Ridley Scott’s film has become a past future, but the story is still in the eyes.

BY DAN DEWEESE

ONLY A FOOL decides to write about Blade Runner, one of the most written-about movies of the 1980s, and for more than thirty years now a film whose tale has been told and re-told by jittery sci-fi cinephiles (I am one, I have told it, and yet here I go again, someone help me) to countless helpless listeners. But Blade Runner states that it takes place in November 2019, and because it is now December 2019, Blade Runner has become a past future. So feel free to skip the following three paragraphs if you don’t want to be subjected to the obligatory There-are-Multiple-Blade-Runners backstory again. For those of you remaining, I will try and do this quickly.

[Deep breath.]

Released the same month as E.T., which is in many respects just a treacly version of Blade Runner (Eliot/Deckard, Gerty/Pris, E.T./Roy, Eliot kisses a girl without consent amid frog chaos/Deckard kisses Rachael without consent ((there may be some ambiguity—I don’t presume to know about replicant sexuality)), E.T. says, “Be good”/Roy says, “I’ve seen things”), Ridley Scott’s brooding “future-noir” was mostly ignored at the box office and gained fans first via VHS rentals secreted home in squeezable plastic boxes, next as catnip for film studies professors eager to replace the discipline’s fusty “film history” reputation with a cool critical-theory vibe, and then, in the early nineties, with a “director’s cut” re-release of the movie that came bundled with a dramatic origin story for the media, which (the re-release) then enjoyed additional meta-ambiguity when the director pointed out that this “director’s cut” was not actually a director’s cut, and that if anyone actually wanted to see a Blade Runner director’s cut, they could just wait until the director was done making 1492: Conquest of Paradise.

Nobody particularly wanted 1492: Conquest of Paradise, but this was not the issue, and was left politely unspoken.

[Intake of breath. Trying to do this fast.]

People did want their director’s cut of Blade Runner, though, so Ridley Scott spliced one together to capitalize on the early-nineties re-release interest. That version of the movie had rough edges that still dissatisfied Scott, however, so in 2007 he released yet another version in which everything, supposedly, had been addressed. Scott says he is done with the movie now, and so this 2007 “Final Cut” is the version of Blade Runner I will be referring to in all that follows. (Yes, a Blade Runner sequel was made a couple years ago, but the less said about that movie, the better.)

So: one important thing to say about the different Blade Runners is that there is nothing left to say about the different Blade Runners. It has all been said in pieces on the internet and, comprehensively, in Paul M. Sammon’s book Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner, and I promise no longer to discuss differences between cuts of the film.

Done.

WHAT I AM interested in here is how the characters in the film look at each other. Blade Runner is one of the all-time watching-you-watch-me-watch-you movies, and throughout the film we see eyes. In the opening sequence, while Vangelis sets the fluttering-synth mood, we see an eye:

When the story begins with a blade runner evaluating what he (and we) soon learn is a replicant, we see that a key item of analysis is the eyes:

And not much later, when Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) first visits the headquarters of the Tyrell Corporation, makers of the “replicants” Deckard has been charged with finding and terminating, we meet Rachael (Sean Young). In addition to her noir hairstyle, what is foregrounded about Rachael is her eyes:

The savvy moviegoer will of course want to point out that these examples could be folded quite easily into the natural unspooling of any number of films. Ridley Scott is hardly the first director to start with a mood-setting sequence while the audience is settling into their seats; a futuristic device that detects the presence of an android has to measure something, and the audience would certainly prefer eyes as opposed to elbows; and finally, photographing the sultry gaze of a femme fatale is a genre convention. So one could easily declare there is nothing particularly declaratory (about eyes) in the way Rachael is introduced.

The issue of eyes—that it is eyes that are at issue—is announced directly about a third of the way through the film, though. When Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and Leon (Brion James) break into a Tyrell Corporation facility looking for information, a man working there (the inestimable James Hong) turns out not to have the information they need, because all he does is make eyes. He looks at Roy and Leon and recognizes them—not as individuals, but as particular models: “I make your eyes,” he says proudly. Batty responds: “If you could only see what I have seen with your eyes.”

The scene is the most explicit moment yet in which we see the dynamic Blade Runner builds on from that point forward: the person who enjoys the power of looking at an objectified other discovers, in short order, that they are in fact the one being looked at. This means they are not actually the subject, but in fact the object, and therefore not in a position of power but, instead, possibly vulnerable. This possibility is then confirmed.

The rest of the film seems, on the surface, as if it is just a repetition of this dynamic: the person who thinks he is the watcher is actually the one being watched. One of the enduring fascinations of Blade Runner, though, is that rather than just repeating that dynamic over and over a la the links-in-a-chain narratives of standard police or detective procedurals, Blade Runner offers something closer to a nested-dolls version: we are continually encountering another level at which the hierarchy of the watcher/watched role is flipped. By the end of the film, the situation looks something like the following schematic:

[Rachael —> Deckard]

[Gaff—> [Deckard —> [Batty —> [Deckard —> Batty]

[Batty —> [Sebastian —> [Batty —> [Tyrell —> Batty]

[Batty —> [Pris —> [Sebastian —> Pris]

I know that’s crazy. And yet would you believe I have actually written that on a whiteboard at the front of a classroom filled with sharp young people, and have been paid (in part) (maybe just in small part) (okay, maybe not paid for these notations, specifically) to do so? So if you will allow me just a moment, I will explain my crude movie-math and convince you that the reason people are baffled and bored when they watch Blade Runner looking for entertainment via traditional Hollywood strategies like car chases, gunfights, or training montages is that Blade Runner is built for people who find dramatic tension in how characters look, look at, and are looked at by others. In other words: the plot of Blade Runner—find and terminate replicants—is not the story of Blade Runner. The story of Blade Runner is: the ones being watched are watching the watchers—but will any of them truly be seen?

By this point I’ve driven away almost every reader—so let’s start. J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson) discovers Pris (Daryl Hannah) “hiding” in trash outside his apartment. Sebastian, believing Pris is powerless and alone, watches her with pleasure. Note how Scott frames the shot below so that William Sanderson looms over/looks down on Daryl Hannah, despite the fact that Hannah is actually taller than Sanderson. This is what I mean by [Sebastian —> Pris]:

When Sebastian turns away, though, Pris’s look changes. This is the dyamic discussed earlier: secretly, Pris is watching Sebastian watch her. In the crude notation:
[Pris —> [Sebastian —> Pris]

When Batty arrives, he watches Pris watching Sebastian (who still believes that he is watching his two replicant guests.) This seems to amuse Batty, and he and Pris put on a little show in which they play at being vulnerable. The entire time, though, Batty knows he is far more powerful than this broken little man, and takes pleasure in the private knowledge that he is actually the one doing the watching. In my little schematic form, then:

[Batty —> [Pris —> [Sebastian —> Pris]

When Batty gets Sebastian to take him to visit Tyrell (Joe Turkel), Tyrell immediately takes pleasure in gazing upon Batty while breaking the news that there is no way in which Batty’s four-year lifespan can be extended. “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy,” Tyrell says, in what is either a moment of god-like condescension, paternal consolation, or both. Batty, however, is studying Tyrell’s reactions to his questions, and knows he is more powerful than Tyrell—which he proves by ending Tyrell’s role as a watcher. Sebastian has been dragged along to watch the whole scene. This means we do not just have Batty watching Tyrell watch Batty, but actually Batty aware (or watching, in a conceptual way) that Sebastian is watching Batty watch Tyrell watch him. Because writing all of this out in sentence form is getting obnoxious (if it wasn’t already a while ago), Batty does us a favor: he also ends Sebastian’s role.

[Batty —> [Sebastian —> [Batty —> [Tyrell —> Batty]

We haven’t even mentioned Harrison Ford’s character. (This is probably why many viewers sense that Rutger Hauer’s performance is the most powerful in the film, and that Batty is maybe the actual protagonist: he is embedded in all of the crucial matrices of watchers and watched, and it is his eyes and looks that serve as pivots for the film’s most dramatic shifts.) Deckard (Ford) has been hired because he is an expert at discovering replicants by looking closely at them (as he gives his test.) Theoretically, then, he is more powerful than the replicants—he “retires” them, and claims never to have made a mistake. It’s interesting that, despite the fact that scopophilia—the love of looking—is bound up with pleasure, Deckard seems to take no pleasure in his work. Jaded exhaustion is a trope of the detective genre, but in the world of Blade Runner, Deckard’s sadness at having to take on, once again, the role of the watcher/pursuer is an early hint that the identity he is being asked to perform—human blade runner—may not be his true identity. Human beings find pleasure in looking (check Instagram); Deckard doesn’t seem to.

A standard Hollywood narrative conclusion involves the hero (ostensibly Deckard) “seizing the sword,” to use Joseph Campbell-speak, and defeating the villain. But by this point in Blade Runner, the watcher/watched engine is providing far more horsepower than the hero/villain engine. This is why, in the film’s conclusion, it makes sense that Batty prefers to look at Deckard rather than kill him. It’s an odd choice within the logic of violence, but makes sense within the logic of looking: watching Deckard from a position of superiority is what Batty wants, because it proves his superiority, just as a cat is only interested in a mouse as long as the cat can watch the mouse feebly attempt to get away.

As his time runs out, though, Batty weakens. It is important (within the film’s visual logic) that he not die alone, offscreen, but in front of Deckard (and, by extension, in front of the audience, who actually occupy the highest level in the hierarchy of watching, as they do in every movie) so that Deckard and the audience can look at Batty as he dies. In the end, Batty purposely places Deckard in the position of watcher, an act that is a kind of generosity. We, finally, are more powerful than poor Roy Batty.

Upon Batty’s death, however, we are immediately reminded of the nested nature of surveillance in the movie: Gaff, the police officer who has a mysterious ability to find Deckard whenever necessary (how he tracks/surveils Deckard is never explained), appears in order to deliver Deckard a compliment, which also serves as a reminder that the entirety of Deckard and Batty’s watching-you-watch-me-watch-you struggle was…being watched.

The last step is less certain, because it contains the ambiguity that arose in the film’s re-cuts. Earlier in the film, when Deckard notices Rachael trembling (she has just shot and killed a replicant), he says, “It’s part of the business.” Rachael replies, “I’m not in the business. I am the business.” In this moment, is she looking at Deckard from a position of superior knowledge and insight? Or is he looking at her? Rachael, it seems, may be the only character in the film who consistently speaks/looks from and for the position of the vulnerable.

I’m not acknowledging another potential, of course: that it may be possible—and ideal—for people to trade a look of equality. At the end of Blade Runner, Deckard and Rachael might be equals, empowered by their watchfulness, but vulnerable to all they cannot see. They are not just motivated by the plot-established need to escape the eyes of the city’s other blade runners, but also by a need to terminate the last level in the chain of the film’s visual pleasure: the elevator door closes over them, obscuring them from the audience’s eyes, as well. No longer present for us to watch, they are finally free, and the layers of surveillance end.

Unless, of course, one assumes Blade Runner’s dynamic applies to our position in the chain, as well. In that case, we would be smart to assume that while we took pleasure in watching Rachael, Pris, Batty, and Deckard, they were aware of this. If so, every time we sit down to watch the movie—even now that its future has slipped into the past—they still watch us watch them.