A Transfeminine Reflection on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner

Pris.

Rewatching Blade Runner recently, I was struck by the freedom of the replicant couple on the run, Roy Batty and Pris. Deckard wrongly thinks he’s authentic and real. Pris and Batty know they’re not. (What masterful casting, by the way: Harrison Ford, archetype, known to audiences as Han Solo and Indiana Jones. Rick Deckard, therefore: a derivative. A copy. A replicant?) In combat with Deckard, Batty flies. He dances. He recites nursery rhymes. Pris makes like a toy to trap and kill Deckard. Fighting for their lives, these two, their souls are free in a way the cop cannot approximate. As Scott Bukatman writes,

“Rutger Hauer’s fabulously campy performance turns Roy into a figure of resistance and play. ‘Gosh … you’ve got a lot of great toys here’ he tells Sebastian, his voice quivering with lust. He exhibits real Joie de vivre (‘I want more life, fucker’), but demonstrates even more joy in performance. He purses his lips, taunts, teases, confesses remorse, paints his face and in general eroticises the world.”1

Dying, Batty’s spirit is unstaunched. His poetry is the song of a short life: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.” He knows himself to be artificial. In that, there’s a special vantage- one Deckard lacks.

The claim that “gender is a social construct” is often aimed against trans women. Leaving aside the veracity of that argument, one thing is clear: trans people’s genders are no more or less “socially constructed” than anyone else’s. Those who attack trans people this way have not considered their own artificiality. (“You know that Voigt-Kampff test of yours? Did you ever take that test yourself?”) This is not to argue that gender is completely socially constructed. It’s just to assert that in the mix, trans people are no more ‘faking’ their gender than are cis people.

Deckard’s destiny is to realise his own constructedness in the image of an origami unicorn. His android-face reflected back at him. And that is the moment he makes a truly innovative decision. There had been no moral purpose to his hunt for the andies. Just a cop doing his job. He executed the task with a nerd’s love of technique, but no heroic aim drove him on. It is in finally understanding his own artificiality as equal to that of Roy, Pris and Rachel that he finds the power to make a truly ethical decision. He will go on the run himself. The central ambiguity of Blade Runner- is Deckard a replicant or not?- is left importantly unanswered. When he nods after gazing into the origami model, we don’t know if he has seen in it evidence that he is a replicant or more that the gulf separating android from “real” human is not so great.

I’ve struggled with authenticity. I’ve wanted to find something in my body to found my transness, wished I had especially high oestrogen levels for someone assigned-male-at-birth. I even had a dream about it… When I start to worry about my ‘artificiality’, it’s then I look to the replicant characters Pris and Roy. And I remember the playfulness and strength of spirit they have through recognising their own constructedness.

Pris and Roy are happy amongst J.F. Sebastian’s electronic toys, because they have abandoned any sense of their selves as founded in something transcendent. They understand that they too are a collection of mechanisms which together create the experience of soul. This is true of both humans and replicants. The science-fiction horror of machines gaining sentience is partly rooted, I would contend, in the way it threatens the notion of human being as spiritually derived. Intelligent machines suggest that human consciousness emerges from simpler material mechanisms rather than an immaterial plane of divinity. Pris and Roy are free of any anxiety about this fact.

The existence of transsexual women has not for nothing led to several deployments of the android metaphor. Mary Daly has called our physical transitions “the Frankenstein phenomenon”; TERF blogs are littered with references to the Stepford Wives in a confluence of robot-horror and the artificialising of femininity. The latter, of course, is more frequently reserved for the charge of artificiality than is masculinity, with trans femininity being the fakest of all its strains…

I’m reminded of the scene in Neil Gaiman’s fifth Sandman book, A Game of You, in which the trans woman Wanda is not allowed to follow the path of the moon during a magical ritual because, so it seems, she’s not a ‘real woman’. Pris and Roy’s position is a materialist one. They reject all the High Gods, recognising their materiality and thus their mortality. They prefer to tear their pleasures with rough strife. Whenever I see Blade Runner, their freedom is a lesson to me.