Eonwe has already elaborated several points I was going to make. I don’t think the point of the film was to answer the question but to pose it. And if Ridley Scott emphasized the question prior to releasing the Director’s cut I don’t think it was so much to make more money off selling the revised edition but to reinforce the point of the film.
Remember that it’s starting point was Phillip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”
In our other discussions of Dick’s works, we’ve talked about his themes of ‘What makes people different from…’ and ‘how are memories validated?’ and ‘what makes law enforcement methods different from criminal activities?’ This movie (I had Dick’s book but lost it after reading only the first chapter), pulls those themes together and, in fact, embodies much of it in Deckard. Nice job, Ridley!
“It doesn’t matter.” is definitely the wrong response. The question matters so much that we’re still arguing about it (and the possible answers) 33 years after the movie and 47 years after Phillip K. Dick was asking. And every time our technology (appears to) make a giant leap – in chess-playing computers, in animated singers seeming real, in robotic pets being marketed, in synthetic voices answering questions on our phones – we should ask it again because we don’t know. And because the line between one and the other is increasingly vague.
–G!
Deckard: Shakes, huh?
[Rachel nods]
Deckard: I get 'em too. Reeeal bad.
Reality not being what it seems, or hard truths exposed as lies is a staple of Dick.
If I remember correctly in the novel, Deckard leaves the city and goes out into the countryside and finds a wild toad, he realizes through examining it the toad is synthetic. He nervously wonders if all existing life is synthetic, including himself. I think there was a plot about a theory that humanity had to be recreated because a nuclear war killed too many, so similar to the toad.
edit:The ambiguity is what is important, not whether Deckard is or not.
Oh… kind of bleak.I don’t think the story works too well, as a metaphor, if all life is replicant. It works great if some is and some is not but you can’t tell the difference. And, yes, I would think having Deckard be a replicant would be standard fare for Dick, but, I also agree the story can go either way and still work well. A little better if he is human though. Makes the replicants “more human” if they learn compassion.
In the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Rick (not Dick) Deckard is explicitly determined to not be an “andy” (“replicant” in the film). However, the film diverges so much from the plot details of the novel that one cannot really be used to validate the other.
Not quite right - he thinks the toad is real (being crazed with guilt by this point.) His wife calls up a repairman to find out how to change the batteries.
The book also had a whole “fake” religion* exposed by blatantly-obvious-but-noone-realizes** replicant pop-media celeb.
*basically an empathy-reinforcement treatment
**as in, has an 18-hour a day talk show on tv, and a separate-but-overlapping 18-hour radio show.
Deckard is saying it is surprising THESE replicants would flee to earth, there are very few special agents hunting down hidden replicants, he has never seen the new model and Racheal is even more advanced than the nexus 6 line.
I assume after they were declared illegal on earth a few agents were used to hunt down those that ran away from their masters or that assumed human identities etc.
The film is even ambiguous on WHAT the replicants are, they are called robots or androids yet we see they are actually made of biological tissue. They have blood!
I think it is pretty clear they are actually vat grown genetically engineered humans.
“Aliens” is one of my favourite movies and I wholeheartedly disagree. A few of the scenes later on add something; they could have left in the robot-machine-gun bit. The rest make the movie far, far too slow. Adding Newt’s backstory was a total waste of time, in particular.
DrDeth, I also disagree with LOTR. But yeah, it’s another thread.
When was Gaff supposed to have planted this dream?
Now, if Deckard had told Rachel something like:
“I used to dream about unicorns all the time. I never told anybody that before.”
…it would tie in to Rachel’s “private” memories about the spider and her brother. Deckard’s dream is not a memory, though, him having that dream is a depicted event in the film.
Scott is getting cutesy, the film as presented does not support his latter-day vision. A better interpretation is that the origami unicorn is a coincidence (or that Gaff intended it as symbolic of Rachel - she is mythically rare like the unicorn in the sense of being a creature who is mechanical but can feel love) but it’s enough to give Deckard a moment’s pause.
Rachel’s memories of the baby spiders are not dreams. She “remembers” it happening. How Deckard learned of this is a small plot hole. Did Tyrell show him a file? A mind-recorded video? Rachel should have had an entire lifetime’s memories - how did Deckard pick that one?
But Deckard’s unicorn isn’t a memory, it’s a dream. Not the same thing. Telling Gaff that “Deckard dreams implanted dreams of unicorns - use that as a weapon if you need to” doesn’t make sense. Why would he be told this? What purpose would it serve?
Deckard told Rachel outright one of her private memories. Like he was ripping her open and showing her her own insides. Very shocking, to learn you aren’t real. But what does Gaff do? Leaves a tiny paper unicorn that Deckard almost missed, referring very subtly to a dream that Deckard might not even remember upon waking, that he’d have to tie in with his own knowledge of Rachel’s fake memories, and draw the desired conclusion. Gaff saying “you’ve done a man’s job” is a thousand times less subtle, and yet still inconclusive.
(unless all replicants have the same implanted dreams. Do replicants dream of electric unicorns?)
A sheep would be hard to make into a tiny origami. The Unicorn was a much easier symbol, so yeah, Androids dream of Unicorns, or whatever else the programmer decides to put int their synthetic brains.
It’s the only reason for showing Deckard “dreaming” anything at all. (he had no other dreams). But using “electric Unicorn” in the story title would have been confusing. Dreaming of sheep everybody could sort of get.
I just figured Tyrrell showed Deckard a bunch of stuff about Rachel’s “formative” memories, partly to show off, partly to answer Deckard’s “how can it not know what it is?” query. This would have taken place shortly after Deckard met Rachel and Tyrrell, at Tyrell’s office. I can picture something along the lines of:
Tyrell: We’re not just giving her social memories, we’re also giving her personal secrets that she can keep, secrets that every human keeps to themselves, all to make her more human. Would you like to see some of them?
Then later Deckard reveals his knowledge of her secrets to her. She is… upset.
Seems to me that when the author of the original novel, the screenwriter and the actor all agree, and the director is saying something different, then the director may be wrong.
Well, the director is free to describe his vision anyway he likes. But we’re also free to say that his version of the movie is weaker than the version we prefer.
Without the unicorn dream, Gaff’s origami unicorn serves only to tell us (and Deckard) that he had been to the apartment, seen Rachel, decided to let her live and made space for the couple to beat it from LA. Even with the implanted dream (implanted by RS), this does not have to shed any doubt on Deckard’s nature. It just as equally sheds doubt on Gaff’s, for a start, but that’s not where I would want to go.
Besides not adding anything of any interest to the story (indeed, as already noted, seriously detracting from its themes) the “Deck’s a rep” theory simply makes no sense:
Holdern, a BR, is certainly human. He gets shot and ends up “breathing through a tube”.
Deckard gets beaten up by a pleasure model. Not a military model, an animated blow up doll. He has none of the physical resilience of a replicant. If it takes one to kill one, why pick a shit one?
He does, however, possess emotional intelligence and a non-autistic perspective. He can bluff his way backstage at Taffy Lewis’ bar, he drinks, he feels remorse, he worries about feeling empathy for the things he is hunting.
False memories, pah. Deck has a well used apartment, routines, knows people, has a history, needs to be talked into doing the job one more time. If he has these things because somebody put them into him, why does Tyrell consider Rachel’s implanted memories to be an innovation put into his latest model?
It’s just a crap and puerile idea from RS. As an anti-replicant measure it sucks shit. Let’s get one of these dangerous android things, make it physically weaker than the things it’s hunting, implant it with a reluctance to do the job and let it loose in the city to be monitored by a guy with a walking stick. Yeah, right.
Here is my read on the scene of Deckard looking at his old photos.
Deckard is not wondering if he is a replicant, he is slowly realizing how absurd the supposed unique qualities of replicants are, that it is really common qualities of humanity.
Replicants are obsessed with documenting their life with photos because people are, it is like if they said you can tell replicants by their fear of death and desire to be free, Deckard is just realizing how much their society “others” reps by attributing to them common qualities of humanity. This is also why they are called androids because people in the outer colonies don’t want to face what their miners and sex slaves are.
