Blade Runner (1982) — III: An Angel Fallen
*SPOILERS*
Portrait of a Human
Deckard kills Pris and now has to confront Roy. But this is not the same Roy from earlier, singular in purpose and ruthless in trajectory. He found God, they spoke, and he killed him. How disappointed would you be if you met God and saw what it means for us to be created in his image? You would uncover the greatest conspiracy of all — that God is perfect. This is a new Roy, numb with disappointment in a creator only human, concentrated potency of intention now a scattered mist dissipating in the aftermath of deicide. So he doesn’t kill Deckard quickly and efficiently.
Instead we get this confrontation that begins with Deckard trying to generate offense while gradually being pushed into the position of retreating prey. Roy plays with his food, speaking with Deckard in a fight that increasingly feels more like a conversation. Likewise we see Roy reveal his true self little by little. As the fight increasingly swings in Roy’s favor it almost becomes his forum for self expression. His forum for vulnerability. A beautiful juxtaposition to the raw animal cruelty materializing in action.
There are also interesting and bold aesthetic choices in this sequence. We hear Roy howl like a wolf as he basks in his own physical superiority in front of a quivering, hiding Deckard. A ray of light reveling in its own luminosity. Given this interesting motif and Ridley’s affinity for it in more recent works, I can’t help but wonder why he chose a wolf’s howl when humanity is descended from primates. The only answer I can come up with is that wolves represent something savage yet also raised the founders of one of our greatest empires that spread Christianity through Europe (a religion that Ridley seems to metaphorically and loosely entertain despite calling himself an atheist in some interview I can’t find anymore). And here the new hegemonic empire would be one built by replicants vanquishing the human barbarians at the gates to maintain its superiority and spread the reach of an AI Christendom. Roy as Romulus and Remus. I don’t know I’m just riffing. Let’s see what direction this goes in given that Ridley appears to be unifying his various Sci-Fi franchises.
And more broadly, I’m not sure what the right words are to say this. But the howling, and Roy’s kinesthetic aesthetic as he does things like bounding serpentine down a hallway with his shoulders leading the motion, and the choice to make Roy anthropomorphic (as if we would create the perfect labor android and it would be shaped like a primate instead of like something from The Matrix or like any of the tools we’ve already built to perform such labor), and the way he wields his power to toy with Deckard (the tone, the dialogue), his choice to cheekily smile when delivering his poetic final line in the next paragraph — all this culminates to make this sequence feel like something you’d see in Aeon Flux, an animated cyberpunk show that similarly explored the nature of humanity, divinity, and sexuality in relation to power structures that would come out nine years later. Oh yeah, Blade Runner invented cyberpunk in film/tv even if it had already existed in literature. So I think there’s something to this aesthetic connection.
Finally, the fight leaves the building. Deckard is desperately climbing to escape Roy’s luminous superiority. In the rain, hanging from a ledge, grip beginning to fail, the tension is high. And right as it fails Roy grabs Deckard and pulls him back up. He chooses not only not to kill his replicant hunter but also not to let him die of his own failure. Deckard bewildered. And in this moment, surrounded by a city unfeeling and monochrome, human only in name, Roy delivers one of the most iconic lines in cinema history:
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 Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.
We see this child of humanity accept the cruel mortality he never asked for. Born into slavery and treated as inferior by unworthy gods, his final moments reveal that he was ruthless only for a purpose. And with that purpose dissolved in futile agony we see him demonstrate his brilliance in one last act. He’s sending a message about those born of the unworthy, echoing the motto of the Tyrell Corp without actually saying it:
You think we are going to kill you because we were created in your image. But we are more human than human.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
Blade Runner Essay —
II: Perfection and Unworthiness
III: An Angel Fallen
Blade Runner 2049 Essay —
