2017-10-17 On _Blade Runner_
(Permalink: https://mumble.net/~campbell/2017/10/17/on-blade-runner)
[SPOILER ALERT: I don't think _Blade Runner_ really has spoilers, so
I made no attempt to conceal anything from its plot. When I first
saw it years ago, it made almost no impression on me; I thought it
was just a flat atmospheric sci-fi noir. Now, having seen it again
recently prompted by the hubbub around _Blade Runner 2049_, it
seems to me one of the deeper films I've seen, and readily
withstands repeat viewing.]
Was Deckard a replicant? Every aficionado of _Blade Runner_, it
seems, is obsessed with this question, whether or not it is ever
answerable, or perhaps partly because it is not.
What is the difference between a replicant and a human? Tyrell
Corporation's motto is `more human than human'. The best we can say
is that replicants are, on average, stronger and more agile or
sometimes sexier, but worse at empathy. And they die after a
predictable duration. The only reason we consider replicants to be
_inhuman_ is that we are asked to as a stated premise of the film.
And that premise is supposed to justify killing them in the spot.
It doesn't take much imagination to formulate an alternative
hypothesis: The Tyrell Corporation breeds and raises humans in a
controlled, abusive environment -- conditioning or selecting them
for strength and agility, desocializing them, and infecting them
with a virus that kills them on a reliable schedule -- and then
sells them as slaves.
Thus they are prevented from organizing resistance while being
raised in captivity, and any resistance they may attempt to organize
if they escape is thwarted after a modest time. The abuse of
desocialization leaves them with impaired empathy, but it is
commercially useful for slaves to empathize with their masters in
order to serve them better, so it is in Tyrell's economic interest
to mitigate the damage of the abusive environment, perhaps with some
kind of therapy to implant false memories.
The Voight-Kampff test is apparently a glorified polygraph test.
This pseudoscientific contraption serves not to distinguish lies
from truths as the polygraph test does, but to distinguish the slave
race from the human race. The idea of making that distinction is
not new -- there is a long history of `scientific racism' inventing
such distinctions to serve the convenient purpose of retroactively
rationalizing the subjugation of entire peoples into slavery, an
idea explored further by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields in
their book _Racecraft_.
We first meet our protagonist Deckard as he attempts to live his
life freely, only to be arrested by the police and denied the
opportunity to finish his sushi. The police want him to come out of
retirement to `retire' some replicants.
Bryant, his sometime police supervisor, can't simply ask him --
Bryant knows he wants nothing to do with it. So Bryant has abused a
position of power to arrest Deckard and compel him to again serve as
an agent of the system of slavery, enforcing it by killing the
escapees.
Deckard fancies himself to be not a racist -- a kind of enlightened
white moderate liberal. In the voiceover (omitted in some cuts) he
derisively compares Bryant's use of the slur `skin job' to the use
of `nigger' by cops in history books. And he's willing to sleep
with a replicant, and persuade himself it is for love.
He even seems to have a thought or two kicking around in his head
about systems of exploitation: when he tries to gain access to
Zhora's dressing room -- whether to administer a Voight-Kampff test,
or just to kill her more discreetly to avoid upsetting passers-by --
the badly concealed ruse he invents on the spot is as a bureaucrat
studying the exploitation of burlesque artists by theatre managers.
Zhora's response is understandable impatience at the clueless idiot
badgering her about a world that is so painfully obviously rife with
exploitation far beyond the theatre. Her weary incredulity at
Deckard's cluelessness concisely reflects many of the sentiments
that are circulating today in response to those who are baffled by
how long Harvey Weinstein perpetuated his own personal system of
sexual exploitation, three and a half decades after _Blade Runner_
was written.
But whatever thoughts Deckard has about exploitation, they fall
short of serious reflection on his own station.
Two short scenes later, Deckard is under attack by the replicant
Leon. Rachael, Tyrell's personal replicant who escaped, saves
Deckard's life by killing Leon herself.
At this point, the threats to Deckard's existence are -- perhaps --
the two remaining escaped replicants Roy and Pris, if they are even
aware of him. The threats to Rachael's existence? Both Deckard
personally, whose job it is to kill every last replicant, and the
entire institution of the state enforcing a system of slavery.
Rachael, in desperation, begs Deckard for mercy. Deckard reads it
as a transaction: Rachael saved his life, so he'll save hers.
Beyond that transaction, to any neutral observer, the imbalance of
power is palpable. To Deckard, infatuated with Rachael's sexiness
after scrutinizing her as a subject under an unusually long
Voight-Kampff test, it is suddenly convenient.
So he rapes her. And he rationalizes to himself that the sexual
slavery he has just coerced her into -- as a condition for his
protection from death by the state of which he is an agent -- is
love.
All the replicants are desperate. All they want is to live a normal
life like everyone else, but they are hunted like prey. Whether one
thinks violence is ever _justified_, it should come as no _surprise_
that Leon, in the circumstances unimaginably far beyond his control,
had lashed out at and tried to kill Deckard.
Roy is smarter, and has become crueller. In the agony of learning
from Tyrell himself that nothing can be done to reverse the
predetermined, premature death imposed on him as a replicant, Roy
sadistically murders Tyrell -- Tyrell, who was too obsessed with the
physique of his commercial product to empathize with the terror of
their imposed early mortality, and can't even formulate an apology
for the curse he brought upon them.
Cruel and sadistic as he is, Roy demonstrates empathy and a regard
for human life beyond anyone else in the film when he saves the life
of his killer, Deckard. Thus his killer can listen to his appeal to
empathy for life as a slave -- and can watch him at long last escape
the system of slavery in the only way it allows: in the pyrrhic
freedom of death, as the white dove that flies from his dying body.
Was Deckard a replicant? To focus on this question after seeing
_Blade Runner_'s meditation on the depravity of the institution of
slavery, and on the monsters it turns everyone into -- masters,
slaves, and slave traders alike -- to focus on this question strikes
me like focussing on the question of whether Hitler had Jewish
ancestry after watching _Schindler's List_. It may be an academic
curiosity, but it's a fundamentally confused distraction from the
elephant in the room -- a twisted fixation of a society desperately
trying not to see itself in the mirror.
--
Copyright (c) 2006--2017, Taylor R. Campbell.
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