■ Since the clarification of the mystery and the explanation of the details in "Blade Runner ( 1982 )" can already be found in numerous articles, we will take a more philosophical approach here. Considering that the final cut of "Blade Runner" ( 2007 ) is a perfect reflection of Ridley Scott's intention ( *A ) to strengthen the Deckard-Replicant theory ( most of the main characters are Replicants ), the film is not about the differences and conflicts between humans and Replicants. It should be interpreted as a film that highlights the structure of the human subject through the differences between Replicants ( *B ). Deckard ( Harrison Ford ) and Roy Batty ( Rutger Hauer ) are perfect examples of replicants.
■ Let us assume that Roy is a replicant who knows he is a replicant ( this is a ) and Deckard is a replicant who does not know he is a replicant ( this is b ). Having presented the a and b theses, there is one more variation thesis to note. It is the thesis that a replicant who believes oneself to be a human being ( this is c ).
Thesis a Replicant who "knows" ownself is a Replicant ( Roy )
Thesis b Replicant who does not "know" that ownself is a Replicant ( Deckard )
Thesis c Replicant who "somehow believes" ownself is Human ( Rachel )
■ At first glance, c may seem to be a thesis that represents philosophical radicalism that exposes the ambiguous self-identity of humans. Because we could suggest a further variation of the thesis that just human being is replicant who think of ownself as human being.
( *A )
A processed image supporting the blatant Deckard-Replicant theory applied by Ridley Scott to the final cut version of the film. Although it is difficult to recognize because the focus is blurred ( it is clearly visible in the movie ), Deckard's eyes also glow orange, as if in response to the orange glow of Rachel's eyes just before this scene.
( *B )
The article referred to here is an interview with Rutger Hauer by "THE Hollywood REPORTER" ( February 18, 2018 ). He was asked what he thought of "Blade Runner 2049" and giving a harsh answer ( "A beautiful thing should be left untouched, not sequeled," he said ), he had interesting things to say about his own "Blade Runner" film.
"In many ways, Blade Runner is not a film about replicants, but about what it means to be human".
■ Let us now consider Rachel, who is very different from Roy and Deckard. Thesis c shows the danger in Rachel's Self-identity. This is because Rachel's Self-identity is interwoven with an objective external perspective that prevents her from maintaining constancy. The objective external perspective, that is, it is "the awareness" of Rachel's gesture of trying to believe that she is human without admitting it, even though she should know that she is a replicant. Rachel suffers from destructive self-identification as the desperate truth that she is a replicant, detached of her humanity, and there is a danger that she may lose her mental balance in trying to hold on to her humanity.
■ What this means is that Rachel is more dangerous than Roy and Deckard in that she is in the process of "collapsing" her self-consciousness. In contrast, Roy and Deckard's mode of existence is more stable than the audience may think. As already mentioned, Roy is a Replicant who knows he is a Replicant ( thesis a ) and Deckard is a Replicant who does not know he is a Replicant ( thesis b ).
■ What both ( Roy and Deckard ) have in common is the appearance of dimension of Knowledge, of knowing or not knowing. It is precisely because of this dimension of Knowledge that we can say that a and b are theses about self-consciousness. The philosophical significance of the appearance of the dimension of Knowledge in the human subject is the opportunity for the development of the psychological structure of the human subject as Geist of Hegel mark. The human psyche could only be Geist, and if it were not structured as such, humanity itself would be buried in barbarism.
■ It was the German ideological philosopher, Hegel, who stressed the importance of this Dimension of Knowledge. His insight is radical one : contrary to common sense, even self-consciousness is only one form of Knowledge. Our common sense would separate consciousness from knowledge, or even place consciousness above knowledge. However, Hegel makes it clear that such an assumption makes no philosophical sense. Hegel does not speak of cultivated knowledge in the sense of capturing some object, as in that we know something. Rather, he is talking about the Real meaning of the "phenomenon of knowing" itself.
■ "The reflective provision" that separates the object from oneself, and then applies the objectification to oneself, is the action of Knowledge, and what we can see from this is that there is the Real of Abstraction of Knowledge itself, free from the idolatrous spell of the object. And the highest level of such abstraction of Knowledge is nothing other than "Self-consciousness. In this sense, Hegel says that consciousness ( Self-consciousness ) is knowledge, and he calls the activation of the knowledge "Geist".
■ If so, then Roy's thesis a has already recovered its humanity in the "Statement Act" of becoming aware that one is a replicant, contrary to its "Statement Content" ( I am a replicant ), in the sense of reaching the self-consciousness that defines its limits ( it has a life span of only four years ).
■ And following Roy, we must consider Deckard's thesis b. If, contrary to superficial impressions, Roy has paradoxically acquired humanity, then the problematic remains, what about Deckard? If Roy's thesis a is "the Pure Content" of Self-consciousness, then Deckard's thesis b could be considered to represent "the Pure Formality" of Self-consciousness, that is, the "Unconsciousness" that may drag us into the bottomless darkness of what consciousness is, the "Unconsciousness" of Self-consciousness being here.
■ To summarize, Thesis a and Thesis b are the difference between the "Content" and the "Form" of Self-consciousness, which indicates that Roy and Deckard are two sides of the same coin. Here I am reminded of an episode by David Peoples, the screenwriter, in which Deckard says "Roy and I were brothers", although this line was not used in the film. Even if the brothers in this episode are only figurative, it is part of a philosophical truth about Self-consciousness. This "unconsciousness" in Deckard is the very thing as anxiety factor to upset human consciousness of identity confuses the audience, and leads the director Ridley Scott to completely shift-up to "the Deckard-Replicant theory" in the final cut version.
■ Let us now return again to Rachel's unstable inner life. She is on the way to collapsing self-consciousness that refuses to admit that she is a Replicant, as well as despair that she is not human. However, it is important to note here that unlike Roy and other Nexus 6 types, she is aware that she can suppress her emotions and behave more humanly ( in addition, it is revealed in "Blade Runner 2049" that Rachel even had the ability to procreate ), and she has stuck to it ( There is even speculation that she is a Nexus 7, a version of Nexus 6, because of her procreative abilities ).
■ Rachel here can be said to be in the process of rebirth as well as the collapse of Self-consciousness. However, it is not simple Self-consciousness that recognizes that she is a replicant, hostile to humans, like Roy. She is not human, but she is not a replicant either. Nor is she both human and a replicant. She has abandoned her identification as a replicant and has become "someone / something" who solemnly believes she is a human being. She knows she is a Replicant. Despite this, she still believes she can act like a human being. Yes, here is the primacy of "Faith" over "Knowledge". If Self-consciousness is what Hegel calls "Knowledge," then "Faith" is the "intoxicating thing" that suspends such knowledge and paralyzes Self-consciousness.
■ How then does Rachel's gesture of Faith to the human thing have any meaning in relation to that structural truth in the human subject of Self-consciousness embodied by Roy and Deckard? Here, Rachel's Faith that deeply reflects her own desires, and which breaks away from Kierkegaardian anxieties, is manifested as "love for Deckard".
■ Like Roy, Rachel is in the process of formally acquiring Self-consciousness as Human being, starting from her recognition of Replicant status, but it is interesting to note the subtle and decisive difference between Rachel and Roy in terms of how this leads to their behavior.
■ How should we interpret Roy's rescue of Deckard from falling from the roof of a building in the duel? Is it a whim of Roy's just before the end of his life? Roy, who had been antagonizing humans in order to prolong his own life, might have given up and realized the meaningless of killing Deckard, as he could no longer do so ( because his life was so short ).
■ At this time, Roy's " self-consciousness" was receptive to his own death. As a result, he made the noble choice to save others at the moment of his death. Rachel, on the other hand, in exchange for her "hopeless Self-consciousness" of being a Replicant, awakens to a very human behavior of loving others.
■ There is no way to know what form this love took except for the final scene in which Deckard and Rachel escape ( which is more clearly shown in the "International or Complete Version," released in 1982 and reflecting the producer's authority, than in the "Director's Cut" or "Final Cut" versions ). However, "Blade Runner 2049" reveals that Rachel was carrying and giving birth to Deckard's child, using her reproductive abilities. At the same time, we learn that Rachel also died, and surprisingly, there appears a "reproductive cycle" that is no different from that of normal human being.
■ What are we to make of this ending? In the various versions of "Blade Runner" before "Blade Runner 2049," replicants and humans were separate subjects that attracted and repelled each other, and were supposed to be referents that disturbed human identity. In "2049," however, the difference between humans and replicants almost disappears due to Rachel's reproductive ability. Far from it, it could even be said that humans and Replicants have merged. In this way, human identity in "Blade Runner" is no longer even a problematic issue. In "2049," the future in which human beings will break out of their identities and become something else is already implied.
■ To understand this, let us first imagine the impossibility of equipping Rachel, a replicant, with reproductive organ that is symbolic organ of human beings. It is more realistic to imagine human subject based on the reproductive organs that are indispensable to humans, and supplemented with mechanical parts for the other vital parts. Of course, it would not be so farfetched to imagine future projects such as genetic manipulation to control human life span and childbirth as extension of the medical procedures that would trigger such a situation. For example, A nation may face the threat of being unable to sustain its existing social infrastructure and national budget ( Declining population means Declining tax base ) due to a rapid decline in its population.
■ As you may have noticed after reading this far, we are back to the "life span" problematic that led Roy to become aware of his replicant status, the thesis a, which is a variation version of being strongly aware of oneself as a subject living in a finite life. And the other gateway to this point was Rachel's love for Deckard. She left the world of finite life in exchange for the crystallization of her love through reproduction, and Roy, the subject left behind in the finite world, and we ( including the new life ) are reminded too much of the fact that we are forced to live in a finite life, both individually and collectively.
■ Rachel's faith in the human is sublimated in the form of her love for Deckard, but if the end result is the emergence of "Merged human-replicant Subject", then we can think of nightmare science fiction in which the human reproductive cycle is exploited by the replicants. However, to call it nightmare, we need to know the "Real meaning" of the form of the reproductive cycle ( see Chapter 2 for an example of this "real meaning" ).
■ Of course, we do not know its "Real meaning". We are just swept away by the convenient explanation that the reproductive cycle is the ancient process of gene transmission, and when we construct questions such as why it is in that "Bio-form" and what is the meaning of "the phenomenon" that life continues in that "Bio-form", we can only be shaken by that "the Real" ( *C ). If so, then we, like the replicants, are just riding the reproductive cycle and taking advantage of it, aren't we? We are Deckers in the sense that our blindness to "the Real" structures our unconscious. And we are Rachel in the sense that we use the reproductive cycle in the midst of suffering and love, and we are Roy in the sense that we finally accept our death and fall asleep in the darkness of our Self-consciousness. In life, we can be interpreted as living as the three subjects presented in Blade Runner.
( *C )
Also Gregory Bateson, known for his double-bind theory, mentions the real meaning of this "phenomenon", though only briefly, in "Steps to an Ecology of Mind ( 1972 )".
