Blade Runner

I have to admit, action films typically are not my forte. Science fiction films are the exception, but even then they have to have something else going for them besides explosions and spaceships. Even though Blade Runner doesn't have a whole lot of gratuitous chase scenes or anything too "action-y," and even though it has Harrison Ford, one of my favorite actors who can get me to watch anything, I still have trouble getting excited about this movie. Something about it is just a little too sharp, a little too abstract - I didn't see much humanity in it. Perhaps this is the point, but nevertheless, I know I'm not really supposed to be critiquing the movie, so I'll continue with my commentary.

What I did find interesting about this film was the core existential question at it's core, when Rick tests Rachel to find if she is a cyborg, and discovers that she doesn't know she is, he asks, "How does it not know what it is?" This question hit me as what the movie is definitively about, and it seems to be clearly a commentary on our own self-awareness - do any of us really know "what" we are? The techy sci-fi aspect of this raises the question of "What if I suddenly found out I was a cyborg?" but this is not really the problem. The problem is that labeling something ("human," "cyborg") doesn't necessarily create a definition, it just creates a label. Therefore, we think we know what we are, but we still don't, even as "human beings." Because we just accept the label, without really knowing "what" it means to be human. If we don't know what it means to be human, there is no way we can even recognize our own humanity - does our humanity exist in memories, or in the ability to feel sad? Or does our humanity exist in the sadness that might occur if we realized our memories were not our own. When Rachael realizes that the picture of her with her mother is not her mother, that the memory of the spider hatching is not her memory, she feels grief. If grief, a distinctively animal emotion, can even be felt by cyborgs, aren't cyborgs capturing the root of humanity? Perhaps Rachael "knew" who she was more than any of us do, because she, unlike most of humanity, felt the need to prove herself and identify what she thought made her human.