Blade Runner

(Director: Ridley Scott, 1982)

Stephen Nottingham

This essay is adapted from material in Chapter Three (Confronting the Clone) of my book Screening DNA (DNA Books, 2000)

Memories and perception are central to Blade Runner. Eyes are the main visual motif, while the nature of experience and what it is that makes us human are its resonant themes. In Blade Runner, androids have evolved from the robotic to the organic. Instead of electronic circuits under their skin, the androids are genetically engineered and entirely flesh and blood. The film is most interesting when the barriers that separate man and android are deliberately blurred. Do the androids have more humanity than a species that is leading an increasingly soulless existence? The director's cut of 1991 confirmed that Blade Runner was indeed a masterpiece. The film has also stood up well, in the light of scientific advances since it was first made.

Blade Runner (1982), based on Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, is set in the near-future year of 2019, and follows an eventful day in the life of Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), a member of an assassination division of the police called a Blade Runner Unit. He is forced out of retirement and told to retire (kill) a group of androids who have illegally returned to Earth: Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), Pris (Darryl Hannah), Leon (Brion Jones) and Zhora (Joanna Cassidy). Blade Runners are therefore reality police, charged with keeping humans and their genetically engineered doppelg䮧ers apart: a knife-edge division that runs throughout the film. The humanoid robotic clones have been manufactured to do the dangerous work of exploring and colonizing other worlds. They are also given as slaves to human families as an incentive to emigrant from the polluted and overpopulated Earth.

In Dick's novel the androids are organic, but their means of manufacture is vague. Between the time the book was written and the film was made, however, significant advances had occurred in molecular biology. The screenplay, by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, specifically invokes genetically engineering and cloning as being used in android production. The androids of Dick's book were renamed replicants in the film, following a suggestion by David Peoples' microbiologist daughter that a variation on the word "replication" would be appropriate.

In the film, the Tyrell Corporation has developed an advanced replicant model called Nexus-6, who are superior in strength and agility, and "at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them". Crucially, the replicants have been made with false memory implants, which they consider to be their own real memories. These memories are the foundation of their identity. They change the replicants from generic adult clones into individual beings. They can build upon this foundation with their own experiences, but these in time become indistinguishable from their memory implants.

There is hidden away in our brains a permanent record of our past. All that we have perceived can potentially be recalled. Extraordinary cases of involuntary memory, triggered by a smell or taste, can open up vast vistas of recalled experience. Scientists have long argued that long-term memory is stored through the creation and strengthening of nerve cell connections. However, there are problems with this view, not least being the rapid turn over of molecules in the nervous system. Recently, a small group of scientists has argued that long-term memory needs a more stable blueprint and that DNA could supply this. Permanent memories could be stored as altered genes. This would operate in a similar way to how the immune system remembers previous infections. It could explain why only three percent of our DNA has a known function. Up to fifty percent of it could be involved in memory functions, giving the order of capacity required to remember a lifetime's worth of experiences. The theory is supported by the fact that the brain is unique in having no cell division after adulthood is reached, which might disrupt the laying down of memory in DNA. Meanwhile chromosomal pairing has been demonstrated in the brain, which could be indicative of DNA exchange.

If the new theory of DNA and memory is right, then genetic engineering could be used to transplant memories. Memories might even be cloned. Therefore, such scenarios, now familiar from science fiction movies, may have more basis in theoretical biology than once thought. In Blade Runner, Deckard goes to the Tyrell Corporation to determine if his replicant detection technique, the Voigt-Kampff (VK) test, can detect the difference between a human and a Nexus-6 model. Tyrell (Joe Turkell) introduces him to Rachael (Sean Young) and Deckard conducts the test on her. The test measures emotional responses, by looking at the dilation of the iris when questions designed to trigger responses are asked. The replicants have a low level of empathy toward animals, for example, unlike humans. Rachael is found to be a Nexus-6, although she thinks she is human. In a later scene, in Deckard's apartment, she fully realises that she is a replicant, who has been implanted with Tyrell's niece's memories. In this scene Rachael plays a piano and questions whether it is her or Tyrell's niece who is really playing it. A similar scene occurs in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), where the creature plays a recorder and asks where his talent comes from, is it his or derived from the memory of someone he was made from. Deckard tells Rachael that she plays beautifully. She is so much more than just her (false) memory.

It is significant that the eyes are monitored by the VK test. The eye motif is first signalled in the opening frames of the film, where a vision of the infernal city is reflected in an unblinking eye. We take this eye's point of view as a lightning flash hits the Earth, warning us of a man-made and unnatural birth. The ocular motif is taken up by the empty eyes of an artificial owl; Leon lifting cloned eyeballs out of liquid nitrogen, Roy holding up model eyes; Pris' racoon-like eye make-up; and Tyrell hiding his short-sightedness behind thick glasses. The replicants first seek out the genetic designer of eyes, to whom Roy says, "If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes". Photographs, recorded by an artificial eye, symbolise memories. Seeing is our eye on the world. The VK test registers emotional response by looking closely at the eyes - the windows to the soul.

Replicants are sent out into the world as adults, but only have a four-year life-span. They were not designed to have any will to live, beyond their allotted years, or to have human-like emotions. However, the advanced Nexus-6 has sufficient complexity to have acquired their own emotional responses after two years. The replicant leader Roy, in particular, makes repeated references to the events in his short life, with which he has tried to come to terms ("I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. All those moments lost in time. Like tears in rain"). They may be derived from generic clones, genetically modified to be a slave race with a limited short life-span, but their own experiences have made them unique individuals. The replicants therefore have returned to Earth to ask questions about their creation, and to ask for more life.

The replicants Roy and Pris locate the house of the genetic engineer J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson). Sebastian lives alone in a massive apartment block. He cannot emigrate because he has failed his medical, due to a glandular condition ("Methuselah Syndrome"). This has prematurely aged him. Sebastian's condition appears related to the real-life genetic disease progeria, caused by a defect in genes that produce enzymes responsible for proof-reading DNA and repairing coding errors. Without these enzymes, sufferers age quickly and die young. Pris remarks that his "accelerated decrepitude" is similar to their problem of a limited life-span. When Sebastian tells Roy and Pris that, "There's some of me in you", he is probably referring to them being designed with Sebastian's premature ageing gene. Sebastian takes the two replicants to meet Tyrell, who greets Roy as if he were his returning prodigal son. Roy confesses that it is not easy meeting his maker, but has done so to request more life. Tyrell explains that this is not possible, because the "coding system cannot be revised once it's been established". Roy embraces and kills Tyrell. This is the film's final eye imagery: Tyrell's eyes being gouged out by the insightful Roy.

Tyrell does not have a soul when he dies. In common with many retellings of the Frankenstein story, the replicants are shown to be more humane than their creators. The Tyrell Corporation's sales motto is: "More human than human". Deckard initially has no qualms about killing the fugitive replicants; after all it is his job. However, his contact with Rachael gives him empathy toward the replicants. His soul has not been irredeemably lost. J.F. Sebastian, an outcast because of a genetic defect, also identifies with the replicants, and is the only other human in the film to act with emotion. The replicants are starting to develop a human-like soul, while the humans are losing theirs. The film on one level, therefore, explores what it is that makes us human, or indeed less than human.

Much discussion of Blade Runner has centred on whether Deckard is a replicant or not. In the present reading, being a replicant is more like a state of mind. Deckard is human. This preserves the film's symmetry. Humans have become soulless and replicants are gaining souls. The replicants have learnt to see. The trend towards regarding Deckard as a replicant diminishes the richness of this remarkable film. However, Deckard becomes like a replicant, when he learns to see, in the dying hands of Roy. The replicants represent hope for the future, by showing humans how much they have let their humanity slide. If we allow ourselves to be dehumanized, through the immoral use of technology, then our doppelgangers need not necessarily be threatening us, they may be showing us how to regain our humanity.

© Copyright Stephen Nottingham, 2001.