Blade Runner
Considering that the new Blade Runner movie is coming out tonight, it's long-overdue for me to publicly state that, despite whatever retconning Ridley Scott may have done in his Director's Cut and Final Cut, the fact of the matter is: Deckard is NOT a replicant!!!
Did Ridley Scott do this in later releases to satisfy his own ego? Did he have some sort of Eureka moment but not entirely think through the implications? Was it a change made solely for the purpose of selling more VHS tapes and/or DVDs, and/or making more box office receipts when The Final Cut was released to theaters in 2007? Maybe it was some combination of all of the above.
I went to prison in 1992, the same year that the Director's Cut was released. I'd never even heard of the idea of Deckard being a replicant until I saw The Final Cut at the Naro in 2007. And I was disappointed, primarily because the movie as a whole does not support this, the inclusion of a unicorn dream scene notwithstanding. My rewatching of The Final Cut at the Naro earlier this year did nothing to quell my concerns; in fact, it only reinforced them, as I had now had specific reason to scour the movie for pro/con replicant clues.
I am linking to a Quora thread I discovered a few months ago when trying to find out if other people felt the same way that I do; the contrary posters (i.e. those that believe he can't be a replicant) make arguments that are far above and beyond anything I myself noticed. But what I myself noticed, both in 2007 and earlier this year, are as follows:
1. The scene in the beginning at the police station, in which he is called out of retirement to hunt the fugitive replicants, makes incredibly clear that he has a long and storied history as a blade runner. This in and of itself, for me, is the definitive indicator that the movie was written and filmed under the assumption that Deckard was human; I mean, Deckard was advanced enough that he would have to have been Nexus Six (or later), and that series was only a few years old, making it literally impossible that he was a replicant.
2. Replicants were prohibited from being on Earth. Therefore, aside from the sheer timeline impossibility, Deckard as a replicant means we also have to accept that various levels of government and/or law enforcement were content to break this rule, even though there were already human blade runners out there who were competent at hunting down fugitives. And if he was a replicant blade runner, it doesn't make sense that (prior to the start of the movie) he would have been allowed to retire from being a blade runner rather than simply being "retired" (i.e. executed) like any other replicant on Earth would/should be.
3. Deckard gets the living crap beat out of him by everybody in this film - including Pris (Darryl Hannah), who isn't even a combat model. Sure, he recovers decently, but he certainly isn't capable of the same level of superhuman strength - or pain tolerance - that all of the replicants seem to have.
4. At no time did any of the Nexus Six models identify him as being a fellow replicant. Even Roy (Rutger Hauer), in his famous "Teardrops in Rain" dying monologue, begins with "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe" (i.e. including Deckard as "you people" among humans, not replicants).
I grew up watching Magnum, P.I. The show grew gradually more and more popular throughout the 80s. The earlier seasons made abundantly clear that Robin Masters and Jon Higgens were separate people, and that Higgens was not terribly happy that Robin was allowing Magnum to live at Robin's Nest and use the Ferrari in the first place. But as the show gained in popularity, and more and more people came on board, it became a very popular fan theory (primarily among those who HAD NOT seen the earliest seasons) that Higgens and Robin Masters were one in the same. Eventually, this fan theory became well-enough known in pop culture that the writers themselves shoehorned this notion into the last two seasons of the show, teasing it as more and more of a possibility, and even going so far as to have Magnum himself ponder it too (despite the absolute absurdity of it, considering that Magnum himself was a good personal friend of Robin Masters); there was even a final-season episode in which Higgens kinda admitted it. I hated this so, so much.
Is it an interesting idea for Higgens to be Robin Masters? Sure. But if that's what you're going to do, then you need to decide this up front, long before you write season after season in which the autonomy of these two characters is an underlying fact of the stories you create.
Similarly, Blade Runner was written and directed with Deckard being human. Ridley Scott deciding a decade later that it would be an interesting twist for Deckard to have been a replicant does not change the fundamental assumptions that went into the writing and filming of each scene, and including a dream sequence does not magically clean up those loose ends.
Did Ridley Scott do this in later releases to satisfy his own ego? Did he have some sort of Eureka moment but not entirely think through the implications? Was it a change made solely for the purpose of selling more VHS tapes and/or DVDs, and/or making more box office receipts when The Final Cut was released to theaters in 2007? Maybe it was some combination of all of the above.
I went to prison in 1992, the same year that the Director's Cut was released. I'd never even heard of the idea of Deckard being a replicant until I saw The Final Cut at the Naro in 2007. And I was disappointed, primarily because the movie as a whole does not support this, the inclusion of a unicorn dream scene notwithstanding. My rewatching of The Final Cut at the Naro earlier this year did nothing to quell my concerns; in fact, it only reinforced them, as I had now had specific reason to scour the movie for pro/con replicant clues.
I am linking to a Quora thread I discovered a few months ago when trying to find out if other people felt the same way that I do; the contrary posters (i.e. those that believe he can't be a replicant) make arguments that are far above and beyond anything I myself noticed. But what I myself noticed, both in 2007 and earlier this year, are as follows:
1. The scene in the beginning at the police station, in which he is called out of retirement to hunt the fugitive replicants, makes incredibly clear that he has a long and storied history as a blade runner. This in and of itself, for me, is the definitive indicator that the movie was written and filmed under the assumption that Deckard was human; I mean, Deckard was advanced enough that he would have to have been Nexus Six (or later), and that series was only a few years old, making it literally impossible that he was a replicant.
2. Replicants were prohibited from being on Earth. Therefore, aside from the sheer timeline impossibility, Deckard as a replicant means we also have to accept that various levels of government and/or law enforcement were content to break this rule, even though there were already human blade runners out there who were competent at hunting down fugitives. And if he was a replicant blade runner, it doesn't make sense that (prior to the start of the movie) he would have been allowed to retire from being a blade runner rather than simply being "retired" (i.e. executed) like any other replicant on Earth would/should be.
3. Deckard gets the living crap beat out of him by everybody in this film - including Pris (Darryl Hannah), who isn't even a combat model. Sure, he recovers decently, but he certainly isn't capable of the same level of superhuman strength - or pain tolerance - that all of the replicants seem to have.
4. At no time did any of the Nexus Six models identify him as being a fellow replicant. Even Roy (Rutger Hauer), in his famous "Teardrops in Rain" dying monologue, begins with "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe" (i.e. including Deckard as "you people" among humans, not replicants).
I grew up watching Magnum, P.I. The show grew gradually more and more popular throughout the 80s. The earlier seasons made abundantly clear that Robin Masters and Jon Higgens were separate people, and that Higgens was not terribly happy that Robin was allowing Magnum to live at Robin's Nest and use the Ferrari in the first place. But as the show gained in popularity, and more and more people came on board, it became a very popular fan theory (primarily among those who HAD NOT seen the earliest seasons) that Higgens and Robin Masters were one in the same. Eventually, this fan theory became well-enough known in pop culture that the writers themselves shoehorned this notion into the last two seasons of the show, teasing it as more and more of a possibility, and even going so far as to have Magnum himself ponder it too (despite the absolute absurdity of it, considering that Magnum himself was a good personal friend of Robin Masters); there was even a final-season episode in which Higgens kinda admitted it. I hated this so, so much.
Is it an interesting idea for Higgens to be Robin Masters? Sure. But if that's what you're going to do, then you need to decide this up front, long before you write season after season in which the autonomy of these two characters is an underlying fact of the stories you create.
Similarly, Blade Runner was written and directed with Deckard being human. Ridley Scott deciding a decade later that it would be an interesting twist for Deckard to have been a replicant does not change the fundamental assumptions that went into the writing and filming of each scene, and including a dream sequence does not magically clean up those loose ends.