tears-in-rain

(3.4) INNOCENCE
There’s a weird moment in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It’s one that
took me back a little, a tiny bit of shock. A prod, if you will, and it’s definitely one of the
moments (many of them) in the book that made me truly ponder something. Innocence
itself. The moment was in one of Deckard’s descriptions of Rachael, and I remember
the quote off by heart.
“A figure like a child’s.”
Deckard eventually falls in love with Rachael. The line hung throughout the book
and I came back to it when Deckard finished up his affair with Rachael. Not to be
hysterical or otherwise absolutely wrong but, with Deckard’s description, is he indulging
in paedophilia? He happily calls her a ‘child’, and actually, the Replicants are in some
sense ‘children’. Short-life spans, four years old as a Nexus Six, implanted memories as
‘emotional cushions’ only go so far. They are children trapped in mechanical bodies of
adults that are probably the best way to put it.
Innocence, then, seems like a precious commodity in the Replicant world. Yet,
looking at the ‘human’ world we already see the geishas of Blade Runner all hypersexualized
young women, the rich folk indulge themselves in looking at naked women
and there’s a true ‘honesty’ to the place. The grime just froths over in the cities, I’m not
sure there are any children in the film. I’ve looked it over tens of times, and they might
be on bikes during Roy’s first appearance. This world, regardless, seems devoid of
‘childhood’. It’s the boroughs and urban filth from wall to wall, no place for a child, but
who knows.
These ‘childhoods’ of the Replicants are fabricated but... does that make them
adults? Memories are what matter here; they’re what makes us human. Tyrell goes
beyond that, “More human than human”. If our own childhood is fabricated, if we cannot
preserve our own past self then what are we? Shells, husks even. The Replicants are
only (at most) four years old but still smoke and drink and kill. They act like angstyteenagers
or the middle-aged or, quite frankly, the depressed milling sheep of Blade
Runner’s world. Even Deckard turns himself to alcoholism, an addiction mirrored with
Rachael and Pris’ smoking. Indulging them in adult activity, trying to keep them ‘adult’
and ‘human’, but utterly falling back on that ‘missing something’. In either case, Deckard
or Replicant, it’s ‘life’.
And it’s that drive for ‘life’, that underlying goal that punctuates Blade Runner’s
moral underbelly. Is Deckard’s quest one for innocence? Are the Replicants asking for
life so they can be children again? Without a childhood, there is usually life-crushing
trauma. Orphans are, thanks to this lovely ‘caring’ world, the most at risk of falling into
depression in Uganda[1] and without generalizing that’s probably true for the Western
world too.
That’s what they are then, the Replicants, ‘Orphans’. The only separation
between them and Deckard, a Replicant in my view but it’s not necessary to view it this
way, is a purpose. A drive, a motivation; his job. Even then, he finds himself corrupted
by his killing. His first on-screen taken life, Zhora, takes him back. It’s like it’s his first
time ever, something doesn’t feel right. He’s shaken as he steps out of the little snow
display. The ‘cold-blooded killer’ becoming physical, tangible, he has lost his innocence