Blade Runner (1982)

— I didn't know if I could play [the piano]. I remember lessons. I don't know if it's me, or Tyrell's niece.

And so 1982's Blade Runner anticipates all of the questions being raised ad nauseum today about spiritual implications of AI art. And this film, set forty years hence (but made in the noir style of forty years prior the 1980s), provides the answer that it somehow doesn't matter: "You play beautifully."

The philosophical questions about whether Deckard is a replicant or not actually obscure some of the more interesting questions raised by the film. Why does Deckard remain on Earth? Surely he can leave, especially as he is given free will? And why, precisely, does Roy kill his Creator? And did you notice that this film is so infused with elements from noir that even the baddies exhibit Nazi tropes? And that's even before we reach the moral questions that the film raises.

ps. The sheet music on the piano is an arrangement of Vivaldi's guitar concerto in D, RV 93.

The substitution of unexplained terms such as ‘blade runner’ and ‘replicant’ for more familiar ones was typical of Scott’s approach, which was rooted in an intriguing combination of the specific and the suggestive.

[…]

The spaceship as factory, drifting in the voids of interstellar space, recalls the Pequod of Moby Dick, which in Melville’s hands became a foundry, an infernal intrusion of culture into the natural environment. The comparison is further justified by the aesthetic of Blade Runner, with its city that resembles nothing so much as a vast, boundless refinery, and its world that no longer contains any trace of nature.

[…]

Blade Runner's city rejects boundaries between public and private. Beams of light strafe the innermost recesses of apartments and alleys. [Director of Photography] Cronenweth said that the lights were used 'for both advertising and crime control, much the way a prison is monitored by moving search lights.' [Replicants] are programmed with false memories, a further dissolution of personal space: even the private territories of the mind become vulnerable to attack.

[…]

The shift from the expansionist and visible machineries of the industrial age to the invisible technologies of the information age created a representational crisis for the genre. The purpose of much science fiction in the 1980s, especially cyberpunk, was to construct a new position from which humans could interface with the global, yet hidden, realm of data circulation; a new identity to occupy the emerging electronic realm. I call this new position terminal identity, which refers both to the end of the traditional subject and the emergence of a new subjectivity constructed at the computer station or television screen.

[…]

Blade Runner [has a] retrofitted future built on the debris of the past – a past which is our present.

It has become a commonplace to note the transition from New York to Los Angeles as a site of utopian/dystopian projection, which is supposedly indicative of the shift from a modernist to a postmodernist aesthetic. [But] despite its ostensible and determining Los Angeles setting, it’s possible to see the film as a return to the modernist urbanism exemplified by New York.

[…]

Replicants melded technology and ‘us’: with their physical and mental, and perhaps emotional and erotic, superiority, they represented some fulfilment of Jean Baudrillard’s discourse on simulation (and seduction) – the copy had superseded and even surpassed the original. Map replaced territory. The only important difference between humans and replicants was programmed: a four-year lifespan operates as a fail-safe mechanism, protecting the human from its own obsolescence.

[…]

Androids emphasise the definition of the human by displacing mere biology as the sole, sufficient, condition. The underlying issue is not whether we can give a machine the qualities of the human, but whether the human has lost its humanity; whether it has become, in fact, a machine.

[…]

Philip K. Dick gives us two oppositions: Human/Android and Human/Inhuman. The first is ultimately unimportant, while the second is urgent. The division between human and android raises a central philosophical question: how do you know you’re human? The second opposition leads to a moral problem: what does it mean to be human? If some postmodern theorists and artists would reject the relevance of this second question, finding in it a nostalgic and outmoded humanist attitude, there should be no doubt that this is what lies at the centre of his work.

[…]

Blade Runner performs an ingenious variation on the definitions of humanity that dominated science fiction film in the 1950s [in which] humans simply have feelings while non-humans simply do not. Blade Runner denaturalises that division and subtly inverts it: what has feelings is human. Thus the film is as much about Deckard’s recovery of empathic response as it is about Batty’s development of such a response.

[…]

The Deckard debate is, in some ways, a denial of what the film really does offer, which is a double reading: undecidability. [The] obsessive desire to answer the question has always seemed misguided. If Deckard is a replicant, then what’s the moral of this story? The issue of human definition is clearly – to me – central to the work, and thus the ambiguity is crucial. Many of the clues to Deckard’s status could certainly be taken metaphorically. The unicorn, for example, could easily represent Rachel: it is, after all, an archetype. [And] when Rachael asks Deckard whether he has ever taken the Voight-Kampff test, she may not be asking about his literal human status, but about his capacity for the empathy that the machine measures.

— Scott Bukatman: BFI Film Classics (1997)

The movie has a hypnotic pace, an elegiac tone. Its narrative is subordinate to the mise-en-scène—which is not to say the story is unimportant, only that the movie’s aesthetic experience is emotional in itself. Blade Runner is a Romantic work of art, in other words, or “Dark Romantic,” in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and noir. [Blade Runner] makes beautiful the tragedy of its future, and that beauty invites the viewer. It creates an ideal container for escapist fantasies about the metropolis.

— Evan Puschak: Escape Into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions (2022)

At seventeen, having flunked all his exams except art, [Scott] decided to enlist in the National Service; his older brother, Frank, had joined the British Merchant Navy. “You’ve got nothing to learn from the Army,” Ridley’s father advised him. “You should go to art school.” He enrolled in a local program, in West Hartlepool, an industrial seaside town. He’d walk the beaches by the steelworks, watching “towers belching filth and junk,” he said. “It’s a wonder I’ve still got a pair of lungs.” Years later, he drew on those polluted skies while envisioning the dystopian Los Angeles of Blade Runner.

— Michael Schulman (The New Yorker)

From the very outset of Blade Runner, we are encouraged to understand the primary difference organizing the world of Los Angeles, 2019—the difference, that is between replicants and humans—as an ideological fabrication.

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By putting Batty in the position of classical occupied by those with dark skin, the film obliges the white spectator to understand the relation between that position and those who are slotted into it as absolutely arbitrary and absolutely brutal.

— Kaja Silverman: Back to the Future (Camera Obscura, 1991)