Blade Runner

By Jennifer Wolfe

April 21, 2001

When I first watched Blade Runner, I was profoundly moved, because it communicated to me an experience I had felt but been unable to put into words:  I believe that Blade Runner  shows the inner experience of an adult who, as a child, felt outside of the range of human experience, who felt in some profound and intrinsic way inhuman. The film captures what it feels like to be a human treated like an object.

This feeling of inhumaness speaks of a profound disruption of attachment. This a child who was used as an object, rather than seen as a subject, whose value was in being useful, rather than in being himself.  To use Buber’s language, this is a child who was an It, instead of a Thou.

This experience can result from a whole range of circumstances.  The most extreme is probably interrelational trauma such as sexual abuse, where a child’s experience of being human is literally shattered, and he or she becomes an object to be used.  It also happens, however, to a child whose parents were narcissistic or otherwise failed to respond to the child as an individual in his own right.  In fact, I imagine that most of us, to some degree, identify with this picture.

A central theme of the film is being seen.  The dehumanized child is not seen as him or herself, is not seen as a human.  If you ever watch the film again, note the constant images of eyes, usually eyes portrayed as objects.  Note also the constant reference to seeing or not being seen

Mood plays a big part in the film.  This mood reflects the inner experience of a dehumanized child.  There is a constant sense of danger, of chaos, of overstimulation, of anxiety.  There is no colour except for the unnatural and garish neon lights.  In fact, everything is unnatural: there is no natural scenery, no natural order, and no humanity.  The world is alienated and alienating.

In the nightmare world of Blade Runner, there are replicants: androids created to be used by humans. They look like humans, act like humans, can only be distinguished from humans by elaborate tests of their autonomic responses.  As Tyrell says, replicants are designed to be “more human than human.”  They are exceptional in strength and intelligence and, in many ways, they show more humanity.

Yet they are not treated as human: they have absolutely no rights  It is impossible to kill a replicant; you can only retire it.  They don’t belong on the world like humans do.  As long as they are useful and know their place, they are tolerated.  When they are no longer useful, they are destroyed immediately (like the rebels) or simply abandoned (and therefore destroyed) like Rachel

In Roy and Priss, we have two cliché situations of dehumanized children.  Roy, designed for optimum self-sufficiency, is driven (or created for) violence.  Priss, your basic pleasure model designed for military use, is a prostitute.  They know they live lives of struggle and deprivation.  They know they have been betrayed and dehumanized.

Rachel is different.  She lives a life of privilege; she doesn’t know she’s a replicant; she believes she has a family who loves her.  Yet she doesn’t, and on some level she knows she doesn’t.   However, as Tyrell says, she has begun to suspect.  When Decker reveals to her that her memories are merely implants, she is sad and betrayed, but not shocked or even surprised.  This is Bollas’ unthought known: on some level she knows her falseness, even though she hasn’t articulated it.

This is part of the horror of the secretly dehumanized child.  She (or he) knows on some deep level that she is non-human, an object intended for use.  No matter what anyone says, no matter how it seems on the surface, she knows the “truth”:  that she is not human and does not belong in a human world

The secretly dehumanized child has another problem: no matter how smart she is, how kind, how good, how well-liked – no matter how perfect she is, it’s not enough – she’s only buying time until her first mistake. As long as she’s useful and pleasant, she’ll be tolerated – never loved, but tolerated.  If she no longer meets some hidden criteria, she’ll be destroyed.  She will not be killed, because she doesn’t have a soul.  Instead she will be annihilated, as in Winnicott’s primitive anxieties

The scene with Leon taking the empathy test, catches another aspect of this. Leon knows he’s not human, but he has to act in the human world as if he were.  If he makes a mistake, if he fails to pass as human, he’ll be destroyed.  His life depends on faking an emotional response to something he has no experience of: a tortoise, or a mother.  Not only that (and I hope I’m communicating how difficult this is for him), his life depends on faking reactions that he can’t even control, like blush response and pupil dilation.  You can imagine the kind of vigilance this requires, and the complete uselessness of being vigilant – he doesn’t understand the questions, he doesn’t know the rules of the questioning, and the responses are impossible for him to manufacture.

So some kids are outcast (like Leon, Roy and Priss) – they know they been dehumanized.  But Rachel doesn’t know.  Someone else’s memories have been implanted in her.  This is often the experience of the dehumanized child.  There’s an interpretation of reality that’s imposed on the child:  We’re a happy normal family, mommy loves you, daddy protects you, and we all smile in photographs.  Yet it’s not really what’s going on under the surface.  It’s not the child’s own experience.  Rachel doesn’t really know who she is.  She can’t distinguish between her authentic experience and the party line.  This is highlighted in the scene with the piano:  she doesn’t know whether she really plays the piano – whether she really loves music – or whether these memories are simply implants.

The film makes the point that a sense of one’s own history, of memory, is essential to being human somehow.  The theme of photographs representing the memory of a personal past runs throughout the film.  Yet an emotional link to the past is also an Achilles’ heel: as Tyrell explains regarding the newest generation of Nexus androids, of which Rachel is on, “we give them a past, so we can control them better.”  When the replicants begin to develop their own emotional responses, they are dangerous.  This is why they are only allowed to live 4 years.  Rachel is controlled through her memories, represented by her photographs. Her photos are quite important to her, and she mourns their falseness.  If she lives, she will have to find and create her own true history.

We come now to the climax of the film.  For most of the film, Roy acts out of intense rage.  He loves and hates and kills the father who has used and abandoned him.  In fact, this mourning seems to me to be the deepest expression of interrelationship we see in the film.  Roy finds and loves and hates and kills the father who has used and abandoned him.  However, he transcends his own violent past by saving Decker and forcing Decker, finally, to see him as a subject.  In making a free choice, he also transcends the constant fear in which he has lived as a slave.

In this climatic scene, Roy says, “I have seen things that you have never seen.”  In other words, “I am my own being, with my own experience.  I have been pushed to the bounds of human experience but I am still a real being.  When I die, this experience, this individuality, will be lost like tears in the rain.”  He will be lost, unless his experience is accepted as part of human experience, unless he can make Decker see and accept him.

This is the first time in the film that Decker really looks at anyone as an individual.  And he looks long, and with empathy, with fellow feeling.  For the first time he sees Roy as a being in himself, valuable in himself.  And in this seeing, Decker finds his own humanity.  He is able to go back to Rachel in a new way and, against all odds, to follow his own heart.  With the ascent of the white dove up to the sky, we find that Roy does, at least now after having been seen, have a soul.

I believe that in these final scenes, the film offers the hope of redemption.  The world, from the point-of-view of the dehumanized child, is brutal and alienating.  Yet there is hope in the true connection between individuals.  There is a Thou-ness that can be found and fought for, even in a world of It-ness. And this perhaps, I hope, is what we offer as therapists.