Putting Right "The BLADE RUNNER Scene Everyone Gets Wrong"

Over at "Eyebrow Cinema," a Youtube channel I've sometimes watched, I came across a new essay by Daniel Simpson, its proprietor,  regarding BLADE RUNNER, Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi masterpiece. Built around the film's much-commented-upon love scene, Simpson calls his essay "The Blade Runner Scene Everyone Gets Wrong," then proceeds to, himself, get absolutely everything about the scene spectacularly wrong. Misreading this scene isn't new--various people who fail to pay sufficient attention to the movie have, with varying degrees of good faith, misread it for over 40 years now--but Simpson's particular misreading leads him to wildly misread the rest of the film as well, in a way that is both bizarre and, in my experience, unique. Fans of the film will be left scratching their heads in its wake.

[Rather than burden this with a lot of exposition, I'll be relying on viewers having seen the movie.]

Simpson says the film's love scene represents "a rather substantial blight on its legacy." He quotes Katy Haber, one of BLADE RUNNER's production executives, as saying "That was not a love scene; that was a hate scene," and he agrees, calling the scene "an explicit act of violence and abuse, underpinned by Deckard's objectification of Rachel." Eventually, Rachel goes along with Deckard's sexual advances, "but only in response to Deckard's violence and coercion. In practice, the scene depicts an assault, with Deckard physically imposing his will on Rachel and only gaining a slim verbal permission through intimidation."

From there, Simpson enlarges his scope:

"BLADE RUNNER's hate scene is not an aberration from what is otherwise an uncritical romance. It is a further expression of the violence integral to Deckard's character, his relationship with Rachel and the broader narrative and themes of the film."

"The dynamics of the [Deckard/Rachel] relationship are not just inherently unequal but inherently hostile," as Deckard is "a state-appointed oppressor of [Rachel's] people, a killer of slaves who refuse to serve." Returning to the love scene, he says, "beyond the explicit violence [in the scene], there is also the implied threat that if Rachel refuses Deckard, she, too, will be killed for refusing to serve." Deckard, as Simpson sees it, is an example of "bigots lusting after the members of the marginalized group they hate." Deckard "can want Rachel, yet still deny her autonomy and personhood." As Simpson portrays it, Deckard looks at Rachel and thinks, "this is one that can benefit me by giving me what I want."

"If this were a love scene," Simpson continues, "Deckard couldn't turn around and continue murdering the members of Rachel's community on the basis of existing." Leaving out that these particular Replicants didn't just exist but had been on a murder-spree, killing, by then, the crew and all the passengers on the ship that brought them to Earth, crippling a cop and killing at least three others, including the head of a major corporation (and also leaving out why Deckard is on this mission in the first place, to which I'll return momentarily). Referring to Deckard's final showdown with Replicant leader Roy Batty, Simpson opines that "in what Deckard thinks will be his final moments before he dies, he uses the last ounce of his strength to spit at Roy, still viewing this Replicant as subhuman." Or perhaps just expressing some contempt for a fellow who just gleefully ran him to exhaustion then, while standing over him watching him struggling for life and failing, had just smugly grinned?

See, refuting Simpson's read here doesn't really take anything more than watching BLADE RUNNER. That is, in fact, all it takes to deflate most of what he says about it in the vid. One can confidently predict that fans of the movie who made their way here have been jumping out of their skins since they began reading my rundown of his "analysis," which depends on grinding under basically the entire film.

A central theme of BR is, "What is human?" Replicants are artificially created but they're not robots--not mechanical, soulless plates of metal and plastic welded together in a factory. They're flesh. Cut them, they feel pain and bleed, like anyone else. They have the ability to reason. They're developing their own emotions. A Replicant of this time, the opening crawl tells us, is "a being virtually identical to a human." The film is directly interrogating the dominant ideology of its world, which says that they're just mechanical tools that can be used or destroyed at will, where killing them wasn't even called execution; "it was called retirement." Deckard is a vehicle for this. These are the headline "broader narrative and themes of the film."

Simpson allows that BR "does portray Deckard's growing disillusionment with his profession and the ideologies it is based on," but never mentions that Deckard, as the story begins, had left the Blade Runner business altogether and had no intention of ever coming back to it. He's given up the violence Simpson insists is "integral to Deckard's character." He had to be directly threatened to get him to agree to one last go-around, and--also unacknowledged by Simpson--that threat hangs over him through everything that happens after. The empathy Simpson says Deckard develops only toward the end of the picture was apparently already there before its beginning. The early cuts of the film straight-up say (and the later ones all essentially show) that's why he stopped doing that sort of work. As he tells Rachel at one point (in every version), he gets the shakes: "I get 'em bad." After he kills Zora, the first of the Replicants he's been dispatched to destroy, he's visibly disturbed and immediately buying some booze to try to drink it away. Bryant, the police captain who forced him to come back, takes one look at him, says, "Christ, Deckard, you look almost as bad as that skin-job you left on the sidewalk." Deckard isn't some bigoted representative of government oppression who, in his dealings with Rachel, is taking advantage of the dominant ideology for his own selfish benefit. He's a person who has broken with that ideology, but--essentially enslaved himself--has been forced back into killing, something that, unlike the caricature of him offered by Simpson, he clearly doesn't enjoy or want to do. The movie catalogues the last stages of his break with all of it.

Rachel was an experiment, an effort to make Replicants more human by giving them a past--memories of a life lived, all the experiences that make us into us, artificially implanted into her mind and as real to her as our own memories are to us. And it worked. And then, after living her entire life thinking herself an ordinary woman, she finds out her family isn't her family, her friends may not be her friends, her memories aren't hers and she isn't even human in the way her world thinks of as "human." That sudden and complete loss of her own sense of identity plays into everything else that happens with her, particularly the love scene. When Deckard explains to Rachel what she really is, it's done cruelly, thoughtlessly, and he immediately regrets it, trying--badly--to pass off what he said as a joke, then, when that doesn't work, offering her a drink, which she could clearly use. He goes to get one for her and she runs away, context for later and some things Simpson apparently forgot, as, in his description of the scene, he says Deckard cruelly exposing that Rachel's memories are implants "and dismisses her." Serves Simpson's narrative, but doesn't reflect what happened.

Later, "the first modest gesture of kindness Deckard shows Rachel," says Simpson, "is inviting her out to join him for a drink." This, Simpson says, is because he's attracted to her. But while Rachel initially turns him down, she then shows up anyway, and when Deckard is about to be killed by Leon, another Replicant, she kills Leon in order to save him. The movie doesn't, as Simpson would have it, merely show Deckard being attracted to Rachel (and Simpson's characterization of this as a lustful bigot's attraction to one of the marginalized group he hates is beamed in from some other planet). The two are clearly attracted to one another.

But there's a problem: Rachel--whom Deckard had just learned has now been targeted for termination too, killing her assigned to him--has lost her own identity and doesn't trust her emotions, doesn't trust who she is. She lets her hair down, plays the piano, tells Deckard she "remembers" lessons but didn't know if she could actually play. "You play beautifully," he assures her and leans in to kiss her--where things are headed. Into it but still not willing to trust herself, she gets up to leave. If she goes out the door, she's dead, a target who can be shot on sight. Deckard forcibly prevents her from leaving, pushes her back into the apartment--protecting her, not, as Simpson would have it, treating her as a slave and implying he will kill her if she refuses to serve (something he couldn't do anyway). In the moment, he's trying to force her to confront, rather than run away from, her feelings; she kisses him at first, then tells him she can't rely on them--like what just happened with the piano. It's a line many viewers have chosen, over the years, to ignore (which is part of why so many get the scene wrong). She finally gives in to them, not to him. She is human. Or "human." Deckard isn't "denying her autonomy and personhood"--he's affirming them when she, herself, is doubting. Simpson says the scene captures "Deckard's violence and Rachel's powerlessness with horrifying precision," but the film establishes that, in a physical confrontation, Deckard is no match for a Replicant. Rachel could leave--or break him in half--at any moment, if she so chose.

Closer to movie's end, Deckard has it out with Batty. Batty spares Deckard's life when he has every reason to simply let Deckard die, then, just before dying himself, delivers his profound and affecting "tears in rain" monologue, which is not the work of some unfeeling automaton. Simpson suggests this could have affected how Deckard sees Replicants--doesn't consider that this could have just further confirmed what Deckard had already been feeling about them (since most of what points to that is absent from his essay)--but then just brushes past it. After Batty dies, Blade Runner Gaff shows up and reveals, to Deckard's visible horror, that he knows about Deckard and Rachel. "It's too bad she won't live," Gaff says, "but then again, who does?" Deckard returns to his apartment, where he has Rachel stashed, and as Simpson asserts in perhaps his most ludicrous misreading of the film yet, "the tension [in the scene] is partially that Rachel may already be dead, but also that if she is alive, Deckard may be about to kill her." Nothing in the scene even hints that so much as a thought of killing Rachel had ever entered Deckard's mind. He's clearly scared to death that Gaff or another Blade Runner may be there, may have already killed her. He calls out her name weakly and repeatedly, as if already anticipating the worst with dread, and when he finds her alive, his relief is so great he seems near tears and kisses her.

There are multiple cuts of BLADE RUNNER but as with much of the rest of what he's said, the ending Simpson describes seems to exist solely in his own mind:

"The inherent ambiguity in the film's sudden ending is enhanced precisely because of how toxic the relationship is. The uncertainties are not just how long Rachel has to live or if the pair will be hunted by Gaff or another Blade Runner but that Rachel is now trapped with this violent killer, whose burgeoning sympathy for Replicants has still consistently been marked by abuse and disgust."

In the actual ending of every cut, the character-arcs of Deckard and Rachel have run as I've described and contrary to almost everything Simpson says and, their having concluded, Deckard chooses to throw away his entire life for one on the lam and hunted by running away with Rachel, a woman who may not live another week. Two lonely people who found one another and bonded in a desperate situation, choosing a romantically desperate course.[1]

A great, great movie.

When Simpson says "the Final Cut of BLADE RUNNER portrays a brutal and abusive relationship," and that the relationship is "couched in cruelty, bigotry and violence," who knows what he's watching? Simpson notes several things that should have given him pause before offering up his odd "analysis." Of the love scene that started all of this, he says

"That scene itself is contradictory, capturing Deckard's violence and Rachel's powerlessness with horrifying precision, but the tension in the score soon gives way to swooning Vangelis music, implying a love scene."

Also implying that Simpson has gotten something very wrong. His admits that his "portrait" of the movie "has admittedly been muddled." For example, the "happy" ending that was applied to BLADE RUNNER's original theatrical cuts--the cuts everyone saw for the first 10 years of the movie's existence--offers, he insists, a "reframing of Deckard and Rachel's relationship" that is "egregious" because "rather than the darkness and toxicity evident throughout the rest of the film, this ending suddenly yields to conventional romance," which is "something the rest of the film empathically does not support." Except the rest of that version also even more explicitly and emphatically supports the analysis I've offered here, Deckard's first-person monologue (dropped from subsequent versions of the film) covering his disgust, right from the beginning, with being a killer, that his boss threatened to kill him if he didn't do this job, his empathy with Replicants, his feelings for Rachel.[2] Simpson also notes that

"legacy sequel BLADE RUNNER 2049 would again reframe the relationship as a romance, with Harrison Ford's performance and the filmmaking suggesting this deep love affair and romantic longing for the now-departed Rachel."

So the love scene contradicts Simpson's reading of it. The unfortunate "happy ending" initially slapped on it contradicts his interpretation of the movie. The sequel contradicts it. As I've covered here, the Final Cult from which Simpson is allegedly working contradicts it and the earlier cuts even more explicitly contradict it.

Maybe all of this should have led to a rethink before immortalizing such a bizarre and contrary take on the film in a video essay?

None of this is to beat up on Simpson himself, who seems like an earnest fellow, a lover of film who has done some good work in the past and will no doubt do good work in the future. I do get the idea that he's pretty young. I'm not an old-enough fogey that I'd reflexively assign this as an explanation for how he botched this so badly. I saw BLADE RUNNER when I was pretty young--younger than Simpson would be now--and still understood these things he's gotten so very wrong. He began by focusing on a scene several people have gotten wrong over the years, mostly by emotionally reacting to the images shown--a guy pushing around a girl--without the context of the rest of the film or trying to apply to it, in isolation, more refined contemporary notions of coercion and consent that, in context, just aren't relevant to it. He just seems, for whatever reason, to have taken it in a particularly weird direction, by trying to reinterpret the entire film to give it a context that would make such criticism of the scene valid. Back in 1982, studio suits were afraid people wouldn't be able to follow BLADE RUNNER and insisted that the filmmakers create a first-person voiceover for Deckard to clarify some points. Simpson's reaction--to a version of the film without the voiceoiver--offers a good example of why they thought this.

--j.

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[1] For decades, it's been a Hollywood convention to throw in often-very-thinly-drawn romantic plots and subplots of this kind. If one sees this one as thin--some have over the years--it's still, in my view, worked out pretty well.

[2] Simpson has seen this, because he covered it on his channel in 2022.