The Life Behind the Eyes

When thinking about the role of eyes in Bladerunner, I'm guessing most people immediately think of the same saying that popped in to my head, "the eyes are the window to the soul". I think the role of eyes in this movie definitely stresses that, as Deckard is able to tell the difference between humans and replicants mostly through observing their eyes. Humans have real eyes, that are able to express feeling and emotion through the involuntary reactions such as dilation of the pupil. Although the replicants' eyes have been constructed and engineered to function and appear incredibly similar to the eyes of the humans, when they are put under very close scrutiny one can tell the difference, because behind the eyes of the replicant there is no soul. As similar as replicants may appear to humans, almost perfectly genetically designed to be inseparable, the one feature that is impossible to perfectly replicate is the eyes.

Bladerunner: Tears in the Rain Unscripted

This was the first time I had watched this film. I had told my dad that we were going to watch this movie in class and he was so excited. He said that I was going to love this film, and I did. It was a little scary at times, but still good. I had learned from a friend that the scene at the end where Roy is talking about how tears disappear in the rain and such was completely done without a script. Wow! I couldn't believe that. I had started to get emotional during that part, and to learn that the actor (Rutger Hauer) had done his own monologue made it even better.

I think there is an obsession with eyes in this movie because of the old saying: "eyes are the window to the soul." While watching the movie you could eventually tell which people were replicants  and vice versa. But I couldn't tell at the end of the movie when Roy was dying. Maybe he made his own soul? Instead of just being born with one? The soul is one of the things that can't be given to a robot. Maybe that's why there was such an obsession with eyes in this movie.

I definitely feel I need to re watch it to pick up on things I missed!

Eyes and Emotions

Eyes may play the most crucial role in the film Blade Runner. The subject matter arises numerous times throughout the movie in dialogue and shown in major scenes of the film. But why are eyes so important?

Eyes are used to differentiate replicants from humans. Replicants are so humanistic a Voight-Kampff test is needed to study the eye; The test measures pupil dilation and other eye movements in regards to emotions. Replicants often fail the test because their automated responses are not the same as humans.

I believe that replicants automated responses are different from humans (besides the obvious of not being human) because they lack actual memories provided through sight. Humans remember the majority of their lives because they have seen and lived through an event that produces an emotional response. Replicants, on the other hand, are provided with a myriad of memories that are not their own. Because of this they do not have the same emotional ties to an event like humans. Human bodies have reactions to certain events that we cannot control like pupil dilation. Say the pupil dilates when a human witness's a murder, if you feed that same murder memory to a replicant, the pupils automated response would also have to be fed to the replicant. I'm not sure how exactly the replicants gain their memories, but it seems as though they gain memories through photographs and stories, so there are no automated responses associated with their memories.

To be Human

The film Blade Runner has a direct link to A Cyborg Manifesto because Donna Haraway focused primarily on the concept of how years of changes in the world have caused the lines separating organisms to blur. She described how the boundaries separating the human vs animal, human/animal vs machine, and the physical vs non-physical have dissolved creating a blend between the ideas. This theme was strongly felt throughout the entire movie because many times, the viewers are not immediately sure of who is a human and who is a replicant. In Rachel's case, she herself was a replicant yet believed she was human. This begs the question, who is to decide what is human and what is not?
Many people base security of their own humanity off of their previous experiences. They have memories of "human" experiences and emotional responses to those experiences. However, how much trust can we place in those memories? One of the most surprising things I have learned is how easy it is to alter, erase, and create memories. Memories are easily altered by the emotions one feels in the present. It can be compared to telling a story and each time that story is told, it is changed a bit depending on the way it is told. Even psychologists have faced scrutiny in their experiments by "planting" memories into people's minds accidentally by trying to bring up memories that don't exist so often that the patient believes it themselves.
Rachel is the primary example of the fragility of ones mind because she truly believed the memories put in her head. While she believed she was recalling her own experiences, she was really recounting the experiences of Tyrell's niece. Deckard was the one who shattered her false knowledge by showing her the truth. Immediately you can see the fear and confusion in her eye because while she believed she was living in a world full of loving experiences between people, she realized she had not experienced a single bit of it.
The eyes have much importance in the film because eyes are one of the most important ways to read body language, which is the primary source of communication in the world. In the beginning there is a man being interviewed by a test "designed to provoke an emotional response." Eyes reveal every emotion. Your pupils automatically give away your interest in the atmosphere around you based on their dilation and eye contact can reveal how comfortable one feels in an environment. Eyes are the one part of a person that cannot lie.

On Eyes

The recurring use of odd lighting to highlight replicant eyes in the movie is meant to draw attention to their non-human state. Since so much of our communication as a species is through nonverbal facial cues, especially around the eye area, we have come to associate human eyes with human-ness and individual personality. Reading the intent, mood, and health of another individual by taking in details about their eyes unconsciously is a fundamental part of how we operate and associate identity. Because the eyes are highlighted ominously, we are told that the character isn't normal in an instinctual way.
However, I don't think that the replicants' non-human state is part of a non-human nature. The movie explicitly states that they have all the fundamentals and complexities of human emotion and thought, but without the life experience to shape these things or give them context for the individual. The crux of the movie is Tyrell Corporation's attempt to ensure that replicants don't develop past reactionary programming; they are edging onto the border of being human, and society wants them to stay on that side of the border. The “monster” of Otherness and uncanniness is to them less terrifying and less of a physical threat than awakened humanity; love dolls and factory machines don't suddenly rise up, but people do.
There is an unspoken ethical streak through the movie that reflects a side of this. When “real” animals are mentioned, as in the replicant tests, humans are expected to have compassion and not harm them. There may be an in-the-movie-world understanding that a replicant is only a replicant as long as it stays on that other side of the human divide, and once they become people the whole basis of their exploitation crumbles.
The strange eyes aren't eerie because they belong to something inhuman, but because they belong to something becoming human. As long as that something remains a something and not a someone, however uncanny the may be the world can still manage them. An identity, a wholeness of self, is expressed by the familiar human-ness of their eyes; and that difference is what sets Deckard and Batty apart from the other replicants.

Do AIs Have Human Rights?

     There's an interesting point raised in the Blade Runner, which has been discussed thousands of times nowadays but is still fascinating. Should AIs have human rights?
     Obviously in the movie the Replicants had none of the human rights. They looked exactly like human and thought and felt almost the same as humans, except lacking some sort of empathy in a test. However, their life was limited in four years by programming; they were used as tools; they saved and killed people under orders; they were forcefully "retired" when humans were tired or even afraid of them. People could never tell the difference between a Replicant and a human simply based on their appearance, and a Replicant could live a human life as long as he or she was not detected. However, once they failed the test, all the human rights they had before were deprived in a second. When some creature, or individual, could think, believe, love, and struggle for life (as Rachel and Roy in the movie), should humans still put themselves in the place of God to decide if the AIs are "human" enough to have basic civil rights? Or, in other words, when something is already intelligent enough to make their voluntary choice, can we just simply deny their most fundamental right to life?
     At the end of the movie, Roy said to Deckard:" 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 darkness at Tannhäuser Gate. " He reminded me of an episode in the TV series Torchwood. The Torchwood team was using an alien as a bait in order to find out who was behind the incident. Such decision definitely put the alien in huge danger, but the leader never hesitated on it. A teammate questioned him that when it was never okay to use a person as a bait, it was totally fine to use an alien. I didn't remember how the team leader reacted, but the meaning behind that scene was that humans had the highest priority above anything else.
     I feel that it was a similar case in the Blade Runner. Replicants were sent out to do the things so no human would need to do so and kill the peoples so no human would need to commit murder. They were placed outside of humans' laws in the very beginning, but it turned out to be their crime and lead them to execution eventually.

Do we have false memories?

The fact that Rachel is really the only replicant that can feel fear and love raises some questions. It questions what it really means to be human. Rachel was unaware she wasn't a human until Rick told her. She had memories from when she was a little girl because her creator integrate false memories into her that she thought were hers, but were really a humans actual memories. These memories and since she has been around humans her whole life most likely are the cause for her ability to feel for others or to become scared. This questions what it really means to be able to get scared or love someone else. How do we know if these are real feelings or just something we perceive to be real because we trick ourselves into thinking they are real. We grew up being taught that these feelings are real so our brains trigger when we believe we should love someone else or we should be scared. So our we actually loving someone or are they based on false feelings like the false memories Rachel has integrated into her? It's a hard question to process, but this can go back to questioning what humanity really is. Rachel always thought she was a human, but she has always been a replicant. All of us as humans could be something different such as a replicant, but maybe never know just as Rachel didn't know. We could have been placed in this world or created in this world and have been given false memories, a fake planet created for us, a fake history so we don't question who we are or what we are. We could be a giant experiment or simulation created by a higher civilization or alien form from another galaxy. They could be watching over us to see how long it takes for us to destroy our planet or to see if we can get off of Earth before it's too late. There is no way of knowing this is happening, but the question is raised from the fact Rachel never knew she was not a human.