What if a group of slaves murdered their overlords and returned home to find themselves targeted by a bounty hunter? What if the slaves were really bioengineered beings seeking not only emancipation but also extensions on their predetermined life spans? What if simulacrum might no longer be distinguished from human? Such are the basic questions that fuel the plot of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), but this only scratches the surface. While the film has been poked, prodded, and scanned for going on four decades, there is still much value to be gleaned from it. This article places Blade Runner in dialogue with the notion of exile to enliven our understanding of the film as well as the aesthetic power of science fiction as a genre. Multiple questions animate this discussion: How does the theme of exile operate in Blade Runner? In what ways does the exile in Blade Runner interrupt other theoretical analyses of the film, such as those championed by the postmodern, genre, and feminist schools of theory?Any analysis of Blade Runner risks morphing into a journey down a rabbit hole. Barry Atkins remarks that “it has been some time since it was possible to discuss Blade Runner as if it were a single and fixed text that might be considered in isolation from its multiple prints, or detached from its vast array of intertexts, paratexts, references and allusions” (79). Therefore, this article treats Blade Runner as a single text, inclusive of the 1968 source novel, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and touching tangentially on the long-awaited sequel, Blade Runner 2049 (2017). We will focus on the literal and symbolic manifestations of exile as revealed through plot, mise-en-scène, and character, placing the film in conversation with other cinematic representations of exile. The exercise reveals not only that this commercial film may reside comfortably in the canon of exilic films, but also that Blade Runner through its boundary- and genre-crossing supports a stunning degree of narrative and symbolic complexity.First, we should consider some descriptions of exile. In Reflections on Exile, Edward Said states that “exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unbearable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted” (173). Said focuses on the historical, lived condition of exile as a permanent state of misery, displacement, and even atrocity in a binary view that pits the exile against the nation state or “nationalisms.” Embracing a certain degree of ambiguity, his definition includes “three categories of exile: refugees, expatriates, and émigrés” (181). Even so, Said cannot resist slippage in his own descriptions: first, he tells us that “exile is not, after all, a matter of choice” (184), but then he informs us that expatriate “James Joyce chose to be in exile” (182; original emphasis). Offering another view, John D. Peters writes that concepts as exile, diaspora, and nomadism are often invoked of late as alternatives and antidotes to the totaling character of Western society and thought. In fact, concepts of mobility lie at the heart of the Western canon; otherness wanders through its center. Exile is, perhaps, the central story told in European civilization: the human estate as exile from God, the garden of Eden, the homeland, the womb, or even oneself. (17; original emphasis)The canon of cinematic representations of exile outside the realm of commercial Hollywood includes Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl (1966), which relates the tragic plight of a Senegalese émigré trapped in a life of servitude; Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), which addresses life in Havana after the Cuban revolution; Hyenas (1992), Djibril Diop Mambéty's adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's tragicomic play The Visit (1956), which tells of the return of an exile bent on revenge; and films such as Raoul Peck's Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet (1991) and David Achkar's Allah Tantou (1992), chronicling the fate of the political exile. These exilic films, and more, intersect with the science fiction world of Blade Runner.From the title itself, unrelated to Dick's novel and displaced from an entirely different screenplay, the theme of exile animates Blade Runner. Dick's story proceeded from two basic questions that hampered him throughout his career: “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” (Barlow 45). In Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner, Paul Sammon relates that Dick's inspiration for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? came from research for another novel, The Man in the High Castle (1962), that imagines an alternate reality in which the Axis powers prevailed in World War II. Dick drew not from notions of technology or from the nascent field of robotics, but from the diaries of Nazis. One sentence in particular stood out to Dick: That sentence read, “We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving children,” Dick explained. “There was obviously something wrong with the man who wrote that. I later realized that with the Nazis, what we were essentially dealing with was a defective group mind, a mind so emotionally defective that the word ‘human’ could not be applied to them.” (qtd. in Sammon 18)Dick believed that this pathology was not limited to the World War II–era Nazi; he saw it in the Vietnam War as well, during which he wrote Sheep. As Sammon relates, for Dick “the problem in this killing then would be, ‘Could we not become like the androids, in our very effort to wipe them out?’” (18). From Sheep comes the basic plot of Blade Runner: a group of androids escape from off-world enslavement and find their way back to Earth, where they have been declared illegal; a bounty hunter is dispatched to kill them. In a sort of double movement or double bind, society finds itself in the throes of diaspora as individuals strive to flee ecological disaster by emigrating to off-world colonies. These fundamental strands of plot play out through various scripts and versions of the film. For example, a scene in an early script recalls the horrors of the concentration camp with an “off-world termination dump” in which two “Dumpers” are introduced, “routinely shoveling dead androids from a huge pile of cadavers” (65).As he developed the script with screenwriters Hampton Fancher and later David Peoples, director Scott added elements that amplified the stakes of the plot and elaborated on the theme of exile. One of the team's most significant choices was to replace the “androids” of the novel with bioengineered “replicants,” consigned to a four-year life span. Not only enslaved and banished, the replicant also suffers under a predetermined expiration date: an exile three times over. Dick found that “the whole idea of the replicants being infused with progeria, or premature aging, was a new twist . . . [ultimately] a beautiful, symmetrical reinforcement of my original work” (qtd. in Sammon 76). And so the viewer is introduced to the given circumstances of Blade Runner with this crawl: Early in the 21st Century, THE TYRELL CORPORATION advanced robot evolution into the NEXUS phase—a being virtually identical to a human—known as a Replicant. The NEXUS 6 Replicants were superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them. Replicants were used Off-World as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and colonization of other planets. After a bloody mutiny by a NEXUS 6 combat team in an Off-World colony, Replicants were declared illegal on earth—under penalty of death. Special police squads—BLADE RUNNER UNITS—had orders to shoot to kill, upon detection, any trespassing Replicant. This was not called execution. It was called retirement.As the film proper unfolds, we enter a visual world that rewrote the book on science fiction cinema. In Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia, John Clute observed that probably the greatest event of the year [1982] is not the publication of a new book, but the film version of an old one. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, makes Dick into a household name and shows people that as well as being big and bold, SF can be bleak and stylish. It also sets the scene for Cyberpunk to become the media obsession of the decade. (86)Scott, who trained as an artist and art director, remarked that “the design of a film is the script” (qtd. in Sammon 79). The film's celebrated “future noir” or “cyberpunk” mise-en-scène, via Scott and his team, including futurist Syd Mead, creates the phenomenon of exile through a range of aesthetic choices that Aaron Barlow calls “hyperreal.” Reflecting Scott's insistence that the “final look be authentic, not speculative” (qtd. in Sammon 81), Mead cited the literary tradition and the “grand deans of science fiction [whose] visions are so realistically based on hard science: chemical engineering, biomechanics, satellite communication systems and so on” (qtd. in Sammon 86). Their comments remind us that the verisimilitude of a lived, material reality is seminal to science fiction and many exilic films, even ones that include absurdist elements such as Fernando Solanas's Tangos, the Exile of Gardel (1986). Romina Miorelli explores the material dimensions of Tangos, arguing that “the material world as both product and producer of social relations as well as a carrier of meaning is particularly relevant in studies of exile and in the challenges to identity that this experience brings about” (3).Blade Runner's hyperreal setting serves as fertile ground for symbolism, including the ancient and biblical. The production team named its spectacle of urban sprawl, punctuated by fire-belching industrial towers, “Hades.” Against this backdrop, archetypal episodes of exile will be played out, including Exodus, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Tower of Babel, the expulsion from Eden, and the fall of Lucifer. The physical space of Los Angeles is literally and socially stratified. Drenched in unnatural rain, the crowded streets teem with multiple ethnicities in a crosscurrent of cultural symbols and cacophony of clashing languages. This is the milieu of diaspora. John Ebert finds that this vision of Los Angeles in 2019 AD is not a city of the future, but rather a [retrieval] of the ancient type of world city cosmopolis configured by Rome, Byzantium, or Alexandria. Huge and impersonal . . . [depending] almost entirely upon slaves for their gigantic output of agricultural exports . . . composed of multi-ethnic swarms who had poured in from all corners of the empire, robbed of their lands and transformed into nomads migrating to the cities in search of employment. (11)Amid this sprawl, we find Hare Krishnas, Cambodians, Chinese, Japanese, Hispanics, German speakers, punks, and streetwalkers. Of this diasporic milieu, Peters writes, The vocabulary of social description, past and present, brims with mobility and displacement. . . . Consider some of the personae characterized by their mobility: Abraham . . . Odysseus . . . Oedipus, an outcast from his city; the legend of the wandering Jew; flâneurs, loafers, and bohemians; gypsies . . . tramps, drifters, vagabonds, and flimflam artists; sociologists, private eyes . . . border crossers of all sorts. . . . I do not, in fact, mean to talk about real people at all, but about the enduring metaphorical power of wandering in the fantasy life and social repertory of the West. (18)In concert with this tangled social repertory, Scott's team designed a semiotic one. For example, a neon sign displays the kanji for the word “origin.” This term resonates in the exilic canon and speaks here to the general given circumstances and the ambiguous nature of characters’ origin stories. The origin story of one central character will be revealed as false memories, and the origin of another will remain one of the film's enduring ambiguities.The designers place this diasporic milieu in sharp contrast to the upper echelons of society. Towering apartment buildings reach hundreds of stories above the chaos of the streets, but it is the massive corporate pyramids that dominate the landscape. Chief among these is the monumental headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation, wherein the “god of biomechanics” resides and whereto the desperate replicants aim to return in their quixotic bid to extend their four-year life spans. Of this spectacle, Judith Kerman remarks, We have the towers of perverse knowledge, the corrupt and filthy city burning in its own fire and smoke. We have the Pharaonic imagery of Tyrell's pyramid, which echoes the hanging garden ziggurats of Babylon. The film's art deco style owes a lot to Egyptian art, although the film also uses buildings which consciously draw upon the style of another bloodthirsty pyramid-building complex, that of Meso-America. The polyglot city is nothing if not a tower of Babel, in both its multilinguality and its overweening scientific ambition. (“Post-Millennium Blade Runner” 35)This biblical-exilic reading of the world of Blade Runner, harkening back to the sprawling ancient multicultural metropolis, opens the first line of conflict with the doctrinaire account of the film as postmodern.Given the film's release during the heyday of postmodernism, we should not be surprised that the original and director's cuts of Blade Runner attracted a good deal of criticism from this camp. Scott Bukatman offers the most comprehensive postmodern analyses of the film in his books Terminal Identity and Blade Runner. He argues that “the world has been refigured as a simulation within the mega-computer banks of the Information Society. Terminal Identity exists as the metaphorical mode of engagement with this model of an imploded culture” (Terminal Identity 22). Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation provided ample fodder for Bukatman to theorize the replicant as “simulacrum,” a copy without an original referent. His work is also heavily influenced by Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. He writes that “Jameson himself has stated that cyberpunk is ‘henceforth, for many of us, the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself.’ His comment reveals a salient truth: science fiction has, in many ways, prefigured the dominant issues of postmodern culture” (Bukatman, Terminal Identity 6).However, in their enthusiasm for the postmodern, Bukatman and others such as Matthew Flisfeder may be imposing this reading onto the film. Ironically, despite the popularity of the term “cyberpunk” credited to it, the world of Blade Runner is emphatically not “cyber” (nor is it particularly “punk” aside from some mohawk-sporting extras). Unlike Baudrillard's notion of the epitome of the postmodern, the simulacrum in Blade Runner is not a copy of a copy; the exile never loses its referent to an original home or lived experience. Moreover, despite the bioengineering, the technology of this world belongs to the analog era in which it was made. Digital technologies—most importantly, the Internet (the properly “cyber” space)—are absent. (The sequel, released in 2017 and set thirty years after the original, layers digital and cybernetic technologies onto the world of the film.) Bukatman's notions of “terminal identity” are perhaps better suited to other, more recent science fiction films such as The Matrix (1999).Ironically, the modernist and postmodernist proclivities, which privilege the surface reality of an object over its depth and politics over symbolic meaning, occlude an appreciation of the theme of exile in Blade Runner. The film's evocation of ancient diasporas and the biblical megalopolis thwarts a techno-centric notion of modernity or postmodernity. To follow the exilic line is to observe a highly realistic—even “hyperreal”—diasporic setting, vertically oriented from pharaoh to slave and horizontally dispersed among émigrés, exiles, and expatriates in a plethora of personae. In this milieu, we meet our antihero, an example of the exilic archetype of the private eye.As framed in Dick's novel, Rick Deckard is not the hard-boiled character we find in Blade Runner. True, both the literary and cinematic versions of the character hunt down and “retire” the androids/replicants. However, the original character fits comfortably among Dick's typical browbeaten, proletarian protagonists: working-class cogs in the machine. Dick introduces him in the morning, wearing “multicolored pajamas” (3), not brooding under the neon lights of the mean streets in a dark leather overcoat as the film does. Deckard immediately falls into squabbling with his wife over what “mood settings” they should each select from their “Penfield mood organ” machine (3–4). He will take on the task of retiring androids to fund the purchase of a real animal—the titular sheep—a status symbol in a world depopulated of living animals. These rather ludicrous elements of Deckard's character morph significantly under Scott's direction. Rather than an absurdist civil servant, the film gives us what Pauline Kael calls a “loner-in-the-big-city [in the] manner of a Hammett or Chandler private eye” in a film she describes as “film noir overload.”In a noir-esque voice-over (roundly criticized by Kael and excised from the director's cut), Deckard (Harrison Ford) informs us that his wife ran away with another man and emigrated to the off-world colonies. Thus, in the film we find him in a situation not unlike that of Sergio, the antihero of Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment. In Memories the bourgeois Havana landlord and frustrated writer suddenly finds his personal and professional lives fractured by Castro's rise. When his wife deserts him by emigrating to the United States, Sergio turns to womanizing to fill a life suddenly devoid of meaning. In a similar fashion, Deckard exists in a static state, out of work, an exile from the workforce. Both men will look to women for their salvation. Unlike Sergio, however, Deckard receives a call to action. As he struggles to overcome a language barrier with a street vendor, Deckard is summoned to meet with his former boss, Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh).As Bryant briefs Deckard, we revisit the action that opened the film. In that scene, replicant escapee Leon (Brion James) undergoes a Voigt-Kampff (V-K) test, designed to expose a replicant by way of biometric responses to empathy-based questions. Literally triggered by a question regarding his feelings for his mother, Leon shoots his interrogator. In addition to poking a bit of fun at psychoanalysis, the exchange reminds us that the bioengineered Leon has no mother. Judith Kerman aptly notes that the scene combines “the methodologies of the psychological test, the lie detector, and the IRS audit. It is a scene full of terror, impressing the viewer that the police powers of this society allow anyone to be defined at any moment as non-human, a target to be ‘retired’” (“Technology and Politics” 19). Scott likened the surveillance apparatus in the world of Blade Runner to George Orwell's 1984 in which “Big Brother is Watching You” (Ebert 25). Consistent with many exilic films, the replicants exist under the constant threat of surveillance. In Memories of Underdevelopment, Sergio's seduction of an underage girl subjects him to arrest, imprisonment, and trial. In Tangos, the cash-strapped Argentinian exiles in Paris tragicomically tinker with pay phones under the eyes of the constabulary. More in line with the stakes of Blade Runner, the films Lumumba: The Death of a Prophet and Allah Tantou document and dramatize the imprisonment, torture, and murder of fallen politicos. The very presence of the replicant on Earth signifies a capital offense. The exile in Blade Runner moves about unnoticed or undetected, a social virus. In the hostility and anxiety surrounding the presence of the replicant on Earth, we also may recognize the prejudice often aimed at the émigré. Fear colors all aspects of exilic life. In two deadly confrontations in which the tables are turned, Deckard himself will be asked how it feels to “live in fear.”Recalling the comments of Said, Deckard, the moral exile, is given “no choice” but to take up his old role as a blade runner to “retire” four replicants. In addition to the state-sanctioned murder familiar in tales of exile, the term recalls the consignment of obsolete technology to the trash heap and removal from the workforce as one ceases to be a producer. Moreover, the term reminds us of the slippery syntactical and juridical games that accompany the process of producing living exiles and erasing dead ones. Whereas many cinematic treatments of exile establish clear categories, Deckard is faced with replicants who defy detection. Though some technological tricks do figure into his sleuthing, he treads the path of the traditional gumshoe detective so familiar in the film noir canon. His first stop is Tyrell Headquarters to put the V-K test to a NEXUS 6 replicant. “What if it doesn't work?” he asks, to which the typically voluble Bryant has no reply.Ascending to the heights of the Tyrell pyramid, where resides the godlike creator of replicants, Deckard is greeted by his niece, Rachael (Sean Young). Of her showstopping entrance in an armor-like, 1940s-style black dress, Deborah Jermyn remarks, [S]o iconic and nostalgic an image is this that it has elicited comparisons between Sean Young/Rachael and that classic noir vision of corrupted femininity, Joan Crawford as the eponymous protagonist in Mildred Pierce. . . . Unambiguously rendered object of “the male gaze,” in this sequence, Rachael is a wholly fetishized vision of the “dark lady, the spider woman,” the femme fatale who lies at the cynical heart of film noir. (160)Tyrell appears, a smiling cipher behind thick trifocals, and agrees to help Deckard. First, however, he says, “I want to see it work on a person. I want to see a negative before I provide you with a positive.” He offers Rachael as a human test subject. As Deckard commences the V-K test, she asks if she may smoke, leading Leonard Heldreth to observe that “her cool sophistication and her casual elegance with a cigarette echo the young Bacall or Faye Dunaway in Chinatown” (42). Her replies to Deckard's more outré questions suggest the worldliness that we have come to expect from the leading lady of film noir: deckard: You're reading a magazine. You come across a full-page nude photo of a girl.rachael: Is this testing whether I'm a replicant or a lesbian, Mr. Deckard?deckard: Just answer the questions, please. You show it to your husband. He likes it so much he hangs it on your bedroom wall.rachael: I wouldn't let him.deckard: Why not?rachael: I should be enough for him.After the V-K test, Deckard concludes, “She's a replicant, isn't she?” Rachael does not know that she is in fact not Tyrell's niece, though her faux uncle believes she is “beginning to suspect”: deckard: Suspect? How can it not know what it is?tyrell: Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. “More human than human” is our motto. Rachael is an experiment, nothing more. We began to recognize in them strange obsessions. After all, they are emotionally inexperienced with only a few years in which to store up the experiences which you and I take for granted. If we give them the past, we create a cushion or pillow for their emotions, and consequently, we can control them better.deckard: Memories. You're talking about memories.Memories bring us to the heart of the exile experience. Comparing the source novel to the film, Marilyn Gwaltney observes that “the androids are clearly persons, but with the exception of Rachael, all are felt to be somewhat defective, not quite right. The book locates the defect in the lack of empathy; the movie more cogently locates the defect in the lack of maturity or developmental experiences which remain with us through memory” (35). With insight that could apply to exilic films in general, Bukatman notes that in Blade Runner “the subject is the body, mutable and mutated. The subject is the mind, thinking and cognizing. The subject is its memory, recalling history and experience” (Terminal Identity 244; original emphasis). As literally stated in titles such as Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment (based on the 1967 Edmundo Desnoes novel Inconsolable Memories), memory is the fundamental ingredient in all exilic texts. In Mambéty's Hyenas, the festering memories of her mistreatment drive a wealthy, one-time prostitute to return to her hometown and site of her exile to exact revenge. Achkar's Allah Tantou recounts the fate of the filmmaker's father, the political prisoner Marof Achkar, whose memories of his wife—including her unheeded warnings—drove him to the point of madness. The film itself, much like the identity of Rachael, is a construction or reconstruction of memory. Of it, Achkar remarked, “I am interested in forms of knowing that operate within ideas of memory and within an oracular view of history that engages with observation, intuition, and self-reflexivity” (qtd. in Gabriel 76). Zuzana Pick, writing on examples of New Latin American Cinema, remarks that “the ambivalent merging of memory and otherness is a site of struggle where identification is dialectically anchored in nostalgia and resistance” (159). “Observation,” “intuition,” “self-reflexivity,” “nostalgia,” and “resistance” are all key words that apply to Rachael specifically and Blade Runner generally.Rachael finds herself in a sort of psychic bind, resisting the dawning realization of her true identity, even as she clings to memories to maintain the dwindling hope that she is indeed human. Following the V-K test, the desperate young woman appears at Deckard's apartment in a pivotal scene. Clutching a childhood photo of herself with her mother, she pleads to Deckard for reassurance. The cynical antihero proves brutally incapable of meeting her need: rachael: You think I'm a replicant, don't you? [pause, with photograph] Look, it's me with my mother.deckard: Yeah. [pause] Remember when you were six? You and your brother snuck into an empty building through a basement window—you were gonna play doctor. He showed you his, but when it got to be your turn, you chickened and ran. Remember that? You ever tell anybody that? Your mother, Tyrell, anybody? You remember the spider that lived in a bush outside your window—orange body, green legs? Watched her build a web all summer. Then one day there was a big egg in it. The egg hatched—rachael: The egg hatched, and a hundred baby spiders came out. And they ate her.deckard: Implants! Those aren't your memories. They're somebody else's. They're Tyrell's niece's. [pause] Okay, bad joke. I made a bad joke. You're not a replicant. Go home, okay? No, really, I'm sorry. Go home. [pause] Want a drink? I'll get you a drink.The tears Rachael sheds as she faces the reality of her identity represent a major narrative and symbolic turning point in the film.As her tears fall, Rachael becomes a boundary-crossing figure, an artificial creation and yet more human than any other character we have seen in the film. Her genuine emotion forces Deckard to confront his own condition of emotional and moral exile. It is here that the binary ontological categories of human and replicant begin to collapse. She reminds us that the exile–as–boundary crosser refuses simple categorization, similar to authors like Said and Salman Rushdie, who consider themselves possessed of dualistic identities. David Morley speaks of émigré Stuart Hall's hybrid English and Jamaican identity as a “doubling of position.” Consequently, Morley writes, “one could argue that it is precisely that doubling of position which provided [Hall] with the epistemological privilege that anthropologists have always understood to be the prerogative of the liminal observer of any group” (3). Rachael assumes this liminal role in Blade Runner. Deckard, rescued from his own moral exile by her love, will assume the symbolic role of Orpheus. Resisting orders to kill her, he chooses instead to lead Rachael out of Hades in the film's final sequence. In the sequel, through what is termed a “miracle,” she defies the supposed limits of the Tyrell technology and bears Deckard's child.The photograph and its importance as cinematic representation of memory now requires mention. The photo plays a pivotal role in many exilic films and signifies a facile device by which filmmakers may externalize or materialize the phenomenon of memory. In Memories of Underdevelopment, the abandoned Sergio prowls his flat restlessly, trying on the clothes left behind by his émigré wife, haunted by her photo among other family images. Photographs also feature prominently in Tran Anh Hung's The Scent of Green Papaya (1993), a somewhat “softer” depiction of exile. Mùi, the romanticized servant and symbolic child of nature, serves a household suffering under a pall of grief from the untimely deaths of two family members; their photos preside in a shrine on the top floor of the house. Archival photos of Patrice Lumumba, Marof Achkar, and other doomed exiles figure prominently in the films that recount their plights.Blade Runner extends this question of memory-as-photography into a whole new dimension. Bukatman writes, “[M]emories, human or replicant, are linked to the recorded vision of photographs. This, then, is a drama about vision. But the film is also a drama of vision . . . and science fiction film is more centered on vision than most other genres” (Blade Runner 18; original emphasis). If memories are no longer reliable and potentially just implanted constructs, then one's humanity is called into question. Rachael's family photo, the evidence of her faux, fabricated life as Tyrell's niece, rema
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