Ten Years to Tanhauser Gate

By Proto

To begin, I want to address what many consider to be the central mystery behind this film: Is Deckard a replicant? The answer: It doesn't matter. It's not important to the story being told. I'd even go so far as to argue that the very fact there is ambiguity over whether or not Deckard is a replicant demonstrates that it doesn't matter; people still enjoy and find meaning in the film even without knowing.

So, for the time being, let's set aside that question and explore a few other issues. Watching Rachael realize that her memories had been fabricated, Batty coming to have compassion for Deckard, and Deckard falling in love with Rachael, I remembered a line in Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines, which was, essentially, "When machines tell us they're conscious, we'll believe them." I was originally skeptical reading that, mostly because I believe I'll still be skeptical when machines start mimicking us.

But what Blade Runner does very well as a film is to show how universal and constant some of humanity's traits are (to humans, anyway): the desire to be loved, to live a meaningful life, and to be remembered. Rachael might not be perfectly human, but it doesn't matter, because in a dark and dying world like the one we see in Blade Runner, Deckard wants very badly just to connect to someone. And likewise, Batty's impassioned, if short monologue at the end of the movie is intended to convince us and Deckard that replicants are worthy of some degree of humanity.

Now, you might argue that the replicants in Blade Runner are not machines, being as how they are genetically engineered organisms and not electronic robots. But I hardly think this distinction matters where it concerns our attitude toward our creations. Humans are already quite capable of professing sympathy for the artificial, so I'm skeptical that humanoid robots would be treated much differently than engineered replicants. What roboticists and computer scientists have yet to convince us of is that human-like creations are human, but they're getting close.

All of this brings us back to what might as well have been Dick's version of the Turing Test, the Voight-Kampff Test. From his slightly warped perspective, however, the machine is used not to elevate but to discriminate. The blade runners of the film run the Voight-Kampff to single out those that are lacking in empathy (especially, in the book, toward animals). Humans have a long history of labeling our enemies as "inhuman" and hating them for it, and here Blade Runner is more allegory than science fiction. It is interesting that we often inflict far greater cruelty and malice on those that appear not quite human than those that are not human at all.