The Ontology of Blade Runner: How Answering the Replicant Question Devalues the Film
As you rightly inferred before clicking: spoilers ahead.
The 1982 film, Blade Runner, is my personal favorite. While I'm not a connoisseur of movies or other fictional programs on our screens, I recognize the value of the medium and appreciate it when done well. Story-telling through audio-visual mediums like film is an art that takes a talent of intuition few could be successful at.
How do we measure success for film? Is it box-office performance at the time of release? Sales of the film decades later? By the opinion of today's elite critics or, perhaps, an average of elite critic views over the decades? I have no idea. I can only speak for why I enjoyed the film when I first saw it as a pre-teen and why I continue to enjoy it into my adulthood.
I loved the film as a pre-teen/teen due to its noir science-fiction atmosphere. It evoked a darkness and beauty through its visuals and music that both depressed and lifted my spirits [*1].
But the true value of the film that stands the test of time is its questioning of what it means to be human. Perhaps other science fiction stories have handled the question better, but none have done so in the visual and auditory realm of film with such foreboding beauty, at sunset of the era for practical special-effects.
Rick Deckard, a special agent of the police called a Blade Runner, is coercively tasked with assassinating escaped manufactured beings of mostly flesh and blood called replicants, which are mostly used for off-world slave labor but are illegal on Earth. The replicants Deckard hunts are fugitives who killed 23 off-world colonists. The audience later learns the replicants came to Earth in order to meet their makers who they presume might help them override a four-year lifespan imposed on them through their creation.
The replicants in the film are dangerous killers, but some killings might be justified. Was the replicants' killing of 23 colonists in an effort to break free justified? Twenty-three might be excessive, even when assuming the replicants were unjustly enslaved, if the goal was just to escape. But maybe not, depending on the circumstances. The film leaves this scenario vague on purpose by not showing us what happened, so the audience can consider the question. While it'd be visually more appealing to have an action scene of the replicants' initial escape, more details of the incident would shade the ethics of hunting the killer replicants or justifying the replicants' killings. The film would become more political and less ontological.
By political, I mean the use of arts like film to evoke an emotional response in order to orient the audience's belief on proper public policy and cultural norms toward those of the art's creators. The line between this and the definition of propaganda is blurry. The more preachy a film gets with its messaging, the more we can label it propaganda as opposed to art.
The public policy and cultural norms of the current year are transient. What is acceptable today was not acceptable yesterday and will not be acceptable tomorrow. When a film gets too political, it becomes a reflection of the artist's beliefs, at that particular time in history, of his ideal public policy and social norms rather than a timeless work of art future generations can enjoy. Considering most media in our early twenty-first century is controlled by about six corporations [*2], we may also assume any political statement from most films is also a reflection, at least partially, of the management within those corporations' ideal views, since objectionable political or cultural messaging would be rejected by the upper-management allowing the art to begin with.
A film extolling the virtues of social justice in 2021 will be seen as problematic by 2041 standards with leftward cultural progress, or, possibly, degenerate with rightward cultural progress. Rather than preaching a current-year political message aligning with the du jour issues of that year, movies are more timeless when they simply tell an entertaining story and/or get the audience to think more deeply about timeless issues. We can't help but be exposed to the hot takes of journalists disguised as news every time we walk into an airport or gym or turn on our devices. Using movies and programs to reinforce political messages trumpeted by journalists might be good strategy for propaganda, but it isn't good art. And for at least half of the potential audience that doesn't share those views, it's annoying, especially when done ham-fistedly.
Central to whether Blade Runner is an ontological exploration of the difference between man and machine is whether, as the film vaguely hints, Deckard himself might be a replicant. If Deckard is definitively a replicant, the audience's sympathy more squarely falls to the replicants. Since Deckard is the protagonist, we, the audience, align with him. So, if Deckard is a replicant, then the replicants are human victims of a corporate and government elite enslaving their class as opposed to wild animals to be put down for public safety.
But if Deckard is a human and the replicants aren't really human beings but malfunctioning machines or wild animals, Blade Runners are just in protecting Earth from these machines or animals, which killed 23 human beings. Since due process doesn't apply to animals or machines we capture that are put down or dismantled for being deemed dangerous after killing humans, why would we have a different standard for replicants?
The original 1982 version of the film allowed such questions to play out without a definitive answer. A few subtle clues leave open the possibility Deckard might be a replicant, but it is never definitively answered. And since we're not sure whether Deckard is a replicant or not, we can more-freely explore different perspectives on the ethical dilemmas presented.
The director, Ridley Scott, later added a director's cut and "final cut" version that answered the question, near definitively, strongly implying Deckard is a replicant. All versions of the film infer replicants are created as adults and false memories are implanted in some replicants to disguise a lack of pre-creation memories. Thus, some replicants might not know they are replicants even though their creators would.
One newly-inserted scene by Scott showed an origami unicorn left outside Deckard's apartment by a fellow Blade Runner. And another scene added a dream of Deckard's with a unicorn. The origami piece infers the police force commanding Deckard know Deckard is a replicant since they know his dreams, which are a predestined product of his creation by his human designers.
With this addition, the film takes a few steps away from the fascinating ontological questions on the line between man and machine and a few steps toward the politics of the '80s through early '00s. The left, circa 2021, defines political conflict as primarily between people of differing racial and sexual-orientations versus their white super-straight male oppressors. But, in the 1980s through the early '00s, when we saw the new versions of the film emerge, leftist politics was still more aligned with the class politics of traditional Marxism, the worker versus the capitalist oppressor and his stooge enforcers in government. With Deckard squarely seen as a replicant, replicants are more squarely seen as the slave class, and the police and corporations creating and using the slaves are the oppressors. Deckard's story is, thus, transformed into one of symbolic class struggle and becomes less of an ontological debate on the essence of a human. In other words, it became current-year, for that time, politics.
But leftists of 2021 would find the film's lack of minority characters and stereotypical application of Asian characters to be problematic, especially the scene where the replicants, all white, torture a poor Asian designer of the replicants' eyes.
The simple presentation of a class struggle between mostly-white characters and mostly-Asian designers is now out-of-vogue. A 2021 politically-aware Blade Runner film would have more characters of color and change the ruler of the Tyrell Corporation in charge of making replicants from an Asian man, Dr. Eldon Tyrell, to a white man (like we see in the 2017 sequel, Blade Runner 2049).
In the real 2049, who knows what the politics-of-the-day will be? The more films are routed in current-year politics, the more out-of-date they seem decades or even years later. Leftists of 2021 will no-doubt see Blade Runner, even with the added scenes making Deckard more-likely a replicant, as problematic, regardless of it being framed more as a class struggle than an ontological exploration. And who knows what wild take leftists of 2049 will have?
Timeless issues presented in a way that raise questions rather than preach about the du jour iteration of the Marxist class struggle make for better art. We see such an issue in the romance between Deckard and Rachel, a replicant serving Dr. Tyrell. Unlike the other replicants, Rachel is not aware she isn't human and discovers the nature of her being in a casually-cruel manner by Deckard describing her most private and intimate memories to her. Rachel hadn't killed any potential innocents like the replicants Deckard is tasked with hunting, and she even saves Deckard's life by killing a replicant attacking him. Rachel's presence is illegal on Earth, but her makers cruelly created her as a servant on Earth, so her existence on Earth can't be her fault. Understandably, Deckard is conflicted about killing her.
In a scene where a flustered Rachel exits Deckard's apartment, Deckard slams the door in front of her and pushes her against the blinds, ordering Rachel to allow Deckard to touch her. To feminists of 2021, this scene might be "problematic," since the line of explicit consent for Deckard's sexual advance is blurred. But to most non-feminist women of all times, it might be arousing depending on how women view Deckard's socio-sexual status.
The best-selling book series for women of all time, 50 Shades of Gray, and its companion novels, illustrate this point in a dance on the line for what a feminist might consider consent. A billionaire male character, portrayed as the highest-possible prize for a woman, tortures a young female. Some feminists might call the encounters rape. But to the extent rape is still defined as a matter of consent, aggressive men dancing on the lines of acceptable consent with their advances is a matter of whether the woman being aggressed enjoys the aggression. If done by a sufficiently-prized male, it becomes a matter of vanity for the woman. What could lift the ego of a homely woman more than to have the highest-prized male be so overcome with desire that he'd force his will upon her? Certainly, different women can have different takes on this, but the over-100-million copies of the 50 Shades series sold speaks for itself [*3]. Exploring this issue should be more about what makes us human than what public policy on the matter should be.
I've heard one famous commentator, Doomcock, generally speaking on our side regarding cultural matters, even state that Deckard being a replicant excuses the otherwise-rapey nature of the scene [*4]. Since Deckard might be struggling with his lack of human social upbringing to form a coherent understanding of sexual relationships, he might not have the requisite agency to be held accountable for his rapeyness. Ironically, women would be even more turned off by the scene and more likely to view it as rape if Deckard is portrayed as insufficiently competent. The more competent and powerful Deckard is, the less likely a woman would see it as rape; she may, instead, be aroused by the scene.
Suffice to say, despite the 100-million-plus book-sales of the 50 Shades series, no man would be wise to create torture rooms and/or forcibly obtain consent with women. Most men know instinctively not to try such acts in real life, the same we know not to do countless things in movies which might look cool on screen but are disastrous. For one example, although feminists might express horror regarding the intimate scene between Deckard and Rachel, they'll utterly ignore the more-chilling scene in the film where Deckard fires his gun at an escaping replicant down a crowded street. Even if Deckard was justified in hunting replicants, firing shots down a crowded street is a morally-horrifying act of reckless disregard for human life.
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FOOTNOTES
[*1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptKGSp4YpUs
[*2] https://www.gaia.com/article/6-corporations-control-most-scientific-publications
[*3] https://nypost.com/2020/01/01/fifty-shades-of-grey-was-the-dominant-book-of-the-decade/
[*4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg-ihsc_phs
[*5] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2017/05/hollywood-narrative-entertainment.html
[*6] https://stratagemsoftheright.blogspot.com/2021/01/planning-for-post-democratic-divided.html
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