Although released to
decidedly mixed reviews and audience ennui in the summer of 1982, Ridley
Scott's Blade Runner has since ascended to the pinnacle
of the sci-fi cinema Valhalla. In fact,
the Scott film is often mentioned in the same breath as Kubrick's 2001:
A Space Odyssey (1968) as, perhaps, the greatest sci-fi film yet
produced.
Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman has written that “Blade Runner is
a singular and enthralling experience. Never mind the plot. From its
spectacular opening shot, a hellishly beautiful vision of 21st-century Los
Angeles, the movie casts a druggy, hypnotic spell.”
Reviewing the director’s cut of the film The Boston Globe wrote
that the film was “a triumph of production design and cinematic mood.”
As many reviews suggest,
much of Blade Runner's now sterling reputation arises
from the film's meticulously-crafted, pioneering production design and dazzling
visual presentation. An heir to Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
(1926), the 1982 Scott film visualizes a world of corporate control, class
warfare, and the next-stage in our understanding of what it means to be man…or
machine.
Or as a special effects guru on
the film noted
to Richard Corliss in his Time Magazine
review, “The environment in the
film is almost a protagonist.”
Yet Blade
Runner's triumph isn't merely one of forward-thinking, dramatic
visualization. The film assiduously echoes the up-to-the-minute social worries
of the era in which it was crafted (the 1980s), and obsesses on an issue that
remains of great importance in our nation, even today: race.
Set in the future year
of 2019 -- in a monolithic, blighted
metropolis -- Blade Runner presents a future world in which
business and technology have ballooned to titanic proportions and dwarfed the
human spirit.
Advertisements for
Coca-Cola and other products stand several stories high.
And as human dwellings reach closer to the
very sky itself, the more grand and opulent those residences appear.
The lucky
rich are literally awash in warm
golden light, as though access to the sun is itself a perk of wealth. We see
this fact visualized in the classical, clean lines of Tyrell's (Joe Turkel)
sun-soaked penthouse apartment: a
veritable Mount Olympus, and a home not just for a Man, but for a God on Earth.
Meanwhile, far down
below on street level...it's a roiling Hell of ugly industry, punk fashion,
neon lights, steam, and ubiquitous rain.
The hungry and the poor toil there
like mindless ants, mostly unnoticed by those living in luxury and wealth high
above.
Again, it’s illustrative
to consider Metropolis, and the idea there of a split “future” society:
rich men above the Earth, living in opulent gardens and residences, while the lower
class, the workers, dwell beneath the ground, in a utilitarian city carved out
of rock. Blade Runner takes that
status quo, but adds a layer of fantastic new special effects visualizations to it.
Thematically, the world of Blade
Runner might best be expressed by a throwaway line featured in the
film: “If you're not a cop, you're little people.”
And if you're not human, if you're a Replicant, you aren't even little people.
Importantly, that
dynamic represents the core of the film's race-based statement. That mankind
has played God by creating the Replicants, but then steadfastly refused to
acknowledge this creation, this child, with the very dignities we all cherish
every day: equality and liberty.
Like all underclasses
throughout history, the android Replicants in Blade Runner are
known by a derogatory slang term: skin-jobs. And Replicants also
boast a built-in expiration date that makes them seem less than fully human: they
die four years after their "incept date."
As you may well imagine,
this fact doesn't sit well with some Replicants, and that's what precipitates
much of the action in the film. A cadre of Replicants returns to Earth (from
off-world) on a spiritual quest; on a search for more life that, in sub textual
terms, might be interpreted as the search for racial equality. The Replicants don’t want to be classified inferior,
their very lives and identities unimportant and unrecognized. They want equality (and more life)…fucker.
Man Has Made His Match. Now It's His Problem.
In narrative terms, Blade
Runner revolves around the hunt and pursuit of six renegade
replicants.
Yep, I wrote six, and that's according to Los Angeles'
police chief, Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh) in explicitly stated dialogue.
This number is important to note, especially according to one specific interpretation of the film. But more on that reading later.
The man doing the
hunting in this case is the laconic, hard-boiled and lonely Deckard (Harrison
Ford), a former detective in a special police squad called Blade Runners. Blade
Runners are famous for "retiring" skin jobs.
The quarry this time
includes Leon (Brion James), Zhora (Joanna Cassidy), Pris (Daryl Hannah) and
Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer). And yes, that's only four names, even though Bryant
specifically mentioned six replicants.
Over the course of his
investigation, Deckard questions the latest model of Replicant, a new upgrade
built by the Tyrell Corporation named Rachel (Sean Young). "More human
than human" as the slogan goes, and Rachel doesn't realize she's
actually a machine. She even boasts distinctive memories from her childhood.
But these memories are really just clever implants; the memories of "Tyrell's
niece."
Deckard soon falls in
love with the winsome, confused Rachel and -- depending on which version of the film you see -- also experiences
strange dreams of a unicorn in a primeval forest. After hunting down the last
of the Replicants, Deckard must decide if he should pursue his romantic
relationship with a Replicant.
Meanwhile, the aggrieved
Replicants go in search of their God, Tyrell, only to learn that he knowingly
created not children...but slaves.
"I Think It Was
Manufactured Locally:" 1980s Terrors Lurking in Los Angeles, 2019
Early in the 1980s, many
citizens in the United States of America feared that the country had a new,
powerful and sinister competitor: Japan. At the time, that Pacific nation excelled in
industry, manufacturing, and the development of new technologies.
Importantly,
Japan was also the United States' main international creditor in this era, and
it benefited financially from a forty-to-fifty-billion dollar trade gap with
the United States.
In particular, the
Japanese auto industry seemed to be cleaning Detroit's clock. Many World War II
veterans who had fought in the Pacific and had witnessed the draconian, brutal
behavior of the Japanese in a time of conflict, perceived a new danger to
America.
As a character in Die
Hard (1988) knowingly jokes, "Pearl Harbor didn't
work" so Japan was conquering the United States economically:
with "VCRs." There were many Americans of the
Greatest Generation who felt precisely that way in the early 1980s, and my
beloved, now-deceased paternal grandfather was one of them. He never bought a
Japanese car.
Although structurally
and visually a deliberate reprise of the 1940s film noir (an
era, incidentally of actual rather than economic war with
Japan), one of Blade Runner's many undercurrents
involves this 1980s incursion of Japanese business interests in future America.
In particular, it
appears that in 2019, American business (always ahead of the curve and looking for ways to stay alive....), has
assimilated Japanese business interests into its very structure so as to
continue turning huge profits and remain on the top of the food chain.
"Crowds
of people mill through rain-soaked streets, evoking common fears about
overpopulation and "foreigners" overrunning future cities. On the
East and West coasts of the U.S., for example, Japanese ramen and sushi cafes
have replaced U.S. fast food chains, and visibly prominent are many Asian
merchants and street people. The film here seems to articulate paranoia about
Japanese capitalism "taking over" the United States. Nevertheless,
the film’s city (Los Angeles) seems under the hegemony of U.S. capitalism,
which now seems to have incorporated its rivals into its structure. The
society’s economic structure combines small, street-merchant-style, "free
enterprise" with paternalistic capitalist control. Most of the merchants
in the film are Asian or European, whereas the corporate president and
executives of the Tyrell Corporation are all North Americans."
So Blade
Runner acknowledges the timely fear of a Japanese take-over in
America, but puts a spin on it. Even the resourceful Japanese have become
slaves to a Corporate Nation – the 1% -- in the future.
Similarly, Replicants
-- constructed piece-meal in Mom/Dad, Asian-controlled shops such as
the Eye Factory run by Chew (James Hong) -- are another symbol of Big
Business run amok in the future of Blade Runner; of the
consumer culture of the 1980s carried to the next level. It's a world where
human beings use other beings (androids) for pleasure, to fight wars, and to
perform menial tasks that humans apparently no longer wish to do.
And yes, this
description today rather uncannily mirrors how immigrants are viewed in modern American society. Interestingly, the film suggests that Big Business will go
along with a new influx of workers from other nations, and even co-opt that
work force so to stay on "top," literally, of the situation (living
high, high above it, in palatial skyscrapers).
"Is This to Be An
Empathy Test?" A Replicant Civil
Rights Movement in Blade Runner
In the World War II era, a dedicated drive
towards equality for all U.S. citizens was begun here at home. The 1940s was
the epoch of Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802, which opened up new job possibilities
for African-Americans. It was also the era in which white-only primaries were
judged unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
Importantly, the noir era
in film was also the age of Truman's National Committee on Civil Rights, CORE
(Congress of Racial Equality), and the election of Chicago's William Dawson in
the House of Representatives. There was still a long way to go, but the long
march towards racial equality was beginning in earnest.
Blade Runner explicitly discusses race and the history of race inequality
in America. As I noted above, it speaks deliberately and forcefully in the film language (noir) of the
1940s, an era when race was a concern in the United States as enumerated above.
More than that, the
Replicants in the film are described in historically racist terms, ones
involving the nature of their skin, not the quality of their character. They
are not "colored" or "negro," but "skin-jobs.
Replicants are not considered "fully" human, and again, this reflects
our very history: In 1789, in the Constitution, African-Americans were considered
3/5s of a person...not the equivalent of a white person, in other words.
Why is this important? If you
see someone as being less than fully human (like, say an "illegal"), that descriptor makes it much easier to
enslave them, or to deny them basic human rights. In the film, Roy Batty
acknowledges this fact and contextualizes his experience, and the experience of the
Replicants…as slavery. He discusses with Deckard what "it is to be a
slave."
I suppose there is no
need to describe Deckard's hunt of the Replicants as a "high-tech
lynching" but certainly, the Replicants are treated harshly as a
matter of course in 2019. Deckard shoots Zhora in the back, exposing the ugly
truth that Replicants have no legal rights in this society. They are not
arrested and afforded due process of law. They are not innocent until proven
guilty.
Instead, Replicants are shot on sight because of what they
are, not because of their conduct. This is the essential
characteristic of institutional racism: denying people freedom not because of
their behavior; but because of their origin, skin color and heritage.
If you desire to delve deeply into the visuals of Blade Runner,
consider that Zhora is murdered while crashing through a series of transparent glass barriers, a metaphor, perhaps, for the oft-mentioned "glass
ceiling" that keeps racial/ethnic minorities from achieving high level positions in society.
Leon attempts to kill
Deckard and says to him, "painful to live in fear, isn't it?" And
that too is a crucial part of the racial equation. For the Replicants, it's the
knowledge that they can be shot and killed at any time simply for living in a city where the authorities deem they do not belong. For Latinos in Arizona today,
it's the knowledge that you can be asked for your papers by armed police simply
because of your skin color.
You can travel pretty
deep down the rabbit hole with this interpretation of the film, if that's your
inclination. There's a test in Blade Runner for
determining if a person is human or Replicant, and it is called a "Voigt-Kampff"
Test. That name sounds uncomfortably like Hitler's manifesto Mein
Kampf, doesn't it? And when we think of the Nazis, we remember
their belief in racial purity, the subjugating of "lesser" races,
right? The Voight-Kampf functions as a tool to identify one such lesser race: the
Replicant.
And interestingly, what
this test seeks is the "empathy" response in the iris, in the eyeball.
"Empathy," of course, has become
a racial code word in America today, as we saw during the last two Supreme
Court justice nominating processes. What Blade Runner doesn't
make plain, however, is if Replicants possess a surfeit or lack of empathy in
their iris responses. What do humans
possess? More or less empathy than a Replicant?
Fnally, what's
abundantly clear in Blade Runner is that Replicants are
people too. They are, as the saying goes, more human than human. They love, they mourn, and they want what all
human beings want: more life. In fact, the Replicants undergo a real
spiritual quest in the film. They seek to find their God, Tyrell, and petition
him for more life. They seek forgiveness from him too, at least after a
fashion, for their brutal methods of self-preservation. In answer, they are
told by Tyrell, Our Corporate God, that they have done nothing "the God of
biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for."
Of course, the
Replicants then kill God, but the relevant point is that Replicants, like
humans, seek to understand their very nature, and turn to the divine for that
knowledge.
Roy Batty does even more than
that, however. He not only seeks answers from his God, but, ultimately, shows
mercy to his enemies, which is something you cannot say for the police in Blade
Runner. Batty could kill Deckard...but chooses to save his life
instead. In his final moment of life, he
decides that life is too beautiful to snuff out, even in an enemy.
In this beautiful and
emotionally-wrenching climactic scene of Blade Runner, Batty is depicted grasping a white
dove as his time on Earth runs out.
This bird is a representation of
the Holy Spirit in Christian Mythology, and a symbolic signifier that Batty is
truly one of God's creatures and, through his mercy, has earned the right to be
considered such.
When the dove flies heavenward, released by Batty, the image suggests that Batty's soul has fled his body; that he was more than
just a machine. Like all of us, he possesses a spirit.
You've Done A Man's Job, or Less Human
Than Human: The Deckard Equation
One of the key questions
regarding Blade Runner involves its protagonist,
Deckard. Director Ridley Scott has suggested that Deckard is, in fact, a
Replicant himself. Harrison Ford has gone on record as saying he believes the opposite, that Deckard is human.
As in all great art, a
case can probably be made either way.
If Deckard is a
Replicant, then he is clearly "passing" as a human being, and that
seems to fit in with the film's racial overtones.
Indeed, there are passages of dialogue in the
film that hint at Deckard's mechanical nature. In particular, Gaff (Edward James
Olmos) tells Deckard after Batty is dead that the blade runner performed a
"man's job." In other words, a job worthy of a
man, or a human being. This description could be interpreted to
mean that the Replicant Deckard has performed as well as a human would under similar
circumstances. It is thus a race-centric remark (Hey, you did good….for a
black guy!) and thus an acknowledgment of Deckard's genetic origin.
Also, Gaff leaves behind
at Deckard's apartment a small origami Unicorn. In the director's cut
of Blade Runner, Deckard dreams of a unicorn in the forest.
If Gaff is aware that all Replicants are encoded with the unicorn dream as part
of their unusual genetic make-up, then he has left behind the origami unicorn
to help Deckard understand the truth about himself. If only Deckard can put it
all together...
In the final battle at
the Bradbury building, Batty also says to Deckard "let's see what
you're made of," as if there is a question about Deckard truly is
made of, genetically-speaking.
Well, what is Deckard
made of?
The following fight
scene suggests that our hero is made of much the same stuff as Batty.
Notice
that in the ensuing fight, Scott's camera catches both Deckard and Batty
mending damaged hands at roughly the same time, through the art of cross-cutting.
This editing choice could represent a subtle, visual connection. Both men share
something in common: an injury.
On one level this could simply be an indication
that a Replicant boasts the same survival instinct as a human does.
On another level, it
could mean that these men share a different kind of "kinship," Replicant-hood, if
that's a word.
Also, it's important to note that both Batty and Deckard
are slaves, though in service of different masters. But this too could be
interpreted either way. To demonstrate, perhaps, that the gulf between human
and Replicant is not so wide; or more pointedly, to sub-textually suggest that
both men are Replicants.
Lastly, remember that
Bryant discussed six free Replicants. Yet
the movie depicts four Replicants, and notes that one (the fifth?) was
killed attempting to cross a border, a fence (a death which again, reeks of racial
connotations in today's America).
That leaves one Replicant remaining, right?
So who is the sixth and
final Replicant? It can't be Rachel,
because when Bryant conveys the story of the six Replicants to Deckard, Rachel
has not yet left the custodianship of Tyrell. Therefore, by process of elimination, the sixth Replicant must be Deckard
himself.
Finally, the very form
that Blade Runner utilizes -- the film noir detective
story -- suggests Deckard's mechanical heritage. In the best film noir movies,
the investigation by a detective leads, inevitably, to some shattering personal
revelation.
Consider Johnny
Favorite's journey of self-discovery in a Blade Runner contemporary, Angel
Heart (1987), or the shattering revelation by Faye Dunaway's
character in Polanski's Chinatown (1974).
In noir,
we must conclude that the ultimate discovery is not who-did-it.
Rather, it is "who
am I?," the discovery or assertion of identity.
If
Deckard is indeed a Replicant, then the film adheres closely to this noir format and tradition That's ultimately why I favor this interpretation (that Deckard is a machine);
it seems encoded in the film's very DNA.
On the other side of the
equation, if Deckard is not a replicant, then, at the very least the film's
racial overtones carry an optimistic message to go out on. If even a Blade
Runner can fall in love with a Replicant, as Deckard does here, then there is
hope yet for the human race to overcome bigotry and prejudice. There is some hope of future equality for these
artificial people.
But whether Deckard is a
Replicant or a human being, Blade Runner remains a
brilliantly-conceived and dynamically-executed motion picture. By co-opting the film noir approach, Ridley Scott's film creates not only a
daring vision of the future, but subconsciously evokes a time period in American history when racism was more up-front and blatant than it is today. The film noir approach thus grants some breathing room for the film to contextualize the Replicant
experience of 2019 in language that we all understand and recognize, at
least subconsciously.
Blade Runner is so packed with fascinating ideas and subtexts (like the
quest for immortality; for example), that it's almost impossible to do the film
any sort of justice in one blog post. As
critic Rita Kempley wrote in The Washington Post (back
in 1992):
"Every viewing of "Blade Runner" brings
new discoveries..."
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