Disclaimer: I’ve not read the original Philip K Dick story. I’m also going to ignore the fan (and commerce) driven ‘world building’ of the various wikis and sequels that have turned the Blade Runner story into a franchise.
This essay concerns the first movie which, it seems in retrospect, was given a profoundly European, poetic spin by Rutger Hauer, the actor who played the alpha Nexus 6 replicant, Roy Batty.
When Blade Runner, the cult science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott, was released in 1982 it under-performed at the box-office and was met with an ambivalent response from film critics. Today it is recognised as a cinematic milestone that has transcended mere cult status, and the noirish dystopia of its world has been casting an ever-growing shadow over Hollywood sci-fi ever since.
While most film buffs talk about the film’s ‘look’ and ‘world- building’, the plot of Blade Runner combines gritty action with deeper themes that linger long after the credits. The plot, by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, poses obvious ‘philosophical’ and political questions, such as what makes a human, human; what makes a slave a slave etc), yet, forty years on, it is Rutger Hauer, the unforgettable actor who plays the replicant Roy Batty, who is now widely recognised to have made the creative changes that turned this film into a classic.
Rutger Hauer’s acting masterclass, the ‘Tears in Rain’ speech at the climax of the movie, is rightly seen as one of the greatest improvisations in cinematic history, but Hauer had been busy introducing his own dark and brilliantly erudite tones to the film throughout it’s shoot.
In particular, Hauer’s deft use of quotes by William Blake introduces some stunning spiritual insights. It’s these I’d like to explore in this short essay.
What we know about the Nexus 6
Ignoring all the fan fiction, what we know from the first film about the Nexus 6 ‘brand’ of replicant is the following:
They were developed to help with ‘off world’ expansion
They consisted of pleasure (Pris), combat (Roy) and assassin (Zhora) models, and basic worker models (Leon)
They were built with strength and physical toughness far in excess of humans
In the case of Roy, they could also be given very high intelligence, in excess of normal humans
It also seems they may have been implanted with memories, to help them develop an emotional intelligence . In the case of Rachel, this makes her actually believe she is human, and does not perceive herself as ‘other’
Nexus 6 brand replicants have been banned on earth since they led a bloody uprising on a mining colony
The Achilles heal of the replicants, according to the Tyrell corporation, is that, after three years, they start to develop empathy and independence of thought – which presumably made them difficult to manage. The corporations response to this was to build in an ‘incept’ date so that they were programmed to die after four years, before they really started getting ideas above their station.
However, it’s the duties that Nexus 6 were made to perform that shock – and not only say so much about the Blade Runner universe but provide an incisive comment on our own humanity.
Leon labours in places where the toxicity or radiation would kill any human worker. He also doubles as a combat soldier.
Pris needs to be lithe and beautiful and strong so she can spend a profitable three years serving as a prostitute in offworld whorehouses of various degrees of repute.
Zhora has similar skills to Pris, but in addition is trained as an assassin. This suggests there are enough enemies of the corporation out there to warrant investing in a female capable of doing anything to get to, and then neutralise, her target. ‘Talk about beauty and the beast, this one’s both’ says Captain Bryant.
One wonders how many successful missions she’s carried out. And then there’s Roy.
Roy is a combat model, but gifted with A-grade ‘genius’ intelligence. According to JF Sebastian, Tyrell himself designed Roy’s brain.
At this point it’s worth contemplating just what is involved in the genetics process that creates the replicants. How much is design and artificial gestation – and how much is just copying and using solutions that are already evolved? When Tyrell ‘made’ Roy’s brain, did he just copy and tweak and splice his own ‘intelligence’ genome sequence into the DNA that made Roy? Presumably all the DNA we share with chimpanzees and earthworms was copied over into Roy too.
The film is awash with ‘synthetic’ wildlife throughout its running time. There’s an arrogance in claiming a life form, so magnificently honed by evolution, such as an owl, to be ‘synthetic’. Who or what, after all, was responsible for the original design?
Do minor alterations of genomes justify the corporation owning and defining the lifecycle of this organism, this synthetic lifeform? What do the copied genomes, developed over aeons of time, contribute to the mix?
This brings us to the question of what, according to the corporation, was Roy’s purpose. We can deduce from the ‘I’ve seen attack ships on fire off the coast of Orion’ that there are wars off-world. There is no suggestion in the film whatsoever that these wars are with alien life-forms, so I think it would be correct to assume these are human wars. Are they between our typical earth-bound entities like countries or corporations? Or are they of a different kind?
One of the most chilling quotes Roy makes to Deckard near their resolution may give some insight:
‘Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave’
We know the replicants feel fear – Zhora’s obvious terror as Deckard chases her down is an example that is particularly difficult to watch. However, as is usual when Roy speaks, there are multiple layers to what he says.
This line hits with a particular impact within the film. The replicants are, unquestionably, slaves. They are synthetic product sold by the corporation for specific needs, and cast aside when their useful time is up – and this is the first time this is explicitly acknowledged as slavery. Yet Roy NEVER simply laments the plight of being a replicant. Whenever he speaks, it is always with a deliberate wider universality, and plays to a knowingly human agenda.
As stated, one of the few things we know about the Nexus 6 brand of replicants is that they were outlawed after a ‘bloody’ revolt on an off-world mining colony. Modern mining colonies in Western countries tend to be commercial entities with voluntary workers – but this was rarely the case throughout history. Mines were often worked by slaves either bought and sold or forced into servitude by economic circumstance. Historically, mining settlements tended to be geographically isolated and therefore lawless and exploitative places – and one can imagine why the skills of Leon and Pris would be in demand on an offworld mining planet.
But Roy? And what about Zhora?
If Roy was a soldier, who was he fighting? How could a corporation guarantee it could remain in control of a planetary asset and its commercial operations? Would the commercial market still pay for its product irrespective of who was in control of it?
Maybe Roy and Zhora were the enforcers of the corporation – the overseers who kept employees in line through fear. Maybe the mining colonies were penal in nature, or just degenerated into slave colonies, too remote to concern themselves with the human rights of their workers. Maybe that is the true future of space travel: a place where the tyrannies of distance, and the subsequent cost of the raw material essential for maintaining a liveable ecosystem, result in brutal exploitation and grinding serfdom, enforced by a synthetic elite, and ruled from afar by a spoilt, deluded elite composed of the likes of Bezos and Musk.
So what were the ‘questionable things’ that Roy has done? Was he engaged in inter-planetary warfare as part of corporate takeovers? Was he slaughtering whole rebellions from the moment he became operational?
There must have been a point where Roy ‘woke up’ from his operational state. Perhaps he developed ‘empathy’ with those he was created to suppress. He realised that he was not superior, and in reality was as much a slave as them. He came to know their fear, and, potentially the most terrible revelation of all, his role in perpetuating it.
Roy gives Deckard an absolute masterclass in fear in the climax of the film, chasing and howling and mocking Deckard for his ‘unsportsmanlike’ use of a gun, with taunts that are delivered with far more darkly mocking sarcasm than moral outrage. And he has already demonstrated he has moral insight when he confesses to Tyrell to having done ‘questionable’ things. Yet we don’t know whether this fear, and these ‘questionable’ actions, were experienced simply as part of his operational duties, or occurred after he ‘woke up’ and started fighting for his autonomy.
And this is where Hauers introduction of Blake into the story is such a stroke of genius.
William Blake: Innocence, Experience and Blakean Replicants
William Blake is a difficult man to summarise. He lived – and stood – within a dense nexus of historical, religious and artistic crossroads, and each road that passed through his life was utterly transformed by the time it ended.
Blake saw the beginning of the industrial revolution and it’s ‘dark satanic mills’. He stood as one of the last incarnations of English dissenting Protestant preachers, who questioned the legitimacy of both church and king, before they themselves faded into the shadows as church and king gave way to commerce and colonialism, and dissent to revolution and socialism. He declared his support for both the American and French Revolutions, opening himself up to accusations of sedition and treason, with the result that he retreated behind a protective curtain of deliberately idiosyncratic mysticism.
But above all this, Blake clearly held deep and fascinating insights into human spirituality as a result of what modern contemporaries might class as his ‘neurodivergence’. His early works demonstrate acute understanding of the dynamics of human spiritual evolution, while his later works use a complex self-created mythology to demonstrate the infinite ‘vector based’ nature of the cosmos itself.
For Roy Batty – as brought to life by Rutger Hauer – it’s best we start with Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Blake originally wrote ‘Songs’ as a money making gambit. At the time of writing, ‘Songbooks for children’ contained sweet, educational poems, and were a lucrative genre within the Publishing market of London.
Using his innovative ‘Illuminated printing’ method – which allowed him to print copies at home without an expensive printing press and attendant editorial oversight – Blake wrote and illustrated his Songs of Innocence. The best known example, which contains the happy contemplation and celebration and gratitude of a child for his pet lamb, follows:
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed. By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Each of the Songs of Innocence similarly capture moments of carefree contemplation. But Blake then partners these poems with darker equivalents in his Songs of Experience
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies. Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire? …
When the stars threw down their spears
And water’d heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
The Songs of Experience destroy the emotional fabric of the Songs of Innocence: the darkness and bitter horror of Experience destroys Innocence totally; trying to return to a state of innocence is an impossible act of naïveté. Innocence is utterly corrupted by knowledge.
Blake clearly understands that spiritual evolution is measured by progress through a series of one-way doors. Once the threshold has been passed, you can never return.
Which is where we return to our replicants, and their Blake- declaiming leader.
The moment when a replicant develops feelings enough to question what they are doing is clearly a transition from Innocence to Experience. The question is, what kind of circumstance would cause this revelation?
Was it when they realised they were both stronger and smarter than the person giving them orders?
Or when, despite their programming and the continual reinforcement to protect their betters and their human charges, they realised their status as ‘skin jobs’ meant they would never be given equivalent respect themselves?
Or was it at a moment when someone was terrified, at their feet and begging them for mercy? Did Zhora feel such fear when she was being run down by Decker precisely because her victims had already taught her all about fear she had inflicted on them? Did these revelations crystallise around empathy?
And what did the state of Innocence from which they fell look like? Was it a state where they just did what they were told and were programmed to do, with no fear and no doubt as to their own righteousness? Did this innocence just get worn down the more danger, and disrespect and base human arrogance and idiocy their ‘masters’ exposed to them?
Tyrell mentions ‘later models’ used memory implants as a ‘cushion’ to help steer development into a more manageable direction. Although the memory implants are a key plot device for Rachel – and Deckard – it is never clearly stated that Nexus 6 were programmed with them. Leon owns photos, but these are recent shots of the ‘gang’ and Roy seems to mock them – ‘did you get your precious photos’.
And what kind of childhood memory would be best for preparing a mixed pleasure/combat model Nexus 6 for three years of effective service? Would it be the kind of a piano playing idyll from Tyrell’s niece that was given to Rachel – or the memories from the kind of upbringing that gives social workers nightmares. How would they go about sourcing and processing an ‘emotional cushion’ that was fit for purpose for Zhora, or Pris?
We can’t answer any of these questions, but the very fact we can ask them helps us view the replicants with ever more ‘humanity’. And there is no better place to start here than their violence.
Violence and Blakean Nexus 6
There are two onscreen acts of violence from the Nexus 6 gang.
The first is at the beginning of the film, when Leon, despite his ‘C’ grade intelligence, shoots a Blade Runner whom he correctly deduces has identified him as a replicant. Given what another Blade Runner, Deckard, does to his girlfriend Zhora later in the film, it is hard to fault his instincts here.
The second on screen death is, of course, Tyrell, literally at the hands of Roy. We’ll deal with this scene later, but it’s fair to say that the audience is either shocked by the gore of it, or is already actively rooting for Roy to kill this disconcertingly suave tycoon.
Offscreen, however, the body count is considerably higher. The replicants have 24 deaths attributed to them within the film. The first 23 are the passengers and crew of the shuttle that bring them to earth, described by the blithely racist, grinning manipulator that is Captain Bryant, as having been ‘slaughtered’. This is later confirmed by Deckard while doing background research in his flying car.
‘Passengers’ suggests civilians, families, children. It immediately establishes the replicants to be amoral, unpredictable and highly dangerous sociopaths whose presence on earth needs to be taken very seriously indeed.
Yet the offscreen murder that, without any doubt, provokes the most revulsion in the film, however, is that of JS Sebastian at the hands of Roy, after he has killed Tyrell.
Roy’s murder of Sebastian’s feels like an unforgivable betrayal. We see Pris ‘befriend’ Sebastian, although once Roy turns up on the scene this becomes more of a kidnapping. Both Roy and Pris are charming in their intimidation, (‘We need you Sebastian! You’re our best and only friend!’) although William Sanderson’s brilliant acting makes it clear that Sebastian understands the danger he is in. And yet they explicitly establish that Sebastian is on their side because they share the same problem: ‘accelerated decrepitude’.
JS Sebastian is kind and gentle, lonely and tragic. He poses no threat to Roy, especially after Tyrell is killed and Roy’s quest to halt the incept dates, and his fast approaching death, has failed.
So why does Roy kill him?
The first motive that comes to mind is that all the offscreen deaths are the Nexus 6 gang ‘tidying up’ after their presence. Witnesses could help the Blade Runners pick up their trail, and therefore should be eliminated whenever possible, on principle. Roy could have killed Sebastian almost out of habit.
There are other potential motives lurking in the background, however. Is this actually sadism born of hatred for their slave masters? Aside from the onscreen deaths already mentioned, and , of course, the gruesome deaths of the replicants, most of the incidents of violence in the film involve Deckard being beaten up.
Zhora’s initial assault on Deckard is brutally precise – she seems to expect him to die from the initial punch to the throat, and is surprised he doesn’t, and then unfortunately (for her) is interrupted from finishing the job. But there is definite sadism in Leon’s revenge and Roy’s final pursuit of the Blade Runner. Are these monsters who enjoy inflicting pain on humans? Is this a war against their human ‘masters’ in which no quarter is given?
It would be convenient for those invested in ‘retiring the skin jobs’ to believe this is true. But the extensive beating that Deckard receives from all four of the gang, particularly his capacity to soak up punishment, may say more about how they ‘feel’ about him ‘retiring’ his friends – and whether Deckard himself is a replicant – than an innate sadism in the gang.
And why doesn’t Pris just break his neck with a karate chop – why go for the gymnastic approach? Does she need to generate more momentum to kill him? Can she only fight through modifying the acrobatic skills she was originally programmed with? If it’s the latter, did this ‘basic pleasure model’ get the opportunity to practice in the past, and, if so, when, and on whom?
Perhaps there are principles at stake here. If ‘woke’ Nexus 6 ever fought alongside human slaves in a rebellion, were they ever able to rise above their status as ‘skin jobs’ – and if so, how? History teaches us that rebellions rarely finish when the first ruler is toppled.
We can imagine Roy, with Tyrell’s genomes, explaining their particular brand of slavery to the gang: synthetic product with built in obsolescence, designed to go places and do things that no human could dare. The cumulative memory of the disrespect and abuse they suffered as compliant ‘skin jobs’ might manifest itself as a kind of shame at their non human status, that seeds a cold burning anger and an overriding desire to assert superiority. And there might be an element of latent ‘blowback’ from their programming; if their human masters were happy for their slaves to simply expire once they had completed all their fucking, fighting and heavy lifting duties, then why not treat every human in the same manner?
Again, maybe Sebastian, and the passengers in the shuttle, were killed more out of habit and principle, than malice.
But there is one off-screen death – or rather, an absence of an off- screen death – that introduces a number of loose ends into the story, as well as a startling revelation.
Understanding William Blake: Fiery the Angels Fell…
We can easily imagine a scene in which Hannibal Chew, the elderly geneticist specializing in synthetic eyes, is found frozen to death in his workshop as a direct consequence of Roy and Leon’s visit. That this scene never makes it into the movie is probably due to Ridley Scott’s commitment to lean storytelling: Deckard does not even acknowledge Chews existence in the film, and tracks down Zhora via a different geneticist, named Abdul Ben Hussan, who made her snake. Maybe Chew’s murder looked like enough of an accident to not raise much suspicion, and consequently didn’t come to the attention of the police. Scott, under pressure to shorten the film, excised it as superfluous to the plot.
However, it’s interesting that police, or Blade Runner procedure, had become so slack in 2019 that no one thought to put the various contractors who designed the Nexus 6 model under surveillance, especially given they knew the gang had already tried penetrating Tyrell corporation and that they posed a grave danger to the public.
The evidence in the film suggests the police just don’t really care. Bryant clearly has contempt for the ‘little people’ he polices, and he doesn’t emphasise that Tyrell and his corporation need to be protected. It just poses an ‘embarrassment’. And there’s something about Tyrell’s residence on earth, his imprisonment in the penthouse of a vast tower block that looks like a mausoleum, and the general distaste and fear of ‘skin jobs’, that suggests he is something of a pariah who won’t be missed.
The real question, however, is why he didn’t supply Deckard with a list of the Nexus 6 engineers when the Blade Runner Voight- Kamffed Rachel. Someone with such a fondness for chess would surely have deduced the next move of one of his very own creations – and indeed when he finally meets Roy he says ‘I expected you to get here sooner’. Was that just bravura? What kind of game is he playing here?
But it is Hauer who injects the meeting with Hannibal Chew with the deep spiritual current that, from that moment on, carry’s the rest of the film.
As Roy approaches Hannibal, he quotes Blake. Not early Blake, from the Songs, or a pithy ‘Proverb of Hell’ from Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but a quote taken from one of his more complex early prophecies, America a Prophecy, which was written in 1793 at the height of both the French Revolution and the American War of Independence.
Roy walks with purpose towards Chew and, smiling, declaims:
‘Fiery the angels fell. Deep thunder rode around their shores… burning with the fires of Orc.’
As many commentators point out, this is a misquote – the original says the angels ‘rose’ – but it’s unlikely Roy has remembered this incorrectly. There’s a thrill in him deliberately modifying what some would see as a sacred text.
Blake’s prophetic work was populated with the figures of eternals, mythic figures that had existed from the beginning of time and illustrated various stages of growth of mankind, both in the individual and their collective form. These eternals were just as likely to be found walking the streets of Lambeth as battling it out at the creation of the universe.
But of all the eternals, Orc is perhaps the most primal, and relatable; not only to Roy Batty, but to all of us.
Blake’s spiritual beliefs owe much to Gnosticism, a version of Christianity declared heretical by the ‘Church Fathers’ in the C2nd AD. Gnosticism, in contrast to the more authoritative version of Christianity that dominated the church, taught that the original ‘God’ of the Old Testament – typically characterised as an old man with flowing white hair who created the physical universe in seven days – was in fact more evil than good. He was the original demiurge that created the world – and all it’s evils – out of nothing. It was the true pilgrims lot to walk a path of learning that taught them to rise above this material world and achieve union with the original spirit from which they had been separated.
For Blake, the original Demi-urge was called Urizen. Urizen isolated a particle of good from the void and in doing so created waste matter that coalesced to form the physical universe. This included our own bodies: our birth caused our infinite vision to be blinded by an eye, our hearing deafened by an ear, our mouths made mute by a tongue, and our soul imprisoned within a body.
Urizen – famously depicted by Blake in ‘the Ancient of Days’ as the Old Testament God reaching out of the heavens with a compass – binds and constrains and punishes the spirit with the laws of physics, of nature and of morality. It is Orc, the young Satanic angel, who rises against him in rebellion, burning with the flames of energy and opposition. Orc and Urizen collide and grip and begin to wrestle, and as Orc gains the upper hand, his hair grows long and white and he grows into the form of Urizen – and a new Orc rises and the cycle repeats itself…
Rutger Hauer’s inclusion of the quote ‘burning with the fires of Orc’ brilliantly establishes Roy Batty as the erudite, conscious nemesis of Tyrell, his father. But this is not simply a clever quote. An understanding of Orc and Blake elevates Batty into a superhuman who can lay claim to be one of the most sublime anti-heroes in cinema.
Blake’s ‘neurodivergence’ manifested itself in feelings so intense they took the form of visions – not unlike that experienced by bipolar patients when their mania starts moving into psychosis.
A quote from ‘A Vision of the Last Judgment’ gives some idea of how acutely Blake felt the world around him, and how, in his world, the eternal walked hand in hand with the mundane:
‘When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.’
This is vector based spirituality – a spirituality of infinitely scaled archetypes. At any moment the everyday can scale into something eternal and magnificent. It’s just a question of focus: a child standing up to a bully, a nation throwing off the shackles of a colonial power, the Big Bang birthing the universe – all take on the ‘lineaments’ of Orc and Urizen.
Roy Batty is superhuman, both in physical strength and intelligence. But he is also superhuman in feeling and spirit. And Batty, unlike us mere mortals, actually gets to meet his maker; Tyrell, his own personal Urizen, who programmed both his life and death.
Not an easy thing…
Their exchanges are terse. Batty gives Tyrell a hint of how arduous his quest to reach him has been, and warns of its importance
‘it’s not an easy thing to meet your maker’
When Batty names ‘Death’ as the problem he wants Tyrell to solve, Tyrell parries by playing down his godlike status, claiming Death is:
‘a little out of my jurisdiction’.
Batty pushes further:
‘ I want more life, father’,
Tyrell responds with the following:
‘The facts of life! To make an alteration in the evolvement of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it’s been established …’
It’s almost as if Tyrell knows he is about to meet a reckoning long coming, and that he is about to die at the hands of his own creation. Batty is not a machine gone rogue here. And he is very far from the kind of prodigal son who asks his maker for forgiveness, and who Tyrell is invoking in the hope he will spare him his life.
No; once it becomes clear that his ‘maker’ does not have the power to save him or Pris from their fast approaching death, Roy reveals himself as a Satanic instrument of vengeance, manifest on earth to punish the hubris of the ‘god of biomechanics’ on behalf of the primal energy that drives all evolved things from the very beginning of life – from bacteria to mammal. And it is in this moment that he ascends from being a mere superman, and claims his title as the spirit of supernature incarnate.
Perhaps the moment when we see JK Sebastian, hiding behind the candles but showing obvious pride in Roy’s achievements, as described by Tyrell, indicates why Roy kills him. JK is also party to Roy’s creation and thus cannot be allowed to survive the fundamental and eternal moment of Orc crushing Urizen with his bare hands.
What follows is my favourite scene in the film. As Vangelis’s film score swells, the camera pans from the infinity of space down to Roy, descending in the lift from the scene of the crime, ablaze with the triumphant fires of Orc. Hauer delivers a masterpiece display of revelation here – transfixed by an ecstasy of recognition before suddenly collapsing into childlike confusion and doubt. Roy has passed through the spiritual gateway for which he was born – but it is still not enough. There is another lesson that must be learned before his fast approaching death.
As stated earlier, it is common knowledge that the famous – and seminal – ‘tears in rain’ speech that effectively closes the film, was the result of some superb editing and creative refinement by Rutger Hauer. However, Hauer’s impact on this film goes far beyond this.
By introducing a simple quote from Blake, Hauer elevates Blade Runner onto an infinite and eternal stage that transforms the film from a clever piece of sci-fi noir into a profound and thrilling meditation on man’s spiritual hubris – and its conflict with his animal self.
And the final lesson learnt by Roy? It is an all seeing and uncompromising vision of a life that burned brightly, and, at the moment it is extinguished, reveals mercy and love to be more powerful and more precious than vengeance.
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