The original Blade Runner film, set in November 2019, opens with the now iconic scene of Leon, a replicant, undergoing what appears to be a psychological association-reaction test. He complains of getting nervous when he takes tests but is told not to worry. âYouâre in a desert,â Holden, the test administrator, tells him, âWalking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look downâŠâ
âWhat one?â Leon interrupts. He is told it doesnât matter, that it is completely hypothetical. But he persists, asking how he would have come to be there.
âMaybe youâre fed up.â Holden tells him, adding some emotional flavour. âMaybe you want to be by yourself. Who knows?â Then he continues with the script. âYou look down and see a tortoise, Leon. Itâs crawling toward youâŠâ
âTortoise? Whatâs that?â
Holden asks him if he has seen a turtle and tells him it is the same thing. When Leon says that heâs never actually seen a turtle, Holden begins to show irritation. Leon picks up on this and reassures Holden, saying âBut I understand what you mean.â
Holden resumes, âYou reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back, Leon.â
But Leon is having trouble focusing. âDo you make up these questions, Mr. Holden? Or do they write them down for you?â
âThe tortoise lays on its back,â Holden continues, the audio track reverberating, presumably allowing us, the viewer, to enter into Leonâs disorientation, âits belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over. But it canât. Not without your help. But youâre not helping.â
âWhat do you mean, Iâm not helping?â
âI mean, youâre not helping. Why is that, Leon?â
Leonâs distress is now quite clear. Holden changes his tone and attempts to reassure him.
âTheyâre just questions, Leon. In answer to your query, theyâre written down for me. Itâs a test, designed to provoke an emotional response.â It appears to have succeeded. âShall we continue?â Holden asks. He continues.
âDescribe in single words only the good things that come into your mind, about your mother âŠâ
âMy mother?â
âYeah.â
âLet me tell you about my mother,â replies Leon, leaning forward, his hands under the table. And he shoots Holden.
The Voight-Kampff test is, as Holden says, designed to provoke an emotional reaction. The apparatus Holden unfolds at the outset of the test, functioning a little like a lie-detector, measures physiological changes, with a particular emphasis on eye movement. The logic of the test appears to be rooted in emotion. Replicants, the humanoids manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation, emerge as fully formed adults. They have no childhood and therefore no childhood memory. They do, however, appear to be capable of desire, with the suggestion, then, of some kind of emotional attachment. The test, in the small samples we are shown of it, seems to operate on the basis of provoking the exposure of the gap between the awareness of the appropriacy of emotion and the lack of such appropriate emotion. When Holden describes the overturned tortoise, Leon appears to know that a reaction is expected of him and yet he doesnât know, or doesnât feel, what this reaction is.
The dĂ©nouement of the scene, with the invocation of the mother, seems pertinent in a psychoanalytic context. Where the tortoise merely provokes discomfort, the mention of his mother provokes a strong, violent, or murderous, reaction. Except Leon doesnât or didnât have a mother. It is plausible that Leonâs reaction is nothing at all to do with the specific content of Holdenâs questions and is simply a pre-emptive reaction to the obvious point that he is about to be found out as being a replicant. And yet, the content cannot be ignored.
The test can be understood to operate on a logic of difference. The presence of an appropriate reactionââwhatever that might beââwould, presumably, indicate a likelihood that the subject is not a replicant. We might assume then, that the absence of an appropriate reaction would indicate that the subject is a replicant. However, this is not the case. It is the anticipation of the absence of an appropriate emotional reaction on the part of the subject themselves which appears to be the true point of confirmation. The test centres on the subjectâs own knowledge of their status, whether this knowledge is consciously known or not. It is not, however, a knowledge of what is but, rather, a knowledge of what might not be.
This point of anticipation exposes something crucial of the Cartesian core of the original film. The three central characters each occupy a particular stance towards the question of their knowledge of their own essence. Roy Baty, the leader of the rogue gang of replicants knows that he is a replicant. Rachel, a prototype of a newer model of replicant, appears to know that she is a replicant but struggles to acknowledge this knowledge. She knows but does not believe (Neill, 2018; 218). Deckart, the Blade Runner, we might, then assume, knows he is not a replicant. A key driver of the film, however, is the uncertainty of this knowledge. We, the spectator, are led to doubt the veracity of Deckartâs knowledge, without this doubt ever settling into a new certainty. Forty years after the original filmâs release, through various alternative cuts and sequels (Blade Runner 2049 was preceded by three interim short films), both Deckhartâs ontological and epistemological status remain uncertain. Even the screenwriters and directors are not in agreement.
The status of replicants, by the time of 2049, appears, on the surface at least, more definite. The new model of replicant, the Nexus 9s, and the older models, whom the Nexus 9 Blade Runner, K., is deployed to terminate, are equally aware of their replicant status. Like Rachel, they have their own memories, developed since their inception, and they have implanted childhood memories. Like Roy Baty, they are clear as to their replicant status, both in terms of their fundamental being and in terms of their subordinated social position. Where, however, Royâs certainty is an unhappy one, and one which motivates the failed rebellion he instigates, the Nexus 9 replicants have been designed such that they can sit with their status and will obey humans unfailingly. To ensure this obedience and safeguard against the risk of revolt, the Nexus 9s are subject to routine tests, referred to as the Baseline Test.
The Baseline Test consists of a disrupted recitation of a section from the central poem from Vladimir Nabakovâs Pale Fire. After the replicantâs initial recitation of the section, selected words are abstracted and repeated, intercut with provocative questions. The task appears to be for the replicant is to repeat the abstracted words without being drawn into or disturbed by the questions.
The section of the poem from Pale Fire, lines 703â707, reads as follows:
And blood-black nothingness began to spin
A system of cells interlinked within
Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.
The first time we see K. subjected to the test, the repeated words are âwithinâ, âcellsâ and âinterlinkedâ, either alone or as phrases. The second time we see him take the test, the words âdreadfullyâ, âdistinctâ and âdarkâ are added. The abstraction of the words, and the questions which follow them, draw our attention to two sides of language. On the level of what we would, in a Lacanian idiom, call the symbolic, language has no meaning. Language, and constituent bits of language, such as words or phrases, may have functions and links, but there is no meaning which is inherent to them. Meaning requires interaction with language. Meaning has to be, and routinely is, imputed to language. This allows what we would usually understand as the human dimension of language. Conventionally, we might even assume that the meaning precedes the language which then functions as a kind of vessel for the meaning. I express myself with (the tool of) language. Even in this conventional model, the separation between the base materiality of the language componentââwhat it looks or sounds likeââand the meaning that is supposed, is evident. I pick what I think are the best words to convey what it is I want to say but there is always room for misunderstanding. What the words mean to me, may not be what they mean to you. In fact, if we think about it, the words are highly unlikely to mean exactly the same thing to you and me. We will have learned the words in different situations, encountered them in different context, used them differently, heard them in different voices, associate them with different experiences and bits of the world. All these aspects which would allow us the possibility of receiving words with the impression of meaning may overlap to a greater or lesser extent, but the configuration will remain unique.
Requiring the replicant to recite the words of the poem, and only the words of the poem, even if abstracted from the poem and presented out of order, is to require the replicant to operate on a purely symbolic level. A replicant is, after all, a machine. They ought to be able to function in this machinic manner. The insertion of the questions, articulated to or echoing the words of the poem, appears, then, to execute a number of overlapping functions. The questions seek to engage the replicant in something akin to a conversation, expressing an interest in the replicantâs life, perspective, feelings etc. The questions, that is, perform the engagement with the replicant as a human being. In so doing, the questions invite the replicant to identify; to identify as one who may have a life, a perspective, feelings etc. or one who might hold such things as something of value. On a seemingly more mundane level, the questions, by repeating elements from the small section of the poem, seem clinically designed to distract. This obstacle to concentration, combined with the invitation to identify, functions to provoke a reaction. What it doesnât allow is the anticipation of certain termination that the original Voight-Kampff test triggers. In the replicantsâ world of 2049, there is nothing to anticipate. Not only has castration has always already occurred, as, of course, is true for the replicants of the original Blade Runner, but, moreover, the acceptance of castration as an irreversible fact is established from the off.
The relationship between castration and language is paramount here and underscores the significance of the shift from Voight-Kampff Test to Baseline Test. Against the commonplace notion t...