The film Blade Runner is hugely successful, but what does it all mean? As the makers’ hint, the key is to watch it through the eyes of William Blake and his mythology of liberation.
I think, Andy, you are one of the few people I've read who see the pointlessness that surrounds the speculation of Deckard himself being a replicant. If you go down that route then the film loses all it's disruptive and disonant power. Who really cares if a robot falls in love with another robot, or is bettered by a later model? Even if it's a robot with more evolved morals rather than implanted responses, it's still just a robot verses robot story - Terminator territory, surely?
I have watched the film in all it's versions more times than I can count. In fact I have come to loathe Scotts' eternal tinkering, he's fucked it up by his unimaginative "Of course Deckard is a replicant" stance. In 1982 I left the cinema quite blown away, and that was from watching the original voice over, tacked on happy ending version, which most people consider the least worthy. However, over the years I have come to prefer this flawed version to the later two edits, because for all the faults it leaves the 'Deckard as replicant' question just as a logical and rather obvious potential question, a "what if" without throwing it in your face. The audience isn't that dumb, give them some respect please. Anyway the 'Deckard as replicant' reading begs the question, why make a replicant Blade Runner so impotent compared to the quarry it is supposed to be gunning down?
In 1982 when I first saw the original version in the local Plaza it was the way the film took away the ground on which you stood, I remember afterwards walking back to the car on Oxted Station Road East and thinking " I could be a replicant too". - and ironically some 13 odd years later I was struck by the fact that as a woman who had transitioned and undergone 'The Operation' I was a 'skin job' too. Which, to cut a very long story short, is one of the (lesser) reasons I choose my name. And yes Mr Deckard I turned out to be a lesbian.
The scene after Rachael has retired Leon and gone back with Deckard to his appartment a second time (this is after she has realised she is not a genetic human and has turned renegade) is the pivotal point in the film for me. Having just saved Deckards life by killing Leon, Deckard asks Rachael "Shakes? I get 'em bad...goes with the business" To which she replies "I'm not in the business, I am the business". She then asks Deckard if he ever took the voight Kampf test himself. This is a rather touching moment when Rachael, having just killed Leon is distraught at having killed. In her weakest and most fragile of moments, afterall she has hours just before learnt that she is not a 'real' human being at all. All the self assurance she previously displayed is gone. Yet at the mpment of her greatest weakness when her back is against the wall she is remorseful, and, arguably is equally as human as anyone else so defined in the film. It is at this moment that she alludes to (rather than out right accusing him) Deckards' comparative lack of humanity or his "sushi/cold fish" nature his wife has accused him of.
This, then, is my reading of the film ...the replicants, well Rachael and Batty at least, are effectively more human or display more humanity than the human characters in the film. It doesn't matter how they came into being they are effectively a continuum of the strand of life that is human, not something separate from and outside of it. Personally, this is why it's been so easy to empathise and identify with Rachael. In the light of Roy and Rachaels origins, whether they be natural or synthetic, those origins can no longer sufficiently inform identity. As you say Andy our ideas about who is or isn't human are practically useless.
It is of course right after this scene when Scott editing the film for the Directors Cut inserts the prophetic unicorn sequence thereby opening the box containing Schrodingers live/dead cat and sets about destroying (for me at least) the wonderful ambivalence and ambiguity that cushions the story.
I don't know anywhere near enough about Blake (yet) and profess to have filtered my research into the story through the lenses of Milton and Shelley by way of Judith Kermans book Retrofitting Blade Runner as the introduction to both. i need to look again at the story with fresh Blake-ian eyes. ("if you could see what I have seen with your eyes"). Back then in the mid 90's I was scrabbling to create my own creation myth and I loved the line Mary Shelley gives The Creature "Did I request thee Maker from they clay to mould me man," for rather obvious reasons. But, clearly in the intervening 30 years the discussion has moved on and rest assured I will be taking another look. I never did manage to reconcile my origins back then, I just accepted the irony and got on with my life. Perhaps it's time to look again.
But, I do take issue with Scott because I just don't think he's that good at understanding his own creation, in a way he's just like Victor Frankenstein and Eldon Tyrell, he doesn't allow his creation to live it's own life either. In fact I have often wished the right film maker would come along and re make the film as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But I suspect those days when such a thing could have happened are over, for a while at least.
Good bit of writing Andy. I'll be checking out the other BR things you've written.
Hey Rachael, I agree with you about Ridley Scott's tinkering. I thought the first release was ambivalent even if very unsubtle, in providing clues that Deckard was a replicant ("'Cold fish', my wife called me....") while the story assumes he is human. The voiceover seems overbearing when you go back to it now, but at the time it had exactly the right ambivalence that got the mind racing. Later edits tended to slow the mind down a bit as they got shoutier about various topics.
It's fascinating to hear about how you registered the film while transitioning, or, if you like, having a self-awareness that is as ambivalent as a Ridley Scott screenplay (?) inasmuch as (I assume, please put me right if I am talking nonsense) that to be trans, one first has to realise that one was born 'the wrong gender' and slowly unravel the contradictions (notwithstanding people who say "i always knew") before realising that you want to transition.
It clearly adds a whole level of experience of the film that I cannot speak to at all.
Would you have come to the same conclusions in the same way if you were cis?
I once knew someone who campaigned online against dialectics because they were 'ambivalent', and insisted on the law of the excluded middle, who later transitioned, and I've always wondered if their passion against dialectical logic was rooted in a denial of their own ambivalence, so to say. I mention this because my instinct would be that being trans, whatever difficulties it created, might be an advantage in helping someone see through false / bullshit dichotomies (male / female), but it didn't turn out that way for my logician friend.
Back at the beginnings of my transition I was often told by people who knew me both pre and post operatively that I was in the unique position to know what it like to be both man and woman. I always replied all I knew was what it was like to be transsexual (since that was the language of the time I will continue to use the term transsexual rather than the designation 'trans' - although I fully admit that both terms are always going to be problematic - for me anyway). My partner of the time worked for Dr Russell Reid, back then Russell was 'the go to' private psychiatrist who did so much for trans gendered people. With her job as his secretary went a small flat at the back of Russells practice in Earls Court Square and so I got to see a lot of people presenting as transgender. I got the impression that there was a lot of undertandable self deception. You got to hear the same story "I knew when I was 3 or 4 or 5 years old that etc etc" this was the story the doctors wanted to hear, so this was the story transgendered people learnt to tell...At 5 years old I sensed something was really not quite right, but couldn't say what it was. That came when I hit puberty and was old enough to conceptually frame a few things and realise I, or my body at least, was heading somewhere I really didn't want to go.
30 years ago the conceptual landscape was very different from what it is now. Back then, certainly in the UK, the ideal was to do your 2 years 'in role' then somehow get through the surgery (which was costly) and ultimately 'pass'. You could increase your chances of 'passing' by moving away from the life you'd lived in your pre transition mode and start again, fresh, amongst people who knew nothing of your true history. Despite making no effort to conform to this strategy that's essentially what I did, circumstantually, by first moving away from London and later`by upping sticks to Belgium. In one sense it's been a very successful strategy for the last 30 years and certainly since I came here to Belgium 15+ years ago. No one apart from my partner and a handful of others have reason to know I have a 'trans' history, they just take me at face value. Even my Belgian GP didn't know for the first two years I was her patient, which put a smile on my face. Now in many ways I'm very happy with this since I never really wanted being trans to be part of my identity. I transitioned whilst I was studying at Chelsea School of Art and one of the biggest bug bears I had to contend with was being suddenly expected to make art that somehow brought my 'condition' into play. I wasn't having any of it. The previous year I'd once been to see my friend Omar on the floor below to scrounge a roll up and he was sitting there with his head in his hands saying... "well...last year they had Chris Offili as their 'Star Black Artist' and now they want me to be their 'Star Gay Black Artist' but I just want to be an artist". ...Once I began my transition I was pretty much in a position to know exactly how Omar had felt. I didn't want having a transsexual history as part of my identity, as an artist or otherwise. I just wanted to be seen as the woman I felt myself to be. Being openly known as being trans undermined that. If one seeks to seamlessly slip into the binary gendered norm of society then the 'stealth' strategy as it was called a few years back (maybe it still is) effective as it could be for some, but by no means all transgender people, is fraught with ambivalence and ambiguity. If you go down this path you move from what you often feel is one deception (wrong body) to another (modified version of pre transition life, known then as SPS or The Suitably Plausible History i.e. you substituted one set of gendered pronouns for the other, when discussing your childhood! " In doing that you'd taken some steps forward and a few back because you then had an identity that again is based on, if not outright lies then certainly untruths. Hmmm...not quite back where I started but.. you know! "You think I'm a replicant don't you? ...Look it's me with my mother". Unlike the replicants I have hardly any photo's of me for the ages between 2 and 37 because I quietly didn't bother to save them ... I edited a version of my history which was a little too uncomfortable for me, an act which in iself is also very uncomfortable. If you don't learn to love ambivalence then you are in for a hard time.
Acknowledging that acceptance as a cis woman (Gennies or genetic women was the argot of the time) within the accepted framework of the regular binary version of society - that ironically by their very existence transgender people bring into question - was to some degree just another deception, I was aware of the slightly frustrating situation I now found myself in. So of course I tried to arrive at a more solid and honest position that would truthfully accomodate my history without undermining my newly acquired identity. I think it was at this point that I dived into the deeper levels of Blade Runner hoping to find some clues and pointers to a better strategy. But I just couldn't see how it was to be achieved. All I found was ambivalence, which in time I began to embrace. I think at this point I took to heart Donna Harraways Manefesto for Cyborgs - something about "not being born in 'the garden' and not seeking a unitary identity" I seem to recall. (actually skimming through Harraway again in writing this it still seems quite good!)
Anway....After a few years I stopped thinking too much about, but as I get older I worry that a story that may be valulable and of help to others may be just lost. What trans people often forget or fail to see is that identity is also determined not only by what one feels oneself to be (no matter how genuine or strong the feeling may be prove to be) but also the way others perceive you. It's not just down to what you feel.
I will finish before this gets way too long with a fact I found a few months back that the percentage of people presenting as being transgendered these days who elect and undergo surgery is tiny, under 10%. This to me is a real eye opener since back then in the 90's determination to undergo surgery was defining and unless you'd had or were not desparate to go for the operation, within the transgender community and that included the care givers, you were "a wannabe"! In some ways things I think times are changing for the better, well in somethings they are....
I think, Andy, you are one of the few people I've read who see the pointlessness that surrounds the speculation of Deckard himself being a replicant. If you go down that route then the film loses all it's disruptive and disonant power. Who really cares if a robot falls in love with another robot, or is bettered by a later model? Even if it's a robot with more evolved morals rather than implanted responses, it's still just a robot verses robot story - Terminator territory, surely?
I have watched the film in all it's versions more times than I can count. In fact I have come to loathe Scotts' eternal tinkering, he's fucked it up by his unimaginative "Of course Deckard is a replicant" stance. In 1982 I left the cinema quite blown away, and that was from watching the original voice over, tacked on happy ending version, which most people consider the least worthy. However, over the years I have come to prefer this flawed version to the later two edits, because for all the faults it leaves the 'Deckard as replicant' question just as a logical and rather obvious potential question, a "what if" without throwing it in your face. The audience isn't that dumb, give them some respect please. Anyway the 'Deckard as replicant' reading begs the question, why make a replicant Blade Runner so impotent compared to the quarry it is supposed to be gunning down?
In 1982 when I first saw the original version in the local Plaza it was the way the film took away the ground on which you stood, I remember afterwards walking back to the car on Oxted Station Road East and thinking " I could be a replicant too". - and ironically some 13 odd years later I was struck by the fact that as a woman who had transitioned and undergone 'The Operation' I was a 'skin job' too. Which, to cut a very long story short, is one of the (lesser) reasons I choose my name. And yes Mr Deckard I turned out to be a lesbian.
The scene after Rachael has retired Leon and gone back with Deckard to his appartment a second time (this is after she has realised she is not a genetic human and has turned renegade) is the pivotal point in the film for me. Having just saved Deckards life by killing Leon, Deckard asks Rachael "Shakes? I get 'em bad...goes with the business" To which she replies "I'm not in the business, I am the business". She then asks Deckard if he ever took the voight Kampf test himself. This is a rather touching moment when Rachael, having just killed Leon is distraught at having killed. In her weakest and most fragile of moments, afterall she has hours just before learnt that she is not a 'real' human being at all. All the self assurance she previously displayed is gone. Yet at the mpment of her greatest weakness when her back is against the wall she is remorseful, and, arguably is equally as human as anyone else so defined in the film. It is at this moment that she alludes to (rather than out right accusing him) Deckards' comparative lack of humanity or his "sushi/cold fish" nature his wife has accused him of.
This, then, is my reading of the film ...the replicants, well Rachael and Batty at least, are effectively more human or display more humanity than the human characters in the film. It doesn't matter how they came into being they are effectively a continuum of the strand of life that is human, not something separate from and outside of it. Personally, this is why it's been so easy to empathise and identify with Rachael. In the light of Roy and Rachaels origins, whether they be natural or synthetic, those origins can no longer sufficiently inform identity. As you say Andy our ideas about who is or isn't human are practically useless.
It is of course right after this scene when Scott editing the film for the Directors Cut inserts the prophetic unicorn sequence thereby opening the box containing Schrodingers live/dead cat and sets about destroying (for me at least) the wonderful ambivalence and ambiguity that cushions the story.
I don't know anywhere near enough about Blake (yet) and profess to have filtered my research into the story through the lenses of Milton and Shelley by way of Judith Kermans book Retrofitting Blade Runner as the introduction to both. i need to look again at the story with fresh Blake-ian eyes. ("if you could see what I have seen with your eyes"). Back then in the mid 90's I was scrabbling to create my own creation myth and I loved the line Mary Shelley gives The Creature "Did I request thee Maker from they clay to mould me man," for rather obvious reasons. But, clearly in the intervening 30 years the discussion has moved on and rest assured I will be taking another look. I never did manage to reconcile my origins back then, I just accepted the irony and got on with my life. Perhaps it's time to look again.
But, I do take issue with Scott because I just don't think he's that good at understanding his own creation, in a way he's just like Victor Frankenstein and Eldon Tyrell, he doesn't allow his creation to live it's own life either. In fact I have often wished the right film maker would come along and re make the film as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But I suspect those days when such a thing could have happened are over, for a while at least.
Good bit of writing Andy. I'll be checking out the other BR things you've written.
I should have mentioned that this essay, written a year later, dives deeper into the Blade Runner story:
https://www.travellerintheevening.com/p/blake-blade-runner-and-animal-solidarity
Hey Rachael, I agree with you about Ridley Scott's tinkering. I thought the first release was ambivalent even if very unsubtle, in providing clues that Deckard was a replicant ("'Cold fish', my wife called me....") while the story assumes he is human. The voiceover seems overbearing when you go back to it now, but at the time it had exactly the right ambivalence that got the mind racing. Later edits tended to slow the mind down a bit as they got shoutier about various topics.
It's fascinating to hear about how you registered the film while transitioning, or, if you like, having a self-awareness that is as ambivalent as a Ridley Scott screenplay (?) inasmuch as (I assume, please put me right if I am talking nonsense) that to be trans, one first has to realise that one was born 'the wrong gender' and slowly unravel the contradictions (notwithstanding people who say "i always knew") before realising that you want to transition.
It clearly adds a whole level of experience of the film that I cannot speak to at all.
Would you have come to the same conclusions in the same way if you were cis?
I once knew someone who campaigned online against dialectics because they were 'ambivalent', and insisted on the law of the excluded middle, who later transitioned, and I've always wondered if their passion against dialectical logic was rooted in a denial of their own ambivalence, so to say. I mention this because my instinct would be that being trans, whatever difficulties it created, might be an advantage in helping someone see through false / bullshit dichotomies (male / female), but it didn't turn out that way for my logician friend.
Back at the beginnings of my transition I was often told by people who knew me both pre and post operatively that I was in the unique position to know what it like to be both man and woman. I always replied all I knew was what it was like to be transsexual (since that was the language of the time I will continue to use the term transsexual rather than the designation 'trans' - although I fully admit that both terms are always going to be problematic - for me anyway). My partner of the time worked for Dr Russell Reid, back then Russell was 'the go to' private psychiatrist who did so much for trans gendered people. With her job as his secretary went a small flat at the back of Russells practice in Earls Court Square and so I got to see a lot of people presenting as transgender. I got the impression that there was a lot of undertandable self deception. You got to hear the same story "I knew when I was 3 or 4 or 5 years old that etc etc" this was the story the doctors wanted to hear, so this was the story transgendered people learnt to tell...At 5 years old I sensed something was really not quite right, but couldn't say what it was. That came when I hit puberty and was old enough to conceptually frame a few things and realise I, or my body at least, was heading somewhere I really didn't want to go.
30 years ago the conceptual landscape was very different from what it is now. Back then, certainly in the UK, the ideal was to do your 2 years 'in role' then somehow get through the surgery (which was costly) and ultimately 'pass'. You could increase your chances of 'passing' by moving away from the life you'd lived in your pre transition mode and start again, fresh, amongst people who knew nothing of your true history. Despite making no effort to conform to this strategy that's essentially what I did, circumstantually, by first moving away from London and later`by upping sticks to Belgium. In one sense it's been a very successful strategy for the last 30 years and certainly since I came here to Belgium 15+ years ago. No one apart from my partner and a handful of others have reason to know I have a 'trans' history, they just take me at face value. Even my Belgian GP didn't know for the first two years I was her patient, which put a smile on my face. Now in many ways I'm very happy with this since I never really wanted being trans to be part of my identity. I transitioned whilst I was studying at Chelsea School of Art and one of the biggest bug bears I had to contend with was being suddenly expected to make art that somehow brought my 'condition' into play. I wasn't having any of it. The previous year I'd once been to see my friend Omar on the floor below to scrounge a roll up and he was sitting there with his head in his hands saying... "well...last year they had Chris Offili as their 'Star Black Artist' and now they want me to be their 'Star Gay Black Artist' but I just want to be an artist". ...Once I began my transition I was pretty much in a position to know exactly how Omar had felt. I didn't want having a transsexual history as part of my identity, as an artist or otherwise. I just wanted to be seen as the woman I felt myself to be. Being openly known as being trans undermined that. If one seeks to seamlessly slip into the binary gendered norm of society then the 'stealth' strategy as it was called a few years back (maybe it still is) effective as it could be for some, but by no means all transgender people, is fraught with ambivalence and ambiguity. If you go down this path you move from what you often feel is one deception (wrong body) to another (modified version of pre transition life, known then as SPS or The Suitably Plausible History i.e. you substituted one set of gendered pronouns for the other, when discussing your childhood! " In doing that you'd taken some steps forward and a few back because you then had an identity that again is based on, if not outright lies then certainly untruths. Hmmm...not quite back where I started but.. you know! "You think I'm a replicant don't you? ...Look it's me with my mother". Unlike the replicants I have hardly any photo's of me for the ages between 2 and 37 because I quietly didn't bother to save them ... I edited a version of my history which was a little too uncomfortable for me, an act which in iself is also very uncomfortable. If you don't learn to love ambivalence then you are in for a hard time.
Acknowledging that acceptance as a cis woman (Gennies or genetic women was the argot of the time) within the accepted framework of the regular binary version of society - that ironically by their very existence transgender people bring into question - was to some degree just another deception, I was aware of the slightly frustrating situation I now found myself in. So of course I tried to arrive at a more solid and honest position that would truthfully accomodate my history without undermining my newly acquired identity. I think it was at this point that I dived into the deeper levels of Blade Runner hoping to find some clues and pointers to a better strategy. But I just couldn't see how it was to be achieved. All I found was ambivalence, which in time I began to embrace. I think at this point I took to heart Donna Harraways Manefesto for Cyborgs - something about "not being born in 'the garden' and not seeking a unitary identity" I seem to recall. (actually skimming through Harraway again in writing this it still seems quite good!)
Anway....After a few years I stopped thinking too much about, but as I get older I worry that a story that may be valulable and of help to others may be just lost. What trans people often forget or fail to see is that identity is also determined not only by what one feels oneself to be (no matter how genuine or strong the feeling may be prove to be) but also the way others perceive you. It's not just down to what you feel.
I will finish before this gets way too long with a fact I found a few months back that the percentage of people presenting as being transgendered these days who elect and undergo surgery is tiny, under 10%. This to me is a real eye opener since back then in the 90's determination to undergo surgery was defining and unless you'd had or were not desparate to go for the operation, within the transgender community and that included the care givers, you were "a wannabe"! In some ways things I think times are changing for the better, well in somethings they are....