The Fallibility of Memory in Jan Bottiglieri's Everything Seems Significant: The Blade Runner Poems
by Beth McDermott
Apparently, there’s some debate about which version of Blade Runner one should watch. In Everything Seems Significant: The Blade Runner Poems, Jan Bottliglieri watches Blade Runner: The Final Cut (2007). Not only does she watch The Final Cut—Bottiglieri creates a real-time sequence of poems that interweaves the poetic speaker’s life and memories with scenes and characters from Ridley Scott’s version of choice. In this way, Bottliglieri’s poems are both personal and ekphrastic: scenes from the film act as framing for personal memories, while other poems verbally represent chapters on the multi-disc Special Edition DVD. Some of the poems’ epigraphs include discussion from the director’s commentary track—an added layer of framing that reinforces the poet’s interest in how a gaze is manufactured. But despite the obvious homage that Everything Seems Significant pays to Blade Runner, the book reverses the film’s direction; rather than propel us towards a dystopian future, the poetic speaker adopts the film’s “forced perspective” to slip back in time. Framed by a film where one is either human or replicant in a futuristic Los Angeles, Bottiglieri’s speaker uses memory as aperture to see herself more closely, as if under a microscopic lens. Why is this film so important to her? Why is the experience of watching it like watching a memory reel of her own life?
Familiarity with The Final Cut isn’t a prerequisite to reading Everything Seems Significant; however, the poems are heavily invested in the film and its context. I think the poems reward a kind of meta-contextuality, so I include The Final Cut trailer on YouTube, the Wikipedia entry for Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford), and the Fandom page for Rachael (played by Sean Young). But the poems also describe the film, suggesting that language holds its own against “the great eye.” This tension is most heightened when specific scenes from the film function as context to Bottiglieri poetic speaker’s memories. (Or is it that Bottiglieri’s memories function as context for the film?)
For example, Deckard at the noodle stand reminds the speaker of sharing a bowl of noodles with Jake, “not yet a year old but a good mimic.” The speaker’s college digs included a poster of Deckard’s face that contrasted her own skin, which was “pale, prone to bruise” due to chemo. In the scene where Rachel “chickens and runs,” the speaker recalls building dollhouses as a girl, “room after room.” One day they lost their artistry, and she could see “only plastic, wood: / lightless, false. What had changed?”
The matter of falseness is central to Blade Runner because one is either human or replicant in the futuristic Los Angeles of The Final Cut. Unlike a human, a replicant’s memories are not their own. Bottliglieri’s poetic speaker sympathizes with replicants such that watching Blade Runner becomes a way to check her own memory. In “Retirement…Witnessed,” the loss of a replicant bookends the memory of Bottliglieri’s speaker watching paramedics carry her father away:
(in my memory
flashing against the bright
pane: my mother
has sent me down to let the men
in and in
the men come to carry out
my father: my body
struck against the wall to make
room for his still
living body the stretcher
[to carry out: as duty burden])
Since I’ve seen Blade Runner, the description of Bottiglieri’s young speaker “struck against the wall” reminded me of a scene in the film even before the book described it.
This scene is beautifully broken down in “Say ‘Kiss Me’”: a poem with seven sections, each of which explores the contradiction of demanded consent. “When my want was shadow-thin— / what a gift I was then!” Bottiglieri writes in a poem that recalls being nineteen when she watched “Deckard / slam that door shut with his fist // and say say kiss me then kiss me / again.” Of all of the sections in “Say ‘Kiss Me,’” section “3” makes the strongest argument that Rachael “didn’t choose her past” at the same time that the poem questions the viewer’s right to determine what qualifies as Rachael’s consent to be kissed. The meta-contextuality of Everything Seems Significant encourages us to consider the various angles of a memory or scene. The past means different things to different people, but it’s most important to rely on oneself in making that determination:
The past: gambit, gantry, cage. What makes you stay put.
A body, a door. What is opened or shut. Your
hands hover, two birds. Your hands
on the keys. What is rely on?
Again. Kiss me.
Certainly, “Your hand / on the keys” radiates to include much of what this book is about: the writing of a film, a version of which finally has its director’s stamp of approval; the writing of poems within the film’s framework; and Rachael at the piano, playing adeptly, despite not knowing how. What’s the relationship between memory and a creative act? To check one’s memory in the context of The Final Cut is to remind us that memory is part of what makes us human. What’s interesting is the way Bottliglieri links the fallibility of memory to writing. Bottiglieri’s poems argue, in deference to the idea of falseness, that true art—whether film or poetry—invites seeing oneself in the work. The forced perspective of “the great eye” will always bend to a memory of oneself at the piano.
Beth McDermott is the author of a chapbook titled How to Leave a Farmhouse (Porkbelly Press). Recent poems appear in Matter, Jet Fuel Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. Reviews appear in Kenyon Review Online, After the Art, and American Book Review. She is an Associate Editor with RHINO and an Assistant Professor of English at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, IL. Her website is www.bethmcdermott.com.