While I dove into the Blade Runner fandom, I discovered massive discourse surrounding whether or not Deckard is a Replicant. In an interview with Ridley Scott about the more recent Blade Runner 2049, he immediately jumps in saying, “Deckard is a replicant.” Explaining how he must be for the new movie. However, Scott had not previously discussed Deckard’s replicant status definitively before hence the longstanding debate about Deckard.
I had never seen Blade Runner 2019 all the way through before, so my knowledge of the fandom topics started with Leibling’s article. But, to my knowledge, this conspiracy has been a topic of debate for a long time. In the director’s cut we watched, Deckard sees a unicorn, which is his own thought not shared with anyone else. Gaff leaves him an origami unicorn at the end. How could he have known this private thought unless it was implanted? Deckard faces questions like the one from Rachel asking if he’s ever taken the empathy test. He never answers leaving us to question who is human, even Deckard.
The theme of empathy trickles throughout the film with an assumption that human’s pass the empathy tests while replicants cannot. The fact that Deckard is a replicant makes this concept much more complex. If he represents the human that must kill replicants then what does that make the humans? Were any of the characters in he film actually humans? They all seemed incredibly creepy. If they were humans, then the other empathetic humans simply left them to go to their new planet because they “qualified” —which altogether sounds completely immoral.
How do you think Deckard’s revelation as a replicant adds or takes away to the film’s commentary about empathy and human life?
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