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. 

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.

Christian- Fenwick, Blade Runner

Blade Runner is a movie that has a large following of devotees that enjoy, not only the si-fi aspects of the film, but also the philosophical concepts of what it means to be human. As W.A. Senior says in his article Blade Runner and CyberPunk Versions of Humanity "the Frankensteinian theme of man creating himself and experimenting with new forms provides both the conflict and the philosophical dialectic that run through the film and through cyberpunk fiction and lead to their mutual central questions: what does it mean to be human? what are the boundaries of humanity? how human or humane are humans? when android/replicants and humans meet, how can one tell them apart? howhuman are replicants, androids, or genetically designed wo/men? "(Senior 1).

This is the backbone of the movie that allows the audience to flesh the film about due to its ambiguity. As a viewer, you do not know, but begin to question wither or not Deckard, a reluctantly reinstated Blade Runner, is human at all. The film leaves hints both ways, but it is almost impossible to tell who is "real". This makes the hunt for the other - in this case a group of replicants that have returned to earth- more interesting because it creates a comparison between the two lifestyles of the groups and it begins to questions the social construct of humanity and the exoticisation of another group. Replicants were not allowed on Earth in this film, even though Earth in the film was not a desirable place to be, but it was a form of elitism that was important to the humans because it separated them and made them fell more important and powerful.