In this film about a race of cyborgs battling to take over the world and the characters who resist it, the active players are cyborg or cyborg-invested. While Deckard sleeps, Rachael, who shows emotion and a desire to live, begins to play the piano. Deckard comes over and Rachel explains that she does not know if this is something she really learned to do or something she was programmed to do. Then she takes her hair down for the first time. This scene reveals the tension between Rachael as a machine and Rachael as a feeling human.
Music often symbolizes humanity in Western cultures.
Further, her comments to Deckard about the music reveal her own internal struggles about her creation as a machine and her desires to be human. The tension is resolved, and the connection in the film between femininity and humanity is made, at the moment when Deckard speaks and Rachael takes her hair down. She then takes her hair out of its rigid, cyborgian bun and lets it hang loose. In the next shot of her, the audience sees her as a conventionally beautiful and sexy woman, an object of the audience's and Deckard's gaze. In the world of this film, humanness and this brand of femininity are intimately linked.