Before the replicants there were the ‘clickers’ in The Creation of the Humanoids
Cinema and Synthetic Life
Before stories of synthetic humans were given over to the ostensibly rational worlds of technology and science fiction, they were the stuff of myth, fantasy, fairy tales and horror. And while mechanical automata never quite attained the idealised perfection of Olympia in Hoffmann’s ‘The Sandman’, or the Edison-built Hadaly in The Eve of the Future (Villiers de L’Isle Adam, 1886), they had nonetheless astonished audiences and brought acclaim to their designers. In the eighteenth century, Vaucanson unveiled a mechanised excreting duck and a pump-operated flautist with mechanical fingers. The human body was a fabulously intricate mechanism, but it could be mimicked and perhaps even replicated. What, then, was the human?
In the late nineteenth century, another machine began generating a simulacrum of life – the cinema. Shadows took on volume and a real-time existence, their actions could move audiences to tears, laughter or anger. Uncle Josh, in a 1902 film by Edwin S. Porter (under the auspices of Edison, a recurring figure in this story), thinks the projected figures are real: like Hoffmann’s Nathaniel, he tries to woo and win the silent simulation. Another early Edison film was an adaptation of Frankenstein, which would be refilmed in the early 1930s. Now the monster was brought to life with electricity and light – the stuff of cinema. Around the same time, King Kong was being billed as the Eighth Wonder of the World, but did that refer to the giant ape or to the miniature one endowed with the image of life by animator Willis O’Brien? In Pinocchio, Geppetto, like the artisans of the Disney studio, wanted his crafted object to be ‘a real boy’. Cinema not only creates life, it reflects upon that very desire.
Synthetic human narratives, from Pygmalion (1938) to Pinocchio (1940) to Terminator 2 (1991), have always challenged, or at least made explicit, definitions of ‘natural’ humanity and its role or function. Defining the human provides most of Blade Runner’s philosophical focus. Deckard gives empathy tests to suspected non-humans. Indeed, he might or might not be a replicant himself: ‘How do you know you haven’t retired a human by mistake?’ Rachael asks him. ‘Have you ever taken the test yourself?’ In The Creation of the Humanoids (1962), a terrific low-budget precursor to Blade Runner written and directed by Wesley Barry, humanoids are becoming disturbingly perfect simulacra. The protagonist is a member of the reactionary Order of Flesh and Blood, but he turns out to be a humanoid after all, and the other humanoids give him an operation to upgrade him to the new, sexually reproducing, model R100. ‘Of course, the operation was a success,’ the narrator assures us at the end, ‘or you wouldn’t be here.’
One more reason Blade Runner was seen as exemplary of postmodernism stemmed from its ambiguous attitude towards the replicants. ‘For the cyberpunks,’ Bruce Sterling proclaimed, ‘technology is visceral … [I]t is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.’70 Replicants melded technology and ‘us’: with their physical and mental, and perhaps emotional and erotic, superiority, they represented some fulfilment of Jean Baudrillard’s discourse on simulation (and seduction) – the copy had superseded and even surpassed the original. Map replaced territory. The only important difference between humans and replicants was programmed: a four-year lifespan operates as a fail-safe mechanism, protecting the human from its own obsolescence.
Before the replicants there were the ‘clickers’ in The Creation of the Humanoids
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
The engagingly paranoid sensibility of Philip K. Dick explored the alienation that comes from seeing through simulations. His protagonists undergo personal crises as the boundaries between the real and the simulated begin to dissolve. But these aren’t just isolated psychotic breakdowns; they follow from the expansion of technologies of reproduction (television and computers, for example) and the rising incidence of simulation in the so-called ‘real world’. In Dick’s fiction, social intercourse with imitation humans replaces involvement with real ones. Entrepreneurs market famnexdo (family-next-door) units to lonely interplanetary colonists so they’ll have neighbours.
Roy
Advertisements are annoying little fly-sized robots. Disillusioned, isolated Martian colonists take a drug and enter the 1950s suburban dream-world of Perky Pat. A corporate mogul employs staff to provide authentic items from his youth: props in a huge simulacrum that he uses as a retreat. Teaching machines dispense information and kindly wisdom: interacting with them is like watching television, only more so. Again and again, spectacles usurp reality.
Around the same time, the political philosopher and artist Guy Debord proclaimed that reality was dissolving into mass media ‘spectacle’, adding that ‘the spectacle originates in the loss of unity of the world’.71 ‘[T]he spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.’72 The schizophrenia that characterises so many of Dick’s ‘heroes’ is possibly a reasonable response to an insane world. In Blade Runner and its source novel, the confusion between human and non-human pervades the world: objects like traffic lights and billboards talk to everyone all the time. Dick once remarked: ‘The ultimate in paranoia is not when everyone is against you but when everything is against you. Instead of “My boss is plotting against me,” it would be “My boss’s phone is plotting against me.”’73
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? androids (or andys) are given as incentives to encourage emigration to the off-world colonies, but since they don’t like it out there any more than the humans do, they keep making their way back to Earth. The San Francisco where the action occurs is a site of decay: emotional, physical and bodily. Citizens dial up desired emotions (for example, ‘The desire to watch TV no matter what’s on’) on their ‘mood organs’ and experience an ersatz empathy with a virtual religious martyr. Humans, then, are as programmed with false feelings as their android enemies.
Electric Sheep is Dick’s most sustained exploration of the ‘nature’ of the non-human. Androids emphasise the definition of the human by displacing mere biology as the sole, sufficient, condition. The underlying issue is not whether we can give a machine the qualities of the human, but whether the human has lost its humanity; whether it has become, in fact, a machine. In writing Electric Sheep, Dick had been thinking of the Third Reich: ‘With the Nazis, what we were essentially dealing with was a defective group mind, a mind so emotionally defective that the word “human” could not be applied to them.’74 There is much less opportunity for identification with the replicants in the novel than in the film, as Dick pointed out:
Among toys
To me, the replicants are deplorable. … They are essentially less than human entities. … Ridley, on the other hand, said he regarded them as supermen who couldn’t fly. He said they were smarter, stronger and had faster reflexes than humans. ‘Golly!’ that’s all I could think of to reply to that one. I mean, Ridley’s attitude was quite a divergence from my original point of view, since the theme of my book is that Deckard is dehumanized through the tracking down of the androids.75
Here Dick protests a bit too much. In fact, his text is inconsistent, shifting scene by scene, with the androids taking on the role of victims at some points and of villains at others. Nevertheless, the theme of dehumanisation is central to Electric Sheep and to most of Dick’s prodigious output.
Philip Dick gives us two oppositions: Human/Android and Human/Inhuman. The first is ultimately unimportant, while the second is urgent. The division between human and android raises a central philosophical question: how do you know you’re human? The second opposition leads to a moral problem: what does it mean to be human? If some postmodern theorists and artists would reject the relevance of this second question, finding in it a nostalgic and outmoded humanist attitude, there should be no doubt that this is what lies at the centre of his work.
In the world as defined by Philip K. Dick, the human is that which experiences empathy (by contrast, in the work of Isaac Asimov, adaptable intelligence is the determining factor). But if androids have no feelings, then it’s worth noting that blade runners are not supposed to feel anything (hatred, fear, lust) for their victims. In the novel, Deckard confidently locates the difference between humans and their imitations: ‘An android doesn’t care what happens to another android,’ to which someone logically replies, ‘Then you must be an android.’
The novel and the film are filled with tests: there are tests to determine who’s human, who’s fit to reproduce, who’s fit to emigrate. The obsession with boundaries, definitions and standards indicates that these definitions are in crisis. In Dick’s novel, the Voight-Kampff scale measures empathic response – but there is discussion that human schizophrenics, those suffering from a ‘flattening of emotional affect’, would also fail the test. But R.D. Laing and, later, Fredric Jameson and others have argued that our whole postmodern culture inculcates a ‘waning of affect’ and that ‘schizophrenia’ is an increasingly common and even appropriate response. In a postmodern world of mass media, spectacle and simulation, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the difference between humans and replicants …
Dolls
Blade Runner performs an ingenious variation on the definitions of humanity that dominated science fiction film in the 1950s: in I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), The Thing from Another World (1951), Invaders from Mars (1953) or Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), humans simply have feelings while non-humans simply do not. Blade Runner denaturalises that division and subtly inverts it: what has feelings is human. Thus the film is as much about Deckard’s recovery of empathic response as it is about Batty’s development of such a response.
The Human/Android division, then, is the narrative vehicle for the deeper and more urgent distinction to be made between Human and Inhuman. The science fiction writer and critic Norman Spinrad has put it elegantly:
What ultimately makes the androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? less than human is not their synthetic origin, but like the Nazis in The Man in the High Castle, their lack of caritas, their inability to empathize with the existential plight of other life forms caught in the same multiverse. What raises the android Roy Batty to human status in Blade Runner is that, on the brink of his own death, he is able to empathize with Deckard. What makes [Dick’s protagonists] true heroes is that ultimately, on one level or another, whatever reality mazes they may be caught in, they realize that the true base reality is not absolute or perceptual, but moral and empathetic …76
Simmel wrote that a sense of ‘reserve’ is necessary to surviving in the city: ‘the metropolitan type … creates a protective organ for itself against the profound disruption with which the fluctuations and discontinuities of the external milieu threaten it’.77 Replicants, supposedly lacking emotions and empathy, are thus exemplary city dwellers. Capitalist relations encourage rational rather than emotional reactions, but doesn’t an attitude of ‘formal justice’ combined with ‘unrelenting hardness’ describe blade runners at least as much as their adversaries?
Effective blade runners won’t – can’t – acknowledge any resemblance between replicant and human. Empathy, for a blade runner, would make it impossible to function; that ‘reserve’ must be kept in place. Upon meeting Rachael, who thinks she’s human,
The unicorn
Deckard confronts her manufacturer: ‘How can it not know what it is?’ He falls in love with her, but in an unfilmed scene another blade runner tells him: ‘You might as well go fuck your washing machine.’ Simmel understood this defensive and ultimately self-defeating reaction: ‘We see that the self-preservation of certain types of personalities is obtained at the cost of devaluing the entire objective world, ending inevitably in dragging the personality downward into a feeling of its own valuelessness.’78 Blade Runner takes place at what must be the end of this process, with a humanity that has been dragged downward and devalued.
Deckard must learn to regard the replicants as more than mere commodities. J.F. Sebastian, a genetically defective designer for the Tyrell Corporation, already exists somewhat outside the cycle of pervasive commercialism, and he resembles Geppetto more than a capitalist tycoon. For him, synthetic life forms provide companionship: ‘I make friends’, he tells Pris, referring to his playful automata (and incidentally providing a perfect illustration of science fiction’s playful language).
New Bodies for New Worlds
When they meet, Roy Batty tells Sebastian, ‘We’re not computers… we’re physical.’ The robot, android, replicant and cyborg are technological selves that are really correlates of century-old technological anxieties. Wolfgang Schivelbusch reminds us of the trauma of industrialisation, exemplified by industrial accidents:
It must be remembered that railway accidents have this peculiarity, that they come upon the sufferers instantaneously without warning, or with but a few seconds for preparation, and that the utter helplessness of a human being in the midst of the great masses in motion renders these accidents peculiarly terrible.79
The merely human body wasn’t designed for the stresses and shocks of a mechanical world. The body had to be armoured against modernity. Superheroes appeared on the American industrial landscape in the 1930s – the Man of Steel had the right stuff to exist in the Machine Age. As embodied by the new bodies of superheroes, robots or replicants, the ‘utter helplessness of the human being’ could be overcome – technological trauma produced its own antidote; or, as the poster for Blade Runner put it, ‘Man has made his match …’.
In cyberpunk fantasies of technological symbiosis, control of one’s self was actually enhanced by the body’s disappearance either into cyberspace or cyborg forms. The dissolution of the body, and its replacement by its own technological simulation, was repeatedly posited as empowering. Technology was internalised, bound to a sense of self that was strengthened but which somehow remained basically the same.
Donna Haraway redefined the value of the cyborg in ways that are more relevant to Blade Runner’s ambiguities. In her well-known ‘manifesto for cyborgs’ she argued for a feminist rereading of technological being in a world that has blurred distinctions between organism and machine. This is a ‘border war’ with high stakes: ‘Our machines are disturbingly lively,’ she noted (and this is Deckard’s problem in a nutshell), ‘and we ourselves frighteningly inert.’80 The cyborg has some advantages for a feminist (or otherwise radical) politics: first of all, it can’t be regarded as natural. The dualisms that structure too much Western thought can be supplanted through a cyborg mythology: ‘A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualities without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted.’81 Just as Michel Foucault declared: ‘man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge; he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form’.82 For Haraway, we are all ‘theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs’.83 Her ‘cyborg politics’ opens the idea of technological symbiosis as a dynamic exploration, not just a masculine fantasy of ‘natural’ mastery and domination over nature, technology and ‘others’. Rather than static armoured bodies of the Schwarzenegger variety, Haraway’s cyborgs are fluid, active participants in the making or remaking of their selves and their culture.
New Selves
Blade Runner appeared just as issues of identity – bodily anxiety and broader tensions around gender, race and subjective experience – were making themselves felt in popular culture. In science fiction, which was becoming increasingly central to mass culture, aliens, cyborgs and androids played out a range of identity-constructions and formations. Within the fractal geographies of Blade Runner, the ‘human’ was increasingly open to question. What was human, and what in the world could it do in this world?
In many ways, of course, the film is very traditional (that is, reactionary) regarding gender and racial politics. Critics, Andrew Ross prominent among them, have concentrated exclusively upon the film’s demonstrable anxiety over urban ethnic pluralism. Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard becomes an archetypal alienated white male battling his way through – and, in the original release, out of – an extended inner-city ghetto environment (Ford has made a career out of playing such action figures, including Indiana Jones, Han Solo and Jack Ryan, although without the bizarre masochism one finds in the work of Michael Douglas). There is clearly something to this reading of the film’s racial politics, especially in relation to its representation of Asians. In the early 1980s, the expanding economic influence of Japan yielded waves of hysterical racism in the United States, and Blade Runner and (even more) Ridley Scott’s next film, Black Rain (1989), and Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun (1993) are products of that moment. Further, a more generalised urban paranoia did find a voice in cyberpunk, as well as in many of the so-called ‘action-adventure’ films of the 1980s and 90s. Both of John Carpenter’s Escape films seem like simple white-revenge movies (especially in Escape from LA (1996), when Snake, our hero, sinks a full-court shot and the black, Asian and Chicano crowd goes wild). Blade Runner, however, is more complicated, and to stop the analysis of the film’s racial imagery at this point is to ignore significant parts of the film’s metaphorical system.
There is an acutely embarrassing moment in the original release of Blade Runner in which Deckard characterises his boss as someone who would once have used the word ‘nigger’ to describe blacks. The word hangs in the air of the movie theatre, ugly and over-obvious; quite out of keeping with the world of ‘replicants’, ‘blade runners’ and the film’s other neologistic creations. The idea of racial prejudice is still central to the film, although not as explicitly as in that voice-over, nor as much as in Dick’s original. In the book, an advertisement for androids promises to ‘duplicate the halcyon days of the pre-Civil War Southern states!’ These ‘custom-tailored humanoid robots’ could serve as ‘tireless field hands’, the ad suggests. Blade Runner preserves Dick’s analogy, as well as the ‘passing narrative’ of escaped slaves that underlies the novel. Replicants are passing for human rather than for white, but at one time, of course, blacks were not ‘defined’ as human by American slave-holding interests.
Kaja Silverman has offered a compelling interpretation of the racial elements in the film, arguing that the metaphor of the replicants repositions slavery as a state of political being rather than a racial, and therefore natural, condition. Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty might look like a poster child for the Aryan Nation, but as the leader of the slave rebellion he actually becomes the deepest embodiment of ‘blackness’ in the film – Silverman argues that his ‘hyperbolic whiteness’ separates slavery and race, while also displacing the white male human from his normally privileged position within such hierarchies.
So, if on one level Blade Runner plays to traditional perceptions of race, it also manages to confound simple definitions and distinctions. Again, the more deeply one penetrates the opulent visual surface, the more unstable categories and meanings become. This extends to the film’s overall treatment of gender issues, which are more complex here than in Dick’s novel. All three of the major female characters are replicants (two are shot in the back by the panicky Deckard). Replicants are not permitted to compete with humans – their four-year lifespan artificially tilts the playing field – they’re not even allowed to exist on this planet. So the replicants are doubly marginalised, aligned with cultural definitions of ‘black’ and ‘woman’ – they are doubly defined as victims within the constructs of Western culture. But once again the film refuses simply to ‘naturalise’ its victims as either women or blacks – Roy is as hyperbolically male and heterosexual as he is hyperbolically white. What defines the replicants as victims is the status they’re given; it is their treatment by humans, and nothing inherent about ‘them’, that makes them who and what they are. As far as being ‘human’ goes, they are simply defined right out of existence. This is common in synthetic human narratives; it’s central to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, to name two.
Gaff
There is, incidentally, an additional ironic reversal: replicants supposedly lack empathy, linking them not to the feminine but to masculine rationality, self-control and willing repression (like Star Trek’s Mr Spock). And yet from the first scene, in which Leon squares off against an annoyingly smug blade runner, the emotional life of the replicants clearly exists, and they continue to demonstrate ample empathy, at least for one another, as the narrative progresses. They are not just physically and intellectually superior to humans; in the dehumanised world that Blade Runner presents, replicants are ‘more human than human’, just as Tyrell proclaims. Their inferior status is arbitrary, solely a function of legal definition and the ‘failsafe mechanism’ of a severely restricted lifespan.
Making History
Science fiction describes the commodification of memory, which can produce an ersatz humanity. In Trumbull’s Brainstorm, recorded sensory experiences can be sold – a consumer can ‘jack in’ to a range of virtual activities. When its inventor discovers that it also records memories, he prepares a tape for his estranged wife. ‘What is it?’ she asks, and he simply answers: ‘Me.’ In ‘Overdrawn at the Memory Bank,’ by John Varley (1976), citizens can store their memories as a hedge against future bodily catastrophe. In an era of bodily transformation, change and dissolution, the fact of physical existence doesn’t guarantee selfhood. Memory becomes constitutive of the self – its continuity implies a kind of immortality, and the vicissitudes of the flesh become irrelevant.
Fugitive
Replicants are programmed with memories to make them indistinguishable from humans. They’ve been given photographs, visual totems of these artificial memories. ‘Photographs are essentially history,’ Ridley Scott noted, ‘which is what these replicants don’t have.’84 The tangibility of the photograph creates a substitute history that belies the replicants’ artificial origins. Photos nail things down – reality, identity, history – because we believe them to be fundamentally connected to what they depict. Somehow, the light reflecting from a body has been fixed on paper and reaches out to my eye in the present moment. Roland Barthes describes it this way: ‘A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze.’85 A provocative image to consider alongside Blade Runner, a film fairly obsessed with mothers (‘Let me tell you about my mother …’). When Deckard looks at a photo of Rachael with her mother it seems to flicker briefly to life, like the central image in Chris Marker’s time-travel reverie, La Jetée (1964). Did it really happen? Did it ever happen?
A vertiginous outlook
It’s important to remember, however, that memories are not givens, even for humans – we select, distort and misremember. Our pasts are, to some extent, constructions; so then are our selves. In a discussion of memory, the neurologist Oliver Sacks quotes an article from 1956, ‘On Memory and Childhood Amnesia’, by Ernest G. Schachtel:
Memory as a function of the living personality can be understood only as a capacity for the organization and reconstruction of past experiences and impressions in the service of present needs, fears and interests. … Just as there is no such thing as impersonal perception and impersonal experience, there is also no impersonal memory.86
Sacks himself has written a case-study of a man who could not hold anything in his memory for any length of time, and so had to remake his life from moment to moment. Sacks cites Luis Buñuel on the necessity of memory: ‘Life without memory is no life at all. … Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.’ Sacks asks what can be done for such patients. ‘Can we create a time-capsule, a fiction?’87 This is, in effect, exactly what the Tyrell Corporation has done for its Nexus 6 replicants – created a fiction of time and history, and encapsulated it in the form of photographs.
Hunting the hunter
Blade Runner both over and undervalues vision. Its own meticulous, shifting visuals mesmerise and convince, but the images in the film are not so reliable. The inescapable photographs that show up throughout Blade Runner are constantly being handled and flipped over, which emphasises their equally inescapable flatness and depthlessness. Memories are no more indelible than the paper a photograph is printed on; history is devalued as a guarantor of truth, stability and unified meaning. Photographs are constantly invoked as signs, but they are ultimately empty signs, signifiers of nothing.
As synthetic humans, replicants inherently challenge essentialist notions of identity. Identity stands revealed as a construction, the result of conscious or unconscious social and physical engineering. The last line of one of Fancher’s scripts has Deckard reminiscing about his relationship with the ‘retired’ Rachael: ‘I guess we made each other real,’ he complacently reflects. But the value of Blade Runner as it exists, along with so much of Philip Dick’s work, is that it makes us unreal – we are forced, or at least encouraged, to confront our own constructedness, and by confronting our selves, to remake them.
Is Deckard a Replicant?
This point is perhaps missed by all those who need to determine Deckard’s status – sometimes it seems that the question, ‘Is Deckard a replicant?’ has generated more discussion on the Internet than the existence of God. I would argue that asking the question is more important than determining the answer (and, further, that it’s not about Deckard, it’s about us). According to the film’s editor, Terry Rawlings, ‘Ridley himself may have definitely felt that Deckard was a replicant, but still, by the end of the picture, he intended to leave it up to the viewer to decide whether Deckard was one.’88 But it is true that the various permutations of Blade Runner, a film, after all, of exquisite and careful visual touches, have made this a mystery to consider.
The crisis regarding Deckard’s status is more pronounced in the novel than in the film adaptation, as when Deckard tries to call police headquarters and finds no record of his supervisor, his office or himself. Are these implanted memories? At one point, everyone is testing everyone else’s status, and the reader has no idea ‘who’ knows what about ‘whom’. Novel and film sustain this ambiguity towards Deckard: is he human or replicant? Some references are joking and suggestive, rather than definitive. Leon, who as we know only has a four-year lifespan, asks, ‘How long will I live?’, but he’s going to kill Deckard now: ‘Longer than you!’ he snarls.
In the Director’s Cut, without the backup of the retrospective, reassuring narration, Deckard emerged as a character of greater complexity. Where his laconic explanations had once placed him somewhat above the fray, in the Director’s Cut he is clearly on the edge from the start. He has quit the force: ‘retiring’ replicants has no appeal. His panic in the face of the superhuman Nexus 6 replicants is a logical extension of the anxiety that now marks his character throughout. His status as a human – physically, psychically, morally – is increasingly in doubt. He is, quite simply, out of control. No retrospective, reassuring voice-over could disguise that any longer.
While it was pursued less emphatically here than in the novel, there were continual hints that Deckard might be something other than human. What, for example, of the blade runner who meets his demise in the film’s opening scene? Is it a coincidence that he looks and sounds remarkably like Harrison Ford/Rick Deckard? Or are they the same model of blade runner? Isn’t it odd that the headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation and Deckard’s apartment (modelled on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis-Brown House of 1923) are both inspired by Mayan architectural design?89 Why do Deckard’s eyes briefly glow with a red reflection? And how does Gaff know about Deckard’s unicorn reverie? Small wonder, then, that Deckard is edgy from the start, and that his anxiety so easily slides into paralysis and panic.
The Deckard debate is, in some ways, a denial of what the film really does offer, which is a double reading: undecidability. Noël Carroll has argued that Citizen Kane was designed to support two entirely contradictory interpretations of Rosebud’s importance to Charles Foster Kane.90 This is somewhat true of Blade Runner as well: Marvin Westmore, the film’s chief make-up artist, noted that ‘a lot of things we did on Blade Runner were “possibly it’s this” or “possibly it’s that’’’, in keeping with Scott’s desire to make a film that was more evocative than explicit.91 To some extent, though, Deckard’s status is undecidable because nobody finally decided.
Some versions of the script made Deckard into an android, others don’t even raise the question. Scott wanted to include hints that Deckard was a replicant, but with all the changes and revisions, it’s no wonder that audiences were baffled.
One might argue that in the original release, Deckard isn’t a replicant, but in the Director’s Cut, he is. Paul Sammon, the author of the definitive ‘making-of’ book on the film, ‘deduces’ that in the Director’s Cut, ‘Rick Deckard is a replicant’.92 The answer lies, as it does for others, in Deckard’s ‘unicorn reverie’, which may connect to the origami unicorn that Gaff later leaves in Deckard’s hallway. According to the Blade Runner FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) list on the Internet: ‘Gaff left the unicorn outside Deckard’s apartment because he knew that Deckard dreamt of a unicorn. If Gaff knew what Deckard was dreaming, then we can assume that Deckard was a replicant himself, and Gaff knew he would be dreaming of a unicorn.’ In other words, the unicorn image was implanted, and Gaff knew it.
But the, to my mind, obsessive desire to answer the question has always seemed misguided. If Deckard is a replicant, then what’s the moral of this story? The issue of human definition is clearly – to me – central to the work, and thus the ambiguity is crucial. Many of the clues to Deckard’s status could certainly be taken metaphorically. The unicorn, for example, could easily represent Rachael: it is, after all, an archetype. Murray Chapman’s FAQ reasonably links it to the unicorn symbolism in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, and the girl who was ‘different to other horses’. ‘Rachael is (and always will be) a replicant among humans, and will be different, like a unicorn among horses, because of her termination date.’ And when Rachael asks Deckard whether he has ever taken the Voight-Kampff test, she may not be asking about his literal human status, but about his capacity for the empathy that the machine measures.
On the other hand, for Slavoj Žižek, philosopher and cultural theorist, the most radical implications of Blade Runner depend upon Deckard’s standing revealed as a replicant. Blade Runner, he argues, is valuable in that it stages a confrontation with our own ‘replicant-status’. Žizek is writing through the discourse of Lacanian psychoanalysis, in which the self never belonged as fully to itself as Descartes’s cogito implied or as fully as we want it to (Deckard and Descartes are homophones, he notes, a pun for which I’d give Philip Dick full credit). ‘Our’ replicant-status is not just a function of our constructedness (old news, really), but of the awareness of the void (the gap between ‘our’ and ‘selves’) that follows its recognition. It is the replicants’ obvious knowledge of their own manufacture that makes them our (or Žižek’s) ‘impossible fantasy-formation’.93
Even before the advent of what is known as ‘the society of the spectacle’ the cogito was incomplete, but the exteriorisation of memory in the information age makes that fundamental error all the more evident. Computer networks and satellite systems make the ‘decentred’ or ‘virtual’ self newly unavoidable, but they hardly invented it.94 Replicants expose the hubristic self-misconception of the human – the mythos of the self-sustaining ‘self’ becomes all the more untenable. Žižek writes: ‘It is only when … I assume my replicant-status’ that ‘I become a truly human subject.’95 It is when we acknowledge our own replicant-status that we come face to face with ourselves as that irresolvable paradox: the ‘thing’ that ‘thinks’.96
Masquerading in the City
Žižek has criticised the Director’s Cut as inadequate and compromised regarding Deckard’s status. He wants Deckard to be unambiguously a replicant and to confront that reality: for him it is in that confrontation that the film’s meaning lies. But there is someone else at the film’s centre who does confront his post-human condition – gleefully – and while Deckard/Descartes remains mired in agonised denial, Roy Batty (batty, nutty, kooky) is romping through the film, the ‘thing’ that thinks and fights and pouts and plays and poses. More human than human, right? Batty provides a kind of antidote to Deckard’s panicky blandness. After killing Tyrell, Batty rides the elevator back down the side of the pyramid. In one of the film’s best subjective moments, he gazes heavenward in what Hampton Fancher points out is ‘the only shot in the whole movie where you see stars. And they’re moving away from him, as if he’s some kind of fallen angel.’97
Roy is a perfect denizen of the modern city; he embodies its kaleidoscopic essence. The city, after all, is a masked ball, a place of emergence and submergence, opulent display and clandestine transformation. Criminals might benefit from the possibilities the concentrated city offered for anonymity, but they weren’t alone. ‘In retrospect it is clear that the laws of the costume ball have governed Manhattan’s architecture,’ Rem Koolhaas has claimed. ‘The costume ball is the one formal convention in which the desire for individuality and extreme originality does not endanger collective performance but is actually a condition for it.’98
Rutger Hauer’s fabulously campy performance turns Roy into a figure of resistance and play. ‘Gosh … you’ve got a lot of great toys here,’ he tells Sebastian, his voice quivering with lust. He exhibits real joie de vivre (‘I want more life, fucker’), but demonstrates even more joy in performance. He purses his lips, taunts, teases, confesses remorse, paints his face and in general eroticises the world. In a few drafts of Fancher’s screenplay, Roy’s appearance in the final battle is described as being ‘somewhere between a Comanche warrior and a transvestite’.99 He jumbles male and not-male, white and not-white, human and not-human.
The protracted battle between Deckard and Roy extends from Sebastian’s home to other apartments in the near-abandoned Bradbury Building to the rooftops. Throughout this penultimate sequence there is a constant straining upward, a physicality reminiscent of the final showdown with the spider in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957). There, too, the scenario forces the protagonist upwards in a straining gesture towards human triumph over an anti-human enemy: these are climbs towards transcendence. But Blade Runner will complicate these oppositions. Roy’s death was the last sequence to be filmed, and while the exhaustion on Harrison Ford’s face as he watches his ‘enemy’ die is real enough, it is also the exhaustion of humanity on display.
The only sign of transcendence that the Director’s Cut provides is the shot of the dove that soars skyward at the point of Roy’s death: easily the most banal image in the film. One problem with the shot is that Roy is hardly a transcendent figure; he is transgressive, and never more so than in that prolonged battle as the prey assumes the role of the hunter. Roy becomes, first of all, a kind of homophobic nightmare: Deckard’s panic grows beyond rational bounds as lesions appear on Roy’s skin and his beauty begins to decay. And Roy manages to track Deckard from room to room, from floor to ceiling, and even through walls and across abysmal gaps: as with the moving cameras of urban cinema, Roy transgresses the given topographies of urban space.
The city is a site for masquerade, a metamorphic zone, a place to disappear and reappear. The performative side of Roy Batty breaks down traditionally drawn distinctions between the authentic and the artificial, or theatrical, and is easily aligned with Richard Dyer’s discussion of a similar dissolve in gay response to the musical.100 Batty is fighting for his life, but it’s his choice to transform that battle into a form of deadly play. It becomes an opportunity to slide from one persona to another, a performance of self that becomes an implicit challenge to Deckard’s stoic desire to preserve the ‘real’. The replicant’s identity is surely real, but it’s also as metamorphic as the urban space through which he moves.101 The fluid positionality of Blade Runner’s urbanism is matched by Roy’s equally fluid personality.
A lived-in future