This weirded me out.
Jack Lynch · October 5, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Wanna be really upset by a similar calculation? You were born in 1973; that means your birthdate is closer to the Great Depression than it is to today. (My birth year is now equidistant from today and 1925.)
Fred Beukema · October 7, 2009 at 6:27 pm
I’m not quite there yet: I was born in 1979, and will be 40 in 2019, just as Ford was 40 in 1982. But I am at the point where high school is smack in the median* of my lifetime.
*(an imprecise usage)