English 192 Blade Runner Lecture Notes
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Blade Runner (1982)
[edit] Outline
- Take Roll
- Response
- Mid-Quarter Class Review
- Blade Runner (1982)
- Film History and Versions
- Translation from the Novel
- Future Noir Aesthetics
- Alien Worlds
- Is this a World Without Heroes?
- From Luba to Zhora: Art and Sex
- J. F. Sebastian: "I Make Friends"
- "If Only You Could See the Things I Have Seen With Your Eyes"
- Memory and Photographs
- Meet Your Maker: Religious Imagery
- Love Among the Ruins: Two Endings
- Deckard: The Replicant Question
[edit] Questions
What does it mean that the replicants are "more human than human"?
If Roy is indeed a Christ figure, for whom does he die? Who is saved?
What is the significance of women as replicants?
What do the different endings offer?
How would Deckard being human or being a replicant change the meaning of the film?
[edit] Introduction
July 17, 2001
Blade Runner (1982)
Take Roll
Response
Mid-Quarter Class Review
Blade Runner (1982)
[edit] Film History and Versions
The film was directed by Ridley Scott and released in 1982. The original theatrical version included a voice over and a happy ending, which we will talk about a little later.
The film was not overwhelmingly successful, but gained a cult following.
In 1992 Scott released a reedited director’s cut version which restored his original vision, inserting scenes, deleting the happy ending, and removing the voiceovers. It is this version we will talk about.
[edit] Translation from the Novel
You will notice that this film includes several shifts from the novel. Characters, locations and situations are often entirely different. Dick’s androids become Scott’s replicants. Deckard does not have a wife. The relationship between Deckard and Rachael is enhanced.
We move from the detective novel noir location of San Francisco to a transformed hyper-urban Los Angeles.
[edit] Future Noir Aesthetics
Blade Runner participates in the film noir tradition of cinema. Typically, noir narratives center around a flawed male hero or detective character in a corrupt world. Films like Chinatown and L.A. Confidential both use and critique film noir conventions.
These heroes are often paired with femme fatale characters. A femme fatale is general a woman who, although sexually attractive to the main character, is somehow implicated in his downfall or in the situations arraying themselves against him.
Film noir, literally black film, is often shot in low light, with heavy use of shadow, etc.
[edit] Alien Worlds
Scott’s Los Angeles, like Dick’s San Francisco is not our world.
The city is made alien by its lack of resemblance to any Los Angeles we have known. There are no shots of palm trees or sandy white beaches. The city never sees the sun. We are in a future Los Angeles where it is always nighttime, always dark, nearly always raining.
Additionally, the film takes advantage of early eighties immigrant anxiety and economic uncertainty. The city shows a distinctly Asian, particularly Japanese influence. The language spoken on the street is a mix of many languages. We are not expected to feel at home here.
[edit] Is this a World Without Heroes?
Besides its overall darkness, the characters in the film are also ambiguous.
As a hero, Deckard fails to live up to standard codes of honor and behavior. He is sent to kill the film’s "bad guys," but the style and narrative make wholeheartedly rooting for his success complicated.
He "retires" only two of the replicants himself, Pris and Zhora, both women. In films male heroes rarely kill female villains. Additionally he kills Zhora by shooting her in the back, another action forbidden by the standard tropes of hero stories.
Let’s watch the scene where Zhora is shot.
Notice how the music swells and lingers on her fight for life. The overall impact of the scene is to make us sympathize with the replicant.
[edit] From Luba to Zhora: Art and Sex
This is a good place to talk about Zhora in general. Zhora seems to take the role of Luba Luft in this film, as she is the performing replicant. However, her art moves from opera to a stylized sex show where she takes "pleasure from the serpent" that once "corrupted" man.
Obviously, as this particular strip show suggests, we are analogizing Zhora, the replicant, to the Biblical Eve as the downfall of mankind, or, at the very least, a temptation.
Here the movie shows a slippage between art and sex. What are we to make of this?
Rick in the novel considers that the planet could have used Luba because of her artistic merits. Is Zhora worth saving because she is sexually desirable?
The emphasis on sex in the film is much more dominant than in the novel. Pris here is a standard "pleasure model" for off-world brothels, etc. The question about the naked girl on the bearskin rug becomes simply a query about the relation between the nude photograph and a hypothetical husband.
All of the main female characters are replicants, and all of them are defined by their sexual, or potential sexual relations to the male characters.
[edit] J. F. Sebastian: "I Make Friends"
J. F. Sebastian, unlike his novel counterpart J. R. Isidore is physically a special rather than mentally. He is a genius who has Methuselah syndrome, making him appear much older than he is. Like the replicants he will die before his time.
He is also a toy-maker, in a very twisted fashion. He genetically engineers creatures, his "friends" to keep him company, without any actual understanding of their potential existence other than as entertainment. He asks Pris to do something for him, to entertain him. This provokes Roy’s statement that he and Pris are not computers, but physical.
Pris returns with the phrase, I think therefore I am.
[edit] "If Only You Could See the Things I Have Seen With Your Eyes"
From the very first shot of the film, an extreme close up of the city reflected in a blue eye, there is an emphasis on the visual and on the eyes.
Eyes, in western tradition are the windows of the soul; they are also the portals through which we take in our worlds.
For the replicants, the eyes are also the part of the body that betrays the body’s most important secret: that it is not fully human.
This also brings up the question of how we know what we see is real in any meaningful way. Is seeing believing? If a woman, like Rachael, looks like a woman, is that what she is? Does appearance matter?
Though it is flesh, as we see in the scene with Chew’s laboratory.
Roy is fixated on what his eyes have seen in his short and his vision. "I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t imagine." The sight of his eyes is lost in his death.
And, in killing Eldon, he presses his fingers into his creator’s eyes. He stops their sight.
[edit] Memory and Photographs
Roy is also fixated on memory. On the moments that will be lost in his death.
The question of memory and implanted memories, which plays a small part in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is emphasized here in both Rachael’s story and in Leon’s collection of photographs.
The replicants seem to want to collect and amass memories, and photographs are the physical manifestation of having been there and having done that.
Posed photographs also generally present an ideal. Here is the family all together and happy. See how well dressed, how well behaved, see how happy.
In this way photographs are always records of fact and also of a fantasy we construct around them.
Leon through his photographs creates a family of replicants.
Rachael through her photograph, and through her private memories creates an understanding of her own self.
But photographs and memories, always unreliable, are more so here where they can be falsified and fabricated. The personal construction of the self is exteriorized. Someone else has created you.
[edit] Meet Your Maker: Religious Imagery
And, the someone else for this picture is Eldon Tyrell. He is presented as a Frankenstein-like genius creator, and again we hear the echo of creator or inventor as god. This is an element interestingly missing from the novel. The characters in the novel show no interest in increasing their short lifespan, but only living as best they can.
Eldon expresses surprise that Roy takes so long to search him out. And Roy says that it is not an easy thing to meet one’s maker, later referring to him as father, and as the god of biomechanics.
Here, however, the Trinity is rounded out by Roy, both the prodigal son and a savior of sorts, and, in image, by the dove that Roy releases at his death.
The image of Roy as Christ is also visually stressed by Roy’s self impaling with the nails. He inflicts himself with stigmata.
This begs the question, if Roy is a savior of sorts, who does he save, what is the sacrifice he makes. Given he rescues Deckard at the end of the story, but is a greater redemption or salvation presented in contrast to the novel?
To look at this we can move on to the next topic, namely the love story in the film.
[edit] Love Among the Ruins: Two Endings
The film is marked by a very strange romance between Deckard and Rachael. This relationship goes much further and in a different direction than the romance sub plot in the book.
Shortly after Deckard is informed that she is now on his list for "retirement, Rachael shoots Leon for Deckard, saving his life. She then returns with him to his apartment, planning her own escape.
This is the scene where, as she accepts herself as a replicant, she actually becomes less machine-like. She takes her hair out of the very artificial coiffure it was in.
She also examines her memories. As in "Alpha Ralpha Boulevard," even though the memories aren’t real they feel genuine. She can play the piano.
A strangely disturbing scene follows this one wherein Deckard physically insists that Rachael own her own feelings and emotions, rather than doubting them. After a consensual kiss, Rachael tries to leave saying she cannot rely on who she thinks she is or what she thinks she feels. Deckard physically prevents her and parrots the words he wants her to say to him.
This could be seen as both a moment where she comes to accept herself, but also as a moment of physically and masculine control of female action and female desire.
We are then given two endings. Both begin with Deckard returning to his apartment with his gun drawn. At this point it is unclear whether he will shoot Rachael or embrace her. The parroting of phrase is reiterated with love and trust and they leave.
The elevator doors shut and the credits roll. They are on the run. She is a replicant; she has less than four years to live.
OR
The elevator doors shut and we cut to a scene with a car driving into the hills, still verdant and beautiful (outtakes from The Shining). The voice-over informs us that Rachael is special, with no termination date. The credits roll.
What meaning do we take from either ending? Which feels more true to the story as mapped out by the film? What does the "happy" ending give us?
[edit] Deckard: The Replicant Question
This final scene is also one of the pivotal moments in the long and fertile debate over whether or not Deckard’s character is a replicant.
The origami unicorn that Deckard picks up in the final scene may be a reference to a scene in the director’s cut wherein Deckard dreams of a unicorn while sitting at the piano.
If Gaff knows his dreams, does this mean that Deckard is a replicant?
In the original script he is clearly meant to be "built for this world."
Ridley Scott last summer indicated that Deckard is indeed a replicant.
However, Harrison Ford insists that in the making of the film as released he and Scott agreed that Deckard was not a replicant.
Since authorial intention is not the be all and end all, I think it is useful to look at this as an intriguing ambiguity.
How would Deckard’s humanity or lack of humanity, at least biologically, change the impact of the story?
Is it more affecting for the hunter to realize he is the hunted, or to learn to empathize?
[edit] Questions
What does it mean that the replicants are "more human than human"?
If Roy is indeed a Christ figure, for whom does he die? Who is saved
What is the significance of women as replicants?
What do the different endings offer?
How would Deckard being human or being a replicant change the meaning of the film?
