I never thought of it quite that way before. I think you’re right.
Referring to my earlier post-
My faulty memory failed me again- I just checked Sammon’s book “Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner” (highly recommended, btw), and according to Hauer (on page 193), Roy’s dying soliloquy was originally a half-page of script by David Peoples; with Scott’s approval, Hauer “cut a little bit out of the opening and then improvised these closing lines: All those moments will be lost in time. Like tears in rain. Time do die.”
On the next page, Hauer also refers to his and Scott’s idea of “a four-year-old (Batty) experiencing a lot of things for the first time in life, like the way Roy’s so impressed with Sebastian’s toys.”
Other replicants. Wars are still being fought, just off world and by proxy. Tyrell Corporation is no doubt supplying all sides. Capitalism is still Capitalism in 2019.
And of all the *(&#@$ arguments against Deckard being a replicant, you don’t bring up how poorly he did fighting the other ones. No human could have survived what he did. He was hanging onto a beam with two dislocated fingers! He got seriously kicked by professional assassin model and was still able to chase after her! He got thrown onto a car window (okay, so it was pre-broken) and walked away! Sheesh. The only question is whether is was an “A” or “B” level model. But he is also an advanced model because, like Rachael, he doesn’t know he is one. (Which sort of rules him out as being one of the escaped Nexus-6 replicants. But that also messes with the issue of how Roy knew Deckard’s name.)
There were no injuries he sustained that were not survivable, and it’s very clear that despite his reputation as a “goddamned one man slaughterhouse” he is in no way as strong or agile as a Replicant.
Ahhh, right, I stand corrected.* Turns out that the word “dreck” came to mind unfairly, while the non-dreck vehicles remained hidden from recollection. Glad to see that his talent’s been put to better use than I thought. Now where’d I put that Director’s Cut DVD, again? Memory can be a tricky thing…
*Well, I’m sitting, actually, so I’m wrong there, too.
Office day. Just got back from a 110-mile commute. I’ll try to be coherent, but there are no guarantees.
First: If I recall correctly (as I said earlier), Deckard was human in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?’. If the original source says he’s human, then he’s human.
I think it cheapens the message if Deckard is a replicant. That is, it makes it too M. Knight Shamalan. ‘What a twist!’ The point as I see it is that Deckard, a human, has become as un-empathetic as replicants are supposed to be; while the Nexus 6 has become ‘human’. Tyrel Corporation’s motto is ‘More Human Than Human’. Roy Batty has become more ‘human’ than the human Deckard, who rediscovers his humanity through his love for Rachael. If Deckard is a replicant, then there is no transformation and the story becomes pointless.
As for Gaff knowing about the unicorns, I call coincidence. In the world of 2019, genetically-engineered and replicated unicorns freely roam the forests of the Pacific northwest and have become symbols of freedom which, to the societal dregs that still cling to a tenuous existence in the rotting cities, is almost as mythical an idea as unicorns themselves are to us. Deckard’s dream and Gaff’s origami both point toward the freedom the former wants and the latter is offering.
I mean, if we’re going to make shit up, why not choose something cool? Deckard being a replicant isn’t cool - it’s just a pointless plot twist for the sake of plot twisting. I remember (but oddly can’t seem to find) an argument I made that Gaff was a replicant, using bits from the movie as evidence, and figured my reasoning was just as sound, if not more so, than the Deckard-replicant stance.
No doubt they’re two completely different movies. Still, IMO, good as Blade Runner is, Raiders is the superior movie all around. And, to address the OP, Ford’s best.
I told my fiancee she had to see Blade Runner before we got married*. So I might disagree with you, too.
Like Hampshire recommended, she saw the version with the Deckard narration, and it helped her understand him. But I like the middle ground of “subsequent viewings should be done sans narration”.
*[tangent] She made me go see Days of Heaven, which I liked almost as much. And, hey, that started with a voiceover, too, that I still remember, twenty-five years later! “Me an’ my bruther, at first it was jes me an my bruther, we used to do things togethah. We used to have fun, we used to roam the streets…” And then she says what I always repeat to myself: *"…goin’ places, lookin’ for t’ings, searchin’ for t’ings, goin’ on a’ventures." *
I repeat it as I start a a’venture, which I do daily.
Given that the whole story was entirely changed from the book, etc., this means nothing. If you want to refer to a source, go look in the earlier scripts which has a couple extra references that directly raise the issue of Deckard being a replicant. E.g., Gaff has the longer line:“You’ve done a man’s job, sir! But are you sure you are man? It’s hard to be sure who’s who around here.”
Plus there’s this Ford quote:
“Blade Runner was not one of my favorite films. I tangled with Ridley. The biggest problem was that at the end, he wanted the audience to find out that Deckard was a replicant. I fought that because I felt the audience needed somebody to cheer for.”
The movie only makes sense if Deckard is a replicant. Read up about film noir. The chaser turns out to be chasing himself. Toning down the references to this hurt the film significantly.
To be fair, the film diverges significantly from the source material, to the point that they really are two different stories connected by only a few character names and basic concepts. In the book, the main character is Rick Deckard, he’s still married if unhappily, he’s a bounty hunter rather than a police officer, and he detects Rachael to be a replicant because she kills his goat. In the book, the “androids” do not have genuine emotions and are not capable of empathy, so the themes of the book and the film are distinctly different.
Referencing an earlier version of the script doesn’t make your point any more than one could say that Rick ends up with Ilsa in Casablanca just because an earlier script had him running off with her. The film is what is on-screen; everything else is interpretation, not canon.
I have to strongly disagree with this. Very little film noir involves some kind of plot twist involving a character’s lack of own identity. What noir often has is a growing awareness by the protagonist of some fatal character defect; witness, for instance, Jeff Bailey in Out Of The Past, or Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, each of whom are undone because of their weakness for “bad” (manipulative, venal) women. Similarly, in The Grifters, Roy Dillon realizes that he’s not cut out for the grift, but he’s trapped in a web of con artists who are desperate for survival even at his expense. One of the central themes of film noir is about finding the darkness within. Discovering that you are someone else entirely–living in a simulacrum, having false memories, not being human, et cetera–is a more overt extension of that that goes into the territory of The Matrix or The Sixth Sense.
