The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction

Seven Blade Runner ’s Moving Still

130 s e v e n Blade Runner’s Moving Still In the time that has elapsed since Blade Runner’s first commercial release, Ridley Scott’s 1982 science-fiction film has been retroactively hailed as one of the most powerful and influential examples of cinematic postmodernism .1 Although Blade Runner has achieved almost canonical status in the annals of film theory, the discomfort displayed by its earliest critics serves as a telling index of the film’s subversive depiction of a posthuman condition.2 Released in the shadow of the cozy humanism of E.T., which treated the alterity of the extraterrestrial with the familiarity of a domesticated pet, Blade Runner alienated its original audiences. Most of the reviews were not overly empathetic. Critics were more or less in agreement with Pauline Kael who wrote: “Blade Runner has nothing to give the audience. . . . It hasn’t been thought out in human terms.”3 Time reviewer Richard Corliss’s rendition of Kael’s lament describes the film in truly monstrous terms: “Blade Runner, like its setting, is a beautiful, deadly organism that Marder-Ch07.indd 130 Marder-Ch07.indd 130 11/10/2011 4:19:09 PM 11/10/2011 4:19:09 PM Blade Runner’s Moving Still 131 devours life.”4 Rolling Stone’s Michael Sragow adds to the chorus with the remark that Scott both overdoses on atmosphere and deliberately underdevelops the emotional tension. . . . His method alienates rather than entrances, completely undercutting his drama. When signs of humanity are so fleeting in both humans and replicants, the audience has no stake in their life or death.5 The persistent echo from all three reviewers revolves around one common complaint—Blade Runner simply isn’t “human” enough. Somehow more or less “human” than a human film, Blade Runner flunks the cultural empathy test. In Blade Runner’s terminology, this film is a “replicant.” And yet, these critical judgments rely on the assumptions and distinctions that the film so radically puts into question. The film posits a world in which humans are indistinguishable from androids to the naked “human” eye, in which the terms “life” and “death” are irrevocably confounded, and where a visual technological apparatus, called the “empathy test,” is used to determine who can be called “human.” By searching for traces of humanity in this film, the critics must blind themselves to the way in which they are implicated in the film’s reflection on the difference between humans and androids. Blade Runner explicitly interrogates what we mean when we speak of a “human film.” What, after all, about film is “human”? Can we unproblematically wish to identify those celluloid figures that are mechanically animated in and by film as “humans”? The critics’ desire to witness “humanity” perfectly doubled through filmic representation is a symptomatic misrecognition—and one that Blade Runner explicitly exposes. The filmic metaphor of the “empathy test” frames the question of the relationship between “human” subjects and the moving pictures that purport to reproduce and represent them so faithfully. It is therefore utterly appropriate that the “empathy test” in Blade Runner is, in fact, an elaborate eye examination. Because the “humans” in the film cannot identify androids as androids with the naked human eye, the bounty hunter, or blade runner, must use the empathy test as a prosthesis. The blade runner looks into a video screen that projects an image of the suspected replicant’s eye. The alleged replicant is given a series of questions to answer that are designed to produce an emotional response. But the blade runner does not heed the verbal response—the true test occurs in Marder-Ch07.indd 131 Marder-Ch07.indd 131 11/10/2011 4:19:09 PM 11/10/2011 4:19:09 PM 132 Photography and the Prosthetic Maternal the dilation of the replicant’s pupil. The replicant’s eye is thereby stripped of its power to look, and it becomes a magnified object of the blade runner’s mechanically amplified gaze. In the logic of this film, the emotional nerve is directly linked to the optic nerve and emotional response can be read only by calibrating quantitative movements in the optic nerve. Although, in the empathy test, the emotional nerve is linked to the optic nerve, the relationship between verbal and visual registers is not purely mimetic. According to the implicit logic of the film, a replicant might...