Blade Runner - Deckert a Replicant?

Cafe Society
41

Okay, Deckard could be an older replicant, less strong than the Nexus 6, but why? Why not build a new one capable of handling the current threat?

We are told that replicants are designed with different strengths for different jobs. If you’re going to build a replicant Blade Runner, why not make him the strongest there is? If you’re going to give him phony memories, why not implant a memory of a replicant having killed a loved one, so that he would be driven by a thirst for revenge instead of questioning the morality of his job?

As intriguing as that “Deckard is a replicant theory” is thematically, it doens’t hold up as a plot point. Far more interesting is the thought that he is a human whose job is gradually de-humazing while is prey is becoming more and more human.

steve biodrowski
www.thescriptanalyst.com

42

Just a guess -

A Blade Runner replicant shouldn’t know that it is a replicant. If it knew, it might feel differently about killing other replicants.

However, Blade Runners must be very good at determining what a replicant is. A replicant BR would have to be clever enough to spot replicants, but not realize that it itself is a replicant. To this end, the strength and relfexes of the replicant are somewhat limited, although perhaps slightly better than a human’s would be. If it was fully as strong as it could be, it would soon realize what it was and possibly go rogue.

Of course the question then arises - what good does it do to have a replicant BR that doesn’t have the benefits of being a replicant?

There are a few things which might answer that question:

  1. A replicant BR would have some benefits of strength and speed. They would be limited, but they would be there and every little bit helps.
  2. A replicant BR could, possibly, be much better than a human at the intellectual part of BR’ing. Deckard is supposed to be one of the best. Perhaps he is one of the best because he is a replicant.

The intellectual area of the job is where a replicant BR could be allowed enormous power without fear that it would realize its true nature. After all, while there are definite limits to human beings’ speed and strength, there is much more variation in their intelligence and mental skills.
3) Most importantly, the replicant would be expendable from the point of view of humans. When you have a machine that has slightly better physical skills and much better mental skills than a human, why risk a human’s life getting the job done?

43

cynical, my ass! you hit it right on the head! its all about the money.

44

Not that I doubt you SA but where in the film is this clue? I have the directors edition DVD. The part where Deckard giver her the Voit Kamph test her eyes glow. Kind of a weird goldnen glow but they are sitting in a room at sundown. (the only brightly lit scene in the film) Deckard is facing the sun and his face is warmly lit up. Here she does not ask the question.

Later at his apartment she does as the question. When the camera cuts to Deckard he is asleep.

Does anyone know where the eye glowing bit is?

45

The problem with Blade Runner is that the script went through something like ten rewrites before it ever got filmed. (One of the versions of the script supposedly has Deckard shooting Rachel at the end of the movie, the reason being it was better for her to be killed by someone who loved her.) Then, of course, after the film was made and showed to the studio heads, they insisted on changes being made. So you’ve got a hodge-podge of a film that despite the “best” efforts of the studio hacks is pretty damn good.

There’s a couple of clues (to me anyway) to Deckard’s true nature that no one’s mentioned yet. One is when Deckard is in Bryant’s office and Bryant says, “You know the score, pal. If you’re not cop, you’re little people!” This means that Bryant’s got some kind of hold over Deckard. (In the voiceover version Deckard says something like, “Bryant’s the kind of guy who would have called black men niggers.”) Then there’s the intense hatred Gaff feels for Deckard, now this could be because of some personal rivalry between the two (of course, one has to ask what it could be, because Gaff obviously is Bryant’s new “boy”), or it could because Gaff knows Deckard’s a replicant. Then there’s Gaff’s comment at the end, “It’s too bad about the girl. Too bad she won’t live, but then again, who does?” Implying that Deckard’s got as much a chance at survival as Rachel does.

As to why Deckard wouldn’t be as strong as the other replicant’s here’s a couple of possibilities:
1.)Brain vs brawn ratio. Elephant’s and humans have roughly the same number neurons, but elephants aren’t nearly as smart as humans. Why? Because they’ve got more body to take care of. So it could be that Deckard represents the optimum ratio of brain to brawn.
2.)A Blade Runner that could do thing’s a normal human couldn’t do would probably begin to suspect that something odd was going on.

Now let me throw these things out:
1.) If Deckard was no longer a cop, where’d he get the money to pay for his place?
2.) Apparently, replicant’s on Earth were pretty rare after the formation of the Blade Runner units. If they are so uncommon, why have cops trained to kill them, who would eventually lose their edge because they hadn’t gone after a replicant in so long? Why not just have a Blade Runner on “ice” as it were, that you can pop out of the Replicant-O-Matic [sup]TM[/sup] when the need arises?
3.) A replicant Blade Runner could be programmed to be totally honest and dedicated to his job and not subject to bribes or feeling sympathy for his victims. (I know, I know, I’ll get to it in a moment.)
4.) A replicant BR could also be programmed with the collective experience of all the other replicant BR’s. This would give it a tremendous advantage over it’s prey, bettering the odds that it would “retire” it’s prey.

Now, for the explanation of point 3. Rachel is obviously a Nexus-7 model replicant as it takes her longer to fail the Voight-Kampff test than any other replicant. Tyrell obviously is pleased with the difficulty Deckard had in proving that Rachel was a replicant. If his goal is, “More human than human.” That to me, says he thinks that replicants are the successors to mankind, so naturally he’d be trying to imbue the replicants with all the properties of humanity, plus a little extra. It may be that Deckard and Rachel’s ability (along with the other replicants in the film) to defy what surely must have been a strong programming command (After all, if you can give false memories to replicants, surely you can program them so that they have a total adversion to travelling to Earth.), and take-off on their own. Think of Deckard and Rachel as the Adam and Eve of a new species.

46

I decided to stop messing around and go straight to the source. Excerpted below are some quotes from an interview of Ridley Scott, conducted by Danny Peary, which appeared in the book OMNI’s Screen Flights, Screen Fantasies (1984). This volume is chock-full of interesting interviews and essays and I recommend it heartily, if you can find it. Anyhoo:

Peary: Except for the fact that he tracks down renegade replicants rather than standard criminals, our hero Deckard is in many ways like the classic disillusioned, morally ambivalent detective - which is fitting considering the other noir elements found in the film, including his hard-edged narration.
Scott: When we first meet Deckard, he is already thinking of giving up his job as professional exterminator. The job was in fact getting to him, as it did to, say, Philip Marlowe…what I wanted to do at the beginning was show a man who wanted to change his whole way of life and was in a way trying to find some kind of absolution or, maybe, a conscience…The scene [in which Deckard kills Zhora] ends with Deckard looking down at this “woman” he has just killed and we get one more facet of the reason he wants to quit his profession. For we’re now dealing with a man who is guilt-ridden.

At this point, it seems clear to me that Scott planned Deckard to be burnt-out, emotionally wasted, seeking redemption, but definitely human. But then he takes a short hop through the Twilight Zone:

Peary: In the novel, Deckard constantly worries he will mistakenly kill a human he thinks is a replicant. In fact, he constantly worries that he, himself, is a replicant.
Scott: At one stage, we considered having Deckard turn out to be, ironically, a replicant. In fact, if you look at the film closely, especially the ending, you may get some clues - some by slight innuendo - that Deckard is indeed a replicant. At the end there’s a kind of confirmation that he is - at least that he believes it possible. Within the context of the overall story, whether it’s true or not in the book, having Deckard be a replicant is the only reasonable solution.

Scott want sit both ways, it seems. He could have included scenes that stated unambiguously that Deckard was (or was not) a replicant, but preferred even then to keep it vague. If he planted firm evidence that Deckard was a replicant, he made it too subtle, at least for me. I find the interpretation that Deckard was losing his humanity (though his love for Rachael restores it) while the advanced replicants were gaining theirs to be the most satisfying, on a spiritual and logical level. Some lame-ass plot twist saying Deckard is a replicant ruins a perfectly good film and I choose to ignore it. If this is what Scott intended, he did a piss-poor job getting his message across. Then again, considering the original novel was a hallucinogenic flight of fancy, maybe he did the best he could.

47

So the blurring of the line is intentional. We’re not supposed to be able to say either way, that’s the point of it. I like that. That works for me.

48

It’s in the scene with Rachel and Deckard in his apartment. He is standing behind her, his face over her shoulder, slightly out of focus, his eyes glowing red. It’s possible this is a mistake; maybe the lighting was set up to make Sean Young’s eyes glow, and it just happened to spill over onto Harrison Ford. In any case, he doesn’t get a full closeup that reveals the effect clearly; you just see it fleetingly – if you’re looking for it.

By the way, Rachel isn’t the only replicant with glowing red eyes. We also seem them on the artificial owl at the Tyrrel Corporation.

steve biodrowski
www.thescriptanalyst.com

49

OK SA I went and found the scene. It is not tied to the line ‘Have you ever taken the test?’

In Deckards apartment after Rachell saves him he goes home. She says she will go north and asks him if he will come after her. He has been spitting up blood in the sink. He washes his face and says ‘No I won’t. I owe you one’ then he walks behind her. He is now out of focus and says ‘but someone will’. At this point his eyes seem shiny and a little red. Then he goes in the living room and starts drinking and she asks f he read her file and does he know when she will die.

But going over the film and rething the book I’ve realized something.

Replicants are NOT androids.

They are not mechnical. They bleed blood. Roy’s conversation with Tyrell is all about DNA and mutations and virus’s and such. (in the book after he kills a replicant a bone marrow test is done to make sure it was a replicant)

So you couldn’t put a blade runner replicant on ice and turn it on only when you needed it. They would be alive as well.

50

I agree with that. A lot of Philip K. Dick’s work focuses on such ambiguities, not to set up for a surprise ending, but blurring the line between opposite thing and illustrating that they may not be so opposite after all. Discussing hints that point to either conclusion is fun, but ultimately it’s not a question that the director or the author can answer - or should answer.

51

Well, assuming they didn’t have a “fast grow” process, you’re right. But remember, replicants have a four year lifespan, so they’ve got to be able to churn them out pretty rapidly in order for them to be usable.

52

ScriptAnalyst said -

Ura-Maru said -

The footage of the Unicorn in Blade Runner is in no way related to Legend. In this book, there is an interview between the author and Ridley Scott and the very first question deals with the unicorn/dream sequence.

I’m going to paraphrase the question and answer because I don’t have the book infront of me (if you want, I can do a direct quote when I get home)

Granted, that is just a paraphrase of the interview, but it was clear that, if anything, the dream sequence influenced Scott’s work on Legend and not the other way around.

53

Hmm…

I was relying on what David Peoples (co-writer of the BLADE RUNNER script) told me in an interview: that he had visited Scott while he was doing post-production on BLADE RUNNER and was simultaneously prepping LEGEND. Perhaps Peoples mis-remembered.

steve biodrowski
www.thescriptanalyst.com