{"id":3107,"date":"2016-01-07T23:02:10","date_gmt":"2016-01-07T23:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/?p=3107"},"modified":"2016-12-09T11:52:04","modified_gmt":"2016-12-09T16:52:04","slug":"the-question-is-not-whether-deckard-is-a-replicant-but-whether-roy-is-a-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glyphpress.com\/talk\/2016\/the-question-is-not-whether-deckard-is-a-replicant-but-whether-roy-is-a-person","title":{"rendered":"The Question Is Not Whether Deckard Is A Replicant, But Whether Roy Is A Person"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blade Runner is a near-perfect vision.\u00a0<\/strong>What I love most about it is its willingness to embrace the Noir idiom, not just in its visuals, but in the ambivalent moral position of its protagonist, Roy Batty.<\/p>\n

I find its rare mistakes downright encouraging to me as a creator; if the entire creative team\u00a0can accidentally, but explicitly, miscount the number of characters in the story, then I can live with that typo in MF\u00d8.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We’re gonna skip talking about Deckard right now, because while he’s our point of view over the course of the movie, he’s not a protagonist; it’s not his decisions that impact the course of events, it’s Roy’s decisions. It’s not his actions that precipitate the events, those are\u00a0Roy’s, Zhora’s, Pris’, and maybe Leon’s (though none of them seem to have any better a relationship to him than tolerance, and I suspect he’s there as a compromise.) And it’s not Deckard’s\u00a0actions that make the moral statement that the movie leads\u00a0up to: that’s Roy’s, again.<\/p>\n

Roy wants one thing: “More life.”<\/h3>\n

\"Roy<\/a><\/p>\n

We know that he was activated today, January 8th<\/a>, 2016. Four years from now\u00a0is January 8th, 2020. But the movie takes place some three months earlier than that. Roy, like everyone else who’s ever lived, doesn’t\u00a0actually<\/em> know when he’s going to die. The information he wants so badly\u00a0doesn’t exist.<\/em> He’s a living thing, subject to the vagaries of life.<\/p>\n

We’re not computers, Sebastian. We’re physical.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But he’s not going to go down without a fight. Roy, the actual detective in the movie, roots out\u00a0every piece of information he can possibly uncover\u00a0in order\u00a0to assemble the brutal narrative of his short life into one that leaves him with a sense of meaning. But he’s also a being forged of, and designed to\u00a0inflict, suffering. He’s at peace with himself in that regard; pain and compassion are the same thing to him.<\/p>\n

Contrast that with Zhora, who’s had enough of death, and just wants to have a life, with the scraps of sex and beauty\u00a0she can gather to herself before she dies. Good job on that one, Deckard. Feeling bad about “Shooting a woman in the back” is cutting yourself rather a lot of slack.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He kills Chu, who only makes the\u00a0windows<\/em> to the soul, not the soul itself, in order to find Sebastian.\u00a0He kills Sebastian, who makes the vessel<\/em> for the soul, in order to find Tyrell. (OK, he doesn’t kill him first. Roy\u00a0holds him aside so he can kill him later \u2014 and, I think choose not to kill him if things go his way. They don’t go his way.)<\/p>\n

For whatever value of “him” you want here. Given that Eldon’s mostly excuses about why he can’t give Roy more life and why he’s good like he is, I think he’s mostly explaining to himself, which, for a man\u00a0of power like him, usually gets him what he wants.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And Tyrell tries to explain Roy’s\u00a0life in a way that’s satisfying to him; tries to explain Roy’s\u00a0life as a slave, living in fear, his vast capacities squandered for the profit of those who built him and direct him.<\/p>\n

More accurately, Eldon\u00a0tries to patronize Roy\u00a0into accepting his own death as both moral and necessary.<\/strong> I get the idea that Roy wants Tyrell to give him a reason to not kill\u00a0his father (per Final Cut) \/ fucker(per Director’s Cut). But no reason is forthcoming. Roy finds Eldon’s\u00a0explanations petty and trite, formed of the kind of compromise one can make when the consequences of that compromise are borne by others. The sun god in his pyramid can make life, but can’t answer the questions that the life\u00a0demands when it walks up to your bed in the middle of the night and wants to talk about ethyl methanesulfonate\u00a0as an alkylating agent.<\/p>\n

Is Roy in the moral right?<\/h3>\n

Roy is a violent person, built for violent purposes. And yet, he loves Zhora and Pris and, even though Leon is clearly an idiot and Zhora seems to have abandoned them, he never considers harming any of his companions. His violence is constrained and purposeful. He wants those who have visited a life of suffering on his kind to feel the same \u00a0suffering that they casually inflict, to relieve them of the belief that they are\u00a0untouched by the consequences of their actions.\u00a0Roy\u00a0even apologizes to Sebastian as he kills him \u2014 he knows that, while Sebastian has done a great evil, he intended no evil.<\/p>\n

Hey, do you like thoughtful science fiction? It takes a lot of hours to write things like this. Please help me by backing my Patreon.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

The other one is the moment it says STAR WARS.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I have a great deal of sympathy for slaves who turn on their masters: Leia strangling Jabba with her\u00a0chains is one of the two moments in Star Wars that brings tears to my eyes.<\/p>\n