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From the film’s mentions of genetic engineers, eyeball sculptors and replicant DNA, it is safe to assume that replicants do not contain circuitry. Their bodies are made of organic materials, even if those materials are synthesized in a lab. With these characteristics in mind, can Blade Runner’s replicants be considered cyborgs?
In “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” Donna Haraway literally defines the cyborg as “a hybrid of machine and organism (p50).” Replicant bodies have no machine parts, and fall outside this first parameter. But defining “the cyborg” would be like trying to define “the woman” -- impossible. So Haraway goes on to offer a multi-faceted, complex description. “The cyborg is a creature in a postgender world . . . . it is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence (p51).” And elsewhere, in her interview with Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, she offers an even more detailed and revealing portrait:
A new entity emerges, one not dependant on a specific set of physical parameters but rather on character, personal goals and whims. Haraway’s cyborg is born out of contradictions, confusion and mess.Penley: So, your cyborg is definitely female?
Haraway: Yeah, it is a polychromatic girl. . .the cyborg is a bad girl, she is really not a boy. Maybe she is not so much bad as she is a shape-changer, whose dislocations are never free. (p20)
Haraway’s in depth descriptions of cyborgicity begin to match elements of the replicant condition, in particular the character of Pris. Comparing Pris, her fellow replicants, and Haraway’s notion of the cyborg yields a greater understanding of each one, how it connects to the others and how it functions independently. Why is Haraway’s cyborg a girl? How do the replicants relate to/represent women? And as a mechanism of popularization, what does Blade Runner express about women and cyborgicity?
Andrew Ross introduces the idea of Haraway’s manifesto being “a kind of ‘bad girl’ manifesto. . . . because it’s about pleasure and danger. . . (p19).” He refers to the dangers of burgeoning technology, of women leaving their historically assigned realm of nature and engaging in a risky embrace of science, the mechanical, everything supposedly foreign to them. Breaching this old boundary is the task of a bad girl, “oppositional.” This move towards cyborgicity must begin with the feminine if it is to cross a gender line and become postgender. For a boy to embrace technology is nothing transgressive or new, it does nothing to help him transcend gender. So it is the female replicants that will occupy the center of this discussion, not Roy, Leon or Deckard, in his ambiguous humanity. Obviously the male characters reflect other elements of Haraway’s cyborg, but Pris, Zhora and Rachael dwell on a more distant fringe and contain the greatest transgressive potential. The film’s treatment of them provides the most meaningful insights into cyborgicity.
In “Technology, Representation and the Feminine,” Mary Ann Doane points out thatBlade Runner’s women are all replicants. Minor female characters are (or are assumed to be) human, like the eyepatch-wearing liquor vendor the fish manufacturer and the various denizens of Taffy’s bar. But the major female players are all manufactured, and all physically attractive. The replicants’ beauty is a point of great interest (and at times creepy zeal) for male SF critics. David Thomson writes enthusiastically:
“Dressed and played as unique, attractive. . .” is a gloss of “fetishized” in this context, and Thomson’s desire to see Deckard romantically “melt silicon hearts” grates sickeningly against the film’s actual events, two gruesome murders and a rough-edged, wrathful sexual coercion (to be discussed later). The way Thomson pretties up the film’s treatment of the replicants is significant -- he locates them within a sexual subject/object equation with Deckard, himself and viewers (who he seems to presume are heterosexual males).Blade Runner (1982) has a similar erotic temperature [to Sigourney Weaver’s tangible, sweaty, warm body in Alien]. Beneath and within its futuristic cityscape there are three replicant women. . .all dressed and played as unique, attractive individuals. . . . we want the tough hero to melt these silicon hearts. (p62)
Danny Peary, following an embarrassingly lecherous line of questioning while interviewing director Ridley Scott, displays a similar attitude towards the replicants.
Notice Scott’s apparent disapproval of Peary’s questions and disavowal of the pleasure model theme, precisely the theme he himself introduces in the film. While he doesn’t really like discussing such a sick, fascistic viewpoint in a personal interview, his film doesn’t flinch from the Zhora’s job “taking pleasures from the snake,” Pris’s past status as a “basic pleasure model,” or Rachael’s unwilling participation as Deckard’s love/sex object. Scott’s question, “why would you want them to be ugly?” reveals his true view of the replicants, that they exist to be looked at, and surveying them should obviously produce pleasure. Once again, despite Scott’s hypocritical protestations, the replicants are placed in a role of sexual object.DP: The female replicants, at least, are capable of having sex. Do you think they have the capabilities of enjoying sex and actually having orgasms?
RS: I never went into this in much detail, either. But I guess that if Tyrell went to the trouble of making perfect replicants, then he’d have taken into account their sexual capabilities. For obvious reasons. Maybe some female replicants like Pris were employed in military camps on space bases and were constructed for specific sexual purposes. . . .That’s a very fascistic viewpoint, a very sick one, and I don’t really like discussing it.
DP: Deckard finds himself sexually attracted to Rachael. Was it your intention to have male viewers find themselves attracted to the three female replicants in order to further diminish the distinction between humans and androids?
RS: No. I just happened to cast three actresses who are rather beautiful. Anyway, if you’re going to make female replicants, why would you want them to be ugly? (p301-2)
Within the film, the three replicants fare no better. Zhora, a skilled homicide detective, is forced to become a sex worker because of her replicant nature. Pris originally existed to sexually satisfy humans, and Rachael faces violence from Deckard when he decides he desires her. Simon Scott observes that “the female characters are placed in awkward and oppressive places by the men that surround them.” How the female characters negotiate these places is the key to their cyborgicity, or lack of it.
Since we do not witness Zhora’s movement into her exploited position as Ms. Salome, it is more productive to focus on Pris and Rachael at this point in the analysis. The prevalent interpretation of Rachael and Deckard’s relationship in movie reviews and critical texts seems to be a bittersweet, romantic one. In the Official Blade Runner On-line Magazine, Katherine Haber offers the following reading:
It is more than a little difficult to see Deckard’s actions as caring and comforting in the scene Haber writes of, and one truly wonders how critics like Haber and Peary, who writes that Rachael falls in love with Deckard, can draw such confounding conclusions. What is attractive, romantic or lovely about Deckard angrily slamming the door as Rachael tries to flee, throwing her against the oh-so-film noir venetian blinds as she flinches and begins to weep?In the love scene Rachael is apprehensive because she’s not sure what to do, she isn’t sure if she is relying on someone else’s memory. She resists and is frightened of Deckard’s prejudices. But Deckard is just trying to say ‘Hold on, you’re okay. I’m doing this because I want to and because I care about you’
Looking at the preceding sequence leads to a radically different reading of the “love scene.” Rachael and Deckard have just returned to his apartment, after Deckard has shot Zhora and Rachael has shot Leon. “Shakes?” Deckard asks her, seeing she is disturbed. “Me too. I get ‘em bad. Part of the business.” Rachael looks at him with quiet despair and says mournfully, “I’m not in the business. I am the business.” Behind her, an RCA logo glows through the window. In a world choked by the neon signatures of consumerism, Rachael faces the knowledge that she was born a product. As a replicant, she exists to be consumed. Deckard takes her statement in with a degree of pity, then moves away. He removes his shirt at the sink and rinses his face, leaving Rachael to contemplate her identity.
She glances quickly at him, then looks down and sighs. It could be that Rachael is wrestling with an attraction to Deckard, but another, more exciting possibility soon presents itself. As Rachael approaches Deckard, he submerges his head in the water, a very vulnerable position. Eerie music fades in, and Rachael’s movements become stiff, her face blank yet purposeful. Her eyes glow and reflect like a cat’s. As she nears Deckard he looks at her, and then straightens up almost apprehensively. In this moment, does Rachael contemplate killing Deckard? Perhaps on her way to the kitchen, she passes through cyborgicity. She has embraced her non-human nature, lost what innocence she had left after shooting Leon. During that brief passage until Deckard fixes her again with his gaze, Rachael has a brush with agency, power, danger. Behind those glowing eyes, she imagines being something other than a good girl.
But as quickly as the danger appears, it disappears. The two resume talking, and Deckard retires to the bedroom. Rachael goes to the piano, removes her jacket with its huge shoulderpads and unravels her lacquered hairdo into a mass of natural waves. Her lipstick and eyeliner somehow disappear as well. Deckard returns and sits beside her, and after some words he tries to kiss her. She regards him coldly, shrinks from his next kiss and abruptly rises and heads for the door. Then comes the angry assault, Deckard’s face tightened and his mouth curling down. The message is definitely not “you’re okay, I care about you” as Haber imagines. It’s closer to “You can’t walk out on me again, not when I was being so charming. I deserve you.” Simon Scott’s reading of the scene is quite accurate. He writes:
In the face of Deckard’s violence and with the knowledge that he has agreed not to retire her, Rachael finally, miserably engages in the “love scene,” picking up the script Deckard feeds her with the line “put your hands on me.” Deckard scoops her up into a devouring kiss, and she is at once possessed, consumed and objectified. Anne Balsamo’s insights resonate here. She writes “as the object of Deckard’s visual and sexual desire, Rachael symbolically reasserts the social and political position of woman as object of man’s consumption (p 151).”she protests that she cannot rely on the false memories she has been given, but Deckard ignores this, and forces her to say that she loves him, until she finally submits. This is perhaps one of the most outwardly misogynist moments in the movie. It outlines again how subservient Rachel [sic] is, especially when compared to the other, more self-aware Replicants.
While some read the scene as Deckard humanizing Rachael and teaching her to feel and love, in reality his rape, with its humiliating script, dehumanizes her and encases her in the rigid role of the good girl. Neither human nor bad girl cyborg, Rachael is trapped as a manufactured replicant, a business product that has been bought. In the next shot, Pris is airbrushing a black mask over her eyes, a satisfied smile spreading across her face. It must be permanent paint, presumably from Sebastian’s workshop. Her face is painted white, and she resembles a harlequin as much as she echoes Rachael’s glamourous retro makeup and the geisha-in-the-sky. But instead of constructed femininity, Pris’s face, framed by an androgynous mop of fuzzy hair, is ungendered. She has effected a shape change, painting her face and becoming the “poly-chromatic girl” Haraway envisions. Whatever else this new black-eyed entity is, she is no longer a basic pleasure model.
Pleased with her work, she cartwheels over to Sebastian. When Roy arrives, she kisses him with an electric passion missing from Rachael’s submission to Deckard. She looks craftily at Roy as they manipulate Sebastian, then bites her lip coyly. She is Haraway’s bad girl cyborg. Later, she morphs into a doll to hide from Deckard, rolling and fluttering her eyes and smiling again, taking pleasure in her dangerous situation. She revels in her complex nature, her head snapping around like a bird’s. When she attacks Deckard, she howls like an animal. As Haraway describes in her manifesto, the boundaries between animal and human, organism and mechanism have been blurred, and cyborgicity thrives.
When Pris dies, she grimaces and thrashes in a way that resembles a child’s tantrum, outraged that she is being robbed of life. When we see Rachael again, it is as an inert, near lifeless possession to be collected by Deckard. She dully echoes his words, and then follows him with glazed, silent eyes. Deckard has robbed them both of vitality, but it is doubtful that Rachael would protest her actual death as much fury as Pris. After all, what sort of life can a replicant hope for? She has lost her chance at cyborgicity, unable to assert her will and forever locked in a mindless bond to her lover, protector, controller, owner, Deckard.
In Blade Runner, women are replicants. Being a replicant does not guarantee cyborgicity, rather the cyborg is a destination that certain characters find at certain times. Their arrival in cyborg space coincides with an achievement of power, and an escape of their oppressive, objectified gender roles. No cyborgs survive the film however, as Simon Scott is quick to point out:
It is severely disappointing that, while the film contains a vivid and inspiring image of cyborgicity in Pris, Blade Runne ultimately allows only the deadened replicant Rachael to survive. While Pris is a fairly sympathetic character, she is still too transgressive to survive a Hollywood movie.. . .if Pris and Zhora are viewed as strong, independent and non-subservient women, and Rachel is viewed as a vulnerable, almost childlike and subservient female, it seems rather negative that out of these three it is Rachel who survives, and escapes with Deckard as his “love-object.”
Despite its unfortunate popularization of an oppressive female stereotype, Blade Runner’s narrative proves a useful tool in exploring Haraway’s notion of the cyborg. The film’s treatment of the female, and the misogynist attitudes surrounding the film, connect women, cyborgs and replicants in a web of meanings that help define all three. Our first question, “can Blade Runner’s replicants be considered cyborgs?” might be better phrased as “how does one reach the cyborg?” Although Pris’s body is organic, she nevertheless embodies Haraway’s description of cyborgicity. Her physical state does not matter -- cyborg is a state of mind. Haraway’s third boundary, between physical and non-physical, is breached when Pris reaches cyborgicity in a body made entirely of flesh. In other words, to expand on Pris’s sly quoting of Descartes, “I think, therefore I am cyborg.”
Doane, Mary Ann. "Technophilia: Technology, Representation and the Feminine." The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader.
Haber, Katherine. The Official Blade Runner On-line Magazine. http://www.devo.com/bladerunner/blade_runner.html
Haraway, Donna J. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980's." The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader.
Peary, Danny, ed. "Directing Alien and Bladerunner - An Interview with Ridley Scott." Omni's Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies. New York: Doubleday/Dolphin, 1984.
Penley, Constance and Andrew Ross, eds. "Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway." Technoculture. Minnesota: UP, 1991.
Scott, Simon H. "Is Blade Runner A Misogynist Text?" 2019: Off-World. http://www.scribble.com/uwi/br/br-misog.html
Thomson, David. "Sex in Science Fiction Films: Romance or Engineering?" Omni's Screen Flights/Screen Fantasies.
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