I fear I started this hare running. I agree that there is much grace and elegance in the idea that Deckard is human, as others have expressed. And there is similar grace and elegance in the idea that he could be a replicant, and the implications that has for him. And I pointed out some of the conceptual problems that emerge if he is a replicant.
BUT - the movie is radically different from the book (which was consumed with religious and other themes), so I doubt much assistance is to be gained from that source.
And Gaff’s unicorn origami was in the original movie. There is much Flashing Arrowing when it appears right at the end, although its significance was less clear until the Director’s Cut. It seemed to be merely a calling card for the present of Gaff.
There is much in the logic that says, why make a replicant hunter slower and weaker than his targets? Yet it seems he does not need to be as strong as they to succeed. He is the uber-blade runner. He has skills that do not require mere strength. Setting a thief to catch a thief (albeit that the replicant Deckard is unaware he is a “thief” in this metaphor) is a potentially sensible reason for using replicants as blade runners. And not having them aware of their status prevents them “going native” and identifying with their prey, resulting in the same problem that they were designed to solve.
The fact that that proposition then generates management dilemmas (like blade runners quitting) doesn’t really invalidate the premise.
I contend there is no point to the whole unicorn dream/origami issue UNLESS Scott was clearly indicating that Deckard was a replicant. Only Deckard knows the content of his dreams, if he is human. And the parallel with Deckard’s knowing Rachel’s secret thoughts, and then having Gaff know his, is too powerful to ignore.
That doesn’t mean I have to like that interpretation. But I don’t think there is any ambiguity about it.
Now whether that is a case of one plot twist too many is an open question. But the unicorn plot line makes no sense at all unless we are clearly being told Deckard is a replicant and Gaff knows it, and tells him in the end as part of a very complex act of mercy. (Gaff could have killed Deckard and Rachel both.)
Oh, and lastly, there is a show here in Australia called Talking About Your Generation starring Shaun Micallef. His host’s chair is a high-backed leather number with “Tyrell Corp” stamped on it (you can see it here).
I BADLY want one. Does anyone know whether they can be bought>? Or is it just a one-off prop?
…and if you are obsessing over the value of “real” life it would make more sense to sacrifice any number of skin jobs in pursuit of same than it would to lose even a single “real” human.
The physiology of replicants is indistinguishable enough from humans that they can only be found out through something called a Voight-Kampff test, which actually requires expert knowledge to interpret.
Because they aren’t actually “robots”. They are supposed to be more like specialized clones.
They are all human. That’s the point of the film. Any way you interpret it. It is just that some of these humans were manufactured and some of them made via the horizontal mambo. The ambiguity as to which humans are replicants is meant to reinforce the argument that every human has a basic human dignity regardless of the misguided objectives of the creator of the manufactured humans.
A more interesting question, and one that Dick played with in most of his works, is what the hell are memories and how do they make us human and who we are and are they real. The knowledge that we have and act on defines much about us: is it equivalent to our humanity? Does the truth of our knowledge or its falsity make us less human? Total Recall, Minority Report, AI and Blade Runner all have this as a major theme.
The question of why they didn’t make Deckard a better replicant hunter assumes Tyrell was perfect at creating replicants. The fact taht they NEED replicant hunters implies he isn’t.
Deckard’s pretty fragile, actually. Leon and Zhora could have killed him easily but for the intervention of third parties, and Roy was just toying with him. Deckard took out Pris because she rather stupidly walked away from a thigh-lock to do another round of somersaults.
On reflection, the whole hunting process is altogether pretty inept. Deckard gets Leon’s address from the interview with Holden, and he goes into the apartment alone. There isn’t even any police warning tape on the door, suggesting nobody had bothered to check out and secure the location. The other replicants could easily have been there and any one of them could tear Deckard in half.
Interesting comment, and it could take us in an entirely different tangent! Also, it reminds me of an old Steven Wright line: “I woke up one morning and all of my stuff had been stolen…and replaced by exact duplicates.”
That’s hardly fair, is it? We don’t know what would have happened had the confrontations gone all the way. We do know he’s a veteran replicant-hunter (well, with false memories he could have been created five minutes before the movie starts, but let’s not go there) and that he survives several beatings by very strong baddies without needing a couple months rest afterwards.
vs. Zhora: Deckard flails helplessly while being strangled.
vs. Leon: Deckard flails helplessly while being beaten senseless, having his eyes poked out and then killed.
vs. Roy: Deckard runs as best he can, gets chased on a rooftop, falls to his death.
Wile E. Coyote durability aside, I can only assume that models prior to the Nexus 6 weren’t all that challenging if Deckard had a reputation for retiring them.
I assume all replicants get some sort of memory implants, depending on what their job is going to be. Combat models are probably born with a certain amount of combat knowledge. They’re probably born already speaking English too. They only live four years so you wouldn’t want to waste a lot of it training them.
So you plug in some basic knowledge/memories so your “robot” can do its job, then you build in a short lifespan “off switch.”
I vote the memories about attack ships on fire etc. would have been real though. Rich, detailed memories like that are new, with Rachael being the only one we know who received them.
[QUOTE=Zebra]
Why would you build a super human replicant, that can pass for human, with a history of being so troublesome that you have special hunters for them but not build into it a remote controlled off switch?
[/quote]
I think the reason for that is because life off-world isn’t always very nice. People get assassinated and everyone has weapon detectors. A replicant with a little bomb in his brain would be detected, and unable to carry out an assassination, for instance. It’s critical replicants can’t be casually detected. That’s why Tyrell was working on ways for replicants to beat VK tests. “More Human than Human” was their motto.
I might be thinking of something else, but wasn’t part of that speech ad libbed?
Did she really fail? I thought Deckard figured it out more by context than the actual test.
But it could be explained as him having lived longer and having more real memories, as well as being a detective, exposed to the dark and gritty realities whereas she was somewhat isolated as a wealthy person.
I personally loved the movie but think many of us are missing the point of the movie when we talk about the replicants being “synthetics”.
They weren’t robots or “androids” despite the movie being based on a book called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
As others have noted there were several differences between the movie and the book.
Amongst other things, the “Androids” in the book were traditional sci-fi robots, but the replicants of the movie are actually genetically-engineered human beings grown in a lab.
If you want an analogy to Star Trek, they’re not Data, they’re Khan and and his followers.
Also, one thing I’ve always wondered about that I’m wondering if anyone else noticed.
At the beginning of the movie Bryant gives Deckard his job, to track down the Replicants. He says that six of them escaped from an off-world colony, “three male, three female” and that one was killed trying to break into the company. So, in the movie we saw Roy, Leon, Zora, and Priss.
So, who was the sixth?
Before anyone says it, no, I don’t think it was Deckard because obviously they’d have recognized him and it would make no sense for it to be Rachel, because she was with Tyrell the whole time.
Most of the details were ad-libbed. That doesn’t mean Rutger Hauer knows the definitive answer - the director, editor, etc. all chose to keep that the way it was in order to craft the universe.
My opinion on the OP - in the theatrical release, they’re real memories. In the Director’s Cut, they’re fake. It’s obvious.
The Tannhäuser gate was set up in temporal space as a primary warp station for trans-temporal- hyper or folded space travel with conventional craft. It was easily terrorized and damaged with C-Beams as a star system jump station for the offworld coloniztion efforts and mercenary forces and transstellar factions. Roy was definitely military issue cybernetics, not unlike a clone stormtrooper.
The missing replicant was an error that was fixed in the Final Cut version (which follows the Director’s Cut in making it look like Deckard was a replicant, so it obviously wasn’t meant as a hint). In the Final Cut Bryant says that two of the skin jobs got zapped by the electrical field.
And I think you’re wrong about both the novel and movie replicants. In the novel, they aren’t mechanical. In fact, it takes a bone marrow test to tell an android corpse from a human one. How they are made is not described, IIRC. In the movie they are genetically engineered, but it seems they are assembled from cultured organs and tissues. Chew makes the eyes in his little shop that Roy and Leon invade, remember?
I also think that IF Deckard is a replicant, people are mistaken in assuming that he had a past with the police department or that he had been a blade runner before. If he’s a replicant, I suspect that his “incept date” is the same day his (human) predecessor was shot by Leon. My guess is that when the police contacted Tyrell, they were told that the Nexus 6 were too advanced to be hunted by humans, and convinced/coerced the cops into accepting a replicant as a blade runner, with the programmed backstory that he was a human blade runner who had retired (since the cops wouldn’t want to have him showing up in the precinct break room drinking coffee before his shift!) Of course, what Tyrell really wants is to test Deckard and Rachel by setting Deckard free and allowing them to interact. That would explain Bryant’s unease around him, as well as Gaff’s behavior. Ford may have been playing Deckard as a human, but I think Walsh was playing Bryant as someone dealing with a replicant.
I like the ambiguity and the fact that even the director, the writer (who says Deckard is human), and the actor can’t agree. The unicorn being in his dream certainly seems like it’s meant to reveal Deckard as a replicant, but it could be a coincidence. A unicorn is a symbol of immortality, freedom, and innocence–all things preoccupying Deckard, and which Gaff could have picked up on. I read somewhere that the unicorn in the US theatrical version could be a message from Gaff that Rachel (and Deckard, either as replicant or human) don’t have expiration dates, and so are “immortal” (compared to the other replicants). To me, the bigger give-away is the flash of eyeshine from Deckard.
I actually suspect that Tyrell might not given Rachel and Deckard limited lifespans. (I’m going off the Final Cut now, without the “happy ending,” and assuming Deckard is a replicant.) Despite his claim to Deckard that he was interested only in commerce and making the replicants more controllable, I think it’s obvious from his conversation with Roy Batty that that’s not the case. He wants to create his own humans–to make people, and to have them become completely indistinguishable from “natural” humans. Rachel and Deckard don’t have super-strength (at least not by much). They have emotions and memories. They are in love. At the end of the movie, the only thing separating them from humans is their limited lifespan. If that has, in fact, been removed, then the final scene is Tyrell’s victory: two complete, genuine people ready to enter the world and to live not as slaves or automatons but as citizens–on the run, but independent and fully, really, alive.
