My friend Michael Moses invited me to give a lecture on America & cinema at Chapman University in lovely Orange County. Serendipitously, John Ford's Liberty Valance & Ridley Scott's Blade Runner are on their 60th & 40th and. respectively. I'll be talking men & robots, the past & the future, the desert & the city, virtue & science, philosophy & poetry. It's all very fitting, since it's California, once the longed for paradise of the Western, the completion of continental expansion, now the home of technological innovation, the inexhaustible quest for immortality.
I'll probably do some writing on these two movies, too. Meanwhile, I recommend them for your viewing pleasure. We learn from these works of art & we honor the artists… I leave you with an essay I wrote on Blade Runner. It turns out, our 2019 & the movie’s 2019 were somewhat similar, which is both instructive & disturbing…