dailyeatings

Tonight, I had the pleasure of seeing what might be my favorite movie for the first time on the big screen.

The Final Cut edition of Blade Runner is excellent, perhaps even better than I had hoped. Much of it has to do with the experience of seeing it on a giant screen with proper cinematic sound—despite having watched my Directors’ Cut DVD dozens of times I found myself smiling as I caught numerous details I had never noticed before and gasped at moments I knew were coming but hit me in the gut anyway.

At this point, I highly recommend those who have not seen the movie stop reading. That is, major spoilers ahead—

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve seen c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All these… moments will be lost, in time… like tears in the rain. Time to die.”
-Roy Batty’s last lines

For me, the major unanswered question of the film isn’t whether or not Deckard may be a replicant (he obviously is, but that fact isn’t important), but rather Why does Roy Batty save him?

As a college student, fresh from my first serious, complete viewing of the film after years of casually browsed network rebroadcasts, I was convinced that Roy saves Deckard because at the hour of his death, he decided to demonstrate the kind of empathy replicants are not supposed to know. “You’re not helping him,” Holden taunts, while screening Leon with the empathy test. “Why is that?” The implication, of course, is that Replicants as artificial life forms are not capable of understanding things like empathic emotions. Therefore, Roy’s act of grace (oo, look at those Christian subtexts creeping in) is a refutation of everything Deckard knows about Replicants, the sternest rebuttal to own existence as a Replicant-killer, and a self-redemptive act. The bad guy proves himself a true protagonist in the end by performing the one truly humane act in the entire film and then dying in peace, a privilege denied to his friends thanks to the inhumanity of ‘Real Humans’. His ending soliloquy thus takes on a tone of sadness for things unsaid, for lack of time. It is unfortunate that my existence ends here, and I cannot share my experiences with you, he seems to say. Or so I thought, 8 years ago.

As a recent graduate, I re-watched the movie several times, and drew a new conclusion. Roy saves Deckard because he means to test him, to push him to the limit to see what kind of lengths he will go to in order to save his own life. Deckard seems to shuffle through life numbly; his life is disorderly, dispassionate and seemingly without purpose other than constant alcohol consumption, and were it not for the job, Bryant accuses, he’d “be little people.” Roy realizes his time is short, and having reached the end of his time decides to “teach a lesson” to the one who is responsible for the deaths of his only friends. Roy seeks to instill in Deckard, who takes life for granted and probably couldn’t care less if he slowly slips away into nothingness, the same zeal to live that the Replicants share, to defy death to the very end. So when Deckard spits at the taunting Roy a moment before he falls, he demonstrates that he feels the kind of burning defiance of death that Roy feels, a sort of reverse empathy test, even, and thus Roy saves him. Roy acts out of a desire for posterity, not out of altruism or empathy. He’s lost everything and has nothing left but a few moments left with the man who is tasked with killing him. My life, though incredibly short, has been so unimaginably rich. Yet sadly, I cannot experience more, his final speech seems to say. Do not waste the life you have. That’s what I though four years ago.

Tonight, I’ve come to a third conclusion. I’m pretty convinced now that once Roy discovers Pris’s body, he means to avenge her death. I don’t think Roy seems to care about saving Deckard at all until the very moment he falls—in the end, he saves Deckard because he can. It is the ultimate victory, to demonstrate his complete superiority over Deckard in every way, that he is beyond things like ‘morality’ and ‘empathy’, that these concepts are none of his concern, and that he saves Deckard simply because he is able to do so. His ending speech, then, becomes My life is but a blip and I leave now with nothing. But the implication hangs heavy in the air, even as he knows his time has arrived—you, you’re still here. I saved you. I die now, but yet you live, and that only because of me. Perhaps in this act, he found something that had otherwise eluded him throughout all his struggles—peace, and his smile, the only genuine one in the entire film, is a poignant contrast to the stark, menacing determination to live displayed until these final moments. When the end comes, he accepts it with wistful acceptance, unlike the other Replicants, who each die by violent, desperate means.

The cynic in me would say that the ending is ambiguous and a complete hodge-podge of Christian/Nietzschean/Randian themes thrown together and incompletely cooked, such that one can look at the pieces and identify their provenance and yet still not find the whole satisfying, sure evidence of pedestrian metaphysics coupled with a desire to impart a sense of depth otherwise absent in this preposterous narrative, the sort of accusation I like to hurl at the Wachowski brothers and their work in the Matrix sequels. Somehow, Blade Runner manages to pull it all off by leaving the metaphysics unspoken, revealing it through implication. Maybe the ending isn’t more complicated than “Batty saves Deckard and shows us he isn’t so evil after all.” Maybe the ending is infinitely more complicated than I have assumed, and is actually a synthesis of all three interpretations. I don’t know. Ask me again in four years, I’ll probably think of something new.