Blade Runner

In class last week several people expressed certainty about Deckard's being a replicant based on references online and to Ridley Scott's own words. One of the premises used to support this argument, or statement, referred to the unicorn dream; however, we never discussed, and those people never revealed, what they thought that dream actually signified. I suppose the dream is there as an answer to the actual question, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" If Ridley Scott chose to use Deckard's dream as the answer, then Deckard is an android and the answer is "no," which leads to more questions than answers.

However, the unicorn dream may actually be calling attention to the question, not answering it. In drawing the audience into the question of whether or not Deckard is human, Ridley Scott portrays him dreaming, and a dream about a unicorn can not be an implanted memory because that is not a real-world/life image. Therefore, if Deckard is human his dream signifies the greater distance between humans and cyborgs by calling attention to the originality of a human dream vs. the unknown of what happens to an android when it sleep. Or, if Deckard is actually a replicant, the dreams signifies that cyborgs do not dream of electric sheep. I think an alternate title for the movie could have played with the title of the book more, saying something like, "What if Androids Dream of Unicorns?" Although, that would ruin the ambiguity about Deckard's identity, it more precisely addresses what this concept insinuates. What is the difference between an android, specifically the replicants in Blade Runner, and a human being? Why, for my part, was I so unsure of Deckard's origins?

I do not know if Ridley Scott meant the audience to know one way or the other, and though I realized the question was there, I did not draw any conclusions from the imagery in the movie. I saw that Deckard had a rare human ability to recognize replicants, something a cyborg could be programmed to be able to do. I saw that he had a strange attraction for Rachel, even though he knew she was a cyborg. He apparently felt that being a cyborg, or non-human, did not diminish her value or potential for humanity, emotions and love. However, he showed strong emotions towards her, a human quality. He was weaker than the other cyborgs, but maybe he was just an older model. He did not have a fear of death as the other cyborgs, the Nexus6 generation, had to fear, and those specifics were never clarified. If Deckard could be seen as a human, his dream calls attention to the question about the differences between android and human; however, even as a human, his actions and attraction to replicants suggests a close link between man and robot. The human body is "created," given that it develops into the grown-up shapes that the replicants are originally produced as, but the organs and functions of the body, given time to learn, develop, and experience, are all the same yet unique for each body, human or replicant. A cold, reserved person may seem more mechanical than a four-year-old android, and an android left to live as long as it will would, according to the movie, become unidentifiable as an android. Therefore, the unicorn dream does seem to answer the question, that, whether Deckard is human or not, androids are not so different from human beings that they dream of electric sheep. And , if Deckard is meant to be a replicant, then they not only dream of real sheep, but dream of creations of the imagination like unicorns, which suggests the infinite potential of the human body once endowed with life, human or non-human, to create, imagine, and be like-human.

All of this seems to lead to more questions such as how much "life" do we endow into robots, machines, computers? How like-human are machines; how like-machines are humans; how valued will/should human creation and imagination be when machines have their own minds to create unicorns and dream; how do we make machines that dream and do we want to? And, can any of these questions be answered?