Blade Runner: the future or now?
Photography by Ged Carroll
Kirese Narinesingh looks back at the legacy of Blade Runner and its relevance in the present day.
I thought it fortuitous when, after watching Blade Runner for the first time, I discovered that it was set in November 2019. Our present is the film’s reality, but how different is our world from the futuristic and often nightmarish visions of Blade Runner? Ridley Scott’s 1983 film is based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The film’s title seems to suggest more of an action-based sci-fi film, similar to Robocop or The Terminator, with an android hero protagonist at the forefront, but it turns out to be quite different. This is an existential work concealed as an exuberant art film.
Blade Runner is set in Los Angeles, but who could have guessed without the subtitles? Artificiality is inescapable in the reality of Blade Runner: it’s a congested, polluted, dystopian nightmare of environmental decay that’s rife with multiple cultures. Its sky is filled with fog, flying machines and starry buildings. Amidst this claustrophobic, chaos are scenes of ancient, mythic grandeur. The home of the androids’ (or replicants) creator, Tyrell, is a prime example. His home is constructed like Egyptian pyramids, as if to suggest his divinity. On the other hand, his creations are enslaved in off-world planets. What’s worse is they’re exterminated after becoming too human, in their revolt against their enslavement. The Blade Runner, Deckard (Harrison Ford), is their exterminator.
The trick is, he may or may not be the thing he is contracted to kill. He dreams of fleeting images of unicorns, but it’s unclear whether this is a false memory that all replicants possess. He falls in love with Rachael (Sean Young) who discovers she is herself a replicant, with false dreams and memories that nonetheless make her more human than android. Scott certainly believes Deckard is a replicant, though Ford vehemently denies it. Either way, does it matter? Kill the replicants, he must. He dispatches the runaway replicants, led by Roy (Rutger Hauer). But he’s hardly the macho, unbeatable noir-detective of ’50s films. The film may be deemed more pessimistic because our “hero” doesn’t actually win in the conventional terms of defeating the plague of evil.
I hesitate to call Roy a “plague of evil” when he faces an essential human problem: death. He is an automaton, mechanical production of human minds, but he has emotions. The replicants have four-year life spans. The robot can feel, and consequently fear death. Artificial intelligence, when perfected, is a creation tainted with the emotions of humanity. It’s even more of a subversion of the antagonistic robot stereotype when he saves Deckard, and dies after reaching the dreaded expiry date. Is there a scene more affecting about the futility of existence? The “tears in rain” monologue, so resignedly delivered, seems to reflect on the current, fragile stage of our being. All of our accomplishments will be washed away, not by someone else’s hand, but by our own fault in design. In this present age, it is our negligence and failure to help our environment.
There’s little doubt that Blade Runner is one of the most discussed films of sci-fi and neo-noir. Granted, more attention has been paid towards its chiaroscuro and blue-tinted lighting, its impressive production design than its premonitory idea of the future. Will we too construct A.I that will be just as human and trapped in polluted cities, or are we already here? Hanson Robotics has already created a robot that can mimic human behaviour. At the end of the year, Blade Runner is worth watching. If we turn a retrospective gaze to its futuristic look of tarnished, environmentally decadent cities, and wonder, is our reality any different from the dystopian fantasy of automaton who dream, not of electric sheep, but unicorns?