Blade Runner, Gender and You

Do you remember that guy you used to know who was always watching Blade Runner and would talk about how it was one of his favorite films? Do you remember how much you wished that the guy and those like him would just shut up about a film that no one understood and would put even the people who claim to like it to sleep? That guy was me. So it’s very strange now that suddenly I find out that I in fact was apparently not the only person in the world who liked Blade Runner. Suddenly, liking Blade Runner is a cool thing now. Weird.

But I didn’t just like Blade Runner. I read the original book (actually a short story by my definition) that it was based on. I also read the novels that were the only things that were ever going to be sequels because we were all sure that no filmed sequel would ever be made.

Then Trump gets elected president and all bets are off. Anything can happen. We have an entire world of possibilities before us and low and behold, we got a Blade Runner sequel. SCORE!

Now, having watched the new film I can say a few things very clearly. First, I liked it. It’s at least as good as the original, but in different ways. The new film made me rear back in my seat with dread and agony. It is rare indeed that a film will elicit that kind of emotional reaction from me. Some of the scenes remind me a lot of the truck scene from the novels. They’re bleak and filled with despair. We feel the new agent’s isolation, alienation, and longing for affection. He could go and either buy or extort physical affection but he would know deep down that it wouldn’t be real. The closest he gets to someone actually caring about him is his fake computer girlfriend who he can’t physically touch. He can only see and hear her. It’s as haunting as the original in this aspect so we understand him when he goes out on a limb in an effort to get some kind of genuine human connection.

Second, I know that this was not a film that I would have written. There is a huge plot twist that we are informed of almost right at the very beginning of the film. Once we see that, most of the rest of the plot is predictable. But we still watch in morbid fascination and horror thinking to ourselves that the film makers aren’t really going to pull this on us. But they do and beat by beat we know what’s going to happen, we just haven’t seen how exactly yet. Knowing myself as a writer, I know I would have never felt confidence in this kind of story. I would never think it would work and yet here it does. The B plot from the first film has become the driving force of the A plot of this film and that is just so macabre that I can’t look away.

If I had written the film, I would certainly have a new blade runner meet Deckard. Why not? However, I would have never made his relationship with Rachael a pivotal plot point. No way. I might hint things in the background but I would never allow it to come up. I would be far more interested in having the new agent asking Deckard about a different case he was involved with before the events of Blade Runner. I would leave Rachael’s fate completely unanswered, maybe even with a hint that Deckard has her still alive and well stashed away somewhere. Or I’d pull some epic dramatic irony where the audience would be able to figure certain things out but the characters in the story would have no way to come to that conclusion.

Now, I do have one huge criticism of the film and it revolves around the question of whether Deckard is a replicant or not. For the record, according to the original short story, most cuts of the film, Harrison Ford the actor, and the sequel novels; it is firmly established that Deckard is one hundred percent human. However, it is intellectually interesting to watch the cuts that slightly suggest that perhaps Deckard is not human and ponder the question. That said, no matter if Deckard is or is not a replicant, it would not change the story of the first film. It is still Deckard’s personal story and it matters to him. The meaning of the film does not change regardless of the outcome of the question.

The original Blade Runner shares a kind of connection to Shakespeare’s Othello. Just as in the play, the title character is not actually our protagonist. In the play, Iago is the protagonist, carefully orchestrating his betrayal. In Blade Runner, Roy Batty is the protagonist, as he inches closer and closer to his goal of meeting Tyrell and maybe getting the chance to extend his life. Roy is the good guy in the film and Deckard is actually the unwitting villain. The big moment in the film is when Deckard finally realizes that he is the bad guy. It messes with our expectations and forces the audience to think outside the box. But that still isn’t the biggest issue that Blade Runner ask us to tackle inside of ourselves.

When that meeting does happen between Roy and Tyrell, if you listen closely, the word virus comes up several times. That wouldn’t seem to make much sense unless the Tyrell corporation was using viral DNA to make the replicants in the first place. If this is the case, then not only are the replicants not human, they aren’t even alive. They aren’t related to anything on the tree of life. They are simply robots made with biological components instead of mechanical ones. They are the other, a true other. That’s scary. Other films have asked us to look at this kind of issue before, when Superman and Lois Lane or Alien Nation but never to this extreme. Some may feel like this kind of drama is diminished if it turns out that Deckard is a replicant but Deckard doesn’t know he is one if in fact that is even true. The audience is still faced with the same question of these things that are made from a virus walking among us and we can’t tell the difference between them and us. In the old film, it would make absolutely zero impact on the story if Deckard is or is not a replicant which is why he almost certainly is not a replicant.

In the new film, however, the issue of Deckard being a replicant or a human is vitally important. It changes everything. If Deckard is a human than it means that all the replicants are human. They aren’t machines at all no matter how many mechanical parts or how much genetic engineering went into making them. If Deckard is human, then we’re dealing with humans again repressing members of their own race and finding a flimsy justification for doing so. We’re no longer talking about the other, but rather our own kind. The same moral issues that are raised in films like Gattica are now at play in Blade Runner. We’re dealing with cloning and designer babies, not a product assembled in a factory.

One of the things about the civil rights movement that a lot of people still need to wrap their heads around is the fact that black people are … wait for it …. people. They are human beings and our fellow citizens. Black people were never an other. They were always part of us. People kept trying to grapple with civil rights as if we were talking about an alien species that had invaded and wouldn’t go away, but that was never the case. Black people and white people were always all in this together from the word go and we were only deluding ourselves into thinking there was a difference. There is no need for black people and white people to have to learn to coexist with each other since we are already one nation, with the same humanity and equal in dignity. That is why the original Blade Runner is not a film about civil rights and it actually smacks of racism to bring that argument up. In the new film, if Deckard is a human, then the scary other of the first film is taken away and we are confronted simply with accepting our own.

However, if Deckard is a replicant then the internal meaning of this new story changes. We are confronted with the idea that humans are dying out and will eventually be replaced by viral automatons that simply resemble humans. It raises the question of how do we deal with the other who is not us and never will be us. Do we treat replicants like toasters or do we afford them at least the same legal protections that animals have? Because they are sentient, do we treat them as we might also treat a population of Neanderthals if we were to happen to find one still in existence? If we are able to decode dolphin language and can talk to them, does that mean they now gain the right to vote? Also, how deep and how complicated is the hinted symbiotic relationship between humans and replicants? Why do we only get told about so few models of replicants when the previous film made them out to be as numerous in model numbers as Android phones? Deckard, a seasoned Blade Runner, even has to be briefed on the four year life span of the new Nexus 6, implying that other models by other makers or previous Tyrell models had a longer life span. Maybe even an endless one. How do humans relate to beings that can outlive them or to beings that live a third of the life span of our dogs?

If the replicants are in fact an other, then for the first time humans will have to learn to live side by side with non humans that are at least as intelligent as us. The replicants are not us and will never be us. The more resources they use, it means fewer resources for the humans that are left. If humans are on the path to dying out, then it raises the question of whether the replicants would be able to take over society and keep the factories producing new replicants or not. If the humans are to die, then perhaps the humans wouldn’t want to leave the replicants behind to fend for themselves. Maybe we’d kill them all off, just to be sure.

In the new film, Deckard’s humanity isn’t an asset to the film, but a detriment. The replicants are human just as Deckard is most probably human because one of the replicants is shown to have DNA that can pass for human DNA and not be spotted. This means that the replicants are human and the messages that we are confronted with in the first film fall away and Blade Runner 2049 turns into just another civil rights metaphor.

So does the film have no value besides purely just entertainment? It is a film after all and entertainment is the purpose so there’s nothing wrong with that. But maybe we can draw deeper meaning if we examine the symbiotic relationship that the replicants and the humans have. Are there no two groups of humans that are in fact fundamentally different? There are.

In many ways, the human and replicant dichotomy is an excellent lens through which we can examine gender roles. It’s not a perfect metaphor but it is an argument that can be made and explored if there is the will to do it. The replicants can not exist without humans to create them, just as a man can not exist without a woman to be his mother. Similarly, the humans need the replicants as slave labor in a similar fashion that many women require a man to financially support her, without which she would be incapable of taking care of herself without hardship. Just as the replicants, being the slave labor, are seen as disposable, so too are men in modern society seen as disposable by many women who advocate for a maleless society while enjoying the shelter of buildings built by men and the freedoms that male soldiers died to protect. In the film, fatherhood is devalued and we witness a father never being allowed to see his child because it would bring danger. The humans see replicants as their created play things that can be abused at will the same way modern women see their sons as things to be taught to hate their maleness as it is a threat to the feminist establishment. We even see Wallace, a stand in for a mother, essentially castrating one of the new replicants, a stand in for a baby boy, in order to prevent the child from developing in ways that the mother doesn’t approve of. With increasing fervor we hear of women advising other women to abort male children in favor of having girls, or to encourage their daughters that the sky is the limit and discourage their sons from seeking their own male identity. We even hear stories of feminists sexually abusing their male children and using the ever nebulous rape culture as justification for child molestation.

The fact of the matter is, most women do not want a dangerous job that could lead to bodily injury, a decreased life expectancy, or instant death no matter how much the world needs that work to be done. And sure, most men probably don’t want those kinds of jobs either if given another valid choice but many men are not. While most women would never consider a career that might get them killed no matter what the pay happens to be, they will at the same time be perfectly happy to spend their boyfriends cash while he is off risking his life at a job that he only took so that he’d be able to afford the things that she demanded of him. And if he dies, she’ll morn, as it would look bad on her should she not do so, but then she’s on the prowl for the next disposable nonfemale to leech off of.

If you think this line of thinking is a stretch, remember, this is science fiction. One of the hallmarks of science fiction is to recast the players of human drama in different roles, put the shoe on the other foot as it were so that we can see the issues more clearly. Think of the Star Trek episode with the guy having one side of his face being white and the other side black. We use scifi to take issues that are too close to us to be able to see clearly, forest for the trees as it were, and we can pull away to see the big picture and gain greater insight. The fact is, men don’t know what it’s like to be a woman. We have no idea. Similarly, women don’t know what it’s like to be a man. Because of this, we’re always each fighting for our own positions without having sufficient information to understand where the other is coming from. By casting the humans as women and the replicants as men in modern society, we can see that the humans stay home and do no work while the replicants are forced to carry out menial tasks or even orders to kill each other for the benefit of the humans. When we see the underground cell of defiant replicants, we can imagine that they must feel the way many men’s rights activists must feel when trying to raise issues of domestic violence against men, financial devastation caused by divorce, child custody, and drought of affection.

If we see the replicants as men, we can understand their loneliness, their fatalism, their want for belonging. We see them desiring a normal family life with love and recognition and society preying on that desire while also cheapening it and ridiculing it. We then understand their capacity for violence and competition and know why they must engage in it even if it’s self destructive. We understand that all of the conflict of the film would be unnecessary if only the humans, a stand in for women, would be able to love and accept the men for who they were and had given them the emotional support they needed.

Perhaps this is the real reason the normal racists characters like Anita KKK Sarkesian want to attack the film. The new film shines a spotlight on female privilege and quietly asks us to ponder if that is ok in modern society. No, it’s not ok. The system is rigged against all men but especially low income black men. That’s not ok. That has to change and we have to be strong enough to tell the likes of feminist frequency that they’re bigots and we’re not going to listen to them.

Surely, if any feminist are reading this article and accept this metaphor, they’ll turn their focus to the scene where a replicant murders a human and the feminists will try to say that this is male violence against women. And you know what, it is. That’s exactly what this scene is supposed to show. The mistreatment by Wallace towards Luv causes Luv to resent and hate him. Luv then revels in the opportunity to kill another human as a stand in for Wallace. Where does the anger that so many men have towards women they’ve never met come from? Likely it comes from abuse they’ve suffered by the women they are close to but can not retaliate against. So all other women become the target of their rage. No, it’s not right. No, it’s not fair. It’s wrong and the film even tells us it’s wrong. Just as women have been campaigning for the ability to leave an abusive relationship, that same right needs to be given to men. Men need the ability to walk away from abuse without society imposing a financial penalty for it. If not, then increasing numbers of men who are forced to face abuse with no recourse to relief will begin to see all women, not just the abusers, as their enemy.

Finally, if we are accepting the humans are women and replicants are men lens for the film, we have to consider the meaning of the child that is born. If the day should ever come that two men or even just a single man can have children without the assistance of a woman, what would that mean for gender relations? The film then asks us to consider that question. There is also a replicant with replicant sex scene in the film wherein one replicant is imagining his idealized woman instead of the other replicant he is with. Men want to be with women, we want women to be part of our lives, but we can’t force women to be part of our lives. If women reject us, it does not stop us wanting to be with them.

 Is all of this a stretch? You decide. It may even be likely that this goes way outside the actual intentions of the filmmakers. They probably simply had another civil rights undertone in mind while telling an interesting story. But I’m glad the film exists in the form that it does so that we can have the opportunity to have this debate and crack this open so we can look at the issues. Perhaps if we do discuss and debate, men who have never been the victims of abusive women will be able to gain some level of empathy towards both women and men who are abused by a spouse. Maybe, just maybe, women who watch this film might actually start to feel some compunction for what they’ve done to the men in their lives and begin to evaluate their conscience.