Note: The following article contains major spoilers for Blade Runner and talks specifically about the final cut of the film.
When a prolific sci-fi film reaches a certain age, it goes through a rite of passage in the critical space. Writers inevitably see agreements and disagreements between the film’s vision of the future and how our present actually shook out, and the printing presses begin churning with articles on what the movie “got right” about the future. The seminal 1982 cyberpunk film Blade Runner is set now, in November 2019, and fittingly, magazines and websites are awash with verdicts on what Blade Runner accurately predicted about the modern world. How smart are AI? Do we still use Polaroids? Where exactly are the flying cars? These pieces almost invariably focus on technological and aesthetic comparisons, and to be sure, Blade Runner was a paralysingly convincing vision of technology, home living, and fashion. In no small part because of its pioneering effects, sets, and props, as well as its cultural prognostication. And carrying out those spot-the-difference exercises between sci-fi and the real world can help make us more aware of the history of both. But I don’t want to talk about Blade Runner as a prophecy as much as I want to talk about Blade Runner as an exploration of humanity.
This neo-noir is loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In its alternate version of 2019, the rich have fled Earth for luxurious off-world colonies where synthetic humans called replicants perform their labour. These androids are manufactured by the renowned Tyrell Corporation and have a lifespan of only four years. In the case that replicants should escape, elite police units called blade runners are assigned to hunt them down. Rick Deckard is a blade runner who is pulled out of retirement and forced to find and kill four Nexus-6 model replicants who’ve left their posts. The team hijacked a colony shuttle, killed its occupants, and piloted it to Earth where they now take refuge in a dilapidated Los Angeles. They are Pris Stratton, Leon Kowalski, Zhora, and their superhuman leader, Roy Batty.
The film is more interested in picking and choosing elements of Dick’s novel and directing them towards its own goals than it is adapting the book. However, it’s trying to answer the same question as Dick’s story: Do androids dream of electric sheep? That is, do the synthetic humans of this universe have experiences comparable to that of people? The bookkeepers and police chiefs of Blade Runner’s world consider this question put to bed: They define the replicants by their lack of emotional response.
The first scene of Blade Runner, after the opening landscape shots, features an employee of the Tyrell Corporation, Dave Holden, checking whether Kowalski is a replicant. In Blade Runner’s universe, there is an unwavering standard for such an examination: The Voight-Kampff test. The Voight-Kampff involves asking the subject a series of emotionally-charged questions and using a machine to measure pupillary dilation, blushing, and other physical responses typically associated with emotional arousal. If the subject fails to display these involuntary signs of distress when prompted, they’re concluded to be non-human.
The Voight-Kampff is analogue for the real-world technology of the polygraph. Both tests ask the recipient questions which may elicit physical signs of discomfort and then make a claim about the contents of their mind based on the appearance or absence of those signs. The Voight-Kampff tests whether a person is a replicant, while the polygraph was invented to test for lies. The only problem with the polygraph is it doesn’t work. Its critics say it’s only slightly more accurate than flipping a coin; its advocates say it only works in 9/10 cases. However, even if that more impressive number is correct, if you don’t have a means of distinguishing whether your subject is in that 90% of accurate readings or that 10% of false positives, then the test hasn’t told you anything. If you do know which slice of the pie graph your suspect falls in, the polygraph is redundant. The fallacy of the polygraph test is that it’s not probing directly for lies, it’s scanning for markers of nervousness and then inferring from those markers that the person is lying. However, a subject may exhibit anxiety for reasons other than fabricating facts, especially during an interrogation.
This suggests that the Voight-Kampff is too, pseudoscience. The test assumes that humanity is to be found within physical indicators of panic, shame, and disgust, but what if some people are less susceptible to exhibiting these emotions upon hearing hypothetical scenarios? If replicants are biologically distinct from humans, how can we assume that they’d share the same flags of rich internal lives? And can humanity be summed up just by how you react to your spouse putting up a pin-up calendar or a party of people eating raw oysters? It would seem that humanity has more to do with complex but close relationships to autonomy, morality, mortality, and beauty. The Voight-Kampff tries to detect personhood using a few largely abstracted questions asked across an interrogator’s table instead of taking into account a person’s life experiences, and that seems all too reductionist.
When Holden administers the exam to Kowalski, his subject, at first, seems to be so inept that he struggles to take the test, let alone pass it. Holden tells Kowalski to imagine flipping a tortoise on its back in the desert and refusing to help it as it kicks its legs in the air. Kowalski doesn’t answer the question directly; he asks what a tortoise is, he asks how he got to the desert, he asks why he’s not helping. We could brand Kowalski as failing the humanity detection process by missing the point of it, but look closer, and you’ll see the replicant uncovering a flaw in the Voight-Kampff’s methodology. It asks him to emotionally connect to an experience to which he couldn’t reasonably relate. Spending a life in off-world labour, he can’t place himself in a desert and doesn’t recognise the animal Holden mentions.
Many of us would struggle to emotionally identify with experiences for which we have no reference points, but that doesn’t make us not people. In asking how he got to the desert, Kowalski also attempts to humanise the scenario. The Voight-Kampff takes the tortoise encounter and isolates it off in its own little box, but Kowalski understands that a person would have events in their life that lead them into such a puzzle and tries to find them in the question. His attempt is denied. It’s early days, however, and it’s difficult to see too much personhood in Kowalski as he shoots his examiner at point-blank range with a pistol, allowing him to make his exit.
But maybe Deckard can get a better insight into the replicants. He is watching them confront the prospect of death and is falling in love with one. The detective finds himself quietly infatuated with Rachel, the assistant to Tyrell Corporation head Eldon Tyrell. Gaff, the envoy to the L.A.P.D. mocks Deckard over this, presenting him with an origami figure of a man with an erect penis. He also made fun of Deckard for being reluctant to take the assassination job by placing a thimble-sized paper chicken near him. Deckard seeing Rachel as a potential romantic partner suggests that he regards her as something approaching human, but he still, ultimately, treats her as an object for his use. One night, at his apartment, Deckard prevents Rachel from leaving by pushing her against a wall and then tells her to kiss him and tell him that she loves him. He is also callous in his reveal to Rachel that she is replicant, even if he later expresses regret for this.
Upon finding out that she is a dying artificial lifeform, Rachel plunges into a sorrowful existential crisis, and that suggests an emotional depth to the replicants that the Voight-Kampff doesn’t acknowledge. However, there is also the intimation that extenuating circumstances may leave Rachel may be closer to being a human than the other synthetics. Replicants are given false memories by their creators, and Rachel was implanted with experiences taken from Tyrell’s daughter. She is also from a newer generation of the organisms, being a Nexus-7. Perhaps replicants are not generally psychologically developed, but Rachel is special because she’s the new model and her memories were delicately chosen. Yet, memory is a tricky thing. There’s the sense in the film that humans see the replicants as fake people because their memories are fabricated, but one night, sitting in his home, Deckard remembers a unicorn running through a forest. We know this is impossible, but just because Deckard’s mind contains false images, we don’t stop thinking of him as a person, so why should it be any different for Rachel or Kowalski? Elsewhere, Deckard expresses a different kind of sympathy for the replicants. When he tracks down and kills Zhora, horror registers on his face, hinting that he feels like he’s just murdered a person, but he’s not so torn up about it that he stops hunting the Nexus-6s.
While Deckard is cutting a path through L.A., the cutthroat exploits of Roy Batty indicate he lacks human empathy. He speaks in a poetic language, but he put an end to twenty-three lives to escape his colony. He lets a genetic engineer for Tyrell slip towards hypothermic death as he extracts information from him. Then, he tricks Tyrell into letting him into his chambers so that he can ask him how the replicants could avoid their fast-approaching expirations. Tyrell explains that despite the best efforts of the company, they’ve found no way to extend the Nexus-6 lifespan, but that Batty should take solace in having lived a life where he saw and did extraordinary things. Roy kills Tyrell by crushing his skull and pressing his thumbs into his eyes. He also murders J.F. Sebastian, a helper to Tyrell, uncaring that Sebastian took him and Pris into his home and led them to the corporation’s CEO.
Despite the best efforts of Batty, the replicants’ hours are numbered. Having witnessed Deckard kill Zhora, Kowalski attempts to take his revenge on the detective. He almost succeeds before being shot in the back of the head by Rachel. After Sebastian’s death is reported to the police, Deckard calls his flat via video phone and Pris answers, which leads him to her and Batty. The blade runner kills Pris, leaving her body for Roy to find. Roy cries at the sight of her dead and kisses her corpse. He and Deckard chase each other through the Bradbury Apartments, but during the fight, Roy seems more interested in toying with his opponent than killing him. Batty pulls Deckard’s arm through a wall and breaks two of his fingers but then leaves him with his gun. Later, he drives a nail through his own hand. Deckard manages to mortally wound Batty with a length of pipe and escapes onto the roof. Knowing his pursuer is steps behind, Deckard jumps to the next building but slips and ends up hanging from the edge of it by his arms. Seeing this, Batty takes a white dove from the coop atop the apartments, leaps to where Deckard is, and pulls him up using the nail in his palm. Deckard lies on the ground in front of him, awaiting the final blow.
It’s around here that we realise that Deckard’s mission was not only potentially unethical but also futile. Deckard is a man, and Batty is genetically engineered to be a genius ubermensch. How was Deckard ever going to win the fight? Here’s how: In one of the most miraculous acts of mercy in cinema, even after Deckard has killed all of Batty’s friends, and Roy himself, the replicant spares him. As his final wisps of life ebb away, Batty gives the famous tears in rain monologue. I’ll reprint it in full here:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion,
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate,
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain,
Time to die”.
Batty slips off his mortal coil, releasing the dove he’s holding, and we get a shot of the bird from below as it flies upwards into the clouds. As Deckard exits the block of flats, he meets Gaff who tells him, among other things “You’ve done a man’s job” and “It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does?”, referring to Rachel. Deckard returns to his apartment to retrieve Rachel, only to find there’s been a break-in. Here, the film makes a threat to Deckard: he has killed the four Nexus-6s, so, maybe his penance is to have his love taken from him. He removes a cloth to find Rachel lying down, still, but she wakes up, and professes her romantic connection to him. The two go to leave the building together when Deckard steps on one of Gaff’s origami figures in the lobby. This one is of a unicorn, the same animal that Deckard remembered, but Gaff couldn’t know that Deckard recalled a unicorn unless he had some access to Deckard’s memories, and that would only be possible if Deckard were a replicant. He gives a knowing smile and heads towards the lift doors.
There’s so much going on here, but let’s start by talking about the end of Batty’s journey. Batty’s arc is one of coming to terms with his own mortality. He seeks out Tyrell to learn how to escape death but discovers it’s impossible. Whether he fully makes peace with his limited lifespan is ambiguous, but there appears to be some acceptance in his final words: “Time to die”. And his monologue is broadly considered to be one of the most beautiful in cinema. The unusual thing about it is that visually evocative poetry typically works by referencing imagery we’re familiar with: lush rolling hillsides, stormy stirring oceans, and so on. Batty’s words describe sights that fall outside the scope of the film but are still touching. The wonder is in imagining what they might look like as opposed to knowing, and they summon some sympathy for Kowalski. Like Leon in his Voight-Kampff test, we have no frame of reference for the sights Batty recounts, but our reaction to them can still be recognised as human. This speech referencing elements of the universe we didn’t know existed is also part of the complete perceptive flip that happens in this scene.
Based on the evidence before now, Batty is a thug. To the extent he’s a physical being, he uses his body to brutalise and intimidate. To the extent that he’s an intellectual being, he uses his cunning to trick and kill. Deckard may be a somewhat of an antihero, but we might conclude it’s his grim moral duty to stop a dangerous criminal like Batty so he won’t hurt anyone else. Yet, in this scene, it’s Batty who’s the one doing the saving and Deckard who’s the would-be killer. There looked to be no question that Batty would snap Deckard’s neck given a chance, but instead, he commits an act of unparalleled heroism. The dove he holds in this moment serves as a symbol of that mercy and it flying from him into the clouds resembles a soul ascending to heaven: a suggestion that despite all of Batty’s violence, he has ultimately been found morally pure, and may, in a way, still live on. I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the obvious Christ imagery of Batty dying with a nail through his palm. Again, an overwhelmingly positive ETHICAL depiction.
Atop the Bradbury, we see Batty display all the human characteristics that I mentioned earlier: He is autonomous, perceives beauty, grapples with his mortality, and commits a moral act. In fact, nobody else in the film embodies these qualities to the extreme that this replicant does here. His poetry and him pulling Deckard to safety tell us more about his human qualities than any pupillary dilation test ever could. And if Batty and his cohorts are people, that casts Deckard and the police in a very cruel light. It makes Batty a slave rebel, a protector of the vulnerable, and in the right circumstance, a pacifist. Deckard and the L.A.P.D., however, are instituting forced labour at the barrel of a gun. There is a dialogue from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, The Measure of a Man, which feels appropriate here:
“GUINAN: Consider that in the history of many worlds, there have always been disposable creatures. They do the dirty work. They do the work that no one else wants to do because it’s too difficult, or too hazardous. […] You don’t have to think about their welfare, you don’t think about how they feel. Whole generations of disposable people.
PICARD: You’re talking about slavery.
GUINAN: I think that’s a little harsh.
PICARD: I don’t think that’s a little harsh; I think that’s the truth. But that’s a truth we have obscured behind a comfortable, easy euphemism: property”.
In fighting Deckard, Batty’s goal wasn’t to kill him but to make him understand the position of the replicants as owned goods. As Roy watches Rick writhe on the ledge, he tells him “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave”. And his moment of reprieve towards Deckard appears to be premeditated. He pushes the nail through his hand long before he uses it to saves the cop. It may even be that Batty recognises that Deckard is a replicant. He killed Tyrell, the eye engineer, Sebastian, and the people on the shuttlecraft because they were his masters or were working for them, but he sees Deckard as another one of him, another slave. After all, Deckard is told he doesn’t have a choice about coming out of retirement. Whether or not Batty knows about Deckard’s synthetic nature, the tragedy of this scene is that as soon as we understand Batty’s humanity, he’s already dead. The tears in rain speech makes us realise there are places and events in this world we don’t know about just as Batty’s sacrifice reveals that there’s a moral dimension to this world that we couldn’t see before.
When Gaff tells Deckard that he’s “done a man’s job”, he could be referencing Deckard’s replicant status. As a replicant, Deckard would be seen as less than a person by the police, part of a societal underclass, but maybe Gaff is saying that by carrying out these assassinations, he’s elevated himself to the level of a human. It’s also a line that doesn’t make a man sound like a particularly good thing to be. The authorities of the film, and arguably the bulk of the film itself, are questioning whether the replicants are as morally or emotionally engaged as humans. However, Gaff defines Deckard’s humanity by his willingness to murder other people in cold blood, and that’s not morally or emotionally engaged at all. We can spend the film mulling over whether replicants are as good as people, but “as good as a human” would be an invalid concept if the replicants are better than people.
Blade Runner is partially about how failing to see other people for who they are could blind us to their humanity, but it’s also about ignorance of self-identity and the connection between the two concepts. If Deckard understood that he was a replicant earlier on in the film, he would have shown more compassion to the Nexus-6s around him, but the corporations and police spend so long judging the suspected replicants, that they never judge themselves. Rachel points this out on her first meeting with Deckard: When he describes the Voight-Kampff test, she asks him if he’s ever taken it. Neither Deckard nor Tyrell care to comment on the question.
But even after Deckard’s murders, there might be a chance for him to start over, to treat another replicant right this time, because he can still flee the Tyrell Corporation with Rachel. Now that he understands the humanity of the replicants, he is ready to be a partner that approaches her as another person; this is reflected in the scene where he pulls the cloth off of her being the inverse of the one where he slams her against the wall. Instead of telling her to say she loves him, he asks whether she does. Instead of demanding that she kisses him, he waits for her to do so. In Deckard and Rachel both emerging as replicants, their social power has equalled out, and they are now in an equitable relationship. The couple is doomed but romantic. Their retirement dates may mean that they’re soon destined for the scrap heap, but most slaves die in bondage; Deckard and Rachel are one in a million: they’re the unicorns. Death may be an imminent reality for them, but most people in Blade Runner don’t get to live a desirable existence for any period of time. “She won’t live. But then again, who does?”.
Little of what I’ve said here is particularly new, but you’ll notice that these thematic discussions of Blade Runner go to the heart of the film in a way that the analysis of the visual design and gadgets never does. To describe Blade Runner as a prediction of the future’s technologies can be fun, and isn’t bereft of critical value, but to treat the appearance of certain appliances and aesthetics as what Blade Runner was fundamentally “saying” about the future or any other time is to confuse the speech for the microphone. What the film strives hardest to convey is not the accurate date we’ll have synthetic humans or its confidence that everyone will use videophones in the future. Blade Runner is expressing more universal points about humanity, memory, class, and artificial intelligence. The androids, eye trackers, and the blocky architectures are just storytelling and filmic tools through which to discuss those points. Because the relevance of any one art style or technological vision is going to fade with age, even the actors and our society’s consciousness of the films will be lost in time, but cinema and people can find far longer lifespans in passing down messages of compassion and humanisation that echo beyond them. These things transcend death and are the key to immortality. Thanks for reading.
