an extinct
species
by Douglas Messerli
Hampton Francer and David Peoples
(screenplay, based on a novel by Philip K. Dick), Ridley Scott (director) Blade Runner /
1982, Director’s Cut 1992, Final Cut 2007
So much has been written about
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner that I am
not sure I really have anything to add to that body of commentary. Let me just
state that its languidly-told story is not really what interests me and can be
summarized in a few sentences. The time is 2019. Four short-lived
replicants—artificially-created human beings with only a four-year life
span—have somehow escaped from their off-planet handlers, returning to earth in
an attempt to extend their existence. Retired Blade Runner, Rick Deckard
(Harrison Ford), is persuaded to return to his former job to round them up and
“retire” them—in short, to murder them. Presumably, since they are not “real”
humans and they have super-human strengths with the predilection to brutally
kill any human that gets in their way, Deckard and his superiors have no qualms
with the moral dilemmas this situation creates.
That is, at least, until Deckard meets Rachael (Sean Young), a beautiful
“experimental” replicant working in the offices of the Tyrell Corporation—the
company that creates these all too-human machines—and falls in love. When he is
ordered to add this unknowing beauty to his list, he is suddenly met with a
conundrum: can he, like God, destroy the very species that has been created in
his own own image? Is it permissible to kill the other figures (Roy, Priss,
Leon, and Zhora) and leave Rachel to her short-termed life? That question is about all the movie ponders,
having little interest in pursuing the real questions it has raised, including
the question of how to define life itself. If Rachel is a man-created machine
of loveliness, what is Deckard? Evidently director Ridley Scott thought his
central figure was himself a replicant, a man deluded by memories implanted in
his mechanism. But then, mightn’t we all be replicants of a sort, with just
slightly more extended warranties?
So much for the profundities of this somewhat overrated piece of
speculative fiction. What matters here is not whether Deckard will be able to
track down the villains (he succeeds in all but one case) or jump into the sack
with his bio-chemically created object of desire (he does), but what kind of world
would create such Frankenstein-like monsters and develop a force to deal with
them when they run amok. It’s Los Angeles, of course! Even if it doesn’t look
entirely like it does today, it has the feel of the early 21st century city.
Just as in all the other Los Angeles films I have written about, nearly
all the central figures are outsiders, including Deckard, seeking a better or
extended life. In terms of our “real” world, the replicants are little
different from the hundreds of others who flock to the city for those same
reasons. Only the replicants are not allowed to return to earth, the society in
general fearing their existence.
That society that director Ridley Scott conjures up is a city of vast
proportions that, while containing coldly empty and desolate streets, is filled
nonetheless with a frenzy of international foods, languages, and
entertainments. Normalized English has been replaced by argot, and a strange
blend of Japanese-and-Spanish influenced advertising floats above the
gargantuan apartment complexes (created in miniature by my artist-friend
Michael McMillan) in neon-lit and digitally enhanced blimps.
Quiet and privacy have disappeared.
Violence, apparently, is omnipresent. It certainly feels like the Los
Angeles I know. As the replicant Roy (Rutger Hauer) puts it: “I’ve seen things
you wouldn’t believe.”
Today we are just a heartbeat away from the time when, as in this world,
machines have been created to help the policemen like Deckard administer the Voight
Comp test which, with just a series of 20 or more questions, can probe anyone’s
mind in order to determine whether someone is a “real” human or a “created”
one.
Oddly enough, although predictable when you think of the Frankenstein
original, although the replicants are passionate individuals fighting for the continuance
of life, their creators such as Eldon Tyrell and, in particular the brilliant
geneticist J. F. Sebastian (William Sanderson) are rather sexually neutered,
and in Sebastian’s example, child-like beings who have no evident sexual
interests—although Tyrell oozes evil desire in the manner of so many corporate
CEO’s as represented in film—except for playing with their own wondrously
invented “toys.” But then, like the replicates, Sebastian, who suffers from
premature aging, also does not have long to live.
In desperate need of extended life Roy Batty (Ruger Hauer) and Pris
(Daryl Hannah) along with their fellow replicants Leon Kowalski (Brion James)
and Zhora Salome (Joanna Cassidy) seek out Tyrell and other creators who
confess that they can do nothing to save them.
They first seek out an eyes specialist who, when he denies their help,
they destroy. Deckard soon tracks down both Leon and Zhora and individually
kills them.
Pris and Roy visit the genius Sebastian, through him obtaining entry to
Tyrell.
Faced with his creation Roy, who confesses that he has done “Questionable
things,” Tyrell praises his Frankenstein-like son for his advanced design and
accomplishments. Kissing his creator fully on the lips, Roy crushes his eyes into
his skull in a horrific act of Oedipal murder, destroying the father at the
very moment that he symbolically makes love to his mother. Sebastian, the child
genius, is done away with soon after.
When Pris meets a terrible death, the final battle is played out between
Deckard and Roy back in Sebastian’s apartment, where Roy attempts to fight despite
the fact that his body is already beginning to fail, chasing Deckard through
the building (filmed in the beautiful staircases and hallways of downtown Los
Angeles’ Bradbury Building), and onto roof. Deckard attempts to jump from the building
onto another roof but fails, left hanging from the edge. Roy jumps across with
ease, where it appears he will witness Deckard’s death. But strangely as Deckard’s
grip loosens, Roy pulls him up onto the other roof to save him, lamenting that
his memories will soon “be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
It appears that despite his fierce attempt of survival, Roy after all
has a soft heart. But it just may be that, as I have already suggested, Roy recognizes
Deckard as a kind of flawed replicant of an earlier period, a more intellectual
breed, but still a being without a true position in the society which he has
been created to protect.
Although Deckard has an apartment, throughout the film he seems
uncomfortable there (with the outside as intrusive as it is, so might we all
be), and along with nearly all the other replicant figures the film portrays,
he seems more at home on the streets.
In the earliest cut of the film, he and Rachel retire to a Montana idyll
in order, presumably, to live out their days in a more hospitable environment.
But in both the Director’s Cut (the version I have viewed most often) and in
the Final Cut they remain locked away in the dark city, pondering the meaning,
as does the audience, of the origami unicorn left behind by the police
assistant, Gaff (Edward James Olmos). Are they both, in their devotion to and
love of one another, a now extinct species? If so, Deckard himself has helped
to destroy his own kind, defining himself as another rebel without a true
home—or even a self-determined cause.
Yet, I think it would be a mistake, despite director Scott’s feeling
that Deckard himself is a replicant, to definitively assign him that position.
Like Rachel, he does not believe that he is yet another merely monstrous
creation. And as Rachel reminds him, as a challenge to her results, he has
never himself taken the Voight test.
Critic E. E. Murphy, writing in Strange Horizons in 2026 makes
some important observations:
“In Blade Runner, the people
and the “robots” have switched roles. Deckard is passionless, the police chief
Bryant is suspicious and eager to kill. But the replicants are full of life,
full of passion and hunger. Roy Batty sticks his hand into boiling water, gives
himself stigmata in an attempt to feel more, and tells his creator he wants
“more life.” He and his cadre search for
a future where Deckard dwells on the past: his former career, his ex-wife, his
anonymous black-and-white photographs of long-dead people, and a piano he
doesn’t play.
Where Deckard has a state-sponsored “normal” life killing minorities and
reifying corporate patriarchal control, the replicants are the opposite, are queer
[italics mine]. Zhora and Pris are sex workers, Leon is a photographer, and
Roy, with his bleach-blonde hair and affinity for leather, is at least throwing
up some handkerchiefs. During his encounter with the designer of his eyes,
Batty even misquotes the great liberationist poet William Blake. If you need
more evidence, he kisses and kills the actual patriarch of the movie, Eldon
Tyrell. Not much more queer and revolutionary than that.”
While Deckard administers the Voight Comp test to
Rachel earlier in the film, she asks him, mockingly, “Is this testing whether
I’m a replicant or a lesbian Mr. Deckard?”
Another critic, Daisy Sprenger, writing in the McGill Daily,
responds, “Perhaps the answer should be…both!” Although most have interpreted the
work as a dystopic commentary on the rise of AI and the dangers of rising technology,
Sprenger wonders:
“But what if the film is [also] an
allegory for something else; for instance, queerness in a world of
institutionalized homophobia? Though the evidence towards this conclusion is
thin, it still serves as an interesting thought experiment. For then the film
becomes not a cop chasing robots, but a reiteration of the everyday police
persecution and discrimination against LGBTQ+ community. Seen in this light,
the question of whether Rick Deckard is a replicant himself adds further
nuance. The cruel irony persecuting other replicants becomes a poignant
allegory for internalized homophobia and denial.”
In
my original 2014 commentary I end with the argument that perhaps only in his
love of the film’s surviving replicant, Rachel, will Deckard be able to become
symbolically whole, a human who feels and truly experiences love. But by film’s
end neither he nor Rachel, another failed experiment, have not yet reached that
place, both remaining as somewhat officiously cold lovers, desirous perhaps but
still unable to consummate their love. If nothing else, in Blade Runner,
Deckard, as Murphy summarizes, learns that replicants matter, just as I have long
argued filmmakers, even when it was outlawed, quickly cam to the conclusion
that their films worked better when including queer characters.
Sprenger proposes an oddly similar conclusion to mine suggesting that
even if Deckard’s relationship with Rachel is heterosexual, not queer, by choosing
her over his former job as a kind of policeman, he is at least embracing a
rebellious existence.
Perhaps one day he can even answer the taunt tossed out to him by Roy as
they race across the roof before Deckard nearly falls: “Straight doesn’t seem
to be good enough!” As Sprenger points out, if at first Roy seems to simply be
referring to Deckard’s bad aim in his attempt to shoot him down, “when read as
a double entendre for sexual orientation, he is also mocking Deckard for being
so straight laced and rule abiding,” while possibly suggesting, even further,
that playing the role of a heterosexual is against his nature, that as the
paper unicorn Lieutenant Gaff leaves behind, hinting at his true identity, Deckard
is not only something already extinct but a freak of nature, a being is
expiration date is over, just as for the other replicants, on earth. Even as a
heterosexual human, with a replicant he can produce no offspring. Rachel might
as well be a lesbian; in this dystopian society she serves only as an enslaved
machine.
Los Angeles, June 19, 2014; revised January 15, 2026
Reprinted from International Cinema Review (June 19, 2014).
