ABSTRACT
Blade Runner thus proceeds through a screening of the Eye/I, which is always already other than what it will have been. Indeed, from its very opening shot, the film is saturated by this metamorphosis. Not only does the centrally important Voigt-Kampff test focus on the eye; the apparatus itself has eyes. In addition: vehicle headlights and street lights constantly evoke eyes; the eyes of the Replicants glow menacingly or mysteriously (Deckard’s eyes at one point glow in this way); in the Eye Works factory, Leon places genetically engineered eyes on the shoulders of a terrified worker, whose thermal suit resembles nothing so much as an eye, its dangling optic nerve-the suit’s electrical cables-severed by the Replicants; when Deckard questions Zhora about her treatment as an entertainer he refers to tiny peep-holes drilled into the dressing room walls; eyes transmogrify into eggs in the scene where Pris-who has painted out her eyes-plunges her hand into the pot of boiling water on Sebastian’s stove; Roy jokes with Sebastian by holding glass eyes in front of his own; the powerful, varifocal lenses of Tyrell’s glasses magnify his eyes before Roy blinds him-recalling Leon’s attempt to put out Deckard’s eyes after his ‘retirement’ of Zhora; in one of Leon’s photographs, Zhora is reflected in a fish-eye mirror; and so on. Hence, from the opening reflections of the cityscape in the false mirror of an unblinking Eye, to the closing sequence of the Director’s Cut in which Deckard and Rachel are enveloped by the contracting aperture of an elevator shaft, the Eye proliferates across the screen. To that extent there is a homology between the undecidable, disseminating Eye and the undecidable, disseminating I. And this twofold uprooting of the centred subject brings us to perhaps the most puzzling dimension of the film: Death. But as with Eyes and Is, this is not really death of a mortal kind; nor is it the death of an individual. As we shall see, death is always already both symbolic and collective. And it is this which enables the apparent apoliticism of Blade Runner to offer a glimmer of emancipatory promise.
