Are the replicants in Blade Runner actually human?

Cafe Society
1

My personal theory is that the replicants are basically 100% genetically engineered/cloned human beings, their physical strength or intelligence is boosted by genetic engineering to the limits of humanly possible. Assuming they aren’t shipped sterile by Tyrel they could likely impregnate or be impregnated by “real” humans.

But I see a lot of discussion and reviews where people call them a different species or race or machines etc. I think its because of the confusing descriptions offered by the film, android and replicant, it makes people assume mechanical robots.

I think them being human slaves who have had their genetics fiddled with is KEY to understanding the film, and Deckard’s epiphany. Its a commentary on eternal human nature and failings that with all the technology available slavery is recreated, the film could take place in the Roman empire or early USA really.

The use of terms like replicant and machine by the characters is willful ignorance, if they dehumanize the replicants with these terms they don’t have to face the fact their society is based on outrageous cruelty for its everyday runnings. Not to mention the giant industry that creates them, its in their best interest that the public never realize they are human to keep the money train going. How would Blade Runners feel if they realized they were shooting people running away from sex slavery in the back? This is why the film starts with Deckard an alcoholic, hes close to making that connection and its breaking him mentally.

A piece of evidence used to suggest Deckard is a replicant is when we see in his apartment a lot of old photos, and it is said replicants love to keep photos. I think this is just a piece of irony, ALL humans love taking and keeping photos and mementos! It just shows how dehumanized they have made the replicants, that when they see normal human behaviour in the replicants they call it unusual. Its the cognitive dissonance you always see in slavery or war.

We see Hannibal Chew the engineer who makes eyes, Priss says indignantly “we’re not machines”, Tyrell mentions the replicants are made by “genetic engineers”, we see them bleed, the evidence to me says biological human.

The Voight-Kampff test looks for emotional reactions that are conditioned by living in society, since the replicants first woke up only years before they never learned these. Why would you have an emotional reaction to violence and sex related questions if you have never had morals pounded into you by society? The VK is looking for normal emotional reponses, I’m sure autistics would fail.

And finally while the question of whats real, whats human is important to the film’s theme Deckard being a replicant would make no thematic sense. Deckard is a hunter of runaway slaves who eventually sees through the prejudices his society holds and encourages, and comes to see one of these dehumanized slaves for what she really is and falls in love with her. If he is also one of these slaves the film suffers terribly, Deckard is no longer making a mental leap and a brave risk, hes just doing the logical thing.

2

That’s pretty much what the story is all about.

3

What is it to be human? Aren’t we just cogs in a machine? How do we tell?

4

You’ve nailed the theme of the movie (what is real? what is human?), and in developing this theme, I think the movie requires the replicants to actually be machines. However, I think you have a couple of key points backwards.

In the dystopian future of Blade Runner, the replicants are a contrast to humans in every way. Replicants are all of the “positive” qualities of humans – curiosity, empathy, passion, etc – while humans are thoroughly ‘dehumanized’ and are disinterested, passionless, uncaring, and weary.

The Voight-Kampf test is a pretty good indicator of this. Humans “pass” the test because they DON’T care about the questions. Leon is found out because of his intense emotional connection to the fictional turtle Holden asks him about. Here’s the series of quotes:

When Deckard later watches Holden get blasted by Leon, neither he nor the police chief flinch, or much care beyond the inconvenience to them. When Bryant explains that the replicants jumped the shuttle and killed the crew and passengers, Deckard somewhat sardonically says “Embarrassing.” Repeatedly, human response to violence or death is apathetic disinterest. Compare that to the replicants, who mourn every single death.

I think a key example of this is shown when Deckard is hunting Zhora. She’s described earlier in the film as “a replicant built for murder.” Yet, we never see her kill anyone. Deckard chases after her, firing wildly into a crowd of people trying to shoot her. To the crowd, she’s a frightened woman fleeing for her life when she’s gunned down. Nobody breaks stride or even looks at her.

I think the point of the movie is, it’s our respect for life, our passions, that make us human. Take those away, and we’re the replicants. In Blade Runner, the replicants are more human than humans. There’s a great quote that really drives this point home:

From Leon’s point of view, the lives of humans are meaningless. It’s ironic that the artificial replicants lead short but rich lives, seeing and doing things humans couldn’t imagine. The rote automation of human life, bustling about dark streets, living in a dying world, buying fake animal pets, would by contrast seem empty to the replicants that have crossed interstellar distances to try to save their own lives. Incidentally, their humanity makes them weaker than Deckard - he kills them all, after all - but they likely wouldn’t trade that weakness for anything. Roy is deeply affected by the death of each of the replicants. Pris befriends Sebastian, becoming perhaps his only friend in the world. Deckard finally finds love - in Rachel, another replicant. Replicants are the sole bearers of “humanity” in the film. Incidentally, and despite what Ridley Scott says, I think this is also why Deckard works better as a human – his awakening to what humanity has become is poignant if he’s human. It’s meaningless if he’s a replicant.

5

Would you step into a transporter, be broken down into your molecular makeup and destroyed in the process, recreated on Mars by a machine with the exact information?

Would that be you?

6

I took Leon’s response to the turtle question more like confusion or irritation, almost like he didn’t know how to respond and had realized his cover was blown.

Remember how Rachel’s implanted memories of an average upbringing made her resistent to the test? It was probably only because of Deckard’s suspicions that he kept going so long she tripped up. Didn’t she pass one question because it insinuated lesbianism which she got angry at? If you woke up in a tank of goo a few years before you’d probably miss that, I mean what concept would you have of your own sexuality? To me it seemed the VK was looking to ask oddly phrased or insulting questions that someone with no values or identity would not realize.

I have seen unemotional humans/emotional replicants theme pointed out before and while I did notice it I thought it was just subtle irony and helped further illustrate that the view of the replicants as machines was cognitive dissonance on the human’s part. It struck me a bit like if in a war one faction realizes the other is hiding among the civilian population in a town using them as cover, and the commander observes that the other faction has no respect for human life right before calling in a airstrike to level the town.:stuck_out_tongue:

I showed my father the movie for the first time, we watched the director’s cut without the voice over and happy ending. He said he thought he liked it but wasn’t sure, then later he told me he realized what was bugging him. That Deckard was really the villain, and the replicants the “good guys”, he said what made him realize that finally was the end when Deckard’s life is spared. I told him man thats only the first reappraisal of the film out of many you’ll probably make :slight_smile:

7

You guys are getting mixed up here. The movie is about whether replicants are persons, not whether they are human*. They never get into the biology. I may be mistaken, but I believe you actually have to deduce that the replicants must have human anatomy, since no physical or biological test is capable of distinguishing them from humans, only a psychological one.

And I don’t interpret the VK test the way Astral did. The replicants just are new to emotions and can’t handle them as well as humans. They get overwhelmed. I mean, how uncomfortable would those questions make you? It’s just a hypothetical–it’s easy to shut off your emotions for that.

And if the message was that humans suck, then why is that one girl becoming more like a person considered a good thing?

*The OP clearly uses human to mean a biological construct, not an ethical or even social one.

8

What leads me to my conclusion is that we don’t really see humans express much emotion anywhere else in the movie, much less during the VK test.

9

Thats correct, I feel like the film is much more profound, tragic, ironic and universal/timeless if they are. This is not to say I don’t care about the ethical and social issues, just I feel the story is improved if they are, it makes the whole thing very darkly ironic if a future society whose temperment has become cold and indifferent insults their human slaves who just want to live free by calling them machines. Its so darkly ironic that there is a whole police division devoted to killing these escaped slaves to “protect” the public when they are trying their best to hide and blend in, and Deckard protects the public by firing into a crowd.
*I do concede they are genetically altered, Leon punches a dent in a dumpster and Priss reaches into boiling water to grab an egg.

10

If they are basically human in a biological sense, I wonder if Scott screwed up when he had Pris flop around like a dying fish after Deckard shot her for the first time, which might seem to indicate that they have machine parts (or at least machine programming).

11

It was a time traveling movie in-joke to Kill Bill Vol. II. Elle (also played by Daryl Hannah) flopping around wouldn’t have been funny in either if it wasn’t in both.

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The replicants weren’t machines; they were androids (and they dream of electric sheep). They were designed to work off-Earth, but manage to make their way back from time to time and try to live as humans.

To be even clearer, an android is a manufactured human being, usually made in a factory; the exact nature of how they’re made is usually vague, but it does not involve human reproduction. It is not a robot, which is a machine.

Dick’s point was that these androids, were undetectable as nonhuman without a barrage of complicated tests (You’d think they’d just make them all bright orange). The question is what’s makes someone human?

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AS someone who used to read American pulp SF mags when I was a kid I always thought that the term Android, meant an artificial human that was a BIOLOGICAL construct not metal and glass.

So it was annoying when S.W.s and the Hitchhikers Guide started called robots androids.

As to the o.p. I think that the replicants were mechanical constructs, but were actually people (though not the same as us), and while they had emotions programmed into them, the fluffy ones like love, compassion etc. weren’t included.

14

It dates the movie somewhat re the notion that you can’t tell the replicant from a human being when a simply DNA profile would deduce it immediately if you have the replicants genomes on file, which they certainly should. The movie Bladerunner was released in 1982 which is based a book published in 1968..

Genetic ID testing took off with the advent of PCR analysiswhich debuted in 1983.

The movie was so elegantly done sometimes we forget the science in the movie is 30-50 years old. Trying to parse out whether the replicants were physcially “real” humans or not is going to be an exercise in frustration.

15

With fave beans and Chianti?

16

I was originally going to say I thought of them as sort of ‘organic robots’ akin to Ash and Bishop in the Alien films. But then someone reminded me that, physically, they were impossible to spot, requiring the VK test, so obviously they must be essentially cloned humans (like the also present cloned animals). Considering that Tyrell Corp. gave them four year life spans I also find it impossible to believe that they wouldn’t have also insured that Replicants could not, under any circumstances, procreate. Either with each other or with humans.

Something really disturbing I believe about this film, if & when cloned humans like that are achieved I can’t help but think that this is precisely how it will happen. An incredibly big, wealthy, technically advanced corporation will be the one to first make them, and they will immediately be viewed as nothing other than product, not soul-having sentient beings equal to humans. Even if they’re not immediately exploited like they are in the film, it will still be a long, painful, legal, moral, religious battle to ever consider them equal to us. I just can’t see it happening any other way.

And its a battle that I don’t hope to live to see!

17

The book mentions that in order to collect his bounty the replicant has to undergo a bone marrow test.

18

Just to disagree with a couple small points:

I don’t think she “liked” Sebastian. She was just using him to get access to Tyrell.

But he doesn’t seem to mind killing bunches of other people. Specifically, he kills Sebastian after killing Tyrell. Tyrell, I could sort of see, as Tyrell was the man behind the replicants features (dying in four years, for example), and created this “race” of slaves. But Sebastian? Sebastian was harmless, and wouldn’t have been able to lead the police to Roy.

Roy also kills the Chinese guys cooking eyeballs for a living. “If you only knew what I have seen with your eyes.”

19

We never see a human take the VK test.

20

Rachel actually blew the question about the photo of a nude woman on a bearskin rug. The woman in the photo is a red herring, Rachel should have been horrified by the rug.

Something that’s only hinted at in the movie but is a major theme in the book is that animals are largely extinct and humans (but apparently not replicants) have a high regard for animal life. It’s not just because animals are rare and thus valuable, it’s because it’s considered spiritually important/beneficial for humans to care for animals. IIRC humans believe that they naturally have more empathy than replicants and that this is why they care more about animals, but this reverence for animals is obviously cultural rather than innate so it may be that replicants simply don’t have the chance to learn to respect animals the way humans do. Anyway, most of the VK questions we hear about have to do with how animals should be treated.

As for the OP, I don’t think it’s clear whether replicants are entirely flesh and blood, but they certainly do seem to be mostly flesh and blood. They might have some mechanical or electronic components or non-human genetic material, but they can’t be just robots or it would be easier to tell them apart from non-replicants.