Blade Runner notes 1
Themes in Blade Runner
More Than Human
Blade Runner is a story about slavery, human identity, and the nature of reality.
Replicants may represent one side of the human psyche, our attachment to memory. They
are the twenty-firstcentury fear of eugenics, future shock, a dystopian regressions into a used-up world.
One is struck by the overwhelming force of symbolism within this film. The reoccuring
focus on the eye plays off the saying that this organ is the window to the soul --the big
question is whether this applies to one that has been engineered. What makes a being
human, what imparts empathy?
Deckard plays the ambiguous human, one clearly bereft of emotional clarity, one capable
of gunning down an innocent sentient with little remorse. There are indications that he is
a replicant himself, though there was apparently much disagreement between actor and
director. Deckard has memories, photographs, yet so do the other Nexus replicants. How
much of a difference does the hardware make? And what does it mean to be "more than
human"? This is question that will later be addressed in such novels as Rudy Rucker's
Software. It is a matter of evolution, but also of spiritual / metaphysical growth (Phil K.
Dick certainly saw it that way).
Policing Memory and Identity
Ian Jones
What is in a memory? Two visions of the future of policing and criminality seen in Blade Runner and
Ghost in the Shell reflect how memory relates to what makes one human. In both movies, the purpose of
the police officers -- traditionally keepers of the peace -- seems to be the general maintenance of
overburdened if not completely chaotic realities. Both movies take place in urban environments that
resemble concrete jungles, with water flooding the streets and pervading the landscapes. This imagery is
suggestive symbolizing the fact that information, like a leaking sewer, can't be contained or controlled in
traditional ways.
In Blade Runner the criminals are the replicants deemed by their creators as "More human than human"
and by the society at large as dangerous and subject to execution/retirement. With implanted memories and
human appearances, these beings can only be told apart in the movie by the true humans' knowledge of
Replicant memories. This distinguishing factor is problematized in the movie as we see that the Deckert
himself appears to have memories and ideas which Gaff (Edward James Olmos's character) is aware
(especially in the original released version in which Deckert's unicorn dream appears in Gaff's paper
unicorn). Thus, the division between the cop and the criminal blurs, and one is left with the idea that the
authenticity of a being's body or memory is irrelevent to the question of what makes him or her human.
Such a blurring between cop and criminal also informs Ghost in the Shell, when the almost completely
cybernetic chief cop chases after a computer- and information-system-based criminal. Although this poses
an interesting problem in itself, the most compelling part of the film to me was the scene in which the cops
inform the ghost-hacked garbage man of the falsehood of his existence, that he has in essence been living a
doctored, unauthentic existence. Memories thus work the other way around in GitS, serving not to
reinforce a false notion of humanity on a manufactured being, but to convince a normal everyday person
into belief in a nonexistent reality. Where as humanness in BR is seen as immutably tied to memory
(although not its authenticity, just its existence), GitS takes the stance of memory as data, extraneous
information which can be deleted, uploaded and downloaded, irrelevent to what makes one human.
Blade Runner notes 2
The self is the One who is not dominated... but to be One is to be an illusion... to
be other is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial.
[Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto," Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 177]
Fan(atics) of psychoanalytic theory would have it that the dualism of self/other is the driving force behind
the actions of every language-using adult. Haraway, on the other hand, sets up this and other dualisms just
to knock them down. For her the indistinct boundaries and origins of high-tech culture challenge these
dualisms, "It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine" ["A
Cyborg Manifesto," 177].
Entry into language, the Mirror Stage, and the imaginary and symbolic orders are steps in the development
of a non-existent creature in today's world: the wo/man of difference. The dualisms necessary for that
construction of psychoanalytic theory break down in the social relations of science and technology. In
response, Haraway posits an alternative to the self/other identification of Western thought, the cyborg, "not
of woman born, who refuse the ideological resources of victimization so as to have a real life." ["A Cyborg
Manifesto," 177]
It is the interaction of these two different ideologies, the illusory security of self by naming and exclusion
and the indistinct boundaries of a cyborg identity's oppositional consciousness, that is played out again and
again in science fiction and film. Often times there are aspects of both ideologies warring within a single
character struggling to find their place in the technology ridden world in which they exist.
... in Blade Runner
Deckard: She's a replicant, isn't she?
Tyrell: I'm impressed. How many questions does it usually take to spot them?
Deckard: I don't get it Tyrell.
Tyrell: How many questions?
Deckard: Twenty, thirty, cross-referenced.
Tyrell: It took more than a hundred for Rachael, didn't it?
Deckard: She doesn't know?!
Tyrell: She's beginning to suspect, I think.
Deckard: Suspect? How can it not know what it is?
Tyrell: Commerce, is our goal here at Tyrell. More human than human is our
motto. Rachael is an experiment, nothing more. We began to recognize in them
strange obsessions. After all they are emotional inexperienced with only a few
years in which to store up the experiences which you and I take for granted. If we
give them the past we create a cushion or pillow for their emotions and
consequently we can control them better.
[Ridley Scott, Blade Runner @]
The human-like replicants in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner are built to such perfection as to be
indistinguishable from biological humans without mechanical aid. In the passage above, the protagonist,
Blade Runner notes 3
Deckard, has just completed a test to see if a woman, Rachel, is a replicant. It takes unusually long because
although Rachel is a replicant, she does not know it.
At the movie's beginning Rachel seems to exist in in the realm of the imaginary, but she is becoming aware
of difference, as Tyrell suggests. However her awareness of difference is not as a fragmented self seeking
an ideal other to identify with, she is becoming aware that she is the other.
Rachel tries to deal with this growing awareness first by denial (Freudian repression) of this awareness of
difference.
Deckard reopens the door, and Rachael enters.
Deckard: Do you want a drink? No? No?
Rachael: You think I'm a replicant, don't you? [ pause ] Look, it's me with my
mother.
Deckard: Yeah. [ pause ] Remember when you were six? You and your brother
snuck into an empty building through a basement window--you were gonna play
doctor. He showed you his, but when it got to be your turn you chickened and ran.
Remember that? You ever tell anybody that? Your mother, Tyrell, anybody, huh?
You remember the spider that lived in a bush outside your window: orange body,
green legs. Watched her build a web all summer. Then one day there was a big
egg in it. The egg hatched-Rachael: The egg hatched...
Deckard: Yeah...
Rachael: ...and a hundred baby spiders came out. And they ate her.
Deckard: Implants! Those aren't your memories. They're somebody else's.
They're Tyrell's niece's. [ pause ] Okay, bad joke. I made a bad joke. You're not a
replicant. Go home, okay? No really, I'm sorry. Go home. [ pause ] Want a drink?
I'll get you a drink. I'll get a glass.
Rachael runs away when Deckard turns to get a glass. Then, Deckard looks at
Rachael's photo.
Eventually Rachel seems to accept what is apparently true, she is a replicant, but she has not solved
anything with this identification, merely substituted one taxonomic classification for another. She still
wants an identity constructed by positive terms and by exclusion. She needs more information to construct
a water tight container for her identity, however, because simply being a "replicant" leaves too many
boundaries unclear, mutable, permeable.
Rachael: Deckard? You know those files on me? The incept date, the longevity,
those things. You saw them?
Deckard: They're classified.
Rachael: But you're a policeman.
Blade Runner notes 4
Deckard: I didn't look at them.
At the end of the film we are left with many unanswered questions, as is Rachel. She is a replicant, but
what does that mean if it doesn't show with a passing glance? She doesn't know her incept date, she has no
way of knowing how long she will live... four years from birth? A hundred? (This is working from the
Director's Cut of Blade Runner, the real version of the movie.) When was she born? Her memories stretch
back to a childhood she knows her present body was never there to experience, but when were those
memories injected into her shell? Rachel has memories and a consciousness which extends beyond the
boundaries of her body and this is symbolic of her existence without a label that completely identifies her.
Her beginning is unclear, ambiguous, and as such she has no origin.
Every story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return to
wholeness imagines the drama of life to be... war, tempered by imaginary respite
in the bosom of the Other. ... A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a
garden. [A Cyborg Manifesto, 177, 180]
Rachel begins the film with innocence (in psychoanalytic terms pre-language, before, pre-Mirror Stage) but
after she becomes Other no such return is privileged. Her origin disintegrates, her boundaries disintegrate,
her concept of self disintegrates. As the word "Other" suggests, she is not a name but is, rather, notsomething-else. "Feminist practice is the construction of [a] form of consciousness... the self-knowledge of
a self-who-is-not." [A Cyborg Manifesto, 159] To find a belonging, Rachel could adopt Chela Sandoval's
model "oppositional consciousness" using awareness of her self-who-is-not, build her "identity out of
otherness, difference, and specificity" [A Cyborg Manifesto, 155].
Sympathy for the Cyborg
The characters we create for film and for print tell a lot about the way we think. Blade Runner and Ghost
in the Shell are of certain anthropological significance; as Haraway wrote in Simians, Cyborgs, and
Women: "The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion" (149). Certainly
this is true; it is rare science fiction that can truly do away with the modern world. I have yet to read/see
sci-fi that doesn't build on and react to social realities. BR and Ghost are easily situated in the late 20th
century. One of the most interesting aspects of these films is the way the viewer is set up to identify with
and feel sympathy for the cyborg characters.The nature of these characters is similar to ours, so much so
that, as the Blade Runner script states, they are virtually indistinguishable from humans. Hence, the
Voight-Kampff Machine test, and for the viewer (and purportedly not the characters): glowing eyes.
Blade Runner plays a lot of tricks on us; the difference between man and cyborg becomes unclear as the
film hints that Deckard, the Blade Runner might be a replicant. The woman he loves, Rachael, is eventually
humanized in a way that the other replicants are not (Roy sticks his hand into boiling liquid, Pris's
acrobatics mark her as different.) A paradox is established: Deckard's mission is to eliminate the NEXUS 6
model of replicants, to restore the gap between man and machine by destroying what is made out to be a
technological mistake. (A common sci-fi theme: it is a mistake to build a machine that is TOO smart. In the
world of Blade Runner, anyone could be a cyborg. In one version of the script, Tyrell himself is a
replicant.
If Deckard is not a replicant, complications still arise. The difference between man and machine in this
film is the supposed inability of replicants to feel empathy. Interestingly, the quote referenced in the title
of this essay requires us to notice that Deckard is a cold, distant man. In one scene, Rachael asks him
whether he's ever taken the Voight-Kampff test himself. Regardless of what Deckard is, Rachael's point is
that he is like her. In this film, machines are humanized and humans are mechanized. Ghost in the Shell
does this too, especially in the scene during which Kusanagi goes swimming. (This a long scene and one
that seems at first to be out of context). All of this supports Haraway's theory that we are already thinking
of ourselves as cyborgs: "By the late twentieth century… we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated
hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs" (150).
The swimming scene in Ghost and the Shell humanizes the cyborg for the purpose of the anime's plot,
which revolves around the A.I.: 'Puppet Master's' desire for freedom and something more akin to life (as
Blade Runner notes 5
well as its subsequent attempts to seduce the cybernetic-human agents with promises of escape and further
evolution). Likewise, Blade Runner revolves around the mortality of the replicants. These are our issues
too; modern wo/man fears the significance of his/her fleeting life. In an era where there are more people
running amuck than ever before a new threat to our identity is established- the cyborg that is like us, or is
us. Roy's death is perhaps the most difficult in Blade Runner; he sounds like a modern existentialist playing
to our fears that our memories, our complicated? lives mean nothing. These machines are mortal, and are
set up to represent modern man.
"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."