Blade Runner

I always liked the movie. It's gorgeous, and the music is great. Being pretty much a formalist as far as film is concerned, I never ask for more than that. But more is always welcome. The common complaint about Blade Runner is that is it emotionless, and barren of humanity. I think these observations mistake the superficial trappings of humanity for the human essense itself.

The film is populated with "replicants," copies of humans, and the film keeps the number of actual human characters to a minimum, with Harrison Ford occupying an ambiguous middle ground. All replicants have a 4 year expiration date. At that point they will die, and nothing can stop this from happening. In short, they experience mortality because they come to understand, through logic, that their death is certain. "What's the problem?" asks one character. "Death," is the reply of lead replicant Roy. At another point the object of the replicants' quest is made clear, "I need more time!" As if time made any difference. It is obvious to us in the audience that the quest for more time is a fruitless one, and it is precisely this tragic knowledge that makes Roy human, even more than his mortality.

For a while I thought the key to Roy's humanity was his mortality. But that seems inadequate now. I think, of course, of 2001, and HAL's dying laments. Perhaps, I think, it is not the knowledge of death but the tragic quest for life that makes us human. Perhaps to be human means to defiantly live in the shadow of death, and to triumph over it, if only momentarily (for that is all we have: moments). "I have seen things," Roy says before he dies. "I am here," he means. And, perhaps in that past tense of the future that embodies our predicament with uncanny precision, "I was here."