Never been there. Never done that.

Rating: 8/10 (9 December 2008)

I don't know why I spent so many years really disliking BLADE RUNNER.
From the first time I saw it back in the summer of 1982 I disliked it. Maybe it was because I'd spent the previous year or so seeing trailers and "making of" segments that made it look so good that basically nothing could possibly live up to such expectations (and what could be better than ALIEN?)
Then there were Deckard's square glasses (you can't drink well out of a square glass), all that tedious smoky light drifting through blinds, and that dove being released in slow motion to make us feel just sowhatever.
I guess I do know why I spent so many years disliking it.
Yet, slow motion dove notwithstanding, I find this new cut tremendously entertaining. I never imagined that more explicitly making Deckard a replicant could make it so much more fun. (Okay, here it is for the sceptics: Gaff's origami unicorn tells us he knows Deckard dreams of unicorns. He could only know this if said dreams were implants)
Sure, it was always in the mix that Deckard was potentially a replicant. People suggested as much back in '82. The suspicion is alluded to in the movie – "Have you ever tried taking that test yourself?"
Now we know for sure. He's a robot and his memory is false. This makes almost everything about the early part of the film wonderfully weird. It opens up the possibility that when Deckard is brought into the police station and speaks with Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh), that this is the first time these two men have ever spoken!
"I need the old magic," Bryant tells him. But there is no old magic. Deckard's complicated, perhaps tragic, in any case mysterious, personal history doesn't exist. Bryant has been told to speak to Deckard as if they'd known each other for years. By who? By higher ups. By people at the Tyrell Corp. maybe. In any case, it's made perfectly clear that replicants equipped with memory implants are a new model. Very new, like not even on the market yet. I know a lot of fans buy into the "Deckard is a replicant" reading, while at the same time wanting to imagine him as a grizzled old veteran cop, with years of experience under his belt. But I don't think you can have it both ways. If he is a replicant, he is necessarily new. Just off the assembly line, like Rachel must be.
Similarly, when we see Deckard going into his apartment, after his visit to the Tyrell Corporation, this is the first time he has ever entered this apartment. He only knows his way around it, and who the people in his photographs are, because of the memory implants.
Obviously, if you prefer, you can imagine Deckard as a week old replicant, or a month old replicant, but I don't know why you would. There'd be no point in having an expensive replicant drifting through the city reading the want ads for a few weeks, looking for a job his manufacturers know he'll never take.
No. It's much more fascinatingly twisted to watch this character do for the first time things he thinks he's been doing for years. He gives Rachel the VOIGHT-KAMPFF test. He's never given a Voight-Kampff test before. He makes a phone call. He has never made a phone call before. And, of course, he has never killed anyone.
This way of interpreting Deckard's actions is provocative not necessarily because it's so radically different a take on reality from what we're used to, but because it's a play on a dynamic that's so absolutely common. The main character's backstory is fictional in every movie. It's the stuff all screenplays are made of. The first time we catch sight of a character in a movie is, effectively, the first time he or she has ever really existed. Backstory is a thing we the audience believe in to create for ourselves that sense of reality or continuity which narrative so depends on.
For instance, when The Maltese Falcon opens Sam Spade and his partner Miles Archer are sitting around their office. They're partners. They've known and trusted each other for years. They're worked on numerous cases together.
But, of course, they haven't really. They only act like they have. It's just a movie. They don't exist prior to the first scene in it. The concept of Deckard's memory implants merely makes this idea much more literal.
And making abstract, theoretical ideas literal is something the best science fiction has always been good at. Serious SF has the ability to confront a concept that's fuzzy and hard to wrap your head around and recontextualize it, turning it into something immediate and tangible.
One of the proto- Sci-Fi masterpieces, Stephenson's Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, does this as well as anything. After all, duality within the human soul had been dealt with and analyzed from any number of viewpoints. What Stephenson did was make the abstraction of moral duality more easily viewable by making it a much more real, immediate situation in which his main character experiences the extremes of this duality in clearly distinguishable personalities struggling for control within himself.
False personal backstory isn't the only abstraction BR makes literal.
There's no difference between what the replicants want and what anybody else wants. The conflicts that the replicants are struggling with are the same existential issues everyone confronts: I'm going to die. I don't know when. I don't want to. What's so unusual? But the fact that their problems are so essentially run-of-the-mill doesn't make the film less interesting. It makes it more interesting, as it bundles this familiar angst in a shiny new package and, successfully, freshens it up, letting us experience it as something novel and provocative.