Blade Runner (1982) — IV: Contagious Light
*SPOILERS*
Memory and Identity
No doubt as Roy transforms in his final conversation, he triggers a change in Deckard, a character that has been pressurized since the beginning of the story and this final change feels more meaningful because of his resistance to it.
Early in the film we see Deckard’s dynamic with Rachael unfolding. Actually, when Deckard isn’t devoting very little character development to moving the noir narrative for the replicants in the story, he is with Rachael. So I see his dynamic with Rachael as articulating the majority of his personal arc, wherein Roy serves as an activating force.
He meets Rachael and these deeply personal existential questions naturally emerge since Rachael doesn’t know she’s a replicant. Yet she feels love for Deckard, and maybe also pity. You get the sense that she recognizes something in him that he doesn’t. Especially in the way she seeks him out despite having limited interaction. In the way she then almost reels in disappointment at his stubbornness. Possibly the same thing Roy recognizes.
In the sequence with Rachael at his apartment, when we get that patient extended moment with Deckard and Rachael in the same space but separate. When Deckard drinks himself into a dissociated stupor to escape his inexplicable suffering, he falls asleep and dreams of a unicorn. That same unicorn is something his boss Gaff drops a figurine of later, implying that he knows about it too. How could your boss know about the dreams you have? In the same way that Deckard checked Rachael’s file and saw that she’s a replicant, Deckard probably has a file that indicates all of his dreams, amongst other things. Because dreams are what stabilize a replicant’s mind. Not enough to find peace amidst the screeching existential dissonance that must constantly occupy their minds but enough to sustain predictable behavior in them for the seven years they live. Yes, Deckard is a replicant. And Rachael saw it when he couldn’t. And Roy likely saw it when he couldn’t.
I don’t think Roy sparing him was simply an act of replicant brotherhood though. I think he genuinely intended to communicate to Deckard that he knows the source of his suffering. The same way Deckard knows deep down inside and runs from it. The same way he runs from luminous, actualized Roy. The same way Rachael knows it. When he spares Deckard he’s not merely saying that replicants can be truly human in a way that ego prevents in organic humans, he’s saying that they are capable of creating beauty and purpose and richness in a life that has been denied them. He’s saying that humans limit humanity with the ego to which they are slave, their organic programming. In his dying moments he’s encouraging Deckard to find his own humanity. So Deckard goes home and does the most human thing possible — he chooses love and in doing so truth.
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Blade Runner Essay —
II: Perfection and Unworthiness
IV: Contagious Light
Blade Runner 2049 Essay —
