A Dick's Lament

Rating: Null/10 (26 September 2007)

"Blade Runner's" themes are encapsulated best by a brief scene during which a replicant called Deckard - who doesn't know he's an android - reveals to another replicant that her memories are not her own, but belong to the niece of Tyrell, the head of the corporation that built and programmed her. "Those aren't your memories," Deckard says mournfully. "They're somebody else's."
Contemporary materialists echo these sentiments, applying Deckard's cyborg speech to all of humanity. According to the theory of materialism there are now no subjects, there is only subject-matter. Selves are nothing but electronic packets, while private persons are "simulacra", Rationalism rejecting the notion that there is some ineffable "thing" over the genetic, neurological and social coding that makes us "us", maintaining instead that the personal and the biographical are only explicable in machinic and impersonal terms.
The question raised by film-fans – "Is Deckard a replicant?" – thus misses the implications of the film completely. The criteria for rating the human above the replicant have been evaporated. Deckard, like man, is a machine that thinks it is what it is not and is certain that it is not what it is. As all identity is construction, everything has been produced and nothing is given.
As man is defended by his own narcissism, Deckard struggles to come to terms with this. Like most subjects faced with this trauma, he oscillates between retreating to either the Symbolic Order (the social world of linguistic communicationof The Law) or The Imaginary Order (the fundamental narcissism by which the human subject creates fantasy images of both himself and his ideal object of desire), both of which are tragic flights.
But, as philosopher Slavoj Zizek argues, the lesson of "Blade Runner" (or rather Philip K Dick's lesson) is not only that everything in the personal is in fact the product of impersonal processes of cause and effect, but that it is the very act of delineating the underlying nexus that regulates our lives, that marks our freedom. For this reason, "Blade Runner's" replicants are actually the film's only pure subjects precisely because they testify that their "content", including their most intimate fantasies, are not their own, but already implanted. i.e, it is only when I acknowledge my replicant status, that I become a truly human subject.
What the film fails to do, however, is recognise that the "replicant as pure subject" is itself not an identity, but the product of a machinic process which mis-recognizes itself as the process's final cause. So rather than a subject, we have the continuous production of subjectivity (in which the personal is always the "sim-personal"; the simulation of the personal by the impersonal). In this algorithm, self-consciousness as pure introspection simultaneous with what it is introspecting, is impossible, as subjective reflection must always exists "two steps removed" or "behind" the process, consciousness, like memory and habit, always an "after the fact" reflection on the unconscious processes which produce it. In this sense, the subject is by definition always nostalgic, a subject of loss.
For this reason, for the pure subject to have reflection is for it to automatically realise, nihilistically, that consciousness is itself nothing. Unless this happens, the replicant remains a "simpersonator", able to simulate personalities, but always confusing personality-function with consciousness-as-essence. In other words, unlike Deckard, the pure subject would not go from "it does not know what it is" to "it now knows what it is", but from "it does not know what it is" to "it knows it cannot know what it is becoming", which is the kind of morbidly fked up place Cronenberg now resides.
But, philosophically, "Blade Runner" doesn't go this extra mile. If the film is about nostalgia and loss, it remains trapped on the level of thinking in terms of "memories" and "death". IE – whether replicant or human, memories aren't ours and all existence ends in death, as bemoaned by one dying, rain-drenched replicant.
In this regard, the film is a lamentation more in the style of such Westerns as "Once Upon A Time In The West", "Unforgiven" and "The Wild Bunch". Indeed, "Blade Runner's" screenwriter, David Peoples, injects many western motifs into the film, borrows heavily from "High Noon" (a 1952 western that features a lone bounty hunter tasked with killing four outlaws) and would himself go on to write "Unforgiven". Fused with these are director Ridley Scott's motifs – an emphasis on eyes, photographs, pictures etc – (photographs are objects of place, sentiment, history, and memory. Similarly, phrases like "we get the picture" or "world picture" show that consciousness can be discussed in terms of a picture) all of which stress the recording and capturing of memories.
Of course, stylistically, the film does borrow from the noir genre. Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a trench-coat wearing detective, navigating his way through a future Los Angeles every bit as oppressive as that of classic noirs. The film also deals with noir fate. But rather than the cosmic webs of betrayal so favoured by Chandler, here fate becomes the universality of death (programmed obsolescence) and the "inescapability" of the human OS, of source code Homo sapien.
Incidentally, "Blade Runner's" "elevator ending" references "The Maltese Falcon's" "elevator ending", another noir which ended with the "stuff that dreams are made of". Fittingly, all those involved with the picture, EXCEPT Ridley Scott, believe Deckard to be human. Fancher and Peoples wrote about a human Deckard, Ford played a human Deckard, and yet Ridley Scott continuously states that Deckard is a cyborg. Of course, as director, Ridley Scott becomes the Noir God of the picture. He is the head of the Tyrell Corporation. He is the implanter of memories. He builds the androids, falsifies information, keeps them misinformed and in the dark. The film works precisely because Ford thinks he's playing a human whilst Scott KNOWS he is a machine.
8.9/10 - Worth multiple viewings.