ABSTRACT

The film, Blade Runner, explores a trio of themes, namely death, empathy, and what it is to be human, and in so doing advances some cognitively rich and interesting views about their interconnections. This chapter discusses the role of empathy and its importance to what it is to be human. Empathy is pivotal to the narrative, since the blade runners use the Voight-Kampff test, an empathy test, to determine who is a replicant. Death and its concomitant empathetic emotions condition and inflect emotions such as romantic love, showing the lover and beloved to be on a par as mortals, bound to a common fate. Some will take these claims as supporting the doctrine that films can do philosophy, and Blade Runner has been proposed as such a film. Blade Runner is one of the most visually dense and strikingly beautiful films ever created, yet it finds its beauty in transience, decomposition and death.