You have raised a question I don’t think has been discussed here.
Were Roy &co (and Deckard, if he were) the same model as Rachel? Were they given implanted memories? Or was Rachel the first?
While it may seem so, I don’t think they are.
Then Tyrell:
So since Roy et al have the four year lifespan, they are not like Rachel. They only have four years of actual memories, not implanted ones. Yet, they can create emotional attachments. Leon and his precious…photos. Roy’s affection for Pris. They long for the connections that humans “take for granted”.
Rachel is new. She has the full memory implantation. She has those connections (or so she believes). If Deckard were a replicant, he would be Nexus 6. But Deckard has full memories. He has his own “precious photos”. This is the existential conundrum of the film - what differentiates him from Rachel (or, to a lesser extent, Roy)? This is what he is contemplating at the piano. “How do I know my memories are real? Why are they more real than Rachel’s? Are they?” We all go through this life trusting what we think we know. But are we really sure any of it is “real”?
Here’s an alternate theory for you - everybody on Earth is a replicant but they’re all like the new Nexus 6 in that they don’t know they’re replicants. Rachel represents the first time a replicant who didn’t know he was a replicant made a replicant who didn’t know she was a replicant. Up to now, the effort has been to keep off Earth replicants who did know they were replicants because they’re gross.
If this is less plausible than just Deckard being a replicant, please explain how.
Good point. I had always assumed that Leon’s photos were a connection to implanted memories, but they could be recent photos he’s used to try and create memories that are otherwise missing. I had interpreted Roy’s scorn toward the photos as “Why do you still carry those photos if you know that those old memories aren’t real?”, not “Why are you wasting time building new memories?”
So is the “experimental” part of Rachel just that she has implanted memories, or that she is being tested for long-term stability by being kept ignorant of her replicantness?
Yep. Makes no sense. But thinking “could he be one?..nah” does add some thought provoking ideas. If Scott had left it as a mystery, it would have been better.
Here’s the BIG plot holes- the replicants could hold their hands in boiling water and were much stronger. Those would be easy-peasy things to DNA test for.
Funny how people equate Deckard being human with the film having a kumbaya point of view.
That’s a pretty big negative right there. Kumbaya goes away if he’s a replicant. Grittiness is the theme of the movie, not let’s all hold hands and sing.
This is why the flying over the pretty mountains ending had to go. It didn’t fit with the film. (OTOH, the intro voice over works. It should have been kept.)
Also note that healthy people (especially someone strong enough to hang from a beam with two fingers after undergoing an atrocious beating!) move off world. Leaving people like Sebastian (accelerated decriptude) and Goff (who uses a cane to move slowly around) to inherit the Earth.
Off world, replicants fight and kill other replicants. They do the dirty work. Sounds like the job of a Blade Runner.
I believe he’s referring to my ‘The point of the film is not “We’re all people, kumbayah”’ post. I feel I stated that poorly.
If Deckard is a replicant (which he isn’t), then the message is that natural people and manufactured people are all just ‘people’. Let’s all hug each other and sing Kumbaya. But that’s not the message. The point is that Deckard is not a replicant, and yet he is less ‘human’ (i.e., he has less humanity) than the replicants are. The replicants really are ‘more human than human’. When the book was published the Vietnam War was going on. Technology was improving by leaps and bounds. Future Shock would come out two years later. That book ‘the social paralysis induced by rapid technological change.’ Deckard has lost his humanity even as the replicants are trying to gain theirs. He has become what he is hunting and killing. But not literally. He did not literally become a replicant. He’s still human, and he finds his humanity at the end.
“We’re all human” is about as far from Kumbaya as you can get. Humans are mean, nasty, ugly, violent, combative, vindictive creatures, regardless of whether we’re natural or replicant, and that’s much closer to the movie’s message.
Not to put words in Chronos’s mouth, but to me at least “it doesn’t matter” is a way of expressing that the question of who is human and who is not (in a spiritual sense) is the important part of the movie, not the answers about the origins of any of the beings we see on the screen.
I feel like people who need it to be one way or the other (including the director) are just catching the tiger by the tail so to speak. If we figure out Deckard’s origins one way or the other, the existential problems the story presents are still not solved. Folks seem to want to know exactly how they’re supposed to feel about the point of the film; that it should fall neatly into a predictable and simple formula. Deckard is a human, but is cold and unfeeling, so is he really more human that the emotive Roy? Deckard is a replicant but doesn’t know it, so who really is human and manufactured in this crazy world anyway?
Those are both interesting I suppose, but man do they tie things up neatly in a box to put under a tree for grandma.
What makes this story great is that Deckard himself doesn’t know what it is to be a (hu)man. He is alone in a dark world, with nothing but memories to keep himself company. You can almost hear him ask himself “Am I a real person?” in the scene in his apartment with the piano and photos. Maybe he’s wondering if he’s a replicant, maybe he’s wondering if the shitty solitary life he leads is even worth calling a human existence, and maybe he’s asking the same questions we are in this thread.
That’s why I keep watching the movie. To watch Deckard confront and question his humanity in a world where the things separating him from the filth of the world, human or replicant, are constantly brought into question and torn away. “There is nothing either good or bad [human or replicant], but thinking makes it so.”
And of course, the replicants have been built in “their maker’s image”, designed and programmed to do the nasty, dirty, violent, and dangerous tasks that people no longer want to do. Despite that this is their essential function in life, and they’ve been deprived of the fundamental basis by which to develop a conscience or social mores, they seek these connections–to family, a society (of sorts), a meaning to their well-defined mortality–in order to become more human. Roy saving Deckard in the end transcends his “killer” programming and limited socialization, a final act of pure compassion, to extend the life of someone else even as his is coming to a predetermined close. The Nexus 6 isn’t just the next stage in replicant evolution; it is likely the next stage in human evolution, just as the HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey is (part of) the next stage of human evolution, a merging of man and tool to become something more enduring and capable. While the two films are in many ways polar opposites–Blade Runner is a gritty, dirty film about a future that is falling apart at the seems and is seeped in emotion, while 2001 is the perfectly sterile future with the human actors are portrayed as almost completely soulless and disinterested–the two films actually complement each other well thematically in the sense that they are about humanity failing to anticipate the effects of building sentient tools or be considerate of the feelings and desires of these newly awakened consciousnesses. While Blade Runner plays with the tropes of film noir and 2001 is hard science fiction, both are at their core existential horror films.
With regard to Deckard being a replicant, he gets his ass handed to him every single time he confronts one of Batty’s replicants, surviving only by luck or (in the case of Pris) because a replicant became careless. It is clear, despite his boss’ estimation, that he is in no way the equal of even the least of the Nexus 6 replicants. His obsession with photos isn’t an indication that he’s a replicant, it is a reflection of the same sense of disconnect; Deckard is only good at his job (insofar as he is at all) because he is, like the replicants he hunts, not connected with the rest of humanity and has no sense of empathy until Rachel awakens it in him.
Scott is a great visual director, but story and plotting is not his strong suite, as many movies, and most recently Prometheus, aptly demonstrate.
Stranger
No, sorry, it’s not a great question at all. It’s a stupid question that has no business being asked. It is as clever an idea as “dinosaurs did not go extinct, they invented time machines and are arriving next week”. Deckard is not and never was a replicant. The whole concept is one that Ridley Scott injected into BR to sell his Director’s Cut. It’s intention is solely to grab the attention of spotty teenage boys who think more robots = better.
Making Deckard a replicant totally undermines every level of depth in the movie. The humanity of Roy in his last moments, the inhumanity of Rep Detect, the triumph of love over fear - all demolished by an irresponsible “hey how cool would it be if”.
Credit where it’s due - the Final Cut (with the exception of the fucking unicorn) is as polished a version as we’ll ever see, but the movie is still riddled with holes. Most of the holes are caused by that stupid text at the very beginning…
Replicants declared illegal on Earth after a Nexus 6 mutiny? So why the hell doesn’t anyone in Rep Detect know about this model? Why does Deckard think it unusual for them to come to Earth? What did he do before he quit then? Why establish a police force specifically for the purpose of hunting illegal replicants on Earth if it’s bloody unusual for them to go there? How is this “a bad one, the worst yet” if its so fucking surprising that it happens at all? Why does a seasoned Blade Runner need to be told what a god-damned replicant looks like and what it can do?
And, whilst I’m ranting, couldn’t Scott edit his bastard movie so Rachel has time to walk more than three fucking steps out of the owl-room before Deckard loudly announces she’s a replicant, something the cloth-eared bitch somehow didn’t manage to arse wiping hear? :smack:
Don’t get me started on Blade Runner.
Favourite movie, though.
My fanwank for this has been that the opening blurb is the public headline / newsclip. The movie that follows is “the real story” that the public isn’t privy to. In reality, it was tacked on the film to aid naive viewers.
I don’t remember any signs that Deckard was obsessed with photos, just that he had some photos like any normal person would. He had a nifty photo analyzing machine in his apartment, but I thought that was just a leftover from his investigation days.
Why does Deckard think it unusual for them to come to Earth?