The Romantic Roots of "Blade Runner"

Abstract

In Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), the influential yet loose film translation of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the clash between creatures engineered in biomedical laboratories (cyborgs called replicants) and those who create them to achieve colonial ends (at the Tyrell Corporation) form the center of cinematic concern. After the replicants hijack a spaceship and kill the human crew and passengers, they return from their exile in the off-world colonies to the Earth to confront the individual genius, Dr. Eldon Tyrell, responsible for their creation. The replicants are led by Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer), the newest combat-model (Nexus-6) developed by the corporation for military use, and under his leadership the group has returned to force from their creator biornechanical modifications in their genetic design to overcome the engineered four-year life-span inserted to protect humanity from these physically superior yet emotionally inexperienced beings. After an unsuccessful attempt to penetrate the Tyrell Corporation headquarters (a pyramid-like building that dominates the dark, despoiled environment that defines the cityscape of Los Angeles in 2019), the replicants are targeted for execution (called retirement). The agent sought to accomplish this task is Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford), a retired (the term applied to those who hunt and kill replicants) who, during his investigation of the Nexus model specifications, is introduced by Dr. Tyrell to his niece Rachel (played by Sean Young). During a test designed to detect flawed empathic responses and thereby reveal replicants (the Voight-Karnpff test), Rachel is unveiled as a replicant (which Tyrell already knew and through whom he sought to measure the validity of the test itself). After Rachel's status as a replicant is revealed, Deckard also learns that, unlike other replicants, she does not have a terminal lifespan engineered into her genetic composition, arid across the opening half of the film the blade runner falls in love with her, following her abandonment by Tyrell. This human-replicant emotive bond manifests a form of hybridized love and becomes a crucial plot device for the film; Rachel later intervenes on behalf of Deckard, saving his life by killing another replicant named Leon (played by Brion James), who had already attempted to kill another blade runner during an earlier Voight-Kampff test following his penetration of the Tyrell Corporation maintenance personnel. The hybridized bond of love also serves as a unifying element at the level of symbolic relations in the film and plays a determining role in the tragicomic resolution to conclude Scott's exploration of the continued relevance of high Romanticism for postmodernism. The clash at the root of this plot between creatures returning to their creator to petition for intervention to improve their existential state resembles Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in which the creature created and abandoned by Victor Frankenstein kills those most loved by him, then pleads with him for a mate to end his isolation, and is hunted in turn by the scientist across the barren wastes of the arctic. The plot of the film, however, also pays homage to another dimension of the Romantic era associated with both Mary and Percy Shelley, as well as its less well-known evocation by William Blake--the core of the Promethean myth and its adaptation in Blake's America, A Prophecy, in Mary's Frankenstein, and in Percy's Prometheus Unbound. While the opening of Blade Runner emphasizes the Frankenstein myth and its themes, the conclusion of the film just as clearly operates in a promethean dimension where will (for vengeance) is overcome by love (of all that lives). The setting and symbolism against which the passage from hate to love of the postmodern Prometheus occurs should also resonate with any audience remotely familiar with Romantic aesthetics, since both features reflect the lingering influence of the gothic and the sublime. …