# Movies where they let the audience be confused **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [July 13, 2010, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484 "2010-07-13T01:56:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![GargoyleWB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gargoylewb/32/199_2.png) [@GargoyleWB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GargoyleWB)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2010, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/41 "2010-07-13T18:42:12Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > Ridley Scott is saying it now. I’m pointing out that in an interview from 1983 in _Omni_ he seems to be saying that he did not – then. In fact, I don’t recall anyone saying that Deckard was a replicant until the past ten years or so. Certainly no review or magazine article was making that claim when the film came out (I was there, and read them all). If Scott thought that was the case back in 1982, you’d think he’d have mentioned it as some point. Agreed. The “Deckard is a replicant” interpretation is a recent phenomenon, fueled by Ridley Scott’s backtracking on what his supposedly true vision of the film was intended to be and the availability of multiple re-edits of the film in the DVD age. Han shot first. GI Joe is 12" tall. Deckard is human. ---
**Author:** ![RikWriter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/49beb7/32.png) [@RikWriter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RikWriter)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2010, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/42 "2010-07-13T18:49:06Z")
> [@Contrapuntal](#): > > So who says he was a replicant? Not me. And not Harrison Ford. Which is good enough for me. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2010, 6:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/43 "2010-07-13T18:50:15Z")
I agree that there was no implication that Deckard was a replicant in _Blade Runner_. But it’s not an idea that Scott invented on his own recently. While it’s never explicitly stated in the original novel, _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_, there are certainly strong hints that Deckard is a replicant. ---
**Author:** ![Tom\_Scud](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/f08c70/32.png) [@Tom\_Scud](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Scud)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2010, 6:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/44 "2010-07-13T18:57:12Z")
Most of Terry Gilliam’s movies leave the audience to work it all out for themselves, particularly the Time Bandits - Brazil - Baron Munchausen “trilogy”. ---
**Author:** ![descamisado](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e480ec/32.png) [@descamisado](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/descamisado)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2010, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/45 "2010-07-13T18:59:16Z")
CachéNot only do they not spell out who it is videotaping the comings and going of the family, they never explain what the link is between that and the Algerian ex-patriate who slits his own throat after luring the main character to his apartment. However, so many other interesting things are brought up in the movie (the disappearance of the son, the of the disparity in treatment of the adopted Algerian boy), that the lack of answers actually made it that much more thought-provoking and satisfying. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2010, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/46 "2010-07-13T19:03:39Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > And how do you know that it was intended for her to have a longer than four year span? > > It seems to me that saying that she might live longer, like the getaway into the sunny mountains, was another tacked-on “happy” ending. More than likely Rachel wasn’t intended to have a longer life. Deal with it. Yes. That was **my** point. ---
**Author:** ![ianzin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/ed655f/32.png) [@ianzin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ianzin)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2010, 7:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/47 "2010-07-13T19:17:39Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > **The Big Sleep** is legendary for being impenetrably confusing. Reportedly, many cast members couldn’t figure it out. It’s even better than that. Chandler himself admitted the plot didn’t hang together or make much sense. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2010, 7:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/48 "2010-07-13T19:28:48Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > Good example. You can read Kubrick’s novel, which many people think “explains” the work, but that’s only Clarke’s interpretation. Kubrick’s mind was clearly working in a different direction. You can see something of the tension between Clarke and Kubrick in the various versions of the story recorded in Clarke’s book **The Lost Worlds of 2001**. > > Clarke is 1/2 of the creative mind behind it, so his more rationalist view has a much justification to be correct as Kubrick’s, which leads to the intersting result that the creative team behind this film had clearly different ideas about what it was supposed to “mean” and be about. > For an interesting interpretation, read the essay written about it by a New Jersey high school student in Jerome Agel’s book **the Making of Kubvrick’s 2001**. my own high school English teacher knew hers, and told me about this before it was published. 2001 is an excellent example, and you don’t have to worry about the “meaning.” The mission of Discovery One is not explained, nor is the link to what went before explained (except for HAL’s little speech) until the taped message from Floyd played after Bowman disconnects HAL. But I don’t think that Clarke and Kubrick were at all going in different directions. They expressed the same thing in very different ways. For instance, while Kubrick didn’t show the aliens, his crew constructed a lot of possible aliens, pictures of which you can see in “2001: Filming the Future” and in one of the extras on the latest DVD. What happens to Bowman is foreshadowed by the end of “Childhood’s End.” Clarke is more literal, and especially in this movie Kubrick is pure film (no words until the receptionist greets Floyd) but they are basically compatible. Also, the last scene, in which the Starchild detonates the nuclear weapons in orbit, was planned, but Kubrick decided it was too much like the end of Dr. Strangelove and dropped it, which was a good call. As for Kubrick and the meaning, he was going to sell a lot more tickets for a mystery which had to be seen multiple times to be understood than if he said that Clarke’s book explains everything. And of course people started reading in all sorts of hidden meanings, like the HAL = IBM -1 thing. I saw it at the Capitol Theater in New York. Given my knowledge of Clarke, and the Life Magazine article on it, I “understood” it the first time I saw it. ---
**Author:** ![Morbo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/morbo/32/389_2.png) [@Morbo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Morbo)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2010, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/49 "2010-07-13T19:30:18Z")
The French film **Tell No One** didn’t explain anything until the very end. Very satisfying, and a great movie. And of course there’s the “was it a dream or not” ending to **Total Recall** , which I hesitate to even bring up based on memories of threads past… ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2010, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/50 "2010-07-13T19:40:32Z")
David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive takes the cake here. ---
**Author:** ![Justin\_Bailey](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/justin_bailey/32/8792_2.png) [@Justin\_Bailey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Justin_Bailey)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2010, 7:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/51 "2010-07-13T19:40:46Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I agree that there was no implication that Deckard was a replicant in _Blade Runner_. But it’s not an idea that Scott invented on his own recently. While it’s never explicitly stated in the original novel, _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_, there are certainly strong hints that Deckard is a replicant. I was always under the impression that Deckard was explicitly human in _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ and that the “Deckard is a replicant” talk is all the result of Ridley Scott having some horrible foot disease. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2010, 8:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/52 "2010-07-13T20:10:45Z")
> [@ianzin](#): > > It’s even better than that. Chandler himself admitted the plot didn’t hang together or make much sense. Was he talking about [his novella?](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Sleep) Some things made clear in that book are only hinted at in the movie (owing to the Hays Code, I suppose), e.g., that the mysterious “bookshop” is front for a pornography-rental business (that business model is older than VCR technology, believe it or not), and that Arthur Geiger is bisexual and Carol Lundgren is his lover. As for the movie, during filming the studio decided the Bogart/Bacall pairing was a Hot Item and did some reshooting to play up their romance, which just confused things further. ---
**Author:** ![Ellis\_Aponte\_Jr](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@Ellis\_Aponte\_Jr](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ellis_Aponte_Jr)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2010, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/53 "2010-07-13T20:36:42Z")
**Last Year in Marienbad** , big winner at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, has been confusing audiences for decades, though it does have a certain conceptual logic to it. ---
**Author:** ![jackdavinci](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackdavinci/32/3259_2.png) [@jackdavinci](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackdavinci)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2010, 9:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/54 "2010-07-13T21:02:18Z")
> [@Justin\_Bailey](#): > > I was always under the impression that Deckard was explicitly human in _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ and that the “Deckard is a replicant” talk is all the result of Ridley Scott having some horrible foot disease. In versions of the movie with the unicorn dream and unicorn origami, it seems impossible to escape the ‘replicant’ conclusion. Without those, not so much. ---
**Author:** ![typoink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecb155/32.png) [@typoink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/typoink)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2010, 9:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/55 "2010-07-13T21:06:58Z")
> [@jackdavinci](#): > > In versions of the movie with the unicorn dream and unicorn origami, it seems impossible to escape the ‘replicant’ conclusion. Without those, not so much. And those aren’t new shots, as far as I’m aware. Clearly, at the time of shooting, Scott at the very least wanted to keep the question open. My recollection of _Do Androids…_ is that Deckard is almost certainly human, but it’s intentionally called into question. But I don’t take the book as gospel, especially since I think the movie is better. ---
**Author:** ![Freudian\_Slit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@Freudian\_Slit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freudian_Slit)\ **Post date:** [July 13, 2010, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/56 "2010-07-13T21:10:55Z")
> [@The\_Second\_Stone](#): > > David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive takes the cake here. That was my first thought, too. The “it was all a fantasy” explanation also felt kind of hokey to me, too. ---
**Author:** ![Contrapuntal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e274bd/32.png) [@Contrapuntal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Contrapuntal)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2010, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/57 "2010-07-14T17:06:19Z")
> [@jackdavinci](#): > > In versions of the movie with the unicorn dream and unicorn origami, it seems impossible to escape the ‘replicant’ conclusion. Without those, not so much. Impossible? The only way that someone can know what another dreams is if he is a replicant? I had no idea. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2010, 5:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/58 "2010-07-14T17:33:48Z")
> [@](#): > > I was always under the impression that Deckard was explicitly human in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and that the “Deckard is a replicant” talk is all the result of Ridley Scott having some horrible foot disease. It’s been over twenty-five years since I read the book so I’m working from memory (and a Wikipedia check) here. As I recall, Deckard believed he was human. But there were hints that he might be a replicant programmed to mimic a human. That was a fairly common theme in Dick’s work - people thinking they were something they were not. In the book, there was a theme that the distinction between humans and replicants was mental - there was apparently no physical difference that was conclusive. Humans were supposed to have empathy for other living creatures which replicants lacked. So there were empathy tests - if you passed you were human, if not you were a replicant. But Deckard found he was having difficulty feeling empathy. Admittedly there were other standards that replicants couldn’t meet and Deckard could. So, like the tests in the book, the answers were ambiguous. One possibility was that Deckard was a replicant. He was a newer model who could act more like a human being which is why he could do things other replicants couldn’t. The other possibility (which is the one that I think is true) was that Deckard was a human but people were losing their humanity. If empathy was a defining human trait then it should include empathy towards replicants. By targeting them (ironically for not having empathy) humanity was itself losing its sense of empathy and therefore losing its humanity. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2010, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/59 "2010-07-14T17:48:41Z")
It’s been a while since I read DADoES, but I don’t recall hints that Deckard was a replicant. The book works well without it, and it’s certainly never explicit. If you want a film where you wonder if apparent humans are really the increasingly sophisticated robots, have a look at an obscure film called **creation of the Humanoids** from 1962 (!) > **[The Creation of the Humanoids](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Creation_of_the_Humanoids)** > > The Creation of the Humanoids is a 1962 American science fiction film release, directed by Wesley Barry and starring Don Megowan, Erica Elliot, Frances McCann, Don Doolittle, and Dudley Manlove. The film is not based on the plot of Jack Williamson's novel The Humanoids, to which it bears little resemblance, but on an original story and screenplay written by Jay Simms. > In a post-nuclear-war society, blue-skinned, silver-eyed human-like robots have become a common sight as the surviving population... > **[The Creation of the Humanoids (1962) ⭐ 5.7 | Sci-Fi](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055872/)** > > 1h 15m | Approved > **[Answers - The Most Trusted Place for Answering Life's Questions](https://www.answers.com/redirectSearch?query=the-creation-of-the-humanoids)** > > Answers is the place to go to get the answers you need and to ask the questions you want ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2010, 8:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484/60 "2010-07-14T20:03:16Z")
In the book, it’s specifically suggested that Dekard is a replicant. He undergoes testing and is found to be fully human. It probably doesn’t show up in plot summaries because the question was raised and then disposed of in a few pages. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/movies-where-they-let-the-audience-be-confused/546484.md?page=4)