— The Search for a Way of Being — Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner By Patrick McEvoy-Halston November 2001 Ridley Scott has recently told us that Decker, from Blade Runner, is in fact a replicant. There are several reasons why I think this a disservice to fans of the film. My primary concern is that it substantiates “takings” of it that focus primarily on the characters at the expense of, as a cover for, explorations of our own responses to Scott’s ominous city-world and its subjected denizens. The choice to create a city-world so reminiscent of our own today, was certainly not an arbitrary one. We have been offered a cold simulacrum, replication , of our own cities—designed, surely, to bring to conscious awareness likely feelings of ambivalence many of us have towards them. I believe the reason we are interested in Decker (a response so natural, logical, in us that the camera’s interest in him mimics our own; it becomes our own viewing eye) is that his movement, his expl...