Hales- Blade Runner

The “other” in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is the Nexus 6. These ‘replicants’ were built by the head of the Tyrell Corporation for several different reasons, but primarily to work on ‘off world’ planets and essentially be slaves. Each model has a different specialty: Roy has optimum self-sufficiency and incredible strength, Pris was noted as a basic pleasure model and had great acrobatic skills, and Zhora was termed the Beauty and the Beast. Because it was believed that after a certain amount of time that the replicants might acquire human emotions (and therefore pose a threat to their usefulness and willingness to comply to their said actions) the Nexus 6 were given a bult in 4 year life span.They came back to Earth to get the brains behind the Tyrell Corporation to lengthen their life spans. When Roy has Sebastian take him to meet Tyrell he is treated with a minimum amount of respect, almost child-like. I find it interesting that Roy simply took what Tyrell said for the end al be all so quickly, it seems like a normal person might continue trying to find a way to stay alive. Tyrell does seem to treat him like a child though and that could be seen as Tyrell looking down on him and disrespecting his emotions as invalid, or it could be seen as a father figure reaction because Tyrell was his maker.

            I cannot help but wonder what point the police force saw in having Deckard hunt and kill the replicants if they knew that their expiration dates were so close on the horizon. Roy died of “natural” causes while he and Deckard were fighting it out. I believe it is important to note that at the end of the film the viewer discovers that Deckard is a replicant as well. Because of this, I find it incredibly cruel that he was asked to kill other replicants, Or, was he built specifically for that very reason? Deckard’s internal journey throughout the course of the film makes the viewer quiestion what being human really is. In the final scene when we find that he is a replicant all the lines between human and non-human are blurred. The love that he and Rachael felt towards each other shows us how strong the replicant’s feelings can be. We had been following his emotions the whole time thinking that he was a human. In Senior’s article, Blade Runner and Cyberpunk Visions of Humanity, he notes, “… all the boundaries are blurred between master and slave, hunter and the hunted, hero and villain, the animate and the inanimate, the human and the nonhuman…” This ambiguity becomes a major problem for the maker, who would have wanted a very clear line between replicant and human. But in the end, if you allow something the ability to have emotions, it becomes human as well.