According to Wikipedia, Blade Runner, came out 24 years ago this June 27th. To mark the occasion, I asked our dear friend, Matthew, to write a brief review. Enjoy - Dan
As one of the various mediums through which cultural theories are posited, the cinema is saturated with nuanced expressions of humans as the locus for a confluence of formative social ideologies. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner exhibits a multitude of cultural propositions which serve to delicately raise questions about the manner in which humans define themselves within society, and the mechanism through which meaning is assigned to social interaction. The primary means employed by the film to illuminate some of the fallacies of human social systems is the production of replicants as a physical manifestation of the mechanical nature of humans within a commercially-driven environment. I propose that the replicants function as a mirror that allows humans to glimpse their own modes of production and identity formation by displacing erroneous human behavior onto synthetic creatures. In this way, Blade Runner—especially through Deckard’s interrogation of Rachael and the proceeding exchange between Deckard and Tyrell—elucidates several aspects of Louis Althusser’s contentions on the topics of reproduction of the conditions of production and the interpellation of the subject under the umbrella of Ideological State Apparatuses.
Under the power regimes present in the movie, which situate humans above replicants in the social hierarchy, the humans defer their problems onto the replicants in order to maintain a proprietary sense of dominance (i.e. the creations (replicants) are seen as flawed replicas of the creators (humans) and the creators therefore experience a feeling of self-deification through oppressive supremacy over the creation). However, there is a sense that the replicants understand their place within the social system to a greater extent than do humans for replicants are recognized as both physical products as well as literal slaves of the persons responsible for their manufacture. Thus the replicants are imbued with a more concrete awareness of the role they play in the relationships of production that fuel the futuristic world in which they live than humans.
As creations, a specialized position as an appendage of the commercial apparatus preexists the replicants so that they possess the power to undermine their human creators, who must struggle to discover the nature of their own social identities. Here, the staging and cinematography come into play where Rachael is presented as the subject of a voyeur’s gaze. Her features and are emphasized by the camera’s clear focus on her face and her prominence in the center of the screen, but once Tyrell enters the scene the gaze is shattered, and she is taken out of focus before she steps out of the shot to make way for her designer. Ultimately Rachael embodies the replicants’ determinate identity from inception—be it military, pleasure, worker—as they exist within their assigned identity for the entirety of their short lifespan. On the other hand, while a human may already be a subject upon entrance into the social mechanism, there is no guarantee that he or she will ever attain a crystalline or permanent societal role in the course of a lifetime. Therefore the replicants retain a distinct advantage over the humans in respect to self-realization which provides an incentive to keep replicants under control and away from Earth.
Due to the immediate threat of the slave’s potential ability to overcome the master in social aptitude, replicants are preemptively labeled as “bad.” The negative light cast upon replicants by their creators furnishes justification for the deployment of the Repressive State Apparatus, the Blade Runners, to retire any and all replicants that arrive on Earth; because replicant identity is preordained by humans, there is no way to escape the negativity affixed to that identity which eradicates the possibility of a “good” replicant. Further solidification of the disapproval surrounding replicants comes from the fact that their relationships with humans—as slaves to masters or creations to creators—function as an identifying factor for humans. In other words, the tension between replicants and humans propagates a dialectical identification system that perpetually reinforces itself. This factor is exemplified by the physical positioning of the characters around the table: Rachael sits alone on the right side of the table, Deckard is encircled by equipment across from her, and Tyrell remains erect at the head of the table in order to watch over the proceedings and physically imply his superiority. In this way, Tyrell silently expresses his expectation that his replicant might not remain docile if she discovers her true identity as he concurrently bolsters his own station as master. The cyclical nature of the dialectic has no exit point and seems only to fortify the positions occupied by both humans and replicants as they interact with one another.
Another important theme of the scene is the manner in which humans are composed—that is to say, what factors constitute humanity and what endows humans with identity? Two chief articles emerge from Deckard’s conversation with Tyrell: emotions and memories. Both emotions and memories contribute heavily to the development of humans as individuals and subsequently as subjects through the inscription of ideologies onto the minds of people. Emotional responses to external discursive stimuli (ISA’s) become internalized through the generation of memories. In this way, the ideologies of the regimes of power are able to imbed themselves within the subject to establish control over the actions of that subject in society. Close examination of the shot which fades from Rachael’s smoking to the side view of the table reveals Deckard’s voice expressing Rachael’s memory of the spider. The sound is nearly imperceptible and is made to seem an echo of his immediate questioning, but it serves as an explication of the constructedness of memories at the hands of ideology; since Deckard speaks for the repressive state apparatus and Rachael’s memories are disguised as an echo of his speech, the use of sound in the shot illuminates the fabrication of Rachael’s memory by repressive powers. Consequently, the entity in power, the Tyrell Corporation, may acquire control over the subjects—the replicants—through the endowment of a past which already contains the desired ideologies that will best serve to spawn submissive slaves to the system. It necessarily follows that the replicants develop a capacity for emotional reaction from the implanted memories; hence Deckard has a difficult time realizing that Rachael is a replicant and Tyrell is able to create a product that is in fact “more human than human.”
Throughout the Voight-Kampff test, Rachael overtly exhibits traits that might naturally be assigned to humans: she smokes a cigarette, responds adequately to nearly every question, her eyes dilate properly as if involuntarily affected by emotional response, and she is reified as a sexually desirable “object” for the voyeuristic heterosexual male audience. All of these factors lead away from the possible identification of Rachael as a replicant since the characteristics that she exhibits are essentially indistinguishable from those of humans. Rachael, in particular, serves as a benchmark figure to blur the lines separating replicants from humans; as the film progresses, she apparently develops an emotional attachment to Deckard which he reciprocates despite his knowledge of her identity. Therefore, it becomes increasingly difficult to define “human” and additionally to justify the “retirement” of replicants for the means they posses to integrate themselves into the productive cycle.
A paradox arises for Deckard: he is bound by the same repressive apparatuses that the replicants find themselves bound, and yet he simultaneously perpetuates his own oppression. He has no choice but to do the bidding of the police and hunt down the replicants who have infiltrated the Earth, including Rachael whom he has developed an affinity for. As a result, Deckard, who would seem to be an arm of the repressive state apparatus, is at the end of the day nothing more than a victim of the very system in which he is a player. Neither Deckard nor the replicants have free will: Deckard must kill the replicants to satisfy the repressive state apparatus and the replicants must kill their human creators in order to topple the regime of power and exploit it to their own ends. Thus, a dual sympathy surfaces in the mind of the viewer over the significant impotence of the subjects in the film to transcend the governing ideological institutions.
An additional key aspect of the film to be addressed is the underlying intention behind the creation of replicants as labor power (as participants of service industries and the military). Parallels can be drawn between the relations of production at work in the film and the scheme of relations of production proposed by Marx: Tyrell Corporation is the capitalist, the replicants are basically the enslaved proletariat; although as products themselves they are even more disposable than the blue-collar workers of Marx’s arrangement. The products and services rendered by the replicants are equivalent to those of the proletariat. From this standpoint, it can be seen that the creation of replicants operates in such a way as to breed a veritable infinity of possibilities of productive capability as well as to substantially alter the methods of reproducing the material relations of production. It is ironic that the replicants themselves conceal the labor relations involved in their own production, while they simultaneously perpetuate an entirely separate system of labor production in which their own relations of production are concealed by the goods and services they create. It is through this dichotomous existence that the replicants are set apart from the human proletariat, but it is curious that investiture of human faculties of thought results in an inquisitiveness that inevitably leads the replicants on a quest to discover the relations of production inherent in their very being.
Effectively, human productive capability is limitless in light of the replicants, for they can be disposed of and recreated at the whim of the Tyrell Corporation and they eliminate a fundamental feature of the productive relationships—wages. Profit potential skyrockets in the absence of wage payment, for the only expenditure on the part of the capitalist is the overhead cost of building the replicant. However, it might be concluded from the narrative of the film that the replicants do not seek to overthrow their masters, but rather to become recognized as important members of the system of production who deserve recompense for their labor. The attempt to prolong their life spans is consequentially not an effort to escape their slavery, but rather to assimilate themselves into the cycle of productive relationships.
Alas, it may now be possible to see that the assimilative attempts of the replicants are but one facet of the search for fulfillment within the context of society. The replicants possess the faculties to interact on the social plane, but until they are recognized socially, they will remain slaves to the capitalists. Since humans pit themselves against replicants to view their own productive systems and assign meaning to their own lives, the replicants become vessels in which human imperfection is poured; this results in the implication of a veritable buttress to the repressive powers, who would deny the replicants a place in social or productive relationships. All of these attitudes towards the replicants surface in the interrogation of Rachael and the filmic techniques that portray her as humanly desirable in the beginning, but which convert her into a discarded object—nothing more than a test—by the end of the scene. Blade Runner takes place in a world that seems to be even more tightly governed by the Althusserian Ideological State Apparatuses and Repressive State Apparatuses than our contemporary world; yet, both humans and replicants alike perpetuate their own oppression through their actions and expressions on the social level. The film, much like Althusser, proposes an environment bereft of freedom or will, and a world where the strangling grasp of state apparatuses is so extensive that there is no hope of escape.
Works Cited:
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus.”
Scott, Ridley. Blade Runner. 1982.
posted on 4:07 pm 05/10/2006Movies, Reviews | |
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