cont....
What this confusion of incest taboos signifies is complicated, however. Creed states that it is the confusion of social boundaries that drives most horror films, and in a similar way here it is the confusion between boundaries that drives Blade Runner. Firstly is the confusion between what is human and what is not human. Secondly is the confusion of family roles (which is in many ways created by the first confusion).
A further role of the incestuous confusion comes back to the workings of the Film Noir. Crowie discusses Gilda in reference to Oedipus in Film Noir. She states that "Freud connects this type of object-choice [i.e. Deckard's choice of Rachel, who is Tyrell's 'property'] to the man's oedipal desires, so that the duplicitous woman is a mother surrogate" (Crowie, 1993). It can be seen clearly that the Replicants (especially Deckard, Rachel, Roy and Leon) are in desperate need of a mother figure, Deckard finds one in Rachel, and Roy finds one in Pris, and possibly Leon had found one in Zhora.
The scene where Pris is retired also holds a great deal of meaning in terms of the surrogate mother roles of the female Replicants. Pris is killed when she is shot in the stomach. As Pris gets her strength from her sexuality, being shot in the uterus is symbolically. Also, as Pris is the surrogate mother of Batty, the nature of her death forms a violent and bloody birthing sequence for Roy Batty, which may explain why Batty is virtually naked for the final scenes. Pris may also, to some extent, reflect the spider imagery used to signify the archaic mother. When at JF's apartment she dramatically changes her identity, becoming a long limbed, black and white, literal spider-woman.
This incestuous sub-text has a relevance to misogyny in the way that the taboo is broken. The Replicants return to Earth through violence, the "questionable things" that Batty speaks of. Thus the return to Earth, if viewed as sex with the mother takes on the traits of rape. The Replicants have been outlawed on Earth, rejected from the maternal womb in their maturity. It is a forcible and bloody return that they make.
The scene which occurs between Deckard and Rachel can also be seen as violent misogynist incest. When Rachel attempts to leave Deckard's apartment he rushes to the door, and bars her exit. Then he forces her against a venetian blind and kisses her. She protests that she cannot rely on the false memories she has been given, but Deckard ignores this, and forces her to say that she loves him, until she finally submits. This is perhaps one of the most outwardly misogynist moments in the movie. It outlines again how subservient Rachel is, especially when compared to the other, more self-aware Replicants.
A defence of this scene is that both Deckard and Rachel, as Replicants, are inexperienced when it comes to emotion, and what the scene represents are two people trying hard to cope in a new situation. This does seem to be corroborated by the way in which Deckard is constantly surprised whenever he experiences emotion. An example of this is the point in the film where Zhora is shot. Here Deckard seems shocked by the events, and does not appear to know how to deal with what he has done. However, in the scene, Deckard appears motivated mainly by anger. This is, after all, the second time that Rachel has walked out on him. Whether anger is the emotion which he is trying to deal with seems uncertain.
To complicate matters further, when Rachel is at the piano she alters her hair from the artificial looking style she wore previously, to a bushy, and more natural style, seemingly mimicking one of the photos in Deckard's possession, a sepia print of a woman that he spends time looking at, when sitting at the piano. As there seems to be some connection between family history and photographs, it could be argued that this represents a further Oedipal rape, where Rachel in effect becomes at least the image of what Deckard views as his mother. The relationship between the Replicant characters become more and more convoluted, the more closely they are observed.
Another of Scott's films, Alien, uses archaic mother symbolism. The archaic mother is shown in the strange shapes of the distressed ship, the leathery eggs and the dark dank places within the Nostromo. The computer aboard the Nostromo, named Mother, who is also representative of the Company, is equally uncaring of her children, placing the alien, as a phallic fetish object of the mother, above the crew of the ship. In Blade Runner the Replicants face similar maternal rejection. However, there appears to be no form of fetish object beyond the real humans themselves, who after all are quite welcome to stay on Earth, i.e. with the mother, eating away at the Spider's back of the city.
Creed also examines closely one of the key elements of male anxiety; castration fear. Freud believed that the very common male castration anxiety develops in the human male from misunderstanding the differences between the male and female sex, viewing his mother as somehow a castrated version of his father. Creed in Monstrous Feminine states that "castration anxiety has given rise to two of the most powerful representations of the monstrous-feminine...: woman as castrator and woman as castrated." (Creed, 1993) She believes that Freud's understanding of the father as castrator was presumptuous, and that much of the anxiety comes from fear of castration by the mother. To back this up she quotes Rheingold's The Fear of Being a Woman.
"Classical theory has it that the boy fears castration by the father as punishment for his sexual interest in the mother. This is not verified by my clinical experience... Throughout life, the man fears woman a castrator, not the man" (Qtd. Creed, 1993)
Thus the female castrator image occurs again and again through the genres that lie closest to the human subconscious, those of fantasy and horror. The mother figure in Psycho is perhaps one of the clearest examples, although literally absent from the plot. Misery and Alien can also be cited as an example of the femme castratrice with Kathy Bates brilliant portrayal as the overbearing, sledgehammer wielding, "Number 1 fan" and the toothed vagina of the zenomorph.
Throughout Blade Runner Deckard is symbolically castrated many times by the Replicants he chases. He loses his laser tube more often than he uses it, when encountering both Leon and Batty. The clearest castration imagery is to be found in the scene with Pris at JF's apartment. Here Pris masquerades as one of JF's toys, which are perhaps more obscene in their existence than the Replicants themselves. Deckard unveils her, and she strikes, attempting to crush his neck between her thighs.
Pris has been, throughout the film, portrayed as an attractive spider-woman, luring JF into taking Batty to see Tyrell. Here, however, she becomes a grotesque clown, who grimaces in her conflict with the Blade Runner. The threat to Deckard clearly comes from the source of Pris' power, i.e. her sex, and the mixture of images between Deckard being crushed and the toothy grimace of his assailant seems to suggest a vagina dentata. Creed sites a rich number of mythical and folklore examples of this castrating force, that of the toothed vagina. She goes on to state that "the myth about woman as castrator clearly points to male fears and phantasies about the female genitals as a trap, a black hole which threatens to swallow them up and cut them into pieces. The vagina dentata is the mouth of hell..." (Creed, 1993)
Creed discusses one of the explanations for the vagina dentata in terms of the "all encompassing maternal figure of the pre-Oedipal period, who threatens symbolically to engulf the infant thus posing a threat of psychic obliteration." (Creed, 1993) The viewer must remember that at this point in the text Deckard is still perhaps wondering if he himself is a Replicant. If this is so then the femme castratrice imagery makes a great deal of narrative sense. If "Deckard" is merely a set of false memories, then that which he knows as his personality comes into question. Deckard risks losing his personality to that of the Replicants, as much as he risks losing it to his mother. This idea is also backed up by the importance of the (absent/archaic) mother figure in the lives of the Replicants, from Leon to Rachel. Thus Pris as castrator goes beyond being a femme castratrice, and becomes a castrating Replicant. What this means outside the narrative is that Deckard is in danger of losing his humanity, by attempting to destroy the Replicants, i.e. he will lose his empathy, that which makes us human.
However, to site this example of the female castrator would be unjust to the film. Stephen Neale lists a number of castration signifiers in the text: "Roy breaks Deckard's fingers, Roy pierces his own hand with a nail; the neon dragon outside the night-club has a phallic tongue which constantly flicks in and out." Added to this is the way in which Deckard repeatedly loses his weapon (It is possible to view such a weapon as a second phallus, a way in which men may allay fears of castration), but at the hands of his male assailants. Again, we must consider that the difference being battled here is not the difference between the male and the female, but the difference between the human and the non-human, the empathic and the non-empathic.
Perhaps one of the most perplexing arguments about misogyny in Blade Runner comes from its fascination with post modernism. The film has been cited as a strong example for post modernism on a number of counts, chiefly the variety of architecture (stone cladding in the lifts), the variety of cultures within the city dwellers (from punk to Krishna), the concept of the Replicant as a "human signifier", and the usage of Film Noir. Post modernism itself has become more and more useful in both assessing and creating works, as can be seen by the success of Quentin Tarantino as a director, who has become ridiculously sought after considering he has directed a mere 2 and a quarter films.
Tarantino came under a great deal of criticism for the levels of violence in his films, but was defended by many stating that the films weren't violent in themselves, but were about screen violence. In a similar way it is possible to see Blade Runner functioning in a similar way with reference to Film Noir, and cinema in general.
If the Replicants are viewed as "human signifiers" then they can be seen to function in a similar way to characters within a film. This is backed up by a number of similarities between the Replicants and cinematic characters. Firstly is the way in which the Replicants are slaves, designed for specific purposes, in the same way that characters are created to perform specific functions, in effect slaves to the films narrative. Secondly is the way in which the Replicants display superhuman abilities, such as Pris' retrieving the egg from the boiling water. This mirrors the superhuman abilities displayed by even the mortal characters within films. Lastly is the way the Replicants emotions are so powerful when compared to their human counterparts, which is similar to the melodramatic nature of the films. This is also carried through into the dialogue of the Replicants, from Rachel's bitter one-liners, "I'm not in the business, I am the business", to Batty's philosophy. The fact that Blade Runner is set in Los Angeles is no accident, as it means that the Replicants are created in the very place that films are made.
This seems to be backed up by the "real" women, and indeed men, in the film. Instead of the gracious, beautiful, occidental characters the Replicants present, the real characters take the form of the aged oriental geneticist, the one eyed shop assistant, the sickened JF Sebastian, etc.
How this affects the plot is intriguing. Deckard is suddenly chasing a series of film stereotypes across the futuristic landscape, and thus becomes a stereotype himself, that of the hard boiled detective, hence the Deckard as Replicant plot twist. The film ceases to exist as a Film Noir, but instead becomes a film very much about Film Noir. Thus the misogyny that is present only exists in terms of the post modern representation. It could be argued that it is not women that Deckard is destroying, but the very stereotypes that critics claim the film is creating. Blade Runner seems to be a reaction to, and not a celebration of, Film Noir.
Neale points out that one of the differences between the Replicants and the humans seems to be that of race. The Replicants are all occidental, whereas the "real people" are a mix of occidental, and oriental. This helps to further define what Blade Runner is examining. The films it refers to are definitely the white American, the films of Hollywood.
The post modernist concept within Blade Runner tends to alter the emphasis of the film considerably, and also allows various parts of the film to make a great deal of sense. The way in which Deckard is repeatedly castrated by both male and female Replicants seems to suggest that the key battle is, as stated before, not between male and female, but between that which is human, and that which is non-human, or to put it more simply, that which is real and that which is not real. The archaic mother imagery signifies his battle against the Film Noir archetype he is in danger of becoming, and not any genuine maternal figure. As Neale states, often in fantasy films the commonplace differences between male and female or black and white often become negligible within themselves, and are effectively transformed into more considerable differences. Blade Runner provides a prime example of this, in that it is the difference between real and unreal, in fact the difference between cinema and real life, that is the focus.
In conclusion then, Blade Runner seems not to be as misogynist as it at first appears. Instead, what the film does is use abjection in relation to the archaic mother, and the fear of losing one's identity to the archaic mother, to examine the relationship, conflict and fascination the real have with the unreal, or the cinematic.
What this confusion of incest taboos signifies is complicated, however. Creed states that it is the confusion of social boundaries that drives most horror films, and in a similar way here it is the confusion between boundaries that drives Blade Runner. Firstly is the confusion between what is human and what is not human. Secondly is the confusion of family roles (which is in many ways created by the first confusion).
A further role of the incestuous confusion comes back to the workings of the Film Noir. Crowie discusses Gilda in reference to Oedipus in Film Noir. She states that "Freud connects this type of object-choice [i.e. Deckard's choice of Rachel, who is Tyrell's 'property'] to the man's oedipal desires, so that the duplicitous woman is a mother surrogate" (Crowie, 1993). It can be seen clearly that the Replicants (especially Deckard, Rachel, Roy and Leon) are in desperate need of a mother figure, Deckard finds one in Rachel, and Roy finds one in Pris, and possibly Leon had found one in Zhora.
The scene where Pris is retired also holds a great deal of meaning in terms of the surrogate mother roles of the female Replicants. Pris is killed when she is shot in the stomach. As Pris gets her strength from her sexuality, being shot in the uterus is symbolically. Also, as Pris is the surrogate mother of Batty, the nature of her death forms a violent and bloody birthing sequence for Roy Batty, which may explain why Batty is virtually naked for the final scenes. Pris may also, to some extent, reflect the spider imagery used to signify the archaic mother. When at JF's apartment she dramatically changes her identity, becoming a long limbed, black and white, literal spider-woman.
This incestuous sub-text has a relevance to misogyny in the way that the taboo is broken. The Replicants return to Earth through violence, the "questionable things" that Batty speaks of. Thus the return to Earth, if viewed as sex with the mother takes on the traits of rape. The Replicants have been outlawed on Earth, rejected from the maternal womb in their maturity. It is a forcible and bloody return that they make.
The scene which occurs between Deckard and Rachel can also be seen as violent misogynist incest. When Rachel attempts to leave Deckard's apartment he rushes to the door, and bars her exit. Then he forces her against a venetian blind and kisses her. She protests that she cannot rely on the false memories she has been given, but Deckard ignores this, and forces her to say that she loves him, until she finally submits. This is perhaps one of the most outwardly misogynist moments in the movie. It outlines again how subservient Rachel is, especially when compared to the other, more self-aware Replicants.
A defence of this scene is that both Deckard and Rachel, as Replicants, are inexperienced when it comes to emotion, and what the scene represents are two people trying hard to cope in a new situation. This does seem to be corroborated by the way in which Deckard is constantly surprised whenever he experiences emotion. An example of this is the point in the film where Zhora is shot. Here Deckard seems shocked by the events, and does not appear to know how to deal with what he has done. However, in the scene, Deckard appears motivated mainly by anger. This is, after all, the second time that Rachel has walked out on him. Whether anger is the emotion which he is trying to deal with seems uncertain.
To complicate matters further, when Rachel is at the piano she alters her hair from the artificial looking style she wore previously, to a bushy, and more natural style, seemingly mimicking one of the photos in Deckard's possession, a sepia print of a woman that he spends time looking at, when sitting at the piano. As there seems to be some connection between family history and photographs, it could be argued that this represents a further Oedipal rape, where Rachel in effect becomes at least the image of what Deckard views as his mother. The relationship between the Replicant characters become more and more convoluted, the more closely they are observed.
Another of Scott's films, Alien, uses archaic mother symbolism. The archaic mother is shown in the strange shapes of the distressed ship, the leathery eggs and the dark dank places within the Nostromo. The computer aboard the Nostromo, named Mother, who is also representative of the Company, is equally uncaring of her children, placing the alien, as a phallic fetish object of the mother, above the crew of the ship. In Blade Runner the Replicants face similar maternal rejection. However, there appears to be no form of fetish object beyond the real humans themselves, who after all are quite welcome to stay on Earth, i.e. with the mother, eating away at the Spider's back of the city.
Creed also examines closely one of the key elements of male anxiety; castration fear. Freud believed that the very common male castration anxiety develops in the human male from misunderstanding the differences between the male and female sex, viewing his mother as somehow a castrated version of his father. Creed in Monstrous Feminine states that "castration anxiety has given rise to two of the most powerful representations of the monstrous-feminine...: woman as castrator and woman as castrated." (Creed, 1993) She believes that Freud's understanding of the father as castrator was presumptuous, and that much of the anxiety comes from fear of castration by the mother. To back this up she quotes Rheingold's The Fear of Being a Woman.
"Classical theory has it that the boy fears castration by the father as punishment for his sexual interest in the mother. This is not verified by my clinical experience... Throughout life, the man fears woman a castrator, not the man" (Qtd. Creed, 1993)
Thus the female castrator image occurs again and again through the genres that lie closest to the human subconscious, those of fantasy and horror. The mother figure in Psycho is perhaps one of the clearest examples, although literally absent from the plot. Misery and Alien can also be cited as an example of the femme castratrice with Kathy Bates brilliant portrayal as the overbearing, sledgehammer wielding, "Number 1 fan" and the toothed vagina of the zenomorph.
Throughout Blade Runner Deckard is symbolically castrated many times by the Replicants he chases. He loses his laser tube more often than he uses it, when encountering both Leon and Batty. The clearest castration imagery is to be found in the scene with Pris at JF's apartment. Here Pris masquerades as one of JF's toys, which are perhaps more obscene in their existence than the Replicants themselves. Deckard unveils her, and she strikes, attempting to crush his neck between her thighs.
Pris has been, throughout the film, portrayed as an attractive spider-woman, luring JF into taking Batty to see Tyrell. Here, however, she becomes a grotesque clown, who grimaces in her conflict with the Blade Runner. The threat to Deckard clearly comes from the source of Pris' power, i.e. her sex, and the mixture of images between Deckard being crushed and the toothy grimace of his assailant seems to suggest a vagina dentata. Creed sites a rich number of mythical and folklore examples of this castrating force, that of the toothed vagina. She goes on to state that "the myth about woman as castrator clearly points to male fears and phantasies about the female genitals as a trap, a black hole which threatens to swallow them up and cut them into pieces. The vagina dentata is the mouth of hell..." (Creed, 1993)
Creed discusses one of the explanations for the vagina dentata in terms of the "all encompassing maternal figure of the pre-Oedipal period, who threatens symbolically to engulf the infant thus posing a threat of psychic obliteration." (Creed, 1993) The viewer must remember that at this point in the text Deckard is still perhaps wondering if he himself is a Replicant. If this is so then the femme castratrice imagery makes a great deal of narrative sense. If "Deckard" is merely a set of false memories, then that which he knows as his personality comes into question. Deckard risks losing his personality to that of the Replicants, as much as he risks losing it to his mother. This idea is also backed up by the importance of the (absent/archaic) mother figure in the lives of the Replicants, from Leon to Rachel. Thus Pris as castrator goes beyond being a femme castratrice, and becomes a castrating Replicant. What this means outside the narrative is that Deckard is in danger of losing his humanity, by attempting to destroy the Replicants, i.e. he will lose his empathy, that which makes us human.
However, to site this example of the female castrator would be unjust to the film. Stephen Neale lists a number of castration signifiers in the text: "Roy breaks Deckard's fingers, Roy pierces his own hand with a nail; the neon dragon outside the night-club has a phallic tongue which constantly flicks in and out." Added to this is the way in which Deckard repeatedly loses his weapon (It is possible to view such a weapon as a second phallus, a way in which men may allay fears of castration), but at the hands of his male assailants. Again, we must consider that the difference being battled here is not the difference between the male and the female, but the difference between the human and the non-human, the empathic and the non-empathic.
Perhaps one of the most perplexing arguments about misogyny in Blade Runner comes from its fascination with post modernism. The film has been cited as a strong example for post modernism on a number of counts, chiefly the variety of architecture (stone cladding in the lifts), the variety of cultures within the city dwellers (from punk to Krishna), the concept of the Replicant as a "human signifier", and the usage of Film Noir. Post modernism itself has become more and more useful in both assessing and creating works, as can be seen by the success of Quentin Tarantino as a director, who has become ridiculously sought after considering he has directed a mere 2 and a quarter films.
Tarantino came under a great deal of criticism for the levels of violence in his films, but was defended by many stating that the films weren't violent in themselves, but were about screen violence. In a similar way it is possible to see Blade Runner functioning in a similar way with reference to Film Noir, and cinema in general.
If the Replicants are viewed as "human signifiers" then they can be seen to function in a similar way to characters within a film. This is backed up by a number of similarities between the Replicants and cinematic characters. Firstly is the way in which the Replicants are slaves, designed for specific purposes, in the same way that characters are created to perform specific functions, in effect slaves to the films narrative. Secondly is the way in which the Replicants display superhuman abilities, such as Pris' retrieving the egg from the boiling water. This mirrors the superhuman abilities displayed by even the mortal characters within films. Lastly is the way the Replicants emotions are so powerful when compared to their human counterparts, which is similar to the melodramatic nature of the films. This is also carried through into the dialogue of the Replicants, from Rachel's bitter one-liners, "I'm not in the business, I am the business", to Batty's philosophy. The fact that Blade Runner is set in Los Angeles is no accident, as it means that the Replicants are created in the very place that films are made.
This seems to be backed up by the "real" women, and indeed men, in the film. Instead of the gracious, beautiful, occidental characters the Replicants present, the real characters take the form of the aged oriental geneticist, the one eyed shop assistant, the sickened JF Sebastian, etc.
How this affects the plot is intriguing. Deckard is suddenly chasing a series of film stereotypes across the futuristic landscape, and thus becomes a stereotype himself, that of the hard boiled detective, hence the Deckard as Replicant plot twist. The film ceases to exist as a Film Noir, but instead becomes a film very much about Film Noir. Thus the misogyny that is present only exists in terms of the post modern representation. It could be argued that it is not women that Deckard is destroying, but the very stereotypes that critics claim the film is creating. Blade Runner seems to be a reaction to, and not a celebration of, Film Noir.
Neale points out that one of the differences between the Replicants and the humans seems to be that of race. The Replicants are all occidental, whereas the "real people" are a mix of occidental, and oriental. This helps to further define what Blade Runner is examining. The films it refers to are definitely the white American, the films of Hollywood.
The post modernist concept within Blade Runner tends to alter the emphasis of the film considerably, and also allows various parts of the film to make a great deal of sense. The way in which Deckard is repeatedly castrated by both male and female Replicants seems to suggest that the key battle is, as stated before, not between male and female, but between that which is human, and that which is non-human, or to put it more simply, that which is real and that which is not real. The archaic mother imagery signifies his battle against the Film Noir archetype he is in danger of becoming, and not any genuine maternal figure. As Neale states, often in fantasy films the commonplace differences between male and female or black and white often become negligible within themselves, and are effectively transformed into more considerable differences. Blade Runner provides a prime example of this, in that it is the difference between real and unreal, in fact the difference between cinema and real life, that is the focus.
In conclusion then, Blade Runner seems not to be as misogynist as it at first appears. Instead, what the film does is use abjection in relation to the archaic mother, and the fear of losing one's identity to the archaic mother, to examine the relationship, conflict and fascination the real have with the unreal, or the cinematic.
I used to want to be an air traffic controller after reading that but then realized that I don't like sitting at a computer for eight hours a day, even if I'm doing something fast-paced and exciting.
