Aged life is punctuated with other people's deaths — a reflection on Rutger Hauer's passing

© 2019 Peter Free

 

24 July 2019

 

 

As we age . . .

 

. . . we see our old world being obliterated by what is new and, in many instances, not better.

 

This is not a bad thing. We old folk do need to get out of the way. But the process is often sad, when people whom we knew, or admired from afar, pass on.

 

 

So it was for me today . . .

 

. . . in reading about actor-environmentalist Rutger Hauer's death.

 

He and I were close to the same age. And I suspect, given what appears to have driven him, prone to some of the same perspectives regarding this small planet and its life forms.

 

In that vein, no film performance sticks in my memory more than Hauer's in Ridley Scott's 1982 Blade Runner. The movie is a loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

 

Hauer performed as one the "replicants", whom Harrison Ford's character had been assigned to eliminate.

 

Blade Runner, I was later surprised to learn is labeled a cult classic. Meaning that it flunked at the box office, but a noticeable number of people — presumably with moral taste, as well as an appreciation for imaginative artistic presentation and nuance — thought it a noir(ish) masterpiece.

 

I was, and probably still am, one of those.

 

Hauer's superbly acted grasp — and self-written closing lines — of what the film was actually about, came across during Blade Runner's moving finish.

 

See those lines (which address the topic that I have raised today) as Hauer delivered them, in a clip taken from the movie, here:

 

 

Samuel Axon, Rutger Hauer, genre actor and Blade Runner icon, has died at 75, Ars Technica (24 July 2019) (with embedded movie clip)

 

 

Today, Hauer and his talent are gone. And our world, for the most part, swirls insanely toward institutionalized rejections of similarly favorable human traits.

 

The integrity-prone journalist Seymour Hersh said recently:

 

 

The whole world has sort of turned muddy.

 

By and large, the world is increasingly run by ignoramuses, wackos and psychotics.

 

This was long before Donald Trump. But we’ve got more crazy people running the world now than ever.

 

© 2019 Chauncey Devega, Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh: The world is ‘run by ignoramuses, wackos and psychotics’, RawStory (23 July 2019) (quoting Seymour Hersh)

 

 

The moral? — We do not just miss people who died — we fear losing the honorable things that they stood for

 

I do not mean to be old-guy pessimistic.

 

But equally, when all the masters are gone — and the world is not, apparently, producing and supporting numerous new ones of the same intelligence and moral class — what then?

 

Vaya con dios, Rutger.