Some analysis of my favorite scene from Blade Runner - I've chosen the sexual scene between Deckard and Rachel at his apartment in the middle of the movie to write about. This scene, one of many beautiful ones in the movie, serves as a fine example of why Blade Runner is rightly hailed as a masterpiece by Ridley Scott. It's a gorgeously layered, philosophical, and textured scene, and serves as a mini-climax of subtle buildup that's occurred throughout the first half of the movie. In a film largely centering around the idea of "What defines our humanity?" the scene is a rich and unique way to visually tackle this question.
Why do I love this scene? It's in the details of objects in the room + the dress of the characters, and how both of these things symbolically mirror what's going on in the script with Rachel at this point in the movie: her coming to grips with the fact that she is, in fact, an Android.
Previously in the movie, Ridley Scott shows the viewer a piano, and various stacks of sheet music on the music stand. Following Chekov's famous "If there is a gun on the wall, it has to go off," quote, we know that the piano/music will be used later in the movie. During this scene, the music finally comes into play. It should also be mentioned that there is a second set up of music, a constant throughout this movie: the soundtrack used almost always has some sort of synthesized layer to the score, or a sort of 80's, electronica vibe, a clever subtle way of bringing in a kind of "robotic", or in-organic, feel to the music in the background. As music is almost always thought of as a form of art that is incredibly emotionally expressive, this soundtrack highlights without any use of dialogue the recurring theme of questioning whether a robot/android's emotions make them genuinely human or not.
For the purpose of analyzing my take on this scene, I am going to equate a large part of "being human" with the idea of being able to feel wild passion, inspiration, deep emotion, and a sort of spiritual or intangible quality that makes us what we are. If this is true, then symbols or metaphors showing the opposite will equate to a form of inhumanity: perfect order, stoic-ness, quantified results, calculated appearances, things that are neat, ordered, and easily defined. Following this idea, we have Rachel, who throughout the movie is meticulously dressed. Her hair is always up in a bun, her dress (shoulder pads and all) neatly designed to make her look clean, sleek, and proper. Her make up is also carefully layered in a way that gives her a ghastly, near-inhuman, or "too perfect" quality. She walks neat and ordered. She speaks with perfect enunciation, carefully, without error. She is the classic femme fatale, cool, analytical, and emotionless. In all respects, Rachel is physically presented as having lost all human characteristics...wild, primal emotion is no where to be found in how she dresses and carries herself.
Aside from Rachel's demeanor and style of dress, we can also see the same images reflected in how music is portrayed in this scene. Where for us, the passion of music often conjures up images of sweat drenched, electric guitar solos ripping out to a roaring crowd on a stage, or the soft, sweet beauty of the romantic classical pieces from centuries ago being able to move even the hardest of men...yet for Rachel, music is represented in a far more passionless way: through calculated, quantifiable, tangible clusters of clearly defines notes scored on her sheet music. Ridley Scott has even gone so far as to choose sheet music that has a very neat and ordered look to how the notes are arrayed on the pages themselves: notes are shown in neat arpeggios moving up and down the staff, there is a clear order, rhyme and reason to them visually, and it appears simply as something easily to translatable to an instrument, as opposed to something emotive that comes from the heart. Scott also chooses to show a close up that slowly pans over the sheet music, underscoring the fact that this image is important for the viewer as a visual metaphor. Furthering this motif, when Rachel sits down in this scene to play this music, the performance mirrors her physical appearance. It is played "perfectly"...smooth, cool, calculated...her body is stiff, rigid and overly-composed. While it is a pretty piece that sounds nice to our ears, there is a clear lack of emotional content when she plays it, and it sounds like she is simply going through the motions, replicating note for note what is on the sheet music. There is nothing of
Rachel in this music. She is not
capable of putting her emotions into the music.
The duality here is that although
how she plays is mechanical, in Rachel's face we are able to see an unmistakable longing.
Longing for what? This question is answered from a set up earlier in the scene, when she first sits down at the piano bench. Before playing, she picks up one of Deckard's pictures sitting on the piano. When Rachel looks at the picture, the viewer is reminded that in the Blade Runner universe, Android's are programmed with a back story of memories from childhood. Android's have images in their minds of these events, and yet they are not real. Some are in possession of photographs of the events as well, and yet these too are false images, events that never actually occurred in the reality of the Androids.
We can infer that as Rachel looks at Deckard's pictures, she is contemplating the validity of her own memories and her own photographs...questioning her own being. Bringing us back to the piano scene, when she plays the instrument, we can further infer that her look of sad longing stems from the fact that she so desperately craves to be to be genuine, to be human, that she is playing what should be an emotional piece as if to convince herself her emotions and aspects of humanity are real. It is a truly heartbreaking moment for us as a viewer. As we watch her face while she plays, we, too, want her to be real. And yet between hearing her try just a little too hard, and her playing coming across as just slightly mechanic...the moment rings false, even though we don't want it to...an incredible mix of melancholy and ambiguity.
However, the musical piece winds up acting as a catalyst for what is to come next: a transformation where Rachel's emotionless, "Robotic" qualities are disrobed (literally and figuratively), allowing her more human emotions to surface and blossom.
While she sits down to play piano, she removes her outer jacket-garment, which is itself a very stiff, formal, professionally looking outfit...symbolically Scott is showing us that Rachel is removing her icy exterior, and is ready to let some of her inner warmth show. As she plays, she notices her music has awakened Deckard. We see a sort of shift occur in her...perhaps she has a moment of self awareness, where she realize how mechanical her playing is, and is embarrassed by it, as she is coming to the realization she is not herself fully human...or perhaps she is intrigued by Deckard's masculinity, and wants to attract him to come closer. Rachel stops her playing and caresses her hair, slowly untying her carefully kept bun, letting her hair spill over her shoulders. It is the first time in the movie that we have seen her look imperfect, and allowing a certain chaotic (and attractive!) look to settle in her physical appearance.
Deckard enters the frame and sits next to her on the piano bench, clearly mesmerized by this new, more human look to Rachel. They share a look; she retains some of her robotic nature, as she looks at him impassively, and yet at the same time shows a very human trait of scared, awkward insecurity, not quite knowing what to do next.
Deckard, in classic Harrison Ford intensity-of-the-eyes fashion, is starting to be consumed with a curious, raw passion for this woman, and moves in to kiss her neck (which can arguably be described as one of the most erotic, sensual place to kiss someone...a further attempt at sliding Rachel's robotic traits away to reveal her humanity).
We see Rachel kind of enjoy this, but she also seems aware that she may not be enjoying this moment fully, powerfully, the way a human would, that her own carbon copy emotions are not fully genuine. Or maybe she's simply frightened of the emotions Deckard is bringing out in her. Seemingly scared by this realization, she hurriedly moves away from the piano to leave the apartment. This is also ambiguously mixed with a coy, femme fetale nature common to the film noir genre...she's playing hard to get, and wants Deckard to chase after her, wanting him to remove his own emotional barriers and reveal his own primal nature. Deckard, now consumed with lust, blocks her exit by slamming the door shut, grabs her shoulders, and roughly shoves her into a wall. While this is a violent moment, it fits with Deckard's character: he is a silent, brooding character that like Rachel, does not tend to show emotion; it makes sense that an outburst like this would occur as his emotions rise, and finally snap.
We see an interesting look come across Rachel's face...scared, but also overwhelmed, and a sort of pleading look she gives Deckard that seems to almost beg of him, "Show me I have real, human traits...show me I can be more than a machine. Bring my emotion, my sexuality out of me, I can't do it by myself." Deckard does so, gently loosening his grip on her shoulders, and then finally kissing her passionately. Rachel only half reciprocates, and in one of the more unique lines in a sexually tense moment in film, she explains to Deckard that she doesn't know how to kiss. Ford, masculinity in full force, proceeds to show her.
The whole last part of this sequence is full of a kind of carnal, passionate, and near-violent sexuality, which works on three levels. The first is that they may both be Androids, and possibly don't know how to physically express their sexual desire. The second works on the metaphorical level: this embrace of carnal lust completes the circle of transformation in this scene...that of the film noir-ish, Android-like emotionless exterior shedding intellect and emotional armor in order to let deep human emotion take place. Third, as with Rachel playing the piano, both characters can be seen as so desperate to know that they have a sense of true humanity, that they feel the need to experience carnal, animal-like emotions take hold completely, perhaps unconsciously thinking, "How can we
only be Androids if we can experience emotion as fully as this?" The sequence ends by witnessing both characters, but particularly Rachel, lose herself in the emotional rapture of the moment before Scott crossfades into the next scene.
This scene is nothing short of grade A+ level filmmaking. Ridley Scott has used the visuals of Rachel's exterior dress, physical movement, objects in the room and piano music/soundtrack music to visually show viewers that a deep transformation is taking place, firmly attaching Rachel's shedding of her emotionless nature with the themes and questions the movie asks as a whole. The dialogue is sparse and completely minimalistic, allowing the viewer to fill in the gaps and figure out for themselves what is taking place during the silent moments. Harrison Ford (Deckard) and Sean Young (Rachel) are both pitch perfect in this scene, bringing to life the complex emotions and chemistry this scene calls for. Ridley Scott's framing of each shot, use of dark, shadowy colors of the apartment, and masterful cuts between shots also round out this exceptional scene.
Most importantly, the tone remains ambiguous throughout, which is a constant in this movie. The viewer is never allowed to take true delight in this moment of rapture between Rachel and Deckard. The electrical, "robotic" soundtrack is still ever-present, reminding us that these are still Androids. The film noir-ish light from the window casts bars of shadow across both Deckard's and Rachel's faces, one of film's classic visual symbols of showing characters still locked in an inner prison. The cross-fade into a kind of dream sequence of sky and clouds capstones the scene with a feeling of fantasy, something that is wished to be real, but is not. These reasons are compounded by the fact that on rewatches, we view this scene knowing that Deckard himself is likely not a human being. This ratchets up the complexity to even higher levels, as instead of this sequence being about a human acting as the catalyst for an Android revealing a new depth of human-like emotions, it is seen as not one, but two lonely, emotionally walled up Android souls desperately seeking some sort of understanding and shared connection about how genuine, and real, the emotions they feel actually are.