I Don’t Care About The Unicorn
*this article contains spoilers for Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049*
My confession
I need to come clean with everyone. I … do not like Blade runner. I’ve never felt any connection to it. There is so much about this movie, on paper, that I should love, but it just leaves me cold.
Yes, I’ve seen the director’s cut (1992). I’ve seen the theatrical cut, and the Final Cut (2007), and multiple TV edits. I have seen this movie many, many times.
I have tried to like Blade Runner, or at least appreciate it. Film professors spoke about it with reverence, and close friends of mine rank it as their all-time favourite movie. As a deeply insecure 20-year-old student, I assumed I was missing something. I struggled to trust my own judgment. I felt alone in my opinion. Like with all things murky and icky back then, I just kind of stopped feeling anything at all. And stayed quiet.
So this is me, trying to work out why I don’t love Blade Runner.
A brief history of every version of Blade Runner
The Theatrical Cut
Blade Runner is Ridley Scott’s 3rd feature film, and follows 1979’s Alien (possibly my favourite movie). His adaptation of Philip K Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is set in a dystopian future where androids (aka Replicants) are almost indistinguishable from humans. The Tyrell corporation uses them as a labour force, and when four replicants escape from their post, it’s up to blade runner Deckard (Harrison Ford) to hunt them down. The book spent over a decade in Hollywood development before landing in front of Scott in 1980. Once he came on board, production sped along and wrapped in March of 1981.
Despite how I feel about this movie, I really do love the aesthetics and special effects. The
visuals are full of gorgeous art-deco matte paintings and models, reminiscent of the classic silent movie Metropolis, and the synth-heavy score by Vangelis is pitch perfect. Actor Rutger Hauer brings everything to his role as rebel replicant Roy Batty, stealing every scene he’s in, and a host of other characters flesh out this universe in interesting ways.
The finished 1982 theatrical cut was far from Scott’s intended vision. Warner Brothers thought the movie was bleak and confusing, so they cut out a lot of the explicit violence and added a voice-over to do some heavy exposition. The studio also used discarded footage from the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to tack on a somewhat happy ending. Despite the changes, it got a luke-warm reception, and critics called it slow and confusing. International audiences got a similar version that included more on screen violence.
Blade Runner earned its cult-classic status when released on Betamax and VHS in 1983. Film nerds, critics and scholars all feasted upon the film’s mix of noir and cyberpunk aesthetics and the central question of the film — what exactly makes a “real” human? The film’s popularity would grow exponentially over the next decade.
The Director’s Cut
Around 1990, a work print version of the film was discovered in the storage vault of post-production company TODD-AO. Thinking it was either a director’s cut or an international cut, sound preservationist Michael Arick bought the print for Warners and then screened it at a festival for 70mm prints. When they realized it was actually an unfinished workprint, Warner made 35mm versions and screened the print three more times at different festivals across the US.
The popularity of these screenings prompted Warner to work on an actual director’s cut in time for Blade Runner’s 10th anniversary. Though Scott provided extensive input for the new cut, it was Arick who supervised this version since Scott wasn’t available to do the actual work. The Director’s cut came close to Scott’s original vision, but he still felt it missed the mark. Most notably, this version restores the original ending (which is ambiguous and bleak), removes the exposition voice over (which Harrison Ford hated anyway), and adds a crucial 12-second dream sequence of a unicorn running through the woods.
There are many other versions of Blade Runner with strange, minor changes. The international version included more on screen violence, and different TV edits played around with nudity, violence and swearing. CBS removed the word “goddamn” from the line “He’s a goddamn one-man slaughter house”, and cut up the fight scene between Pris and Deckard, including the part when she wraps her legs around his head (prudes).
The Final Cut
In 2007, Scott released the Final Cut, which is now considered to be the film’s official version. A lot of small but important details have been tweaked — the audio is remastered and the colour grade tweaked, they fixed wires and matte edges to improve the visual effects, and they smoothed out some ADR dialogue. All of the original violence they shot back in 1981 has been added back, the ambiguous ending from the director’s cut remains, and there is no voice-over at all. Notably, the unicorn dream sequence is now represented as a daydream/memory that Deckard recalls while he is awake, which was the original intention of Scott and editor Terry Rawlings.
That goddamn unicorn dream sequence
The drama around the director’s cut vs the theatrical cut is legendary in film circles. During one particularly wild class about film genres, the teacher brought up Blade Runner on a regular basis. “Look how much difference 12 seconds can make to a film!” he exclaimed, in reference to the unicorn dream. Because of this sequence, we are meant to doubt Deckard’s entire reality. When police officer Gaff (Edward James Olmos) leaves an origami unicorn at Deckard’s door, it implies that he may know what’s in Deckard’s head, that Deckard’s dream was possibly designed by the Tyrell Corporation. Twist! The protagonist we thought was a person, may not actually be a person!
Not only do I find this detail underwhelming, I struggle to understand how, or why, the film uses a unicorn to represent Deckard’s inner life. His backstory is almost entirely absent, and we know basically nothing about him, except that he’s the “best in the biz”, an exceptional-yet-ordinary man with no personality. We learn nothing about his childhood or his memories (whether real or designed, like Rachael’s). There’s nothing about him that is “unicorn-ish”, no hints or suggestions as to why he’d have a connection to that kind of symbol. While I could extrapolate lots of different metaphors around the unicorn, the film doesn’t offer anything beyond this sequence. To use such a flamboyant, unique symbol in a void, to not replicate that motif anywhere else in the film, seems like such a waste.
There are a few other hints that suggest Deckard could be a replicant, like when Rachael asks him if he’s ever taken the Voight-Kampff test himself, or at the end when Gaff tells him “you’ve done a man’s job”. But ultimately, nothing in the narrative hinges on whether or not Deckard is human. Deckard is just a vehicle that introduces the audience to this universe. He does nothing heroic really, just hunts down beings that are clearly scared of him, who want a life beyond labouring for a corporate overlord. For all his lack of personality, he may as well be a replicant, and the movie would play out the same either way.
Rachael
CW for description of sexual assault
Sean Young’s portrayal of Rachael, a replicant with memories so sophisticated that she believes herself to be human, is stunning. She shows total control of her movements and facial expressions, while still giving a deeply emotional performance.
When I recently watched the final cut, I was struck by the intensity of her story. She suspects her life is a lie, that the men in her life are lying to her. She then risks her own safety to learn the truth from Deckard himself, who coldly tells her that her memories are actually those of Tyrell’s niece. She is hyper aware that he could kill her — she even asks him point blank “Would you come after me? Hunt me?” but he is the only other person she knows. She ultimately puts her life in his hands, because she has nowhere else to go.
As they sit together in Deckard’s home, he decides to kiss her (he’s already drunk-dialed her earlier in the film). Clearly overwhelmed, she walks away, but he stops her. He blocks the door, grabs her, shoves her across the room, pins her to the wall with his body. He presses his lips into her face. “I can’t rely on my memories,” she says, trying to avoid his advances. “Say ‘kiss me’” he insists, he repeats, until she does. “‘I want you’” is what he wants to hear next, so she says that too. She gives in. The music swells, because the film thinks it’s love.
I think about her, after the fact, telling herself that it must have been love.
So many versions of this movie, so much handrigning about a half line of dialogue here, an extra gunshot there. A generation of film nerds obsessed obsessed over a 12-second dream sequence that’s supposed to prove a man is less human than we think, but after that “love” scene he’s already a monster to me. Even the sequel paints this interaction as romantic, miraculous even - so much so that Rachael gets the “honour” of dying in childbirth. So many different cuts and versions, but Deckard assaults her in every one.
About the sequel
In 2017, Denis Villeneuve released the highly anticipated Blade Runner 2049. For the most part, critics loved it, and though the box office performance wasn’t as impressive as producers hoped, the film remains a favourite among us film geeks. The visuals are quite literally breathtaking (I actually stopped breathing after one sweeping shot when I saw it on the big screen). The combination of legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins and composer Hans Zimmer gave me some wild goose bumps.
In this story, Wallace (Jared Leto), the new CEO in charge of the latest replicant models, is a megalomaniacle villain, a man with god-like creation abilities who is fundamentally envious of bodies that can grow their own children. Though simplistic, I get the concept of his character — he’s a very powerful man who covets the one thing he cannot control. Wallace faces off (sort of) with protagonist K/Joe (Ryan Gosling), a blade runner who learns that much of his life has been a lie. A 20-story-tall projection literally confronts him with his own delusions and reveals that everything he thought was real was in fact corporate propaganda.
I quite like the structure of K’s journey. He learns that he is not special, which turns into a freeing revelation. In the final act, with no obligation to any higher power, he makes his own decisions based on his internal morality. There’s a kind of hopeful nihilism built into his narrative that I find moving, despite the violence throughout the story.
The sequel tries to offer a critique of misogyny, but is pretty clumsy on that front. Women in this universe are either ruthless capitalists, or (literal) projections of male desire. They mostly all die violent deaths, except for one childlike lady who lives in a glass cage. There’s also a subtext that links the ability to bear children with “authentic” womanhood which I find very disappointing. In 2017, Vanity Fair asked Villeneuve about the film’s representation of women, to which he answered “Cinema is a mirror on society. Blade Runner is not about tomorrow; it’s about today. And I’m sorry, but the world is not kind on women.”
Being a fan of Villeneuve’s filmography, I find this take to be a little heartbreaking. There are a few pieces missing in his vision, pieces I would have assumed were within his grasp. Though Joi (K’s hologram AI “girlfriend”) does confront the audience with how we perceive femininity, I don’t think that particular moment is enough to counter the rest of the harmful elements in the Blade Runner universe. As Marykate Jasper pointed out for The Mary Sue “portrayal is not critique. Including an element is not the same as holding it up for criticism”. She continues:
“I think his thinking here reveals the way that privilege can stunt your imagination. He clearly had trouble imagining what it might be like to be a woman when the world’s treatment of you does not correspond to your own understanding of yourself. … Both Joi and Luv [a replicant assassin] evolve, yes, but never in ways that challenge an understanding of themselves as tied to and in service of male needs.”
Though Villeneuve is able to accurately portray misogyny, he fails to build agency for his female characters. His female audience is well aware that the world is cruel to them; we struggle within that system everyday. I know life is harder for women, Denis. I know.
The revolution I wanted
When you put aside the stunning visual effects and world building, the problems of Blade Runner are the same as so many other genre movies. The protagonist is, by default, the everyman, “the good guy” we assume will protect the girl/the wife/the country from the bad people. Deckard is just a proxy for boys to explore a world full of violence, where no emotions are necessary (side note — is Deckard just Twilight’s Bella, but for straight dudes??). By the end of Blade Runner, Deckard has only just started to question his world. He chooses to spare Rachael with the hope of fulfilling his own lust, not because he thinks replicants should be free to exist. It is only in the final moments of the film, when Batty saves his life, that he begins to seriously question his values.
In fact, Batty is only a villain because we’ve been conditioned to see Ford as the hero. Rutger Hauer saw this dynamic for what it is, and brought a lot of his own interpretation to the role, famously cutting up his final monologue and adding the line “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain”. In 2019, Stephen Dalton published Blade Runner: anatomy of a classic and included this anecdote:
“Hauer pushed to make Batty a romantic, flamboyant, sexualised dandy: half-rock star and half-terrorist. He ended up with far more charismatic screen presence than Ford’s scowling anti-hero. ‘He’s not the hero, he’s the bad guy,’ Hauer says of Deckard. ‘He gets a gun pointed at his head and then he fucks a dishwasher, and then he falls in love with her. It doesn’t make any sense.’”
Maybe if you live in a world that treats you like a protagonist, you’ll find Blade Runner’s twist to be mind blowing and unsettling. But for everyone else — all those intersections of women, people of colour, queer people, trans people, indigenous peoples, people with disabilities — we’ve known, on some level, that the system is fucked for a long time. The rest of us spend the movie waiting for this dude to clue in to something we already feel. Hauer’s Roy Batty is a way more engaging anti-hero, why can’t the story be about him? Or, if the themes are about what does or doesn’t make someone “authentically” human, why isn’t Rachael the protagonist? Why not follow her as she struggles to understand her identity (like K does in Blade Runner 2049)?
This is what frustrates me so much; the potential for a fantastic metaphor is right there. The critique of capitalism’s ruthless quest to manufacture and sell authenticity for maximum profit is already integrated into the very celluloid of the film. But the films are shockingly white, and male, and straight. The aesthetic dips into techno-orientalism (Chloe Gong’s essay on this is a must read for any sci-fi fan) and the replicants themselves are “symbolically black”, as argued by professor Adilifu Nama in his 2008 book Black Space. All those visionary, groundbreaking special effects, but this revolution still offers us the standard quo. I wonder what kind of groundbreaking themes or stories could have been fleshed out had either film tapped into a more diverse creative team.
I don’t care about the fucking unicorn dream
As beautiful as the film looks, and as much as I love an open ended metaphor, I don’t think Blade Runner earns its ambiguity. I don’t care whether Deckard is human or not, nothing in the film gives me a reason to care about him. Still, I’ve often hesitated to talk about my dissonance with this movie. It’s taken me weeks to put together this essay, fact-checking details, re-watching the films, just to be sure I can prove to you, dear reader, that I’m not just some angry feminist raining on the fun movie parade. There’s a part of me that still wonders if what I feel is valid, or makes sense. I worry that I’ve missed some obvious detail that throws off my whole argument, that all the boys from school were right to scoff and dismiss and talk over anyone who disagreed.
I say “boys”, but I participated in that culture too. I belittled others who didn’t feel the same way as me about art that I loved. There’s a push within the art industry to worship auteurism, to study technique over narrative, and to follow the popular opinion, lest you be deemed “inauthentic”. I know what it’s like to desperately curate your likes and dislikes, to present a front of impeccable taste so you don’t look like the fraud you fear you are. I wish I knew back then how little any of that actually matters, that everyone was really like me — scared and dumb and just trying to survive.
So fuck that unicorn. I don’t have to like it, but it’s fine if you do.
We’re all just tears in rain anyway.
BC — July 2021
- IMDB breakdown of every version of Blade Runner in existence
- Blade Runner: anatomy of a classic published on BFI on April 25th, 2019 by Stephen Dalton
- Q&A: Ridley Scott Has Finally Created the Blade Runner He Always Imagined published on Wired on September 26th 2007 by Ted Greenwald
- Denis Villeneuve Is the Sci-Fi Remake Master with Blade Runner 2049 and the Upcoming Dune published on Vanity Fair on November 24th, 2017 by Jordan Hoffman
- Director Denis Villeneuve Tries to Defend His Portrayal of Women in Blade Runner 2049 published on The Mary Sue on November 26th, 2017 by Marykate Jasper
- Techno-orientalisn in Science Fiction published by Chloe Gong on her personal blog in December 2019
