Bladerunner - I missed the hints? (Spoilers)

Cafe Society
21

I saw the Final cut a couple of weeks ago, partly to look for an answer to this question. Our local paper ended their review with something along the lines of “PS: Deckard is totally a replicant.”

I understand what the Unicorn dream implies but somehow I always interpreted it as more of a statement about Rachel being the last of her kind, than Deckard being a replicant. I like that it is ambiguous, but I think the movie has more pathos if Deckard is a human willing to break the very law he’d been enforcing for even a few years of doomed love.

And for what it’s worth, this question is directly raised in the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and he ends up getting tested. To find the answer, I recommend visiting your local library. It’s a great read that fills in a lot of details that are only hinted at in the movie.

22

I read it. I found it a rather dreary read and finished it only because I am a fan of the movie. To be frank, I’ve never read anything by Philip K. Dick that I enjoyed. Why he and Michael Moorcock have the fanbases they do mystify me. I find them both nearly unreadable.

23

[QUOTE=Scumpup]
Because then there wouldn’t have been any dramatic tension in the movie.
[/QUOTE]
I’m sorry. It’s a plot device? Tyrell was concerned about dramatic tension? Are you answering from the point of view of a character, or a writer? Either one is fine, but it needs to be consistent.

There is plenty of dramatic tension without assuming that Deckard is a replicant, and the problems that arise if he is a replicant are enough to seriously hinder the narrative.

24

The plot device is that Tyrell wanted to create people, not humans. As part of that plot device, Deckard is a replicant programmed to believe himself human and set to hunting other replicants. If we want to posit hyothetical why’s, then how about they figured it was better to get replicants killed hunting other replicants than to get humans killed on the job?
The reality is that it makes a better story to have Tyrell create Deckard as a cop than as a garbage collector.

25

[QUOTE=Scumpup]
The plot device is that Tyrell wanted to create people, not humans.
[/QUOTE]
That’s not a device, at least as you have represented it. It’s a major plot point.

[QUOTE=Scumpup]
If we want to posit hyothetical why’s, then how about they figured it was better to get replicants killed hunting other replicants than to get humans killed on the job?
[/QUOTE]
Because human life is valued more highly than replicants? Isn’t that a central theme? *The *central theme? It is at the very least the central point of conflict. And replicants wouldn’t get killed on the job if they had, you know, replicant abillities. At least they would not be as likely to.

26

Am I the only one who thinks that Deckard being a human or Deckard being a replicant diminishes the movie? The whole point, as I see it, is that you can’t tell whether Deckard (or any other character in the movie) is “real” or not… Even people hate and fear the replicants, and there’s this huge infrastructure to hunt them down, there’s really no fundamental difference between them: The replicants are human.

27

[QUOTE=Contrapuntal]
That’s not a device, at least as you have represented it. It’s a major plot point.

Because human life is valued more highly than replicants? Isn’t that a central theme? *The *central theme? It is at the very least the central point of conflict. And replicants wouldn’t get killed on the job if they had, you know, replicant abillities. At least they would not be as likely to.
[/QUOTE]

Speculation:

Tyrell seemed obessed with creating replicants that were indistinguishable from the real thing.

Assuming that he made Deckard as his latest and greatest attempt along these lines, what better way to prove that it is indistinguishable is to place it in the very organisation whose job it is to retire replicants. If they never catch on, what a great marketing coup it would be, say, after ten years of service, to reveal to various important people (and not necessarily the public) Deckard’s secret, and offer the latest, improved model for sale. (I assume Tyrell would feel that he is above the law and prosecution.)

Or, he may not necessarily tell anyone, he could do it just as an intellectual excersise and ego stroking…

28

[QUOTE=BlueSilver]
And for what it’s worth, this question is directly raised in the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and he ends up getting tested. To find the answer, I recommend visiting your local library. It’s a great read that fills in a lot of details that are only hinted at in the movie.
[/QUOTE]

I’ve read it, and have the paperback packed away somewhere. I don’t remember how that turned out. Go ahead and spoiler-box it.

I disagree. I think it says more if Deckard is a human who has become a machine than if Deckard is a machine that thinks he’s human. The former is an annalysis of humanity’s descent. The latter is an M. Knight Shamalamadingdong ‘twist’.

29

I think it works better with Deckard as a human, because he is essentially what the replicants are made out to be; he’s a pretty unempathic person. The point being that replicants are as near to human as to make no difference are supposedly dangerous and need to be hunted down, while it’s the hunters, the “true” humans, who make up the danger.
[QUOTE=Contrapuntal]
Because human life is valued more highly than replicants? Isn’t that a central theme? *The *central theme?
[/QUOTE]
I would say the central theme is not only that replicants are seen below humans, but that they’re seen as below even animals.

30

Chronos has a good point.

The point isn’t that Deckard is a replicant or that Deckard is a human. The point is to make you think about what it would mean if Deckard were a replicant? What would it mean if Deckard were human? Deckard is either a human who might as well be a replicant, or he’s a replicant that might as well be a human, and the ambiguity is the point, not the answer.

31

Correction. They are “more human than a human.” That’s why we have to kill them all.

32

A recent interview with Ridley Scott on this very topic

Wired Magazine

33

I’m going to say here what I said in the other thread re: Deckard being a replicant.

34

[QUOTE=Lemur866]
Chronos has a good point.

The point isn’t that Deckard is a replicant or that Deckard is a human. The point is to make you think about what it would mean if Deckard were a replicant? What would it mean if Deckard were human? Deckard is either a human who might as well be a replicant, or he’s a replicant that might as well be a human, and the ambiguity is the point, not the answer.
[/QUOTE]

By George, I think you’ve got it! After all, the movie was based on a book by Philip K “What is Reality?” Dick.

Whether Ridley Scott’s opinion is right or wrong–he made a wonderful movie.

35

They purposely gave replicants limited life-spans because they tended to go nuts after awhile. But Tyrell, the arrogant bastard with a God complex, finally succeeded in making a human by giving Rachael memory implants. I like to think he knew he’d succeeded, and gave Rachael a normal life-span. When Rachel was playing piano and complained whether it was her playing or someone else, Deckard reassured her by saying “you play beautifully.” Deckard came to the realization there was no longer a meaningful difference between humans and replicants and he fell in love with her.

To me, it’s more meaningful for Deckard as a human to accept Rachel as human, then to have two replicants finding each other and running off.

36

Well the humans we see in the film, don’t really have a life do they.

J F Sebastian all alone with his toys in the Bradbury building.

Tyrell, all alone in that huge building.

“If you’re not cop you’re little people” Look at Deckards great life, is he living? The VK test is testing for emotional response. But does an emotional response mean that you’re a replicant?

The first replicant gets mad at the test, just before he kills the guy.

Rachel stays cool, it takes Deckard quite a few questions to ‘decide’.

Deckard doesn’t express much emotion, except for fear and only at the end of the film.

37

Scott’s recent interview, linked above, re-iterates the claim that Deckard was supposed to be a replicant from the start. But, again, therre’s nothing to drive you to that conclusion in the flick as released, despite his claim that the others said “Isn’t it obvious?”. No. Why would it be?
Show me a single review from the 1982 release that even suggests this possibility. Or anything from Scott at that time that says “You people are all missing the REAL point of my film!”

38

Deckard being a replicant ruins the movie. Ignore it.

39

I thought it odd that Scott seemed to be ridiculing anyone who didn’t think Deckard was a replicant.

40

[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
Scott’s recent interview, linked above, re-iterates the claim that Deckard was supposed to be a replicant from the start. But, again, therre’s nothing to drive you to that conclusion in the flick as released, despite his claim that the others said “Isn’t it obvious?”. No. Why would it be?

[/QUOTE]

I saw the recent Final Cut, so my answers are limited to that (as mentioned in previous threads, I slept through every other version). Before that, I knew that there was a “debate” about the movie and whether or not someone was a Replicant, but I thought it was about Rachel. After the movie, I still couldn’t accept that the debate is about Deckard. These are the “obvious” clues in the movie that led me to the conclusion that Deckard is a Replicant:

First, the glowing eyes. Each Replicant’s eyes are shown as glowing yellow, and Deckard’s eyes glow yellow. Human eyes don’t glow yellow, as we all know, they glow red when light hits the blood vessels behind the retina. There’s no way that effect was an accident or lighting artifact; it happened in multiple scenes with each Replicant character (and Deckard). It had to have been a deliberate effect.

Secondly, as has been mentioned upthread, Deckard’s emotionlessness. Even in his passionate love for Rachel, he’s dispassionate. (And was anyone else made seriously uncomfortable by that near-rape scene perpetrated by the protagonist? Yowza, how times have changed.) He’s so dispassionate, in fact, that he’s robotic. I know Harrison Ford made a career out of playing cool headed guys, but this guy is so cool he’s frozen. He’s cooler than Leon, who we KNOW is a Replicant.

Where’s his family? The pictures in his apartment were of distant (in time) people, not of his parents and himself and siblings or anyone else post-1940. They might as well have been the photographs that come in the frame in the drugstore. He has (or presents) no more evidence of having a real history than Rachel does.

Point the fourth, of course, is the refusal to answer whether or not he’s taken the test, much less sharing the results with anyone.

And fifthly, while he didn’t show the Slayeresque strength of Leon (created for loading nuclear fission material), Zhora (trained for homicide) or Roy (a self-sufficient combat model), he certainly showed greater-then-normal human strength, even by Hollywood standards. Hauling himself up onto a roof one handed with broken fingers? C’mon, that’s not standard Yaweh issue!

Finally, I couldn’t figure out why the hell Gaff (Olmos’ character) was following him around everywhere. It wasn’t like they really worked as a team. I finally decided that Deckard isn’t the Blade Runner at all; Gaff is. Deckard is just his tool, and Gaff is keeping an eye on his progress.

And, of course, the unicorn and dream. It just doesn’t make sense that the two aren’t connected - there are eleventy billion other things Gaff could have made out of a bit of paper.

So you might disagree, but there are a lot more “clues” than simply the unicorn.