Blade Runner is my number one, all time favourite film.

As I may have already mentioned, I’d have a hard time putting together a top 20 list of films but I am scribbling this simple fact on the wall: Blade Runner is at the top of the list. I mention this because yesterday the “Final Cut” edition of Blade Runner was released and I’m holding out for a relly to buy me the 5 disc box-set for christmas. I don’t own a copy of BR on DVD at the moment because there just wasn’t a release worth my money but now that Ridley Scott has gone back to revise the film, do the commentaries and throw in a mega fuck load of extras, it’s finally going to grace the shelves of my collection.

What follows are my thoughts about the controversial issue of whether Deckard is a replicant or not. (There are spoilers but come on, this is a 25 year old film. If you haven’t seen it by now, you never will!)

I’m well aware that any argument I make can be easily refuted by the simple assertion that Scott himself has said that yes, Deckard is a replicant yet both the writer Hampton Fancher and Harrison Ford himself claim that Deckard is a human.

The argument for our protagonist being a replicant hinges on the inclusion of a fantasy sequence about unicorns coupled with Gaff leaving an origami unicorn in Deckard’s apartment at the end of the film - the inference being that Gaff knows what Deckard is dreaming in just the same way that Deckard knows what Rachel used to dream about as a child. Supporting evidence is Deckard’s photo collection - a habit that identifies with the escaped replicants he’s hunting.

The arguments against, however, are much more subtle. Several times it’s stated that the replicants are pretty much superhuman in terms of intelligence and strength (although not necessarily both as is evidenced by Leon - extremely strong, not very clever.) The Tyrell Corporation, the creators of the Nexus 6 replicants, has a motto: more human than human. The inference here is that the replicants are designed to be better than humans, to withstand greater extremes (like Pris putting her hand in the boiling water), to be stronger, fitter, more adaptive. But the cost to the replicants is that they have only a four year life span because “the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.” But Deckard is anything but superhuman - he’s weak, flawed and very, very human.

Let’s consider Rachel for a moment. Rachel is unique amongst the replicants we see in the film in that she’s given memories and it’s these memories, coupled with the belief that she’s human, which make it difficult for Deckard to detect her using the Voight-Kampff (VK) machine. The memories allow her to be empathic whereas the other Nexus 6 replicants are discovered because of their lack of emotional response. The assumption that we have to make, if Deckard is a replicant, is that he has also been implanted with these memories. Yet this seems to make no sense: if his job is to “retire” (a euphemism for execute) replicants then surely his empathy would work against him. After all, we see what happens to Rachel when she kills Leon and Deckard tells her that even he still gets the shakes. It might be argued that he’s had the memories of previous killings implanted and is therefore inured to the feeling but surely he would make a more effective “one-man slaughter squad” if he was lacking in empathy.

Then there’s the four year life span. Roy Batty and his crew are coming up to their use-by date and they’re the first wave of Nexus 6 replicants. Rachel, whether or not she has a four-year lifespan, must have been produced after the rest of them. It’s even implied that she’s a prototype, hence having been given the identity of Tyrell’s niece and kept on the premises as it were. So if Deckard is a replicant with memories then it must be assumed that he is less than 4 years old. In fact, Roy Batty is not even four years old as his incept date is January 2016 and the year of the film is 2019 (although the month is unknown - it could be December). Leon is the newest Nexus 6 we see with an incept date of 2017 which means that Rachel, the experimental model, must be at most about 2 years old and Deckard, if he’s a replicant, must be 2 or younger.

If that’s the case, then how come the extremely predujiced Captain Bryant is able to act so well that he acts as if he’s known this “skin-job” for years. Sure he acts brusque and uses thinly veiled threats to coerce Deckard into taking on the job but he starts by trying to sweet-talk Deckard, telling him that he needs “the old magic”. Later on, after Zhora and Leon have been ‘retired’, Bryant tells Deckard that he’s the “same old shitstorm”¹ and that Gaff “could learn a lot from this guy.” I struggle to believe that, even if he knows the score about Deckards ‘true’ nature, that he could so easily be as pally and ingratiating with a “skin-job” he barely knows. I also find it hard to believe that such a predjudiced man would trust a skin-job to take out his own kind.

So far, you couldn’t be blamed for believing that I think Deckard is not a replicant and is, in fact, a human. Unfortunately I’m more contrary than that and you’d be wrong. This debate seems to polarize people into either a for or against camp. I land in the grey area between the two - I don’t think we’re meant to know the answer. This might sound like a cop-out but there’s one line in the film which I think provides the key for this. The scene is in J.F. Sebastien’s apartment. He’s already met Pris and now Roy Batty is in the flat with him. Sebastien has realized that they’re both Nexus 6 replicants and asks them to show him something. Batty simply says “We’re not machines, Sebastien” and the Pris sticks her hand into a pot of boiling water to retrieve an egg which she throws to Sebastien, along with the line “I think, Sebastien, therefore I am.”

I think, therefore I am. Cogito ergo sum. In his Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, Rene Descartes uses this phrase to prove that he does actually exist. But he arrives at this conclusion after first calling into doubt the world he lives in and everything he percieves, including his own corporeal nature.² Essentially the central issues of Descartes writing was doubt - “How do we know who and what we are?” It’s this theme that is relevant to Blade Runner. After VKing Rachel, Deckard asks Tyrell “How can it not know what it is?” and the answer, it transpires, is because of memories. Rachel has been programmed to remember, to think and to believe but after taking the VK test, she begins to suffer from her own Cartesian doubt and becomes uncertain about her very nature.

In some ways, I’m disappointed that Scott felt he had to go back and insert the unicorn sequence in although, to be fair, without it the discussion about Deckard being a replicant or not may never have begun. Irrespective of what Scott said, to my mind there will always be that doubt because it is more in keeping with the rest of the film which is shrouded in ambiguity (for example, Roy Batty is most definitely an antagonist but could never be called “the bad guy” and his death scene serves up a reminder of the fact that he is very much the victim of the film.) Irrespective of all this, the film is a masterpiece - full of texture, imagery and atmosphere and I am counting down the days until I own all five versions of the film.

¹This might not be dialogue from the actual film but is taken from the Feb 1981 draft of Hampton Fancher and David People’s screenplay. Interestingly it gives more lines to Gaff at the beginning which further seem to undermine the case of Deckard being a replicant as they talk about his reputation and former nicknames - something a two year old replicant is ulikely to have.

²It’s Descartes’ philosophy that drives most of the central conceit behind The Matrix and The Star Trek: Next Generation episode “Ship in a bottle”. Simply put, how do you know that you’re not a brain in a jar having the world around you programmed into it? How do you know the people who surround you are not figments of your imagination or, like the world, being programmed into you? How do you know that you yourself are not the figment of some crazy scientist’s imagination? The answer is that if you can think, you must exist - how else would you have the concept of your own being?