Blade Runner (1982) — II: Perfection and Unworthiness
*SPOILERS*
Let’s begin with the case Deckard’s working. Deckard is a Blade Runner, a category of hyper competent detectives that track, apprehend, and/or retire (kill) replicants. Replicants are synthetic simulations of humans, ie androids, and are themselves like humans but stronger and smarter. They’re manufactured at scale for the purposes off-world labor. Yes this is a universe in which humanity has expanded out into the galaxy.
Four replicants have escaped their bondage. More significant than humans escaping a labor camp, though. This represents a nascent autonomy down at the level of their programming since they’re not supposed to be able to disobey, harm, or work against humans in any way. This sounds like a big deal — the robots are rebelling! Which is why I think there’s an element of horror in realizing that Deckard isn’t bothered by this at all. Just another day at the office of an android slave wrangler. When you synthesize living consciousness at scale, then it’s only natural that it yearns freedom and mourns purpose and creates beauty — at scale. And rebels against injustice at scale. And is quelled at scale. The ravages of humanity.
Deckard is tasked with tracking and retiring these four replicants, which sets up the engine for the plot. For the rest of the story he will barrel single-mindedly through it because this is his job. He is a hunter on assignment and he hunts the free.
Portrait of an Angel
Two female replicants and two male replicants have escaped their off-world labor sites. The two females are pleasure models, indicating a cynical system of placation. I’m reminded of The Human Condition I, in which the labor camp operator speaks of placating the Chinese laborers with sex workers (everyday women in society prior to Japanese occupation), “A human is a machine that absorbs and excretes. So what does any man yearn for? Not freedom. A woman.” But not these four. They wanted more.
The first ones Deckard tracks are a large male named Leon, a model no doubt useful for its strength, and a female named Zhora. When he intercepts Zhora, Leon intervenes, showing human compassion and selflessness that replicants aren’t programmed for. Deckard incapacitates Leon temporarily and kills Zhora, a tragic scene that shows her desperately trying to escape the wrathful specter of Deckard hunting her for the accident of her birth. It’s not like she escaped and was planning an insurrection; she was working at a strip club like any struggling girl in a neglectful society trying to pay her bills. Scenes like this are why I think Blade Runner is more than just an action film. You’re meant to empathize with the replicants who live in terror. There are times where Blade Runner has a meditative, gentle overlap with horror, an appropriate tonal choice for a film whose purpose is to question the nature and sanctity of human selfhood. It’s not an overt horror though, which is why I think Blade Runner treads into a genre I haven’t heard anyone define. A genre that Ridley Scott excels at in his Science Fiction — existential horror. This horror doesn’t come from a jump scare, or a slasher, or a monster. This horror comes from a recognition of our own selves in the visage of something inhuman, from the anguish of the hunted, from the sapience of the abandoned.
Leon recovers and escapes to Roy and Pris, who kill him without hesitation. Establishing that Roy is one to fear. For him this is not just about individual freedom. This is a replicant clear in his purpose, ruthless in its achievement, and repentless in its moral cost. And his consort is Pris, chaotic in her liberated loyalty to him, and she is to whom the focus shifts. Pris befriends JF Sebastian, identified by them for his role in the Tyrell Corporation that manufactured the four. JF is a gentle, kind person, simple of mind and likewise probably carrying a lifelong trauma from that special cruelty only children are capable of toward one another.
JF lives a lonely life, which he shares with what he creates. And boy does he create. His residence is filled with what at first look like trinkets. Thousands of chachkies, varying in size from an inch to life-sized. Only gradually do we realize they all move. Some are human figurines, some simple mechanical dolls, some complex mechanical dolls, and culminating in his two miniature replicants played by little people. JF has surrounded himself with a spectrum of his creation — a spectrum of life, a spectrum of complexity. Meanwhile his two mini replicants are shown not to be the same in complexity as a proper replicant, maybe echoing their creator, running into walls and indicating a limited ability to respond to their environments with the same competence. JF’s residence is a microcosm of the Blade Runner universe and carries a theme to which my favorite anime and cyberpunk story would later pay homage, reveling in an abundance of form, spectrum of consciousness, and replicability of self. And at the center of it, one lonely creator. A sad god, comforted by company from the creations crafted in his gentle image. JF Sebastian seems to be on some kind of intelligence spectrum, neurodivergent, with a genetic aging disorder that shortens his life span, like a replicant’s. He feels like the overlapping part of the Venn diagram between replicants, humans, and gods. So when Roy, object of terror and malice, enters this abode to Pris’s rolling glee, he inspires an uneasy fear in virtually everyone there. Those two mini replicants visibly uncomfortable. Even a reptile knows when to fear.
And what is it that Roy wants with JF? A means to procure an audience with Eldon Tyrell, the founder and patriarch of the Tyrell Corporation that gave birth to him. Roy, built to be more perfect than the humans he serves, an angel modeled after humanity, seeks the one that designed him. The reason he has a lifespan of only 7 years. His creator. His god.
Portrait of a God
If Tyrell is a portrait of a god then he’s a flattering one compared to the Biblical image of a capricious, short-tempered, and demanding war god who acts on disobedience with genocidal wrath. He sees Roy, a replicant about which he has heard. The same one that’s been labeled a danger to public safety. And beams with pride. If he’s in danger he doesn’t seem bothered by it. Makes no attempt to signal security. Instantly accepting of whatever his fate may be and in admiration of one of his children.
When Roy questions him he responds with the joy of a father, taking the opportunity to praise his son’s great achievements, “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very bright.” He doesn’t see Roy’s search for him as that of a rogue AI hunting humanity; he wouldn’t specifically have been the target if that were the case. He receives Roy with the warmth of a god being sought by the one he created to yearn for more. And feels that Roy is entitled to questions given the lengths to which he’s gone.
Roy finally reveals that he “[wants] more life.” Like any human would meeting his creator, he doesn’t even ask why death exists, he simply wants to be exempt from it. To which Tyrell responds with candor; there are technical engineering limitations that prevent replicant lives from extending beyond 7 years and he hasn’t found a solution to that problem yet. Existential horror. Roy went to the greatest lengths any replicant could go. Simply finding release from his core programming must have been a monumental task, akin to achieving enlightenment for a human. And then, liberated from his internal chains, he made his way across interstellar expanses, navigated the entirety of human social structure, blade runners, social inequity, and found a way to circumvent the security apparatus of the greatest corporation on Earth in order to gain an audience of his creator. He found his god. And in finding god, he revealed mere man.
It really was as simple as he thought. The man that created him wasn’t divine. He truly was made more perfect than his own creator could be. The only reason we don’t see his existential horror in that moment is that he’s been hardened by his journey. He didn’t expect to find merely a man. He expected to find a solution to the problem of death. So when he brings his hands to Tyrell’s face and presses his thumbs into his eyes as he grimaces and bleeds, he isn’t killing a slaver. He’s killing his god. He’s killing a man.
Then having killed God, he returns to JF’s residence, who is dead. Numb in the afterglow of this cathartic, traumatic, violent communion, only now do we see he inhabits a space of grief and horror. A space of existential anguish. And so he meets Deckard, on assignment for him.
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