CS Weekly Archive > The Big Picture > 12/21/07

From Electric Sheep to the Final Cut:
The Evolution of Blade Runner

By jason davis

As Ridley Scott's final cut of Blade Runner hits the DVD shelves, CS Weekly explores the evolution of its story and protagonist from Philip K. Dick's novel through the various iterations of the film.

Warning: The following article contains spoilers for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, as well as every iteration of Blade Runner.


Like many cinematic adaptations of Philip K. Dick's voluminous output—Minority Report, for one—Blade Runner takes its hook from the novel, but runs far afield of the literary antecedent. Blade Runner, as scripted by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples and realized by director Ridley Scott, inverts much of the novel's intent by altering the nature of the story's protagonist and the audience's viewpoint on the film's world.

Written in 1966 and published two years later, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? told the story of bounty hunter Rick Deckard and his pursuit of renegade androids in a feel-good consumer culture occupying a dying Earth. Dick's book presents a richly imagined society whose citizens exalt their empathy by caring for an ever-decreasing supply of live animals (or pretending to, in the case of the eponymous electric sheep). The depleted state of livestock is the result of a radioactive cloud that constantly erodes the genetic code of those who remain on Earth rather than immigrating to its prosperous off-world colonies. If the prospect of eventually being classified as "a special" —too gene-damaged to reproduce or hold down a worthwhile job—isn't reason enough to leave Earth, the deal is sweetened by a free custom-designed android to every colonist. However, these androids are illegal on Earth, and it's Deckard's job to "retire"—read: kill—any that make their way to the homeworld.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? developed from its author's reaction to Nazi atrocities during World War II. Rationalizing that only a deficiency of empathy could allow one people to exterminate another, Dick differentiated humans and androids in his book by the former's ability to empathize. Indeed, the novel's principal religion, Mercerism, is founded on the adherents' ability to empathize with Wilbur Mercer, the sect's martyr. The novel regards the androids as subhuman because they cannot empathize with Mercer, nor the nearly extinct animals populating the world. In the book, Deckard fears that he empathizes with his quarry. When compared to fellow bounty hunter Phil Resch's lust for android blood, Deckard is positively sympathetic to the artificial beings and their pursuit of a life free from slavery. Deckard, in fact, admires the androids' vitality and notes at one point that they have more purpose than his own wife, herself a slave to the Penfield Mood Organ, a device for inducing different states of mind.

Though Blade Runner discards Mercerism, Mood Organs, and much of the animal fetishism of Dick's novel, the relationship of mankind to its sentient machines is the greatest departure from the book. The film's replicants ("android" was discarded by writer David Peoples) are not subhumans bereft of empathy, but rather Nietzshe's Übermensch—superior beings with every evolutionary right to supersede their callow creators. This inversion has serious consequences for Deckard (Harrison Ford), who develops even further in Scott's 1992 director's cut than his late literary creator could ever have imagined.

In the book, Deckard is a middling bureaucrat with delusions of purpose reinforced by Mercerism and his electric sheep. He's the department's second best bounty hunter and is only offered the cases featured in the novel because Holden, his superior, got sloppy and took a laser beam to the spine. For dramatic purposes, the movie turns all this around. As the film opens, Deckard is retired from being a blade runner (the film's designation for police officers tasked with retiring replicants). When Holden (Morgan Paull), Deckard's successor, is shot, Captain Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh) calls upon the legendary blade runner to finish the job. Rather than a freelance bounty hunter attached to a police department, the film makes Deckard himself an elite lawman and, at the behest of Harrison Ford, several sequences of the blade runner investigating his targets were added to the script, bolstering the detective element of his work. With these changes onboard and the loss of the literary Deckard's emotional crutches, the film's protagonist is already a more dynamic character than his prose counterpart. Thus, the film elevates its antagonists to superhuman status while upgrading the importance of its protagonist in a complimentary fashion.

Early in the film, as in the novel, Deckard is dispatched to the headquarters of the corporation that manufactures the state-of-the-art Nexus-6 replicants. At the Tyrell Corporation (the novel names it the Rosen Association), the blade runner administers the Voigt-Kampff test—a measure of empathy designed to differentiate authentic humans from replicants attempting to mimic human behavior—to Tyrell employee Rachael (Sean Young, in the movie), who fails. In the book, the corporation's head, Eldon Rosen (Tyrell in the film, played by Joe Turkel), undermines the test by explaining that Rachael lacks empathy due to a harsh childhood aboard a deep space vessel that robbed her of normal human experiences. This wrong-foots the bounty hunter, who then becomes vulnerable to Rosen's bribery—a live owl perhaps? While the owl and Voigt-Kampff questions featured in the movie represent the last vestiges of Dick's fauna fetishism, the film's Deckard shows none of the weakness evident in his prose predecessor. After an extended interrogation, he pegs Rachael as a replicant and even recognizes that she's unaware of her own nature.

This motif of the cinematic Deckard outshining the book's bounty hunter is constantly reiterated by his ongoing relationship with Rachael. In the novel, she's a manipulative pawn of the Rosen Association. She pushes his buttons to control him and, when the two eventually make love, she pushes the novel Deckard over the edge in terms of his self-perceived sympathy toward androids. The movie Deckard, on the other hand, has the upper hand for the whole of their relationship. He outs her as a replicant, and though he's unprepared for her emotional response to the news, he eventually comforts her in a very human fashion. This Deckard is unashamed of his feelings for Rachael, and the final scenes of the film find him racing back to his apartment to ensure that she hasn't been retired by his fellow blade runner, Gaff (Edward James Olmos).

Noir-style narration was dubbed onto the theatrical release's soundtrack to mimic the inner monologue of hard-boiled detectives while allowing Deckard's internal commentary to clarify the action for the viewers. Early on, the voiceover mentions the blade runner's ex-wife, reveals Deckard's negative feelings about his former job, and offers up his opinions of the men he works with. The closing narration, played out over Deckard and Rachael's escape into the countryside, leaves no doubt as to his feelings for the replicant/girl: he loves her. The movie's Deckard has come to appreciate the replicants as equal, or possibly even superior, to humans. This reverses the novel's sense of ennui when Mercer is revealed to be a simulation rather than a flesh-and-blood savior. The theatrical cut replaces the book's downbeat ending with the potential for a hopeful future.

Of course, the theatrical cut of Blade Runner was far from the final word on the subject. It was an exercise in compromise that would be redressed nearly a decade later when a work print surfaced at a 70mm screening. The excitement over this alternate edit resulted in "The Director's Cut," a hastily prepared revision of the film that supplanted the original cut from 1992 until this year's final cut was released. The most obvious alterations were the deletion of Deckard's voiceover narration, the removal of the happy ending where he rides into the sunset with Rachael, and the addition of a brief dream sequence featuring a unicorn. Though the modifications seem minimal when compared to revisions like those James Cameron made to The Abyss, the cumulative effect in Blade Runner is a radical shift in Deckard's nature that totally alters the meaning of the movie—is the hunter, in fact, the hunted?

The notion that Deckard himself is a replicant is not without literary precedent. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the bounty hunter finds himself arrested, taken to an unfamiliar police precinct, and accused of being an android. The book makes little of this moment of doubt, and Deckard quickly discovers the precinct to be a front created by rogue androids to cover up their presence on Earth. With the help the fake police station's authentic human bounty hunter, Deckard escapes. Indeed, Deckard actually suspects Phil Resch, the other bounty hunter, to be an android, since he revels so much in their slaughter. When a Voigt-Kampff test reveals otherwise, Deckard's questioning of his profession, his affinity for the artificial life forms, and the morality of his society become all the more evident.

The director's cut, on the other hand, takes a much more serious swipe at Deckard's human heritage by building on a pair of subtle beats from the theatrical cut. Cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth's penchant for bouncing light off the retinas of the actors playing replicants was the first building block for Deckard's alleged artificiality. Throughout the film, the director of photography mimics the red-eye effect of amateur photography in close-ups of Rachael and other replicants (even the aforementioned Tyrell Corporation owl). In the middle of the film, an out of focus Deckard steps into shot behind Rachael and his pupils display the same eye-shine as the replicants. The second beat is the origami unicorn found outside Deckard's apartment in the director's cut's final scene. Throughout the film, Deckard has been shadowed by Gaff, who often comments on the protagonist's mental state with folded paper figurines—a chicken, a sexually stimulated man, and a unicorn. Through the meanings of the first two were obvious in the theatrical cut, the third was more esoteric. Deckard's final voiceover tells us Rachael was a replicant without the standard four-year expiration date. Perhaps Gaff is saying she's a mythical creature?

The director's cut redefines the unicorn with a brief shot of an actual horned horse charging through a wood. The beat appears in a dream Deckard has after revealing to Rachael that her memories are implants designed to give her a false past. Deckard knows what Rachael is thinking, and the unicorn sequence suggests that Gaff is similarly aware of Deckard's thoughts. Indeed, Gaff is always lurking in the shadows, keeping an eye on Deckard. The loss of the voiceover eliminates the history established for Deckard in the earlier edit, and the eye-shine and unicorn dream suggest that coming out of "retirement" might have a more sinister meaning for Deckard. Perhaps Bryant thinks the best way to hunt a replicant is with another replicant. Suddenly the sum of the subtle clues suggests that the film has been told from the perspective of a replicant who was unaware of his own nature. Of course, the evidence is ambiguous at best, but the evolution of both Deckard and the narrative from novel through the various edits of the movie cannot be ignored as an intriguing case of adaptation.

Ridley Scott's final cut cleans up some technical loose ends left hanging from the director's cut, but does nothing to dissuade theories of Deckard being a replicant. Philip K. Dick's subhuman machines lacking empathy have become superhumans constrained to four years to understand themselves before dying, while the bumbling bureaucrat who hunts them has become more like his quarry than even he suspects. The process of adaptation has created in the movie a mirror to the book, each with as much emotional import as the other.

Jason Davis has been the DVD Manager for CS Weekly, a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.

Blade Runner (Five-Disc Ultimate Collector's Edition) courtesy Warner Bros. Home Entertainment

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