NPOV Debate over whether Deckard is Human or a Replicant Well first of all I ll improve my paragraph by putting back its meaning because somehow you got that by nobody tells you that I meant sitting with you in the theater rather than in the movie and by you I mean Deckard So when you changed it to imply that I was saying the audience needs the plot explained to them it just went from dumb to dumberer Having to have the plot explained isn t Dickian having to be told you re not human is I m mulling whether to use mind fuck rather than mind bend because Phil would have wanted it that way Mulling mind you And I m going to remove the idiotic statement in one of the upper sections that Deckard is pronouced like Descartes It isn t in the movie and not even an Austrian with a head cold would rhyme the two It s either the dumberest part of the article or the subtlest troll I ve seen in months You re welcome and thanks for the compliment I actually have a very strong opinion on the subject i e it s Ridley Scott s film not Dick s not Ford s not Fancher s and Scott even changed it to make the issue crystal clear and the question is much deeper and involves the audience much more using the device of recasting the entire story through a final revelation but I also believe that NPOV is the soul of wikipedia so I make sure my side and the other side get the same level of rhetorical emphasis and let the reader decide which makes logical sense Your scientific method at work Reasons for replicant I think that Deckard being a replicant makes the film MORE interesting as the audience is led into an emotional relationship with Deckard on the presumption that he s human To find that he is a replicant points up the poignancy of the film s core ethical position the problem established by Frankenstein of the position of artificial sentience in the circle of empathy per Lanier In terms of the story itself Decakard s staus as a skinjob makes him more orthoganal to the beings he kills but it problematises the most important relationship that with the audience Hwarwick To emphasize Deckard s struggle to find his own identity and to cause the audience to feel as he does in their own struggle to understand Deckard s identity and ultimately to question their own understanding of how we can know our own humanity is different and how we can know anything cf epistemology If the audience does not know the answer until the end and the characters do not know it either then the story makes the audience and the characters ask again what is the difference between me and something un human if I can be either human or un human and I need someone else to tell me which This interpretation would also fit the mind bending quality of a work by Philip K Dick Tension in his books often relies on the false paranoia of characters whose identities are being manipulated impressed on them or hidden from them His style is to misdirect the reader brainwashing the reader as the character is before allowing the mystery to be solved sometimes leaving open the identity crisis as well as the philosophical questions of identity and knowability I agree the information is presented earlier in the article but I think at the point where the scene is presented as evidence it s important to point out the purposefulness of Scott s director s cut revision I ll leave it as is and if you agree you can add it back in I m just going to nudge a typo I noticed When I ve got some more time right now I m kind of procrastinating on something else I ll read all the stuff you ve pasted here and see if there are things that are missing in the article By the end of the movie he clearly feels empathy for Roy and the other replicants He has I think learned that the replicants are just as human and just as deserving of life as any real human And through Deckard we learn this too We too are challenged by the notion that humanity can not be assigned that it is not an inherent trait as much as the label we assign to a very deep colorful and complex interplay of thoughts and emotions And regardless of their origins the replicants by virtue of their emotions needs and desires had become just as human as us If Deckard had been a replicant much of the movie s relevance to us the real humans would have been lost What would Deckard have learned provided he was an N6 That he too was a skin job That he was being used by humans to do the dirty work agains his own kind That his memories lied to him