Work of fiction · film
Blade Runner
If we can make beings like us in every way, what still sets us apart from them?
Version analyzed : The Final Cut (2007), the only version over which Ridley Scott had full control: no voice-over, the unicorn dream included, and an ending that stops at the elevator door. The 1982 versions and the 1992 Director's Cut are not used as evidence.
Los Angeles, 2019. Manufactured beings, the replicants, almost impossible to tell from humans, serve as slaves in the off-world colonies. They are banned on Earth, and police officers, the blade runners, are tasked with "retiring" them. A few fugitive replicants have come back all the same. The film puts to the test what we think we know about the line between a person and a manufactured thing.
The problem
The common belief put to the test
We think we know what separates a human being from a manufactured object: a human is born, has a past of their own, and no one has set the date of their death in advance; an object is made for a use, and we do with it as we please.
The problem
Replicants were made for a use: their bodies, their strength, their function and even the length of their lives were decided by others. Yet they are afraid, they care for one another, they want to live, so much so that their makers cut their lives short for fear of their emotions. If a being is what it was made for, it can be "retired" the way one scraps a tool, whatever it feels. If what it feels and what it does count for more than its origin, the line on which this whole world depends falls, and the hunt becomes a string of murders. But we do not know how to recognize what, in a made being, truly belongs to it, since even its best conduct might have been planned by its maker.
Los Angeles, 2019. The Tyrell Corporation, founded by Eldon Tyrell, makes replicants: living beings engineered in a laboratory, stronger and more agile than humans, used as slave labor in the off-world colonies. They are banned on Earth, and specialized police officers, the blade runners, are tasked with killing them; the official word is "retiring" them. Gaff, a cop who folds little paper figures, brings Rick Deckard, who had left the job, back to his old boss, Bryant: four fugitive replicants have returned to Earth, led by Roy Batty, along with Leon, Zhora and Pris. To kill them, you first have to recognize them, and they look exactly like humans. For this the police have a test, the Voight-Kampff, which takes empathy as its criterion: the subject is asked disturbing questions while a machine watches their eye for an involuntary reaction. The choice is far from obvious. told man from automaton by language and by a reason able to respond to any situation; replicants meet both criteria, and by his lights they would have to be granted a mind. So the test looks for something else: emotion. But the test only says who is a replicant. It does not say why that would make it right to kill them.
If the test does not justify the killing, what they were made for must: in this world function stands in for nature, and nature decides rights. Bryant introduces each fugitive by their function: a combat model, a loader, a trained killer, a "pleasure model". He also explains why they live only four years: their designers feared that, given time, they would come to feel emotions of their own, hate, love, fear, anger, envy. Their death is a safety device, built in so that they remain what they were made for. To show that for human beings , started from the opposite case, a paper knife: an object whose function is conceived before it is made. Their maker would like replicants to stay that paper knife. But a paper knife is not afraid of dying. If these beings are nothing but their purpose, retiring them amounts to scrapping worn-out tools; if they become someone, nothing distinguishes this "retirement" from murder any more. To decide, one would have to know how to look into them.
Everything then depends on where one looks. The film shifts the examination from the eye one scrutinizes to what that eye has seen. It opens on an eye in extreme close-up, reflecting a city bristling with flames. The test scrutinizes the suspects' irises. In Tyrell's office an owl keeps watch: it is artificial. Batty, for his part, goes to see the man who makes eyes for the company, and tells him that if only he could see what Batty has seen with those eyes… The manufactured eye is not the issue: what counts is what it has seen. And it is the viewer the film puts to the test. Deckard explains to Rachael, a young woman who works for Tyrell, that replicants are like any other machine: either a benefit or a hazard, and if they are a benefit, it is not his problem. The film does not leave us that indifference: it is built to draw from us the very reactions the test means to measure, and to turn them toward the replicants. Those who give the test show little of it themselves.
The characters' evolution and the fiction's inferred position are hidden (spoilers).
- Character, placed by their acts
- Main character
- Main antagonist
- What they say / what they do
Click a character to see the scenes their position rests on.
And you?
0/4 answeredAnswer these questions: your point appears on the map, among the characters. Your answers stay on your device and add to your profile.
A living being has been designed for one specific task: it excels at it, and all its abilities are geared to it. Yet it wants to do something else with its life, something it is less gifted for.
What should it follow?
You have recognized aptitudes for one line of work, and everyone sees you succeeding at it. Another path draws you, one you would be less gifted for.
What should guide your choice?
We know how to make living beings that work where no human could survive. They feel fear and pain, and they run away when they can.
What do we owe them?
A test can reliably tell a human from a manufactured being that resembles one in every way, down to the fear of dying.
What does a positive result tell you about what you owe it?
Answer on both axes to appear on the map.
The characters
- Main character
Former blade runner forced back to work
Played by Harrison Ford
What they embody
Replicants are machines like any other, at least as long as he does not have to look at them closely.
Key action
He gives Rachael the Voight-Kampff test at Tyrell's.
Main positions
- Essence and existenceExistentialism ≠
- Moral circlePathocentrism ≠
- Main antagonist
Leader of the fugitive replicants
Played by Rutger Hauer
What they embody
A life, even a made one, is worth defending against those who made it short.
Key action
He seeks out the man who makes eyes for Tyrell, to work his way back to his maker.
Main positions
- Essence and existenceExistentialism
- Moral circlePathocentrism
- DeathRefusing death
Rachael
A young woman who works for Tyrell
Played by Sean Young
What they embody
What one does with one's past counts for more than where it came from.
Key action
She asks Deckard whether he has ever retired a human by mistake.
Main positions
- Essence and existenceExistentialism
- Moral circlePathocentrism
Eldon Tyrell
Founder of the company that makes the replicants
Played by Joe Turkel
What they embody
His replicants are products: "more human than human", but made to serve and to last as long as he has planned.
Key action
He asks Deckard to give Rachael the test.
Main positions
- Essence and existenceEssentialism
- Moral circleAnthropocentrism
Bryant
Deckard's former boss in the police
Played by M. Emmet Walsh
What they embody
Replicants are a threat to be eliminated, nothing more.
Key action
He forces Deckard back to work and introduces the fugitives by their function.
Main positions
- Essence and existenceEssentialism
- Moral circleAnthropocentrism
How the work answers, in its own way
The film does not settle the question with an argument. It makes the viewer feel what the test claims to measure, and that empathy goes to the made beings. It does not say whether what they become belongs to them. But it takes away from origin the power to decide what a being is, and what one has the right to do to it.
What it leaves open
Replicants are organisms, not machines: the question of a bodiless artificial mind stays out of frame, and the empathy they arouse owes much to their resemblance to us. Nor does the film say what consent to death is worth when no choice remains. Finally, it weakens its own defense of manufactured beings.
Other problems in the work
Questions the work raises in passing, over an episode or a subplot: they do not carry the whole work, but they are worth a pause.
Theatrical cut (1982), Director's Cut (1992), Final Cut (2007)
One film, several versions: what changes?
Spoiler passageJ. F. Sebastian's apartment
Why does Sebastian, who opens his door to them, age too fast?
J. F. Sebastian, a designer at the Tyrell Corporation, lives alone in an empty building, surrounded by automata he has made to keep him company. He suffers from a disease that makes him age too fast: like the replicants, he will not live long. He is the one who takes them in. One may read in this a condition of in 's sense, who wrote that we pity in others only the ills we do not believe ourselves exempt from.
What the fiction seems to defend
Distinct from what the characters think: where the narrative seems to lean, judging by what it confirms or refutes, what it stages and what it values. This is an inferred, debatable reading, not its authors' opinion. On each axis, the diamond ◆ marks where the narrative appears to lean.
- Inferred reading on “Essence and existence” (reveals plot turns)
- Inferred reading on “Moral circle” (reveals plot turns)
- Inferred reading on “Death” (reveals plot turns)
The concepts it sheds light on
- The film gives a body to the example Sartre set aside: a being made to a plan, whose function precedes its existence. It asks whether such a being can nonetheless make itself through its acts.
- If a past can be manufactured, is memory enough to make a person? The film puts the idea to the test.
- The refusal of an imposed condition, and what it can found or destroy: the film stages both faces of revolt.
- The empathy the test claims to measure, the film arouses in the viewer, and in its characters it springs from a shared vulnerability.
In the corpus
The question the work raises, and where it meets the framework: the problems, thought experiments, arguments and thinkers that shed light on it.
The question
If we can make beings like us in every way, what still sets us apart from them?
The framework's problems at stake
- Essence and existenceWhere does the essence of things come from?If things have an essence, where do they get it: from a plan that conceives them before they exist, from nature itself, from a convention of our minds, or from nothing?
- Essence and existenceFinding oneself, or inventing oneself?The injunction "be yourself" is itself divided: is self-realization bringing to light a self already there, or freely inventing one? "Become who you are" tries to hold both at once.
- Moral circleThe privilege of the speciesIs favouring one's own because they belong to our species a natural duty or an arbitrary prejudice, comparable to racism? And if infants or severely impaired humans count without possessing reason, can species still serve as the criterion?
- Moral circleCan a machine count morally?If an artificial intelligence said it was suffering, should the sentience criterion be extended to it, or does moral consideration stop at the living, simulated suffering obliging us to nothing?
- DeathIs finitude a good?Would a life with no term end up drained of its savor, passions dulled, everything already lived? If so, it is not in spite of death but thanks to it that our days count.
Thought experiments
- Turing, 1950The Imitation GameDoes being unable to tell a machine from a person by conversation prove that it thinks, or does behaviour never prove the presence of a mind?
- Bernard Williams, 1973The endless lifeWould you accept an endless life? If you hesitate, what does that reveal about the place death holds in a life that has meaning?
Arguments
- 'Can they suffer?'A wrong is grave because it harms someone; but every sentient being has an interest in not suffering. To set that interest aside on grounds of species is a speciesism of the same form as racism: every being capable of suffering thus enters the moral circle.
- The dignity of the personFull moral status rests on being able to be wronged, to hold rights; but rights and duties go together, and only a rational being can recognize a duty. Animals and nature thus fall under our benevolence, not the justice owed to an equal.
- Lucid revoltTo call death "natural" or "gentle" is to excuse what destroys the irreplaceable; to refuse it without illusion is to stay faithful to the worth of living.
Close thinkers
- PhilosopherSartreThe paper knife whose essence precedes its existence: replicants are its living version, and the film asks whether they can escape their purpose.
- PhilosopherDescartesReplicants meet his criteria for telling man from automaton, language and reason; so the film's test looks for something else, emotion. Pris even quotes his "I think, therefore I am".
- PhilosopherLockePersonal identity grounded in consciousness of past actions: the film asks what that criterion is worth when a past can be manufactured.
- PhilosopherCamusThe revolt that founds a "we": the film asks whether the replicants' revolt can go that far.
- PhilosopherBentham"Can they suffer?": the question the film puts in place of the question of origin.
- PhilosopherEpicurusA life's worth does not lie in its length: the film tests this consolation against a life deliberately cut short.
Going further
Readings
- Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? : The source novel. Empathy is the criterion of humanity there and the androids seem to lack it, though the novel already unsettles that split; the film goes further and gives empathy to the replicants.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism : The paper-knife example and the thesis that existence precedes essence: the key to the question of purpose.
- René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, Part Five : The two ways of telling man from automaton, language and reason, which the film's test replaces with emotion.
- John Locke, , Book II, chapter 27 : Personal identity grounded in consciousness and memory: the theory Rachael's case puts to the test.
- Camus, , Chapter I, "The Rebel" : "I rebel, therefore we exist": a revolt that founds a community, like the one that leads Batty to spare his hunter.
Other fictions
- Blade Runner 2049 (film, 2017) extends : Denis Villeneuve's sequel pushes the question of origin further: a replicant who may believe he was born, and memories whose owner no one can tell.
- Frankenstein (novel, 1818) extends : The model of the creature who comes to call its maker to account, and whom rejection turns murderous.
- Ex Machina (film, 2014) contests : Here empathy becomes the made being's weapon against the one examining it: the film casts suspicion on the trust Blade Runner places in emotion.
- Ghost in the Shell (anime, 1995) extends : An entirely artificial body and memories that can be faked: what remains of a self when everything can be manufactured?