The movie I want to analyze today is Blade Runner. Made in 1982, the movie is a dystopian science fiction movie set in 2019 LA. The plot of the movie is that there are ‘synthetic humans’ made by a large company called Tyrell. The synthetic humans, also known as replicants, are used essentially as slaves on other planets in work colonies. A group of these replicants escapes from the planet they were working on and have returned to Earth, where they are tracked and killed by Rick Deckard(who is played by Harrison Ford). At the start of the film, Deckard meets a replicant named Rachel who has been given false memories and believes she is human. The key here is that replicants and humans are virtually indistinguishable other than a test Deckard has that does not necessarily always give the correct answers. The main premise of the movie works around the replicants that Deckard finds and the emotional struggle he goes through regarding the ethics of killing the replicants and possibly Rachel as well.
I think the movie really hits an idea of what it means to distinguish humanity, whether through race, gender identity, or in this case what defines a human. The replicants’ work is justified by the Tyrell corporation as they are engineering and not truly human, but their sentience and ability to live is very real as well as their impact on those around them. I think that the movie looks at the injustice of what happens to the replicants as a way of showing how we can be cruel and assume intentions for those who we dehumanize. We often focus on clear lines of an Us vs Them, a Self vs Other, and as those lines get blurred people see how those lines are often drawn in violent and cruel wats. From looking at the way race has been dealt with in the world, we see that as more people realize that race is a social construct the violence and oppression that has been placed on folks of marginalized races is senseless and systemic. But it is only when those who are in power make the connection to start including those who they classified as Other as themselves that they can start to understand the ways that oppression works. Deckard starts off the movie set in the idea that he can distinguish himself from replicants. He truly believes that their struggles and needs are those of an Other that he does not need to care about. But as he meets more of the replicants and learns of their struggles and pains he starts to blur that line and struggles to make the Self vs Other that allowed him to hunt the replicants in the first place.
