Analysis

In Blade Runner’s opening sequence, we watch as Leon Kawalksi squirms under the simple questions which Holden (a Blade Runner) asks him. Our first clue to the nature of this enquiry or what its true purpose is occurs when Holden offers the hypothetical, “you’re in a desert—” to which Leon interrupts, “—what desert?” Holden replies, “any desert, it doesn’t matter.”

The lack of specificity means that Leon—whose Replicant thought processes are rigidly literal—will struggle to grasp generalised concepts, such as “a desert”, which could be any desert, anywhere. Leon needs to know which desert precisely so he can process that information accurately. This pattern of thought is eerily similar to my own experience of autism. In many cases, a question intended to be hypothetical or sarcastic or merely rhetorical might be answered as though it is literal.

One of the dominant themes of Blade Runner is the nature of how intertwined empathy and humanity potentially are. Within the parallel reality of the film, Replicants are implicitly branded as inhuman precisely because they cannot apparently empathise with others. The film—just as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the book it is based upon—makes a point of contrasting this assumption with various observations that many of the so-called humans in the film struggle with empathy, too. Especially when it comes to the Replicants themselves whom, among others, the police chief Bryant speaks of with starkly dehumanising terminology.

Replicants are designed to be mere tools, replacement labour for the ubiquitous “off-world colonies” which are incessantly advertised via gigantic dirigibles, encouraging the depressed masses of Earth to migrate to the next colonial adventure. This, too, suggests that the dominant society of this alternate 2019 has not learned from its last colonial epoch, and are likely to be repeating the same mistakes—this time crushing a new vector of life. Instead of African free labour building the foundations of, say, a new American colony, now it’s Replicants slaving away, just as literally as Africans once did in the United States, for the benefit of Earthlings on distant off-world colonies.

The film is remarkably insightful in its expression of a simple idea: that empathy—the ability to put one’s self in the shoes of another—is somehow fundamental to what it is that makes us human. Any animal can dominate others, any animal can engineer a measure of order and habit and hierarchy. These are not higher-order mechanisms. But empathic responses? That is a rarer thing.

Why? Perhaps because, at its most fundamental level, empathy requires a certain surrender of status. In order to be empathic, one must acknowledge another entity’s legitimate worth. Anyone obsessively protective of their own status becomes inherently insensitive or indifferent to the plight of others, lest they risk losing even a small part of their precious prestige. Which, in some circumstances, they cannot afford to lose. There’s a word for that: callous. By definition, a callous person cannot be empathetic. By the reasoning of Blade Runner’s narrative, callous people are inhuman.

Replicants in our own time

Black lives—by which is typically meant African-American lives, but equally means, for example, First Nation Australian lives—are rendered, in our present reality, much like Replicant lives in Blade Runner. They are disposable, lesser, unimportant by definition and default and design. Right up until they challenge power, or status, of course. Because once they do make such a challenge, they are most usually viewed as a violent threat by established authorities, not to mention those who benefit from their oppression.

It is especially tragic that this is also the reason why so many people from other groups suffering a parallel repression of their own—such as members of the poor, white underclass which the brutal capitalism of the United States exploits with what seems like a deliberative cruelty—end up being so resistant to any shift in status. Instead of uniting with their oppressed sisters and brothers under a banner of, say, economic salvation, they are encouraged to brood and seethe over the fact that some other shit-kicking-class might one day outrank them. Being second-last in the pecking order is infinitely preferable to being dead-last, it seems.

In other words, poor white people are incentivised to view black people as an enemy simply because they are actually doing something about their oppression and, should that movement succeed, might one day be considered of a higher status than poor white people presently are. And since poor white people have at least enjoyed the many systemic benefits of an inherently racist society, that has in turn allowed them at least a modicum of pride in respect to their social position.

Mind you, none of this is at all conscious; there will be a litany of associated reasons why white people will think they need to resist change, none of which will be because “I fear the slippage of my cultural status”, any more than BLM protesters will be thinking “I am here to increase my cultural capital”. All that the powers-that-be need to do in order to effectively marshal the force of the white people they themselves subject to misery is continue to make them feel even more miserable about their own existence than they already do.

Throw in a bit of flag-waving jingoism, some bright colours and simple slogans, a dash of nationalist fear-mongering, and channel their bitterness about the loss of potential “entitlements” (like their preferential treatment by police for example), and you have a recipe for resistance against any kind of change (which is typically thence labelled “radical”). Such well-hustled rubes then perceive rival groups as having “stolen” something from them, as though equality was somehow the same kind of zero-sum game as the capitalist system which actually oppresses them.

This is the perverse genius of turning something like “gun control” into a political issue: guns (the bigger the better) make weak people feel safe; guns allow cowards a dramatic capacity to confront those they might otherwise be fearful of. Once “guns” become symbolic of the “rights” of the white-oppressed (not to mention becoming a basic necessity for many members of numerous black gangs), whether the NRA is cynically out to profit from the very insecurity it engineers among its members becomes irrelevant. To the average white gun owner, gun control suddenly represents their fundamental identity and capacity to literally defend their social status. Ergo, removing their access to even ridiculously overpowered and patently unnecessary military-grade weapons threatens not only their physical insecurities but their cultural ones as well.

Similarly, the tired and intellectually sterile slogan of “Make America Great Again” which has become such a calling-card of the largely poor, white demographic who most fervently support Donald Trump appeals in a similar sense to a “loss” of some kind of previously-held status. One might ask, “when was America last “great”?" Ten years ago? Twenty? Fifty? Is it not currently “great”? Clearly its status as a global economic and military superpower has not changed, so what has? Only the distribution of its incredible—arguably obscene—wealth. Some Americans practically fetishise their bitching and moaning about the cost of things like social security or healthcare (services which are, bizarrely, absolutely in their interests) whilst ignoring the fact that the average Bezos or Gates controls more wealth alone than the poorest third the entire country combined. But that’s capitalism by design, and nothing to do with woke-ness or gun control.

That the various guises of efforts toward equality—affirmative action, social safety nets, critical race theory—intrude directly upon the status of those who once directly engineered the very inequality it seeks to confront, remains an insurmountable affront to the pride of those who most directly benefit from it. In other words, what the ubiquitous red hats really mean to say is “Make America Racist Again”. Which, like gun control, is ludicrously overstated since the United States is objectively one of the single most racist countries on the entire planet.

It is perhaps instructional—though not in the least bit surprising—that police responses to white rioters who literally smashed and trashed a symbol of governmental power might be described, at best, as timid. Yet, when various predominantly non-white rioters took to the streets in response to police brutality, that response was manifestly aggressive and fraught with tension. Take a look at photos of the insurrection versus some street protests in response to police killings; one set involve tear gas, fully armed police, and frequent fracas; the other involve officers having polite conversations with white people in the process of storming the seat of government.

Now, a question of security: do I give you the steel heel or the rubber bullet?

This trope of authoritarian disdain for their socially-enforced “lessers” is so clear that—back in the 1980s when these themes were not so controversial—Deckard’s original voiceover describes Bryant, the white police chief who bullies him back into service, as something along the lines of “the kind of guy who calls black people niggers.” This is the line I thought of when Netflix released the “Director’s Cut” version of the film, making much of its “new” material (which isn’t new; I have owned a DVD version of it for over 20 years), and I realised how offensive, and yet how insightfully accurate, that accidental line would sound to contemporary ears.

Conveniently for Netflix, the Director’s Cut expunges the original voiceover in its entirety. Scott’s latter cut adds little new footage (and arguably removes more, by cutting the original uplifting ending, than it adds in the four-or-five-second dream sequence), but does notably remove the somewhat clunky (and now, given the film’s famously cult status, unnecessary) voiceover.

It could also be argued that this was also an effort to shift the film further away from its film noir roots, toward a more futurist, or perhaps science fiction, style. For my money, it can’t escape that stylistic gravity, and shouldn’t even try, though I don’t particularly miss the comments, especially that particularly uncomfortable line.

But to return to Deckard’s off-hand comment, those on the political “left” might possibly be insulted by the deployment of such language by a white character (both Deckard, whose voiceover it is, and Bryant, the chief he is describing, are both white). Those on the “right” might perhaps find fault with its inference that white people in authority are, by default, racist.

Yet there’s a depressing accuracy to this entire situation; Deckard does deploy the word casually (if critically), as is appropriate for its film noir tone. Deckard is himself an extraordinarily compromised character morally. By any reading of the film, he is not a well-intentioned person. Bryant, for his part, is bigoted, quick to disdain anyone who is not a cop as “little people”. He calls Replicants “skin jobs”, a not entirely subtle doppelgänger for a racial or sexual slur.

Pay attention to Bryant’s context and corresponding attitude here—as a washed-up, overworked and overweight cop in a shitty little cramped office, out of his depth, he is belittling anyone even lower in status than he.

Note that all the Replicants are white. Two of them are female, Zhora and Pris. In calling them ‘skin jobs’, Bryant calls into focus the manner of their cultural exteriority. In this case, that great chasm of otherness which manifest itself so blatantly in the 1980s: wealth, or a lack of it. While to our eyes, Replicants may scream to be aligned with racial inequalities, in its contemporary time the othered ‘skin’ covered people without means. The ‘little people’, those huddled on the bustling and crowded streets, or hiding in garbage; not those gliding through gilded halls as Tyrell does.

The book, in contrast, depicts a world depleted of humanity—the world is hugely depopulated—in order to draw parallels between otherness, loneliness, and alienation. The film, in 1980, ironically (now) subverts its socialist message beneath a veneer of casual racism. Bryant’s fascism, though guised in racist terminology, was ultimately designed to invoke class frictions.

Tropes take on a life of their own for a reason, because they speak to some perspective of consistency. Many, over time, recede into obscurity or become anachronistic. This trope, of the overtly racist and authoritarian cop, however, has only become ever more amplified over time, so what was a kind of stereotype in the 1980s has since become reflective of an actual culture in all its rampaging toxicity, particularly in the United States.

In Australia, the police do from time to time get caught up in overzealous action, but neither the force itself, nor our citizens, tend to be armed like well-funded paramilitary forces ready to invade the Ukraine. Without excusing regular abuses of power, police action in Australia is nowhere near as insidious or prevalent as even many mundane police interactions in many parts of the United States. Our problem is how pathetically we neglect our First Nations brothers and sisters, and abuse those who aren’t yet actual citizens.

Our reckoning isn’t with violent revolt so much as behind bars, within prisons and Gulag-esque detention centres for political prisoners less of the “you threaten the security of the State” as the “we simply do not give a shit about you” variety.

Limited empathy

So we come back to the empathy test. Without specificity, a perspective becomes entirely generalised; a hypothetical merely in principle, without detail. A stereotype. It fascinates me that the Replicant mind insists upon a measure of specificity out of necessity, and as a result literally fails to fully comprehend such vague hypotheticals. The Replicant response to a hypothetical is heightened emotion, the very thing the Voight-Kampff test is designed to detect. Frustration, and anger, in the face of a lack of clarity.

Humans, in the context of Blade Runner, are universally assumed to possess such empathy; the simple inference to be made here is that we do trade in hypotheticals and can also place ourselves in other people’s shoes. But what if that inference is incorrect? What if empathy actually demands a Replicant state of mind? That is, what if to be empathetic, one must insist on specificity, to understand context, and remove generalisations so as to avoid hypotheticals which do not actually exist?

When Rachael visits Deckard to prove that she’s not a Replicant, he cruelly refutes her assertion with tersely phrased examples from her childhood, which he then reinforces with the question, “did you ever tell anyone about that—your mother, Tyrell, anyone, huh?” He spits these questions at her with a vitriol which reveals his sheer disgust at the very nature of Replicant existence. When she can’t answer him, and because it confirms her status as a Replicant, she begins to cry.

Suddenly, Deckard’s demeanour changes; he seems to slump and he rolls his head around, as though annoyed. So he changes tack, and attempts to mitigate his actions. He says, “okay, bad joke. I made a bad joke. You’re not a Replicant. Go home, okay?” He rubs his eyes—he is tired and irritated—but then stands up and with faux-sympathy, says, “no, really. I’m sorry. Go home.” Even while making an effort, his message is clear: get out of here, I’m only ‘sorry’ so that my insufficient effort might hasten your departure. Here, Deckard is precisely that kind of person who might later claim, but I apologised… I don’t know what they are so upset about.

This speaks to a kind of imperfect empathy; Deckard has a sense of empathy because he can identify that her feelings were upset by what he just said—whereas Roy Batty, his nemesis and the film’s villain, seems to behave with uniform callousness around everyone he meets, clinically assessing his surroundings in a very effective, but decidedly uncaring, manner. Batty is, counterintuitively, almost always calm and polite. Yet it is interesting that Deckard, on the other hand, doesn’t respond empathically even if he has a sense of what the appropriate response to Rachael should be.

In essence, he is annoyed because her reaction makes him feel guilty. He doesn’t care about her per se, he merely wants the feeling of guilt to go away, which is why he responds so coldly to her emotional response. Rachael remains silent for the rest of the scene, as Deckard flounders around with further efforts to mitigate the damage he has done.

Like many interactions in the film, this exchange illustrates a form of empathy. Deckard can identify that he has caused damage, but only cares about it insofar as it affects himself. He does not seem—arguably at any point in the film—to legitimately care about Rachael, instead using her as a figure upon whom he places meaning, rather than her having meaning—or identity—inherently unto herself. She is like a mirror of his own soul, which is why he gets irritated when her response makes him reflect upon what he said. She has shown him a part of his true self. And it isn’t pleasant.

Later in the film, he uses physical coercion to force Rachel to confess a desire for him she very likely does not have—another means of assuaging the guilt he feels in response to actions or consequences he simply does not care to examine nor control.

Go home, okay?

Similarly, when something like Black Lives Matter triggers a reaction in those who are defensive about issues of race, their response is—like Deckard admitting, “bad joke”—to either trivialise the associated harm, or to redirect it in a fashion which minimises its importance. So we see “All Lives Matter” evolve as an attempt to re-frame the BLM movement as something exclusionary.

It’s all in aid of avoiding the emotional problem at the heart of the conflict, in service of maintaining the status quo. Essentially, those with the power don’t want to give any of it up, and so the source of their potential pain is deflected elsewhere. The “All Lives Matter” argument is based on the notion that BLM is technically unfair on some completely de-contextualised hypothetical plane of perception, so the debate can be turned, ironically, to quibbling over auxiliary minutiae in order to avoid the larger systemic problems which were the focus of the original movement.

That is, the argument suggests that it’s not the largely white police force (or the Anglo-centric culture of such a police force, which is clearly not exclusively staffed by white officers) who are the problem. No, it’s these exclusionary people whose movement infers that white—sorry, non-black—lives don’t matter in comparison to their own niche in-group which excludes all others. That’s racist, right?!

Imagine: someone has just lost a parent, a child, a partner. They are in pain, and that pain is immediate and real. For them to say, “this loss matters to me”, the compassionate response would be to consider their pain and offer empathy. Perhaps, “I hear you”, or “that loss is legitimate, and terrible”. Who, then, in that circumstance, would say, “big deal, everyone dies. Everyone matters, not just your loved one”? It is technically correct; everyone does matter, and everyone does die. But that’s not how empathy works. It requires a consideration of individual factors, of context, and of acknowledging in that moment the personhood of the individual feeling pain.

To hearken back to Leon Kawalski, the particular desert does matter. It’s not just “any desert”. We really do need to know why he isn’t helping that tortoise.

Perhaps if the “All Lives Matter” movement had enjoyed a long and proud history of embracing and championing all lives including, say, Latinx lives and Asian lives and First Nations lives as well as just white lives, such an argument might have held a bit more water. But they didn’t, which is a very simple way of exposing the rank hypocrisy of such counter-arguments. “All Lives” in this context only exists to refute the value of “Black Lives”, specifically. The same undignified tactic would have been used against a “Latin Lives Matter” movement had it happened to arise first.

When a movement like BLM draws attention to the inadequacies and inequalities of a culture, the response of that culture’s primary beneficiaries is to feel guilty. It’s a perfectly well-known phenomenon; we all know what white guilt is and how badly some people need to mitigate it. Some seek to do so by undertaking (what they want to believe are) actions which assist the oppressed group in order to salve their own conscience. As imperfect as that instinct is, it’s a damn sight better than getting defensive about it and railing against a guilty conscience by expressing that self-loathing as rage at the movement which threatens it, or projecting guilt outward in order to prevent it from being felt and confronted internally.

The capitol riots in January 2021 are perhaps the example par excellence of inappropriately-directed fury stemming directly from repressed white guilt. Certainly, very few in the crowd would have expressed their behaviour thus, but that’s the point—few people with body dysmorphic disorders stare at their physical form and think, “well, sure, I actually look perfectly healthy but I should acknowledge here that my instinct wants to distort my appearance for the sake of the horrific insecurities my culture has inflicted on me in regard to physical beauty standards and the gendered role I’ve subconsciously absorbed.” That’s not how psychology works at all.

Guilt tends to be expressed in one of two ways: internally, or externally. If it’s internal, one person tends to suffer and it’s only society’s problem insofar as managing the wellbeing of that one individual. If it’s external, however, that frequently becomes everyone’s problem. When that need for an externalised catharsis to mitigate inconvenient ethical anxieties is embraced by an entire social movement, you get things like capital riots and National Socialist Workers Parties or Pacific Solutions. This isn’t the first, and won’t be the last, time citizens of a democracy dabble in the dark arts of fascist rhetoric in order to slake their own unacknowledged shame.

For Deckard, it is Rachael’s distressed response which triggers his particular shame. He tells her to go home, and when he finally realises she might be in real pain he offers her his personal solution to emotional problems: he suggests she suppress her discomfort with alcohol. “You want a drink? I’ll get you a drink.” She rejects his offer, and leaves while he pathetically finds a dirty glass and hastily rinses it amongst his other unwashed dishes, but he then simply goes on to get drunk after she’s gone.

The problem here is ignoring the source of the pain in the first place: Deckard has disregarded Rachael’s personhood. And he senses that and feels guilty about it. In our own world, the very real oppression identified and resisted by the Black Lives Matter group in turn makes many white people feel guilty (whether they recognise it or not). Like Deckard, some of those people have manifested some extremely unhealthy ways of avoiding that guilt instead of confronting it honestly.

None of this is to say that Deckard himself doesn’t have any problems, or “all” lives don’t matter. The point is that by denying the contextual value of a particular group in order to salve guilt, or without a recognition of imbalance or injustice, nothing is done to actually salve that guilt, nor remedy the systemic injustice which fuels it. Remonstrations then only act to suppress the feeling associated with it. And that’s not empathy. In the world of Blade Runner, that’s in fact inhuman. In our world, however, it’s positively commonplace.

Moments lost in time

In the film’s denouement, Roy Batty inexplicably saves Deckard’s life in spite of the ostensible opposition they have held throughout the rest of the film. The reasons for his decision are never explicitly revealed, but lost amidst the tonal and lyrical beauty of Rutger Hauer’s most famous recitation are two quite telling considerations.

Firstly, Deckard seems utterly ill-equipped to understand Batty’s behaviour. He does not even know how to react to his enemy having saved him; he remains emotionless, stunned by a situation he could never have expected. Here is an enemy, the hunted-turned-hunter, who moments ago had been standing in looming dominance above him, deciding at the last moment not just to spare his life but to actively save it. An exquisite expression of munificent empathy, and one which Deckard himself might in fact be said to be incapable of.

Secondly, the only reasonable conclusion which might be found in the exchange is that Roy knows he is about to perish, and wants someone, somewhere—even his nemesis—to hear some small part of his tale that his personal suffering might be acknowledged. That his life, with all its amazing experiences, might be seen, known, and legitimised. That despite the inherent inequity of his very existence he might be recognised as a human being by virtue of his standing there and saying so. Is this not the very definition of a humanising action? Is it not also, in essence, what the contextual force of Black Lives Matter was designed to achieve?

Hauer’s delivery of the speech is truly inspired. He begins with a measure of regret, or perhaps mild sardonism, which morphs into wonder as he recalls his own experiences. But as he continues, his speech becomes halting, full of pause, as his body ceases to function:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion...
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
All those… moments
will be lost in time, like…
tears… in rain...
Time… to die.

It is often called a soliloquy, which I find somewhat telling: Batty is clearly not alone physically (the typical definition of such a speech), but perhaps the point of labelling it so is the overwhelming sense that his speech will, ultimately, go ignored by Deckard and so he may as well be alone. Just as the plight of Replicants—or people of colour—are similarly ignored despite their best efforts and most humane pleas. It is, however, a soliloquy in the sense of Roy speaking of himself, to himself, and for himself, regardless of Deckard’s attention or ultimate actions. Deckard is, after all, a cop and a Blade Runner—the very definition of excessive authoritarian power in this iteration of Los Angeles and, dispiritingly, not all that far from the actual iteration, either.

The speech is heartbreaking in particular because it manifests as a plea to humanity. For the entire film, Roy Batty has lurked within the frames of the film and menaced those who stood in his way. He has bullied, assaulted, murdered and maimed anyone who threatened his efforts to extend his own existence. The entire penultimate scene invoked his inverting the hunter-hunted dynamic between he and Deckard, as he became manifest as some kind of primal, animalistic force, howling and stalking Deckard through J.F. Sebastian’s half-abandoned home.

Yet here, right at the end, when he could have had his vengeance on Deckard, he relents. Instead, he simply asks to be remembered, to express himself in his most fundamental form; a form which we learn is observant and poetic, not violent or domineering. It is further evidence that Batty—representing the Replicants and, in some sense, those who Replicants themselves represent—is acting violently out of sheer desperation and necessity. That, given the same opportunity as a human—with the attendant privileges that such a status offers—he may have been something altogether different, and greater.

Whether or not Batty gets his wish is largely irrelevant: we, as the audience, are meant to be the vessels of empathy who might carry his plea with us. That is the demand of the speech: “see me!” It is an absolute indictment of humanity that we—all of us, regardless of our nation or politics or class or status—fail at this most basic of empathic tasks. In part because we avoid discomfort by creating dishonesties to embrace instead. We ignore specificity in order to generalise, to homogenise; such apparatus leads us to fail in our existential duty to learn and understand. Instead, as a species we remain dullard consumers.

Like Deckard, we who are in possession of privileges of any sort are used to assuming that a Voight-Kampff test is designed to detect inhumanity in others. Not us. And that’s because it is; the existence of such a tool is itself a signifier of all the assumptions we make about observing otherness and defining one dominant definition of “humanity”. When the tool is designed to point outward, we begin to develop a blind spot to what it might detect if it was ever turned the other way.