Isaacson: Blade Runner

The central element of Blade Runner is the ambiguity of humanity and the human experience. Occurring in dystopic future where science and technology has greater power over culture than the dreams of the people that inhabit it. In this future humans have perfected "replicants," artificial persons who are exploited by "real" humans as commodities despite the claim by their maker, the Tyrrell Corporation, that they are "more human than human." Humans also remove two of the primary lifelong motivators from the replicants, the ability to have pass on pieces of themselves through offspring and the uncertainty of death, because they cannot reproduce and they have a four year lifespan. This is similar to the controls placed on AIs in William Gibson's Neuromancer and it comes to a similar conclusion; replicants are banned on Earth and an found are "terminated" by a Blade Runner, a police officer specifically trained and authorized to kill replicants.

However, despite theses small differences, the film is incredibly ambiguous as to who really is human. It's obvious that the replicants Deckard, the protagonist and highly skilled Blade Runner, has been hired to terminate are not human; also clear is Rachel's status as a replicant. However, the humanity of ever other character in the film is open to interpretation. We are told by Tyrrell, with the introduction of Rachel, that she believes herself to be human and had false memories of her life before her manufacture implanted so that she might be more human, or at least more emotionally controllable. Both of the Blade Runners, Deckard and Gaff, are solitary men that do not have familial connection and that share many of the eccentricities of the replicants. For example, replicants become heavily emotionally involved with certain objects, perhaps because of the very limited time they have to interact with them; everywhere that Gaff goes he makes an origami figure out of available everyday objects, a bizarre sentimentalization of objects and wish for a personal history when considering this hardened killer. Through this we are also given one of our biggest clues for Deckard identity as a replicant; he dreams/remembers a sequence where a unicorn is running through a field and the final origami that Gaff leaves him is a unicorn, suggesting that Deckard's memories or desires are a scientific matter of filed data which Gaff has access to in the same way that he had access to Rachel's memories. Other characters in the film, from Bryant to Tyrrell himself, are circumspect in their humanity, particularly since none of them can be sure of their own humanity either. Thus, the line between replicant and human is blurred to the point where lifespan and involved emotional response are the only real indicators of the difference; the continued discrimination against replicants is not a matter of their inhumanity but of their inability to effectively fight back given their four year lifespan. They are useful to the ambitions of "real" humans so, much like our slaves now and historically, their humanity is not an issue that the slavemaster is concerned with.