Towards the end of Blade Runner, Roy Batty stands in godlike potency over Deckard; he is transfixed by the power of life and death that is now his. When warriors in the Iliad are in the final throes of hand to hand combat, they are often described as ‘equal to Ares’, the god of war, or the god of martial fury. It’s a descriptive which conveys both the intensity of violence at the point where one of the combatants will die, and the way in which when a human being is taking upon themselves in that precise moment a power which belongs to the gods – that of life and death over another.
This Greek concept of a hubristic attempt at equality with the divine illuminates an anxiety which pervades Bladerunner: that by creating the replicants, humans have overstepped a sacred boundary, that the creations will return to bite their creators. As they do – they become terrifyingly incalculable. Roy’s final conflict with Deckard is unrelentingly violent, a manic attempt to transfer to his pursuer his own experience of slavery to imminent mortality. The violence of the moment before he grasps Deckard’s hand is precisely a moment of divine intensity.
The life span of the replicants, a bare four years (“Wake up! Time to die!”) was intended to prevent their developing any sort of emotional life, but Roy is a prodigy. He is knowledgable about his own construction, profoundly reflective, with a taste for the poetic: “fiery the angels fell, deep thunder rolled around their shores, burning with the fires of Orc”, he says, adapting Blake. In the frozen cavern of the eye technician he quips, cruelly: “ if only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes”. He has his own moral compass: “I’ve done questionable things” and, most significantly, he has an acute consciousness of self: his beyond-natural capacities. You might call it a sense of the heroic.
Though he was a creation of an imagined future which we are still not quite inhabiting, he has things in common with Achilles, a figure from the deep, legendary past. Achilles too knows he is destined for an intense, short life. He too, has a clear sense of his heroic status. He does “questionable things”: withdrawing from battle with the result that many comrades die and later returning in a blaze of uncontrolled violence. He is cultured, an accomplished speaker and musician. Achilles is a richer character, whose emotional complexity is worked out in detail and whose trajectory reaches a point of resolution. The moments of his life are recorded for ever in the Greek epics. We see little of Roy’s life, his “tears in rain”, just iconic, resonant moments towards its end. Achilles chooses fame instead of long life, Roy dies unaware of his celluloid memorial; for him it’s a brutally final cutting out.
I can’t resist mentioning that an owl was a symbol for Athena, goddess of war and technology and that Hephaistos, god of craft and fire, made his own robotic studio assistants – in gold, naturally.
Published in the Hastings Independent Press issue 93. 3/01/2018
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