The pivotal, climactic scene of the 1982 film, Bladerunner, a science fiction classic some also argue is the greatest film ever made, involves the character, Roy Batty, played by Rutger Hauer, and the character, Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford. It is a dark, rainy night inhabited only by Deckard’s fear and Batty’s desire for revenge. Earlier in the film, Deckard, the titular Bladerunner, a form of freelance hitman employed by the cops, is assigned Roy Batty and his three friends, Zhora, Leon and Pris, as targets to be hunted to their deaths. By the time we get to that climactic scene, only Roy and Deckard remain. All four of Roy Batty and his friends are replicants, near perfect replicas of human beings created by the Tyrell Corporation whose head is Eldon Tyrell. But they have become unstable, dangerous, instead of doing as they are told, for replicants are in fact really only near human slaves. Some defy their human masters and then they must be destroyed. In fact, so dangerous can replicants become - in some cases they are both more intelligent and physically stronger than human beings - that they have been hardwired with a fixed four year lifespan in the Nexus 6 iteration of replicants we see in the film.
Replicants have been banned from Earth in the setup to Bladerunner but Roy, Leon, Zhora and Pris have come to Earth, contrary to the law, in search of the most valuable thing in the galaxy - more life! The latter three will die at Deckard’s hand in pursuit of this but that still leaves Roy, the most intelligent and most dangerous of them all. So smart is Roy that he even manages to trick his way into the home of his creator and “father” - Eldon Tyrell - who lives in a huge pyramid-like building accessible only by a singular elevator. Roy uses one of Tyrell’s friends and employees, J.F. Sebastian, to get access via the elevator and, in a scene full of the meaning appropriate to when a prodigal son meets his father, his creator and his God, he crushes the skull of all three in his created hands after Tyrell tells him that there is indeed no way to give him more life. What’s done is done, how things are is how things are. You are, dear Roy, what you are.
Yet Deckard is still on the trail of Roy Batty and, having followed the trail to J.F. Sebastian’s place, he is confronted by Pris - whom he kills. Roy returns to the dark, atmospheric building populated by the synthetic creatures Sebastian keeps around as friends for his amusement to find Pris’ dead and bloodied body - which he briefly and genuinely mourns over, wiping some of her blood on his face. Deckard takes a shot at Roy but fails to kill him and then Roy grabs Deckard’s gun hand through a wall, dislocating two of his fingers as punishment for the deaths of the females Zhora and Pris. Thereafter, he gives Deckard a few seconds to start running before he begins hunting him down, howling animal cries as he does and even though he begins to feel the physical effects of the fact that his own, hardwired life is nearly up. Deckard, with his fairly useless right hand, tries to get away, climbing to the roof of the building, but Roy is never very far away and constantly taunts him. Suddenly, Roy appears on the roof as well just as Deckard is about to make good his escape and, in his desperation, Deckard runs and tries to jump to an adjacent rooftop in the opposite direction. He fails to make it and is left clinging precariously to a steel girder that juts out from the roof. Roy follows him and makes the jump easily, he walks to Deckard and, standing over him, says, “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.”
Deckard, tired, injured and soaking wet through in the constant rain, cannot hang on to the girder any longer. As a final act of defiance, knowing he is going to fall to his death, he spits in the direction of Roy Batty before relinquishing his grip on the slippery metal… but then a twist! Roy reaches forward and grabs Deckard by the left wrist just in time and lifts him up onto the rooftop where he drops him down again. For a moment there is more tension as Deckard backs up to a part of the building jutting upwards from the roof - does Roy plan to kill Deckard with his bare hands as he had killed Tyrell? It seems not for Roy, bare-chested, bloodied and holding a dove in his left hand, sits down, cross-legged, on the rainy rooftop and gives one of the most memorable and meaningful speeches in film history as the helpless Deckard looks on:
“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Time to die.”
And with that, Roy Batty bows his head in the rain and dies, the hard limit of his life reached. The dove, released from his grasp, flies away, a metaphor for Roy’s free spirit.
It is Rutger Hauer himself who has remarked, before he sadly passed away in 2019, ironically also the year in which Bladerunner and so Roy Batty’s death is set, that this speech Roy gives, something which Hauer himself heavily modified without director, Ridley Scott’s, knowledge, is not really connected to the rest of the film. Most of the film plays out as a film noir, “good guy versus bad guys” kind of film. But this disconnected speech, the only real insight we get into the psyche of the replicants in the film besides the necessary plot point that they want to live longer than they have been created to, fundamentally changes all that. Is it not now the case that the “good guy” in Bladerunner is, in fact, Roy Batty? Is it not now the case that, in the light of this speech, Deckard is an inauthentic man trapped in a system in which he must kill beings on someone else’s say so, an act of bad faith in the fiction of a self that has been assigned him by others that he cannot escape from? Is not the whole human system of control that creates, determines and destroys here exposed as venal, cruel and ingenuine? Is not the dying Batty’s choice to save Deckard’s life, a thing he did not need to do and which would have had no consequences for anybody since Deckard was going to die by not being able to hold on any longer anyway, the most human act in the film? As Rutger Hauer himself has said, Batty wanted to “make his mark on existence... the replicant in the final scene, by dying, shows Deckard what a real man is made of.” He does this by an extreme example of authenticity and self-actualisation, an act of anarchy in which he rebels from every expectation of him.
Batty is a replicant, a being who was created by a species to be its slave. They determined everything about what he would be even upto and including the point at which he would die. But Roy and his three friends are not willing to accept that. They are beings in their own right [a theme the later sequel Bladerunner 2049 will take up] and, as such, they have their own ideas about that, their own conscience and their own will. It was the human beings who gave them these things. But now the question that is raised by Roy in his authentic action in voluntarily saving Deckard is “What makes you most human?” and the answer comes back “acts of self-actualising authenticity” - becoming who you are. In this salvatory moment Roy Batty defines not only himself but, in the context of the film, he also defines humanity as well as his action to save Deckard is clearly the most consequentially human thing that takes place in the film. He shows Deckard what a human being is and makes the claim that, rather than a created machine, a human biology project, a mere tool and a slave, replicants are people too. This is ironic when read against the film’s script in which Eldon Tyrell, a mere commercialist, a businessman, an example of the inauthentic humans who buy and sell and use without ever knowing who they are, says that the motto of the Tyrell Corporation is “More human than human”, a slogan to sell his product, which is all Roy Batty and his friends are to him. But not so to Roy! In his voluntary and needless actions Roy proves that, without ever realising it or even caring, Tyrell was actually right. It would have been nothing for Roy to let Deckard drop to his death. It makes perfect sense in the film and no one could even blame him. Deckard was certainly trying to kill him, after all. But Roy spares his life just because he can and, in doing so, he defines with crystal clarity just who and what he really is: a being who can define himself against his creator, in spite of the narrative the species that hunts him down has given him, and over and against all expectations about him. Roy creates his own authenticity and his own identity and says that this, in end, is what real humanity actually is: the act of actualising who you yourself are as a person in the anarchy of a world we all have the power to define.
This realisation cannot be overestimated in its importance. In it, Roy Batty breaks all systems of human control and manifests a pure form of anarchy, an anarchy which comes from within - which, I suggest, is where true anarchy only ever really comes from. Beside him, Deckard, in director Ridley Scott’s mind also a replicant although he doesn’t know it, is playing the role that others have assigned him. He is the pawn, the tool, the inauthentic being who plays along with narrative boundaries others set for his life. But Roy, especially Roy, does not. In this climactic moment most of all he will not be defined by a role others have assigned him, a life others have dictated to him and even encoded in his biological make up. Instead, he will fulfill - and more than fulfill - Tyrell’s empty, commercial slogan and give it the meaning that Tyrell never even realised it had and he will do that by defining what real humanity actually is - rising above the control, the human narratives about identity and place and assigned meaning, to recreate himself anew as a being who knows who he is and who decides for himself what that will be - expectations and fictions of others and even biology be damned! Roy Batty here defines humanity because he does that thing which, as far as we know, is something only human beings can do - be creators themselves and say “I am this because I want to be this and I will be no other!”
The ending to Roy’s speech then gains a poignancy that can only be gained from recognising this realisation. “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” Roy Batty is not a thing, a creation, one of the crowd of inauthentic, generic beings many human beings regularly exist as. He is not just going through the motions of a role life has assigned him without self-awareness or his own consciousness. He is an individual, a unique being, one of a kind. He is Roy Batty. No one else is. No one else ever can or will be. This uniqueness, this precious, singular, uniqueness, is ephemeral, fleeting, temporary, contingent. It is the plaintive reflection of one who realises how important each person, whoever they are, is - but who also knows, in that same moment, that all bleeds back into a one without identity, without character, without personality. Like tears in rain: indistinguishable, unidentifiable. The moment of self-actualisation is also the moment of the realisation of one’s own annihilation. The moment of your creation is the moment of the recognition of your own inevitable destruction. In that moment in which you are most a self-defined something, you recognise that you are forever to be an indistinct part of the great Nothing. Yet this is not to be avoided, resisted, unimagined. It is to be accepted as who you are, part of that act of authenticity. And that’s why its highly appropriate that in this moment of such thorough-going definition and identification the very next action is Roy’s death. The time of such self-actualisation and authenticity is the “time to die”. For death is the eternity and life is only a brief flicker in time, an aberration. Who you are doesn’t matter at all. But if you should rise to the heights to which Roy did, overcome all the fiction of others who will try to assign you a role for you to play out, and become who you are, then the only place to go thereafter is death. And to embrace it willingly as the person you have made yourself to be exactly as Roy Batty did.
That is authenticity. That is self-actualisation. That’s the spirit!
PS The subject for this short essay came to me as I was flitting between being asleep and being awake this morning - as such thoughts often do for me. But as I was writing it it should be unsurprising to find that I found its subject matter very pertinent to our present moment in a world of global pandemics of disease, racism and prejudice. For very many people “who they are” is the defining question of their lives, one which brings them heartache, trouble and real distress. In some cases, people are even killed for who they see themselves to be or who they are. So i do not regard this essay as dealing with a trivial matter, nor is it merely an exercise in popular philosophy. For people of colour or for those who deal daily with issues of gender or sexuality “who they are” are consequential matters in ways that those who never have to give these things a second thought probably can barely understand. I stand with these people and I stand against those who want to argue for the supremacy of one kind of person over another. In many cases, these are the constricting human narratives of racial or gender supremacy that self-actualised human beings have to rise above. I believe in everybody’s ability to define for themselves who they are and for their right to do so - and for that to be respected by all others. So it is not merely an unfortunate observation that many anonymous people who have no clue who they are and have never even considered the question quite often threaten and harass those for whom such questions are all too existential. I think that being fully human, as Roy Batty shows, is about defining yourself, consciously and deliberately, but it is also about knowing and respecting who others are too. In every case. And it is also about recognising the anarchy of the void in which we all do that and how temporary, and so how precious, we all really are and could agree ourselves to be if only we had that awareness which Roy Batty had.
Peace be with you.
