Blade Runner: Genre, Conflict and Ambiguities

The conflict at the heart of Blade Runner is like that in most noir, neo-noir and detective films -- a fight between good and evil. In Blade Runner, this conflict is particularly compelling because the distinction between these two forces is ambiguous at best. The film uses the man vs. monster motif put forward in Shelley's gothic masterpiece Frankenstein (in Blade Runner it is updated to man vs. machine to fit the futuristic setting), and this motif allows the film to explore the question of what makes us human, intelligent, sentient, and mortal. The film's underlying philosophical tone is not used in a pedantic manner but rather to elicit sympathy for the film's most interesting characters -- the replicants themselves -- as well as the individuals responsible for creating them and destroying them. The hero of the film, Deckard, is one of the latter -- yet even he is conflicted in his quest (he does not even want to do the job -- but is pressured into it by his former police chief. Deckard goes on to fall in love with a replicant, further blurring the line between reality and illusion, human and machine, good and evil. This line is blurred completely in the film's climax when the main villain, the replicant Roy Blatty, displays heroic empathy (he saves Deckard's life), gives a speech in which he expresses longing for life, and describes in vivid terms what could only be identified as his soul thirsting for rest. Yet for Roy the replicant, there is no hope. Deckard meanwhile escapes with the machine he loves leaving audiences to wonder if Deckard himself is not a machine ("Blade Runner" 65). Thus, this paper will show how Blade Runner is a complex film that defies categorization and yet remains true to the tenor of the detective, noir and neo-noir genres by adhering to the good vs. bad paradigm and leaving the audience with more questions than answers.

As Paul Schrader points out, American cinema's focus on the darkness began well before Blade Runner hit the screens: a "new mood of cynicism, pessimism and darkness . . . had crept into the American cinema" (8) in the post-War period. Instead of brightening, the darkness turned darker as the years went by. Gritty realism and narratives expressing fatalism and hopelessness became common. From The Sand Pebbles to The French Connection, films showed that greater forces were at work, blinding and misleading central characters, thwarting heroes from... With Blade Runner, this sense of thwarted destiny is projected into a futuristic world where even the clear sense of what it means to be a human being is gone. A sense of self, of identity, of purpose, of love, of life, of being is pursued both by heroes and villains in the sci-fi neo-noir. Schrader echoes Raymond Durgnat's sentiment that "film noir is not a genre" so much as it is a cinematic expression of "tone and mood" (8). However, film noir does tend to typically focus on these forces that are internal and external to the main characters -- whipping in and out of them to such a degree that the ending lines of Touch of Evil reverberate through virtually every well-made film noir and neo-noir: "He was some kind of man." The lesson that noir teaches is exactly that: the more one looks, the more inscrutable and impossible to judge becomes every man's character. Noir is like the stylistic setting of the facts before God and saying, "It's all yours -- we don't know what to make of it." Or, as Doll and Faller put it, "genre functions through a set of codes that are recognized and understood by both the spectator and the filmmakers" (89). Blade Runner is recognized as a neo-noir because it respects those codes -- the centralization of conflict between two opposing forces and the ambiguity that results from an extended and empathetic examination of that conflict.
The conflict that is inherent in the noir genre is considerably spiritual when approached in this manner. In Blade Runner (as in Shelley's Frankenstein), the scientists have worked to extend life, to create life, to mimic it (how noble, how intelligent, how sophisticated and advanced these scientists must be) -- and yet they cannot even save themselves (nor do they really resemble any of the nobility that one might expect from a Creator). In many ways the head of Tyrell resembles Shelley's Frankenstein -- expressing an almost inhuman aversion for anything that actually reflects light, heart, or real life. His focus is on playing God. The result is a wide range of replicants -- some that look human and are kind (Rachael), some that are seductive (Pris and Zhora), some that are brutal (Leon) and some that are complicated by a mixture of intelligence and violence (Roy, the main villain). Yet, true to the genre, the main villain must be a mixture of intelligence and violence to pose as a sufficient threat to the…