One of the most talked about elements of the Blade Runner movie franchise is whether Deckard is a human or a replicant. After extensive research I have found the definitive answer: It doesn’t matter. Let’s settle this once and for all. It doesn’t matter.

The reason is because any difference between replicants and humans is irrelevant and, by the time of the first Blade Runner movie, the time of the Nexus 6 within the film, the replicants had already progressed to a point where they are human. And that is the point of the movie. Blade Runner is about what it means to be alive, to exist, to be human. And replicants are human, they are everything we recognize to be human, if not more human than human.

If you clicked on this, I assume you have seen the films and are familiar with the basic plot elements and won’t be reiterating them. If not, do yourself a favor and do so after you’ve liked the article and followed. Though, not the theatrical version of the first one. If there’s voice over, find a different version.

Now, to me, and maybe to you, this might seem like an obvious answer. However, there is a great never-ending discussion about the topic amongst fans, and beyond the fans, it even includes the people who made the film. Ridley Scott, the director of the first film, and Harrison Ford, the star, disagreed for years, Scott saying replicant and Ford human. Denis Villeneuve, the director of the sequel, is agnostic about it. There are many other participants in the film with various opinions.

The film itself is ambiguous about Deckard or at least doesn’t offer a definitive answer to the question, though maybe because the screenwriter didn’t intend it to be a question (he wrote him as human). But Roy Batty spared Deckard; Deckard didn’t spare any androids. Batty was the one who, at the end, behaved humanely. The second film does show K to be a replicant, fully, but again, asks if it matters, if his actions and feelings are not those of a human, of something alive. It’s just not possible to get canon answers on human vs. android to a large extent within the Blade Runner universe, but that’s ironically the answer in itself.

While supposed human characters destroy not just androids but other humans and the Earth itself, desperate and grubby to find any way to secure more for themselves regardless of consequences, and without even awareness or consideration of those consequences, the androids demonstrate not just the survival instinct, the cruelty, the anger, the hate, and the violence that humans are capable of but also the love, the friendship, the sacrifice, the regret, the appreciation for life and existence, the longing, the sense of justice, mercy, forgiveness, etc. In 2049, they’re even capable of having offspring. They’re human.

But in today’s world of AI, we have to acknowledge that technology can mimic human behavior, can understand the stimuli and appropriate responses in a way sophisticated enough to trick humans into thinking it human. A lot of what they display that appears to be human could just be the result of a machine programmed to survive, and understanding that its companions are crucial to that and the Tyrell corporation and government are antithetical to that. How do we know the replicants have actually crossed a threshold from a machine that mimics humans to actual human consciousness though? Consider the following.

Blade Runner

Let’s take the first movie. Roy Batty killed Tyrell. There was a logical purpose to everything he had done to that point. Killing Tyrell was pure indulgence, pure emotion, not productive in the slightest. So violent and horrific not even an animal, let alone a talking calculator, could comprehend it. As Tyrell explained, there was nothing that could be done at that point. He had tried to figure out a way to extend the lives of replicants like Roy. There was nothing to be gained from killing Tyrell other than the satisfaction of revenge. Then he killed J.F. Sebastion as well, an even less purposeful expression of his hate or, at best, brutal sense of justice. It was the type of evil only humans are capable of.

Think about the scene where Roy and Leon are trying to intimidate Hannibal Chew. Leon stands behind Chew, Roy in front, while Leon puts an eyeball on Chews shoulder and moves it around. Roy and Leon exchange looks, and smiles. They’re joking. They’re making each other laugh. They’re being funny. And you may say that AI can make jokes, but they make jokes based on stimuli, in response to requests, the AI doesn’t know it is funny. Roy and Leon are smiling, they’re doing it for each other. To what end would an AI want to entertain another AI? Maybe Leon plays with the eyeball because he understands that output will make Chew more intimidated, maybe Roy smiles to intimidate Chew to achieve their goal. But then why does Leon smile too? Only Roy can see Leon’s face. If they were doing this only because they thought it would provoke a more favorable response from Chew, then what was the point of Leon smiling at Roy? It’s because Leon wanted to have fun with his friend Roy and to share joy with him.

One more thing before we move on to Blade Runner 2049, where the case gets even stronger. Think about the end of the movie. Think about the moment where Deckard hangs from the roof. Roy Batty stands over him. Roy can kill him. He wanted to. He would not benefit from it, but revenge and hate was enough of a reason to kill him. Three of his friends were dead because of Deckard. Why not kill him? Because looking at Deckard, weaponless, weak, broken fingered, hanging in the rain with his tormentor standing over him, with Roy himself being so close to dying, Roy felt something not even Deckard had felt in all the countless replicants he had destroyed, he saw Deckard struggling to survive and had at the end come to understand that all life is precious and worth preserving. He empathized with Deckard and saw himself in Deckard. They were both human. They both just wanted to survive in this horrible world Blade Runner takes place in. They were the same.

While that is beautiful, it also shows Roy is capable of empathy, but more than empathy. Theory of mind is a concept in psychology where you’re capable of understanding where another person is coming from, even if it is different from where you come from. This is something that neither robots, nor animals, nor even humans before a certain age, and some never, are capable of. This is recognizing life in other living things. Throughout the movie the replicants make reference to ‘living in fear’ and being a ‘slave’, occasionally asking humans if they know what that is like, and Roy himself sees that Deckard kind of does, maybe not to Roy’s extent, but enough.

Shortly before that, Roy claims Deckard was being ‘not very sportsmanlike’ in their fight to the death, but recognized now that its not a game, that life is precious, and expresses that recognition with his famous speech about his memories being lost like tears in the rain. His memories are who he is and when those are gone he will go with them. This ties back to Deckard’s meeting with Rachael. Her memories made her seem human. Deckard was shook when he killed Zhora, after he met Rachael. Even if Rachael’s memories were not hers it still informed who she was. Deckard had begun to recognize the self within Rachael. The source of her memories, and the source of her existence, didn’t matter, because the result was now human. A replicant, like a person, becomes the sum of their memories, regardless of their programming.

After all, why would Tyrell have needed to put memories into replicants if replicants were not human in order to function correctly? What machine needs to believe they were a baby once in order to work right? I can say, as a human, if I didn’t recall anything before beginning my life as a slave in a 30 year old looking body with all the technical knowledge I’d ever need in my head already, I might not function so well either. Robots and AI aren’t susceptible to existential crises.

Blade Runner 2049

Now let’s talk about Blade Runner 2049. There’s a scene where K confesses to Madam that he’s never killed something that was born before. She asks him what’s the difference? Indeed. Is a human born through IVF not a human after all?

If you look at the test between Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, it is much different. While the first focuses more on working with hypotheticals in order to determine who is a replicant, in the sequel it seems more designed to ensure that replicants can ignore emotional or existential questions to focus on mindless repetitive words. Where the Voight Kampff test in Blade Runner obscures its intent, K is fully aware of the purpose of the test and what he is meant to do. K might be a replicant, but he’s human, he’s just been brainwashed into pretending he’s not. The replicants are so human by the point of Blade Runner 2049 you have to test for whether or not they’re capable of pretending they’re not.

The replicants are so human that they have to be brainwashed, and actively participate in their own bizarre brainwashing, under the guise that it is meant to help them function. Consider that K goes home to Joi. K creates this fake domestic life where he pretends he lives in a weird 1950s suburban existence. He pretends to have love. What kind of thing needs love in order to function? Does your toaster? Does ChatGPT? Even Luv, Wallace’s main subordinate, expresses a desire to be loved by Wallace, to be the ‘best one’, as if that would make her closer to human, but the desire to be loved already makes her human, more human than Wallace who behaves more like a robot, or at least a sociopath. 

This is all beside the fact that in Blade Runner 2049, it was established that replicants can have children. In both films it is implied that this is a meaningful distinction. This is so much so the case that what sends K spiraling is the thought that maybe he was born, that his memories were real. But when he finds out that wasn’t the case, what happens? Does he turn into a car like a transformer? No, he’s the same as he was before and after he thought he was born, before and after he thought his memories were real. It doesn’t matter. The source of his existence doesn’t change the fact that he exists, the source of his memories didn’t change that they influenced who he is. This is made especially true when he meets the source of his memories, Dr. Ana, Deckard and Rachael’s daughter. She cries and he screams, she was born, he was not, they are both expressing how important their memories are to them. The very search for meaning in K is in itself what is human, regardless of the answers.  

Wallace is the inheritor of Tyrell’s legacy. Where Tyrell was a thoughtless artist, Wallace is a brutal dictator. Tyrell was in it for the act of creation, and Wallace for control. Tyrell made something, Wallace acquired it. Wallace knows he is making slaves. That is why he is excited by the prospect of replicants who can replicate, because he can’t build them fast enough as he confesses, if they could give birth then they could just keep creating themselves, and then how are they different from slaves? What makes them different from just enslaved humans at that point?

The replicants in Blade Runner 2049 desire to be free, even if so brainwashed as to not know it is possible or what freedom could be. Joi is delighted to be free from the ceiling mounted projection device. They have formed rebel groups in order to achieve this. They talk of miracles and cling to other semi-religious prophecy stuff in order to find meaning in life.

These are not the behaviors of AI. These are slaves. This stuff with Joi and memories, combined with the threat of ‘retirement’ is just a way to enslave people and would not be necessary with robots or AI, the behavior they exhibit is beyond mimicking human behavior but actually is human behavior. The born humans need replicants and could gain from them so tell themselves that replicants aren’t human, but if that were true they wouldn’t need to trick replicants into believing the same and condition them to behave like machines if they were machines.

By the time of Blade Runner, the technology of replicants had gotten to a point where the replicants were human, and in reaction to that humanity society adopted these ridiculous protocols under the guise of maintaining the product but which is obviously just an insane level of brainwashing, followed up by murder when it failed. The replicants are treated like enslaved humans because that is what they are. If technology has progressed to a point where you have to treat technology like a slave and not a product then it is a slave and not a product.

Think for a moment about the scene where K meets Deckard, and he asks if Deckard’s dog is real or a replicant. Deckard tells K to ask the dog. The joke is that dogs cannot talk. But there’s another layer to it. Even if the dog could talk, the dog wouldn’t know, it would not know if it was human or replicant, because it doesn’t matter. It is alive, it feels, it exists, it wants and fears and loves and hungers, all of it. The distinction is irrelevant to the dog, because it is irrelevant.

The last example I’ll give is when Wallace confronts Deckard with the possibility that Deckard is a replicant. That he and Rachael had programming embedded within them to make them fall in love, and Tyrell had planned everything. Deckard was unphased because the source of the love didn’t make it unreal. And when confronted with a new Rachael, Deckard pointed out that her eyes were a different color. But if it wasn’t that, it would have been something else, because that wasn’t Rachael. This is why K did not buy another Joi, because that wouldn’t have been Joi. It may look the same, but it’s not real. It wasn’t about mimicking love, but about love.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion, Blade Runner is a franchise about what it is to exist, to be alive, and to be human. Blade Runner shows us that replicants have progressed to a point that they are human. So when it comes to whether or not Deckard was a replicant or not, it truly does not matter, because both humans and replicants are humans, and given how replicants seem more capable of recognizing this than humans are, replicants may even be more human than human by Blade Runner 2049.

by Zackary Goncz

Share if you enjoyed with the links below and tell us what you think in the comments section. Follows will be reciprocated. 

Read more at The Takaho Post. Like us on Facebook. Thanks for stopping by.