Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner cost about $28 million to produce, and returned some $33 million at the box office. The producers made their money back and pocketed about five million in profits; even so, the film was considered a critical failure upon release.
A future-noir art house production, Bladerunner was real heady stuff. Instead of spamming all the hot buttons for cash, it was aiming for greatness. After the meteoric success of 1977‘s Alien, Ridley Scott had only himself to contend with.
Despite its artistic integrity, Bladerunner became recognized as the cinematic landmark that it was only gradually.
Forty years on, it is considered a masterwork of science fiction; one of the best that ever did it.
Roy Baty’s Death Soliloquy, also known as the Tears in the Rain monologue, is the artistic flourish that seals the package and sends it off-world:
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 dark Near the Tannhäuser Gates.
All those... moments... will be lost in time, Like tears... in... rain.
Time... to die...
This brief speech has gone down as ‘perhaps the most moving death soliloquy in cinema history’, at least according to Mark Rowlands, the critic cited in the Wikipedia article about the Tears in the Rain monologue.
To understand its gravitas, we need to position it in its original context.
Do Androids Dream?
Bladerunner is a film about replicants— artificial humans, replicas of the real thing. The movie is based on the novella Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) by Philip K. Dick, as acknowledged in the film credits:
Like Bladerunner, Philip K. Dick’s work has aged well. Innovative and disconcertingly relevant, there aren’t enough nice things I could say about it.
For all that we are edging ever closer to the sociological conditions he had anticipated, the psychadelic era came and went; on an individual basis, people seem less equipped to deal with the ramifications of Philip K. Dick than when the writer died in 1982. This could only mean we’ve regressed— exactly as PKD anticipated.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? confronts us with an Earth where people are stupefied and sterilized by a radiation-rich and rapidly deteriorating environment.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Bladerunner have the same set-up.
Rick Deckard, bounty hunter, is given a list of androids to ‘retire’— ‘retire’ being the Bladerunner’s euphemism for android murder.
In the book, the androids’ names come with addresses attached.
This detail is critical to Philip K. Dicks dystopian vision: SFPD already knows where the androids are hiding— before sending its hired guns after them. This is Full Spectrum Dominance. This is the Grid that everyone is always talking about:
Philip K. Dick immerses us in a fully functional surveillance state.
Legend has it Ridley Scott’s daughter was in college studying cellular biology while the acclaimed director was working on his third film, Bladerunner.
With her input, Scott came up with the term ‘replicant’ as a reference to DNA Replication, setting the manufactured humanoids of Bladerunner apart from the popular conception of the mechanized android auto-human that audiences would have been familiar with by way of Star Trek, Battlestar Gallactica, and Logan’s Run.
Logan’s Run was a popular 1977 television series run by CBS that was spun off of a popular 1976 film of the same name which featured a mechanical android named Rem:
I like to think Rem’s name is a reference to Rapid Eye Movement; the portion of the sleep cycle during which people dream.
As a fully conscious, fully-autonomous artificial being that is also Logan’s best friend, Rem is the realization of a utopian dream: high technology used for the good of Man.
Wouldn’t it be funny if this is where 90’s vanilla alt-rockers R.E.M. got their name from? Come to find out, they were an animatronic band the whole time. They certainly sound like the Chuck E. Cheese House Band—
But the android Rem is a machine. The replicants of Bladerunner are like the androids of Philip K. Dick: biologically engineered being that are nearly indistinguishable from organic, womb-grown humans:
Tech Noir
Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner takes Los Angeles as its backdrop, while Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is set in a future-noir San Franscisco.
I guess the LAPD does shit different, because much of the Bladerunner film is taken up with the Hunt.
We shadow Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard as he works the bounty hunter beat in a dark, rainy, and cold Los Angeles doing old-timey detective shit. He sips whiskey neat and bangs smokey-eyed women to the melodramatic imitation saxophones of Vangelis; gets into tiffs with his superiors as well as the occasional street fight; and threatens club owners to get his drinks paid for while gluing together vague hints with his razor-sharp future-noir detective instincts.
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep we get none of this. The SFPD runs a tight ship— even if they did somehow manage to lose track of an entire rival police agency, they hardly spend any manpower at all finding out where the escaped androids went. That’s what the surveillance state is for.
Bladerunner is a slug of film-noir sensibilities packed into a shell of visionary dystopian science fiction. Indeed, it effectively launched the third wave of American film noir by pioneering the ‘Tech Noir’ genre— yet nothing about Deckard’s process is convincingly futuristic. Instead, his methods seem quaint, dangerous, and remarkably inefficient**.
Typically American crime dramas or psychological thrillers, films noir had common themes and plot devices, and many distinctive visual elements. Characters were often conflicted antiheroes, trapped in a difficult situation and making choices out of desperation or nihilistic moral systems. [meanwhile],
‘Neo-noir film directors refer to 'classic noir' in the use of Dutch angles, interplay of light and shadows, unbalanced framing; blurring of the lines between good and bad and right and wrong, and thematic motifs including revenge, paranoia, and alienation.
**Spoken with the benefit of hindsight.
The first home computers were released in 1977, but were still rudimentary in 1982. Wireless technology was still in development, and the grim specter of the Cold War cast a decades-old iron shadow over the prognostications of every oracle.
Scanning Electron Microscopes for rent in open-air wet markets, electronic devices that respond to voice commands, and a blasted world where the only animals left are artificial probably seemed like totally reasonable predictions for November 2019. Never mind the Orwellian surveillance state, 1982 had a nuclear holocaust to worry about.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep has a different time stamp than Bladerunner. The action of the novel begins to unfold on January 3, 1992.
For all the ways the Bladerunner film and PKD’s book missed the mark, there is so much they got right.
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Deckard found more warmth and validation in the arms of an android than in his marriage bed. In Bladerunner, he fully elopes with a fugitive android.
The first large language model artificial intelligence program, GPT-1, went public in 2018. It is now 2025, and an entire industry has emerged out of people developing romantic attachments to AI Chatbots.
Ever since Jules Verne predicted the submarine, the visionaries of Science Fiction have been remarkably prescient — Accurate but not precise, their oracles are Delphic: useless in the moment and uncanny in hindsight.
Like Meatloaf said in 1977, the same year the first home computers went to market: two out of three ain’t bad.
Bladerunner christened Tech Noir as a genre, but it was an easter egg in the 1984 film Terminator starring Arnold Schwarzenegger that gave the genre its name — behold, the TechNoir Night Club:
Though the weave and weft of Bladerunner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep are different, they were spun on the same loom. Both works lead their audience to consider the implications of humankind trespassing on God’s Lawn by creating artificial consciousness:
Once consciousness has been created, where do we draw the line between ‘real’ and ‘artificial’? What is the responsibility of the creator to the created? Of the created to the creator? What dark forces are we playing with, after all?
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) preceded works like Bladerunner, Logan’s Run, etc. in anticipating the ethical dilemmas presented by artificial consciousness.
But Lang took the problem in another direction:
By adding a mephitic layer— (Mephitic as in Mephistopheles, the personification of the Devil in Goethe’s 1808 poem Faust), Metropolis poses the creation of artificial life and consciousness as a kind of Faustian Bargain.
Speaking of Mephitic Sorcery—
The term Bladerunner occurs nowhere in Philip K. Dick’s work; it is something Ridley Scott and Co. borrowed from experimental novelist and proto-edgelord William S. Burroughs, as acknowledged in the films credits:
Burroughs was a pioneer of the profoundly unsettling. Though he was already in his 40s when he met the young arch-beatniks Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, he outlived both his juniors by a significant margin. By that same token, his life and legacy have waxed in influence while that of the other Beat poets has waned — probably because, while the other Beats were on the bleeding edge of culture, Burroughs spent decades writing from the bleeding edge of consciousness itself. That’s true of all the beat poets, really, but Burroughs had a special ingredient— an occultic paranoia that set his work beyond the bounds of time and place.
The obscenity trials surrounding Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl: For Carl Solomon (1956) were also aimed at Burroughs’s experimental novel Naked Lunch (1959). The proceedings made counter-cultural icons out of both, though they were already headed in that direction.
William S. Burroughs was a detective noir magician — and I mean magician literally; the dude was deeply interested in actual, dyed-in-the-wool, spells-and-incantations-to-bend-the-fabric-reality, fucking, sorcery.
Blade Runner: A Movie (1979) is a decidedly unfilmable dystopian sci-fi novel co-authored by William S. Burroughs about a sinister for-profit healthcare industry.
In the book, Blade Runners are people who smuggle scalpels and other medical supplies—
Bringing it back to the center:
Bladerunner is a post-apocalyptic Frankenstein set in the shadow of Bennito Mussolini’s Corporate State— that is, in the shadow of a fully-realized, by-the-book, fascist dispensation.
By the time the credits roll, the men who helm the legal apparatus and their cold, calculating science are shown to be the enemies of love— and in the bladerunners we recognize knights in service to the real monsters of the world.
It’s the replicants who win our hearts, attaining the status of martyred heroes. Roy Baty’s Death Soliloquy is an alchemic equation that breathes life into the manufactured flesh of the replicants by erasing the line between the Nexus-6 models and their human counterparts.
Roy Baty
Though he had appeared in dozens of films before (and after) Bladerunner, Rutger Hauer’s star reached its zenith when he made Roy Baty one of the most iconic villains in sci-fi history.
Studios wanted a Roy Baty Reprisal, and Hauer came to specialize in the role of morally ambiguous action hero (e.g. Flesh + Blood (1985), The Hitcher (1986), Wanted: DOA (1986), The Blood of Heroes (1989), Hobo With a Shotgun (2011).
Hauer’s legacy has become so tied to his role as Roy Baty that a recent documentary produced by the late actor’s granddaughter was named…
Like Tears in The Rain (2024).
In the book and the film, Roy Baty is the de facto leader of the androids/replicants:
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Roy Baty is the Spartacus of a Martian slave revolt; he and a handful of his android ‘friends’ kill their masters and flee to Earth to escape the grueling labor conditions on Mars.
I put ‘friends’ in bunny ears because the androids of Philip K. Dick don’t have real feelings for animals or people or each other.
Roy Baty has an aggressive, assertive air of ersatz authority. Given to mystical preoccupations, this android proposed the group escape attempt, underwriting it ideologically with a pretentious fiction as to the sacredness of so-called android "life."
In addition, this android stole, and experimented with, various mind-fusing drugs, claiming when caught that it hoped to promote in androids a group experience similar to that of Mercerism, which it pointed out remains unavailable to androids.’
The account had a pathetic quality,[thought Deckard]. A rough, cold android, hoping to undergo an experience from which, due to a deliberately built-in defect, it remained excluded.
The pseudo-religion of Mercerism is how people remind themselves of their humanity in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
It’s a kind of mechanically induced empathic trance, like hooking your brain up to an MDMA box. Empathy is a quality androids are not known to possess — but Deckard’s reflections reveal that the android empathy short-circuit is a deliberately built-in defect.
Ironic. Humans hook themselves up to an electronic device to get in touch with the empathic response that ostensibly makes them human, while the only thing preventing the androids from experiencing the full range of human emotion is a deliberately attenuated empathy response.
The androids’ lack of empathy doesn’t prevent them from being sensitive to art and beauty— worth mentioning because it’s one of the first things I noticed about ChatGPT: how skillfully it handles beautiful or poetic ideas.
The androids of PKD are also prey to a range of classically ‘human’ reflexes, like loneliness, longing, and a desire for autonomy:
Do androids dream? Rick asked himself. Evidently; that's why they occasionally kill their employers and flee here. A better life, without servitude. Like Luba Luft; singing Don Giovanni and Le Nozze instead of toiling across the face of a barren rock-strewn field. On a fundamentally uninhabitable colony world.
Bladerunner tells the same story as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, except it’s different: the replicants have killed their masters and fled to earth, but not for a better life— what they are after is more life*.
*I wanted this to come across as another Goethe reference— according to Herr Carl Vogel, personal physician to the esteemed poet, Goethe’s last words were ‘Mer Licht!’, or, ‘More Light!‘. It sounds like he just wanted someone to open the damn curtains, but the phrase is
[]... often interpreted as a symbol of [Goethe's] pro-Enlightenment worldview and a desire for knowledge and understanding.
The androids have a four-year lifespan. It’s a technical limitation, something mentioned in passing in the book. The scriptwriters seized upon this detail and turned it into the primary axis of the film.
When we are first introduced to Roy Baty, his hand is all spidered up; he’s malfunctioning. His time is running out, and he knows it. He’s come to earth on very human business; he doesn’t want to die. His entire mission is to figure out how to not.
There is a major difference between Scott’s replicants and Dick’s androids that suggests they aren’t the same thing; that they needed different names:
The androids of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep do weird and unsettling shit, like in the scene where Priss cuts the legs off a living spider one by one with a pair of scissors because she thinks it has too many of them.
In her defense, she is less than four years old; this is the kind of shit children do when they are first probing the boundaries of the world — but John Isidore, a human, is there as a witness. We are privy to his internal monologue as he agonizes over the spider’s creeping death-by-torture. Living spiders are rare — in the world of John Isidore, all living creatures are rare. The scene demonstrates the androids’ non-existent empathy response while doing double duty as a sort of Voigt-Campf Empathy Test for the reader (how do you know you aren’t an android/ replicant?).
The androids of PKD are devoid of empathy, constitutionally unable to experience or express love or compassion— even if they understand what these qualities represent, what they look like.
In the novel it is explicitly mentioned that leaving a pet in android custody is a death sentence for the animal— the androids’ fundamental lack of emotional warmth or emotional responsiveness make them unfit to care for living things.
Though the replicants of Bladerunner are cunning and full of menace, they never demonstrate the same passive, scientific cruelty as Priss does in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep— instead, Ridley Scott’s replicants demonstrate just the opposite*.
*Unless you think Roy Baty crushing the skull of Eldon Tyrell with his bare hands and then turning his bloodlust on the man who had been trying to help them qualifies as Scientific Cruelty. To me, these look more like crimes of passion perpetrated by a doomed lifeform lashing out against the cage it’s in.
Rising up to kill the masters, the Father, the Maker — was this meant to be oedipal? — But even as Roy Baty leaves a pile of corpses in his wake, he can’t lay hands on God— and there is nothing he can do to divert the inexorable flow of Time. Once again, this is all very human.
What did Eldon Tyrell say about the Nexus-6 model replicants at the beginning of the film?
With one sly easter egg, Bladerunner completely reverses the formula of Phillip K. Dicks spider torture scene.
When Roy Baty settles in to recite his Death Soliloquy he is a half-naked, rain-drenched, and clutching a mourning dove in one hand:
The dove— the symbol of Venus, the symbol of the Company of the Grail in Wolfram Von Eschenbach’s Parzifal, the symbol of the minne— the symbol of love.
Roy doesn’t torture the animal; instead, he spits some sick bars while holding onto it and looking like a barbarous image of Saint Francis.
The moment Roy dies, he relaxes his grip on the dove. It flutters off like a ghost leaving the machine and disappears into the first patch of blue sky we’ve seen in the entire fucking film:
Against the dying light
The androids of Do Androids Dream are quick to forfeit their lives, a fact Deckard openly laments:
The dark fire waned; the life force oozed out of her, as he had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism - with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it – could never have reconciled itself to.
"I can't stand the way you androids give up," he said savagely. The car now swooped almost to the ground; he had to jerk the wheel toward him to avoid a crash.
Meanwhile, the whole action of Bladerunner revolves around the replicants’ refusal to submit to death. We follow Roy Baty and Company as they …
Do not go gentle into that good night—
But rage, rage against the dying light.
Another unsettling feature of Phillip K. Dick’s androids is their lack of loyalty to one another. While internal evidence in the novel complicates this picture, Ridley Scott discarded this peculiarity of android psychology entirely.
Toward the end of the film Roy sees Pris, his lover and best friend, lying dead in a pool of replicant blood. He loses his shit, sending wolf-like howls echoing through the deserted corridors of the Bradbury:
The next twelve or so minutes are taken up with Roy running around in his underwear and toying with the life of Harrison Ford’s character.
I really hated this scene as a kid; it reminded me of the agonizing twenty-minute chase scenes of the India Jones franchise, also starring Harrison Ford— I guess this was just a thing in the 80’s. Lengthy choreographed action sequences set to pompous orchestral music— except in Bladerunner the scene is as over-the-top as it is downright strange.
A grown man in a dilapidated building running around in his underwear and making wolf sounds is some real crackhead shit, and pretty fucking anti-climactic as far as boss fights go.
The last time I sat through the scene it made me think of the Norse/Germanic Wolf Cult depicted in Robert Eggars’ The Northman (2022):
Eggers’s Wolf Cult is partly based on a passage from the 13th century Norse Volsung Saga wherein the young hero Sigurd and his father put on magic wolf-skins and are transformed into marauding werewolves.
Researchers believe the tale of Sigurd’s lycanthropy recalls a Northern Germanic wolf/warrior cult known today as the Ulfhednar.
Rutger Hauer being Dutch (see: Northern Germanic) helps to drive home the impression that this is what Ridley Scott was getting at with Roy Baty’s Wolf/ Berserker antics: Roy Baty the android Ulfhednar werewolf warrior.
But for Roy, the wolf noises might just sound the depths of his heart’s sorrow—wolves are monogamous creatures, and they mate for life — sometimes choosing to lay down and die rather than carry on living without their bonded partner.
Tears in The Rain
When at last Roy has Deckard cornered and dangling from a ledge, the replicant does something the androids of PDK’s novel would never dream of: he reaches out to save the life of the man who had been hunting him — the man who killed his lover and all his friends.
Does Roy save Deckard’s life just to have someone to deliver the Tears in The Rain Death Soliloquy to?
Here lies Roy Baty: Warrior, Poet, Priest, Strategist, Leader, Lover, Friend— hemmed into moral ambiguity by the grey specter of death.
The final scene of Bladerunner is like the spider scene in the book— another Voigt-Campf test for the audience, only this time precisely articulated to generate empathy for the androids/replicants.
Nothing like the Tears in the Rain Monologue appears anywhere in the novel, but there are moments in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep that resound with the same tragic beauty. I can hear the synthetic saxophones of Vangelis mingling with the smack-smack of acid rain falling on the neon-glazed streets of a future-noir Los Angeles as I read this passage to myself:
"We came back [to Earth]," Pris said, "because nobody should have to live [on Mars].
It wasn't conceived for habitation, at least not within the last billion years. It's so old. You feel it in the stones, the terrible old age.
Anyhow, at first I got drugs from Roy; I lived for that new synthetic pain-killer, that silenizine. And then I met Horst Hartman, who at that time ran a stamp store, rare postage stamps; there's so much time on your hands that you've got to have a hobby, something you can pore over endlessly.And Horst got me interested in pre-colonial fiction."
"You mean old books?"
"Stories written before space travel but about space travel."
"How could there have been stories about space travel before - "
"The writers," Pris said, "made it up."
Tears In The Rain has such a high polish that it acts as a mirror, showing us to ourselves. It’s an unforgettable Memento Mori with a deep resonance.
Roy Baty roared in triumph over interplanetary battlefields where servitude and freedom came to grips; and disappeared with all his dubious glory as entropy made the final claim on his life’s estate, dissolving like tears in the rain— washed out to sea and into forgetfulness.
When I die, I’ll stop paying the bill on this website and all my research notes will be scoured from existence. I will take my thoughts down into darkness, dissolving like the war trophies stored in Roy Baty’s memory.
*Memento Mori is a Latin phrase which means ‘remember that you will die’. It’s also the name of a 1992 film loosely based on a 1974 short story by Gabriel Josipovici called “Mobius the Stripper: A Topological Exercise.”
BONUS LEVEL: Android (1982)
Did you know?
There was another film about androids released the same year as Bladerunner:
Based on its advertising copy (Much More Than Human) and release date (October 16, 1982 for Android; June 25, 1982 for Bladerunner), we can guess what the producers of Android were getting at: a B-grade Bladerunner subbing Klaus Kinski for Rutger Hauer.
Klaus Kinski was a Nordo-Germanic Art-House Action Hero from another era. By 1982 his hype had faded, but Kinski’s tumultuous working relationship with director Werner Herzog remains the stuff of cinema legend.
Rutger Hauer's Re-Write
I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep from cover to cover just to see if there was anything like the Tears in the Rain Death Soliloquy in it. Specifically, I was looking for references to The Tannhauser Gate. There are none— Hauer’s moving speech and the mysterious Tannhauser Gate are entirely the products of scriptwriters David Webb Peoples and Hampton Fanchers’ genius.
…Well, almost.
In the documentary Dangerous Days: The Making of Bladerunner (2007) the screenwriters tell us Hauer significantly modified the speech, while in Hauer’s autobiography he tells us that he merely trimmed the fat and added the closing lines that gave the monologue its name:
‘all these moments will be lost…like tears in the rain’;
Here’s the text from the final draft of the original shooting script according to Wikipedia:
I've seen things... seen things you little people wouldn't believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as magnesium...
I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
All those moments... they'll be gone.
Compare to Hauer’s re-write, the version that ended up in the film:
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 dark Near the Tannhäuser Gates.
All those... moments... will be lost in time, Like tears... in... rain.
Time... to die...
Allegedly Hauer’s delivery was so moving that members of the cast and crew burst into tears on set.
Here’s a passage from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep which, like the Tears in the Rain Death Soliloquy, reeks of Momento Mori:
[Deckard] wondered if Mozart had had any intuition that the future did not exist, that he had already used up his little time. Maybe I have, too, Rick thought as he watched the rehearsal [of Mozart's 'Magic Flute'] move along.
This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another; finally the name "Mozart" will vanish, the dust will have won. If not on this planet then another. We can evade it awhile.
The Number 42
Rutger Haur died at the age of 75 on July 19, 2019— the same year as the events depicted in Bladerunner— and Philip K. Dick died the same year Bladerunner was released. But wait— the numerology gets even weirder.
Before we get into this, let’s take a moment to appreciate how hilarious it is that Tears In The Rain has its own Wikipedia page. like Ridley Scott, like Harrison Ford , like Philip K. Dick, like Rutger Hauer, like Bladerunner, it’s an icon. The Wikipedia page goes so far as to specify the exact word count of the monologue: 42.
In Douglas Adams’ Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy, the number 42 is the output of the supercomputer Deep Thought after it spends 7.5 million years calculating the ‘Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything’.
In the Holy Bible, there are 42 generations from Abraham to Christ according to Matthew; 42 generations from David to Christ according to Luke; 42 months of famine during the time of Elijah; and the Beast of Revelation is allotted 42 months to spread the blasphemies of the Anti-Christ.
There is a kabbalistic cipher known as ‘gematria’ wherein every letter of the Hebrew alphabet is assigned a numeric value. It’s a literal application of the first line in the first book of the Holy Torah, the famous In the Beginning was the Word. Gematria treats word/number correspondences as the key to revealing the architecture of the universe and the details of G-d’s Plan for humanity on Earth.
Applying the gematric cipher to the number 42, it breaks down into the words:
‘I am that I am’, which some believe to be the true name of God-as-Christ (I AM).
Another Kabbalistic tradition states that 42 is the number through which God created the universe (Rabbi Dr. Hillel Ben David can tell you much, much more about the number 42 in Jewish mysticism here).
Fan Theory:
In creating the replicants in Man’s image, Eldon Tyrell, in his Babylonian hubris, usurped the Throne of God the Creator and assumed the role of Heliophant, Gods representative on Earth.
God, who had created Man in the Divine Image, and Eldon Tyrell, who created the replicants in Mans image—
Was Douglas Adams a Kabbalist? What about the writers of the Bladerunner script?
Because Rutger Hauer added eleven words on the spur of the moment and subtracted a few more, the final count of 42 words ends up looking like an accident rather than a kabbalistic encryption device.
Still, Bladerunner has several potent religious and poetic motifs sitting right on the surface that beckon us, like the lady in the wet market with the scanning electron microscope, to lean in for a closer look.
Finest Quality— Superior Workmanship.
Say, pal, just what kind of future is it where women sit in open-air markets with scanning electron microscopes? An iconic one, is what.
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