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.
Not me. And not Harrison Ford. Which is good enough for me.
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.
Most of Terry Gilliam’s movies leave the audience to work it all out for themselves, particularly the Time Bandits - Brazil - Baron Munchausen “trilogy”.
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.
Yes. That was my point.
It’s even better than that. Chandler himself admitted the plot didn’t hang together or make much sense.
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.
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…
David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive takes the cake here.
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.
Was he talking about his novella?
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.
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.
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.
That was my first thought, too. The “it was all a fantasy” explanation also felt kind of hokey to me, too.
Impossible? The only way that someone can know what another dreams is if he is a replicant? I had no idea.
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.
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 (!)
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.