If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes: destabilized spectatorship and creation's chaos in blade runner.

Twenty-two years after the initial release of Ridley Scott's futuristic drama, Blade Runner (theater release, 1982; director's cut, 1991) (1), we find ourselves in something of a realization of the film's predicted universe: the world has become radically altered through globalization, the majority of human interactions--on a mass scale--are determined by commerce, and the line between the real and the virtual is a blur, threatening to dissolve into indistinction. As our claim on the agency of creation is fortified through biotechnology, the blur spreads to our relationship with God: who is the creator when we can make robots, sheep, even human beings?

Blade Runner poses these questions in Los Angeles in 2019, a city made gray under the nearly constant drizzle of rain. The space is overwhelmingly crowded yet also deserted, inhabited by all those left behind as the physically able and financially privileged have escaped to colonies in space. Human clones are used "off-world" as slave labor. Five of these "replicants" have escaped and come to earth in search of a way to prolong their four-year life-span. Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a Blade Runner, a member of the special police force that hunts and "terminates" the banned replicants.

The narrative is rich in tropes common to Judaism and Christianity: creation, salvation, destruction, and meeting one's maker (literally). Jesus figures abound--the leader of the replicants, Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), spends his last minutes with a nail thrust through his palm. Roy kisses the creator of the replicants a la Judas before killing him. In fact, the film is so rich with Christian mythological echoes that one scholar remarks: "Roy Batty can be equated with Adam, Christ, Satan, Jacob, and Esau and so can Deckard. Or, each character can also be the opposite of these associations." (2) The film denies such facile links to readable characters; instead, we are tossed onto a twisting sea, unsure of each character's place in relation to the creator/created divide and ultimately unsure of our own. Blade Runner does not simply draw us to the conclusion that machines produce humans as much as humans produce machines. Blade Runner seems to refuse such interpretive "conclusions" in general, destabilizing even our identity as spectators.

In this paper I will propose that the monstrous element in Blade Runner is neither the replicants nor Deckard but the chaotic confusion of boundaries itself, rearing its head just as the chaos monsters of Ancient Near Eastern mythology, the Hebrew Bible and our contemporary cultural imaginations do: terrifying reminders that chaos is the site of erupting creative possibility. In such an appreciation of chaos, the role of a patriarchal omnipotent creator must shift into the matrix of disorder or risk His own extinction.

I will discuss this chaos monster and its repercussions in theology by intercepting its thrashing movement on three sites of destabilization effected by Blade Runner: spectatorship, humanity, and subjectivity. I will rely heavily on the philosophical and filmic work of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and the theological explorations of Genesis by Catherine Keller, particularly looking at their understanding of chaos and meaning-making.

Confused Identification and Faulty Spectatorship

Classic spectatorship functions on an expected script that is borne of the alignment of a protagonist's point of view and the affective experience of the spectator watching the film. In Blade Runner, however, these expectations are undermined from the start. In the opening prologue, the audience is told that the replicants are beings created, enslaved, and then murdered. The script of the prologue points to the injustice of this system in multiple ways, creating an immediate link of sympathy for the replicants. The beginning of the visual film, however, heralds a disjunction: the man sent to kill the replicants, Deckard, is quickly established as the protagonist. Viewers find themselves caught in the conflict between an early sense of identification developed in the prologue and a recognition of the expected identification with the film's hero. This site of conflict is framed by the opposing pulls of narrative cinema's drive to polar classification, leaving the audience to swim in the question: who are the heroes--the replicants or Deckard?

Any achieved identification is destabilized as the film progresses; indeed, the very distance between these two categories is called into question. The climactic scene of the film takes place on the roof between Deckard and the replicant Roy. Now that Deckard has finally caught up to Roy, Roy announces that he will kill Deckard--the chase reverses itself as Deckard scrambles through a deserted building to escape his prey. Just as Deckard is about to plummet to his death, Roy saves him. The flip-flopping of hunter and hunted brings the tension of identification to a head--the spectator of this scene on the roof is unsure of whom to cheer on.

The work of being a spectator to Blade Runner jumps continuously between this division and blurring of categories. The spectator is caught between these movements, prevented from establishing a concrete reading of one character that would allow for identification. We are engaged in the process of ordering this chaos of identification, only to find that each grasp on a sense of order breaks into confusion again. According to philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, this is our experience of subjectivity. We are part of an expansive, infinite matrix, a site of chaos that surges upward into ephemeral distinctions that open up again, necessarily, to the whole of which they are part: "This plane of immanence is the movement (the facet of movement) which is established between the parts of each system and between one system and another, which crosses them all, stirs them all up together and subjects them all to the condition which prevents them from being absolutely closed." (3) Deleuze and Guattari draw chaos's insistent presence into focus.

In the first of his two volumes on cinema, Gilles Deleuze applies this notion to the work of the shot: "It divides and subdivides duration into subdurations which are themselves heterogeneous, and reunites these into a duration which is immanent to the whole of the universe." (4) The Deleuzian understanding of the shot parallels the work of spectatorship itself--singling out strands from a complex whole to link them into one cohesive narrative. Understanding Deleuze's concept of the shot in terms of the plane of immanence reveals the impossibility of any ultimate cohesion in the whole. Narrative cinema often proposes a foundational coherence to the plot, characters and practice of spectatorship. Deleuze seems to point to the indelible fractures that persist even in elements constructed to be seamless.

Spectatorship in Blade Runner echoes the movement of Deleuzian shot, both in the drive to division and the inevitable reuniting. As in Deleuze, Blade Runner shifts the broader matrix of which it is a part--the categories of human and non-human, and our placement in those spheres, reconfigure constantly. The work of classification does not reveal the expected categories but points instead to the dynamic unity of the whole. Deleuze makes this link between film and our participation in life outside of the theater explicit:

        The shot, that is to say consciousness, traces a movement which
        means that the things between which it arises are continuously
        dividing between things (the Dividual). It is movement itself
        which is decomposed according to the elements between which it
        plays in a set ... But it is also recomposed into a great
        complex indivisible movement according to the whole whose change
        it expresses. (5)

The impossible work of spectatorship in Blade Runner engages the shaky spectators with a constant process of redefinition, making them supremely conscious of the dynamic movement of such subjectivity. We are reminded that even as we forge categories of separation, they slip away beneath us in the unending flux of the whole from which we extracted them in the first place. It is not so much the categories but their fixity that is revealed as impossible.

Blade Runner insists on active spectator participation in this double-movement of dividuation and dissolve. The film constantly asks us to make distinctions between characters and then thrusts us back into the chaotic. Deleuze explores the work of division in his writing on the Soviet school of montage. Crucial to montage, according to Deleuze, are oppositions and contradictions. Whether quantitative (one vs. many, single shot vs. a salvo), qualitative (inside vs. outside), intensive (light vs. dark), or dynamic (movement in one direction vs. movement in another), the montage shots are distinguished by their difference. (6) The defining features of the Soviet school for Deleuze are founded on the law of the One and the opposition: "the One which becomes two to attain a new unity." (7) This reading of montage serves as a foil to Blade Runner's avoidance of most expected differentiations, both thematic and visual, offering primarily a field of blurred indistinction: humans and replicants are confused, people of indistinct "Asian" background blur into each other in a universal costume of drab, the entire cityscape offers little if any contrast with its oversaturated scenes cast in a muted palette and lacking blank space.

In Blade Runner, undermined spectatorship echoes broader themes of confusion and chaos. The destabilization of spectatorship is linked directly to the visual impact of the film in Rebecca Warner's reading of the film's focus on multiplicity: "The viewer is bombarded with details until they can no longer be assimilated--and Deckard, the film's central character, is a detective, who of course must notice everything. Then again, part of what this movie is about is entropy, pure and simple: things fall apart, the center cannot hold." (8) The spectator role itself falls apart--note that Warner's reading of the film parallels the film's entropy with the audience's inability to identify with the protagonist.

To speak explicitly about creation, Blade Runner seems to insist that we never fully leave the second verse of Genesis, before the ordered distinction of light and dark, sea and earth, and the animals that belong to each. Catherine Keller reads Genesis to offer new strategies for understanding the work of chaos. She provides this translation, retaining the Hebrew that loses its potent movement in translation: "the earth was tohu vabohu and darkness was upon the face of tehom and the ruach elohim was vibrating upon the face of the mayim." (9) The film demands a turn from the myth of a singular creation and its resultant escape of chaos into a divinely ordered universe. Disorder pervades the screen, refusing any semblance of classical notions of providence, justice and organization. Instead of the clear-cut right and wrong of the garden, we seem to be staring into the primordial face of the deep. Just as Genesis 1:2, "so densely packed with its terse triune chaos, sends a mysterious tremor through the whole narrative of creation," (10) so the eruption of chaos in Blade Runner seems to shake the foundations of spectatorship itself.

The Infinite Possibilities of Disruption

Deleuze and Guattari, like Keller, are adamant that we do not regard chaotic space as an assimilating unity or coherent system. Concepts emerge from the plane of immanence and return to it but never find themselves collapsed into it without distinction: "Concepts are absolute surfaces or volumes, formless and fragmentary, whereas the plane is the formless, unlimited absolute, neither surface nor volume but always fractal." (11) To lose the difference of the plane would be to lose its openness and hence its infinity. Deleuze and Guattari do not subscribe to the notion that infinity is compromised by potential change; the plane establishes its infinity by being potential change. The relationship of the concept to the plane is paralleled by Deleuze and Guattari's refusal of a division between reality, representation and creation:

      There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of
      reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a
      field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage
      establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from
      each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world
      as its object nor one or several authors as its subject.... The
      book as assemblage with the outside, against the book as image of
      the world. (12)

They call us into a process of signification in which reality and subjects are images, arising ephemerally from the plane of immanence in an ongoing process of interactive formation. We can no longer hold to a sense of creative authorship--creators are thrown into the same turmoil as the created, arising together, momentarily, before plunging back down into the flux.

In this way, the chaos at play is fundamentally characterized by a persistent interruption to any sense of closure or stability. The plane achieves its infinity in its open movement: "Every movement passes through the whole of the plane by immediately turning back on and folding itself and also by folding other movements or allowing itself to be folded by them, giving rise to retroactions, connections, and proliferations in the fractalization of this infinitely folded up infinity." (13) The principle of non-closure functions on every level of Blade Runner. Los Angeles is defined by its sense of containment. It is an oppressively gray city, teeming with people. Nothing is smooth or blank--walls and clothing are patterned and complicated, empty air is filled with smoke, flashing lights and almost constant rain. The air above the city is marked by the shooting fires of industrial smokestacks and accessible only by those with flying cars or those granted access to ascend to the penthouse of the cybernetics magnate, Eldin Tyrell. The lack of access to the empty air and, beyond it, the off-world colony combined with the overpopulation and over-saturation of ground-level life gives the feeling of a city on the brink of explosion.

Furthermore, Los Angeles is defined by its separation from the promise of a better life in the Off-World Colonies, which hovers in the shape of a blimp over the city, constantly interjecting in voice and vision the lure and inaccessibility of this other life. Every person in the city is marked in some way by their non-presence in the colonies. Note for example, the fact that most of the people still in L.A. have some mark of physical difference from the common picture of bodily health: eye patches, limps, extreme shortness, Methuselah's Syndrome. This is then coupled with economic and racial exclusion--most of the inhabitants are identified as "Asian" and "Middle-Eastern" or people in service jobs. The Nexus 6 Replicants (except for Rachael) bring back to Earth visions of life on the colonies. They function like outsiders not because they are replicants, but because they come from this outside world. Roy's final speech drives this point home, as he points out: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe." He stands impossibly between worlds, inserting one into another, refusing closure. The out-of-field exists in two aspects: the relation to other sets and the virtual relation with the whole. Often, Deleuze points out, the second is reached through the intermediary work of the first. (14) In this way, Roy opens a path to a greater connectionality, a more realized membership to an excessive whole. Read in light of the broader themes at play, this whole is excessively real and excessively virtual: Roy, as virtual being, offers the virtual world; and Roy, excessively emotional, offers humanity.

On another level, it is the space between the characters that refuses the closure of humans and replicants, both diagetically as seen in Deckard's empathy for Roy and his love for Rachael, and extradiagetically as the spectator finds no solid ground for identification. Even the fandom around Blade Runner has refused a closure of the film itself. In his study on Internet fandom, Will Brooker notes that Blade Runner has not only secured a place in notable eighties cinema but, through the continuation of its narrative in the emotional investment of fans, has been continuously revived and rejuvenated. (15) In an interesting way, this process finds a novel form with the advent of the DVD release of the director's cut--now fans can obsessively repeat certain scenes, just as Deckard repeatedly runs the tape of Leon's interview, or they can zoom in on specific parts of any frame, as Deckard does with Leon's photographs. Fan practice makes more obvious the work which Blade Runner refuses to let us forget. Our spectatorship is a selective subjectivity, an image created in the action of deciding what and how to see, all of which arises from an original atomic field.

Chaos, then, is primarily a rupture in the field of the familiar. With all this disruption, it is no wonder that chaos has been personified in our biblical texts as terrifying monsters, e.g. Job's Leviathan, the wild beasts of the desert, even storms and floods. Stephen King, a master at evoking this primal fear, writes that horror "arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment, that things are in the unmaking." (16) It is this chaotic disorganization that returns us to the beginning of creation. Chaos is represented as destruction when read in the context of an origin myth that posits the destruction or suppression of chaos as a requirement to creation. Keller offers a potent characterization of the demonization of chaos born of such a reading: "The abiding western dominology can with religious sanction identify anything dark, profound or fluid with a revolting chaos, an evil to be mastered, a nothing to be ignored." (17) However, if we are able to forge a reading of chaos that understands it to be the source of creation, these "monsters" of destruction hold open possibilities for new constructions. By turning to chaos, we find new outlets for creation's becoming.

It is here that Blade Runner seems to prophetically mirror the current cultural situation, as the United States finds itself firmly planted in early twenty-first century capitalism. Identities erupt and explode, demanding recognition. We have been promised visions of ordered peace, as evil is named, blamed, and held for questioning, but we never seem to arrive at that simple place. Concrete evidence evaporates, directions of focus shift, and we cannot seem to find the bad guy or the good guy. To note the pervasiveness of chaos is to refute the systematization of the world around us and the ability to control those slippery factors that threaten envisioned order. A might-makes-right modus operandi as the highest expression of divine imitation no longer makes sense. As Keller states, an embrace of chaos refuses such fixed, empowered roles: "In our shockingly expansive, possibly infinite universe--the universe of a hundred billion galaxies, each sporting at least a hundred billion stars--there remains paradoxically less space for an omnipotent Person, a Creator ex nihilo." (18) The roiling deep will not permit a stable perch above all else but calls us all back into the ongoing work of becoming.

Replicants and Destabilized Humanity

Blade Runner's plot is driven by the semblance of an ordered distinction between human and replicant, yet indistinction threatens at every turn. Not only are we unable to locate a clear hero with whom to identify, we can barely determine whether these hero-villains are human or replicant to begin with. The film goes to great lengths in humanizing the replicants (their emotionality is almost over-whelming, verging on the comedic in its intensity and in the sheer volume of tears shed) and to dehumanize its human characters, who barely exhibit emotion outside of smug or indecipherable expressions. As the disconnected human inhabitants trudge through this futuristic daily grind, the replicants seem to offer the only opening to emotive connection: a salvation as simple as love. The disruption of order, the unleashing of chaos, the entrance of the other becomes not monstrous but hopeful. When Roy contemplates his own approaching death, kneeling on the roof in a downpour, he remarks to Deckard that his memories will be "lost in time like tears in the rain." Deckard finally offers an emotional response as his own tears join the falling water.

Just as the spectatorial identification is dislodged between the prologue's championing of the replicants and the casting of Deckard as their protagonist hunter, so too are the distinctions between replicant and human constantly undermined. Within the script, the only way to distinguish humans and replicants is through emotionality and the latter's lack thereof. The distinction between the real and the virtual is so slight that Deckard, unable to distinguish them visually, twice asks the owners of replicant animals whether they are "real." Replicant identity can only be unequivocally determined by a test of involuntary pupil dilation in emotional response. However the viability of this test is thrown into question as the replicants spontaneously develop human emotions on their own after a few years. For the genetic designers, this ability signals a facet of replicant development exceeding the control of their design--the emerging life of the robotic beast. The designers regain control by developing a code sequence that offers replicants only a four-year life span and by implanting specific memories in order to govern how their emotions arise.

The drive to separate the virtual and real also motivates the plot. Deckard is the icon of the real, evoking the classical cowboy despite his residence in a futuristic city: in a slouchy leather jacket and with a penchant for Jack Daniels, he uses old-fashioned know-how and a gun to kill beings designed to be physically and mentally superior to humans. As the man who determines replicants from humans with the sole purpose of killing the replicants, Deckard is the agent through which the reality of the "real" is established and through which the real proves both authorship and ownership of the virtual.

However, this reading is undermined throughout the film. The audience's search for a site of spectatorial identification is further destabilized as the difference between the human and the replicant fades. If, that is, the film allows a clear identification of who is a human to begin with. The final scene of the director's cut shows an origami unicorn left outside of Deckard's door, reflecting a daydream he had earlier in the film. The implication is that his memories are also implanted--he may be a replicant.

Productive Echoes: Repetition and Replicants

Much of the film's presentation of indistinction is created through effects of exaggerated reproduction, pointing to the contested notion of "replicant" and reproduction in general. Very few images of the film are shown as singular objects. There is a proliferation of TV screens, neon serpents, umbrellas, and the infinitely repeating raindrops of the city's almost continuous precipitation. The reflection of this central thematic subject in the visual impact of multiplicity does not, however, bolster a reading of reproduction as a sign of non-unique imitation. The film's visual obsession with reproduction and reduplication serves, rather, to blur the space between real and virtual, thereby undermining any sense that the replicant is definitively non-human or, perhaps more importantly, that the human is non-replicant.

For Blade Runner, the repetition of humanity in replicants is presented as threatening. However the humanization of the replicants and their plight as slaves radically reverses the dehumanization implied by their reproduction of humanity. In her study of the function of tohu vabohu in the Genesis text, Catherine Keller notes the deep links between chaos and repetition: "Might we read the echo-effect of tohu vabohu as the minimal gesture of difference--a difference not of separation or opposition but of repetition? A repetition is by definition never the 'same' as that which it repeats. It is always already other." (19) Repetition offers the possibility of productivity, even in the face of absence or loss, as the Genesis text was written in the desert in exile. Blade Runner toys very specifically with the premise of loss with repetition, calling immediately to the fore questions regarding the difference between the original and the reproduction. Replicants offer a certain sense of possibility for humanity, as one genetic engineer remarks when two replicants appear at his home that he could identify them by a sense of their "perfection." Keller writes: "The threat of the chaos, in other words, may also purvey--in the creative reinscription of the colonized, at least--the hope of the new. Indeed they may map upon the imposed order the alternative pathways of a transgressive chaosmos." (20) The confusion unleashed by the replicants' repetition of humanity can be productive and transformative.

However, the cybernetic "enhancement" of the human is not presented as hopeful in and of itself. Rather it is the human indistinction from its creation that offers the possibility of newly emerging subjectivity. The scene in which Deckard kills the replicant Zhora indicates the violent potential of distinction as a foil for human/replicant ontological intimacy. Deckard's chase of Zhora begins with a distance that gradually decreases. Notably, the closer they get, the less Deckard raises his gun. It is not actually until Zhora runs, putting the initial distance between them again, that Deckard is able to shoot her. This sense of ontological intimacy is reflected in the filming as well. Using what initially seems to be a shot-reverse-shot (21) that would show Deckard looking for Zhora and then Zhora looking back at him, the shots show Deckard and then Deckard again, confusing subject and object. In the search for the other, Deckard finds himself.

At the end of the chase, Zhora's death is marked by a surplus of reproduction and a confusion of the reflection and the original. The reflections of her explode as she crashes through display windows. As she falls, it is often unclear as to whether we are seeing her or a reflection of her in the multiple lenses/mirrors of windows, rain, shards of glass and the clear plastic of her raincoat. She dies at the feet of mannequins that rise above her, a final mocking insistence of facile replication. This spin on her reproducibility jars sharply with the humanizing similarity realized in the chase shots and the blood that falls from her dying body. It is only when she dies that replication seems easy and lifeless.

Cyborg Sight and Chaotic Subjectivity

At the site of such multiple destabilization, the film engages us in practices of cyborg sight. The opening sequence of the film inserts two shots of the cityscape reflected in unblinking blue eyes. We never know to whom the eyes belong nor how they came to their particular lofty point of view. From the start, any easy subjectivity is unsettled. Shetley and Ferguson read the eye to be an analogue to the camera itself, pointing to the confusion between a lens and a mirror as it both sees the city and becomes a reflective site in which the city's image is reproduced. Such unsettling, blurring the lines between the lens and mirror, locates the eye on the front between cinema as a reflection of reality and cinema as a forum for imaginative creation. (22) The confusion between these readings draws us to Deleuze's explosion of a cinematic theory that posits film as a reproduction of reality. Reality, he argues, cannot be held separate from any image of it. Reality's existence as an image refuses the notion of simulacra. This is the hinge upon which Blade Runner turns.

Hassan Melehy, in his study of Deleuze and the science fiction films of the 1980's, notes that science fiction films almost universally make an effort to produce identification between the spectator and the cyborg. (23) This is visually represented through obviously mechanized sight to represent the cyborg's point of view (e.g. the red, pixilated picture that represents the point of view of the Terminator in The Terminator). (24) Melehy reads this as the production of a Deleuzian body without organs--a body that stands against the organized system of the organism itself. For Melehy, these disruptions of spectatorship force the viewer to take on a "dead" gaze and as such undermine the human gaze by "indicating broader possibilities of life than those offered by the organic alone." (25) Read against this genre trope, what is striking about Blade Runner (and its absence from Melehy's study) is that the point of view of the replicants is indistinguishable from that of the humans. This in no way indicates, however, that the links between gaze and spectatorship go unnoticed by the film. In fact, the film seems to place excessive focus on eyes and looking precisely, it would seem, to establish a foundation of meaning upon which the indistinguishability of the replicant gaze functions as a destabilizing factor.

The film focuses on the eyes as a site of difference and blurring between replicant and human. Recall the use of the test for pupil dilation and its approaching obsolescence as replicants develop emotions. The human eyes in the film are often marked by deficiency that is remedied through the use of a machine--microscopes and video devices are everywhere. The human ability to see is further destabilized in a fleeting moment: Deckard picks up one replicant's photograph of her fabricated family--the proof in her mind that she is not a replicant--and for an instant, the figures move as if the image were alive, or as if the photograph were a video. The reality conveyed by this moment confronts the audience's knowledge that Rachael is a replicant and her family is fiction. Moreover, the shot lasts less than a second, making spectators question the reliability of their own sight.

It is notable, then, that Eldin Tyrell, the creator of Nexus 6, wears oversized trifocals. He is marked both by the powerful linkage between creator and spectator and the handicap that holds him prisoner on earth. Powerful spectatorship is a hindrance. Ultimately, it is this conflation of creation and sight that results in patricide. Roy Batty, furious at his own mortality and the suffering he endures in his four short years, ascends to the penthouse of the Tyrell corporation pyramid high above the city. There he confronts Tyrell and kills him, crushing his head by inserting his thumbs into Tyrell's eyes. We are witness to the death of the source of singular creation and overpowered sight. In his death, we find reflections of the destruction of the "God of the omnis" and our own easy spectatorship--sight has moved from the top of the pyramid to the multiple and confused places of the new life emerging below.

Most importantly, the implication at the end of the film that Deckard is a replicant leaves the audience to wonder which sight was "dead" and which was "live." In other words, the audience is unable to determine whether they had seen through human or non-human eyes. Ultimately, the film spills out beyond its temporal boundaries--as the movie ends the spectator must recognize that all of it was after all seen through a machine--the camera. Blade Runner drives this home in a scene in which the replicants meet the genetic eye engineer (who is, after all, looking through a huge ocular contraption). Eyes in Blade Runner are never "natural." The practice of seeing the film establishes a further possibility: neither are the eyes on the film. In the confusion of the organic and the machine, the biocybernetic monster turns to the engineer and states, wistfully, "If only you could see what I have seen with your eyes."

With the abolition of the myth of an organic original, God's involvement is radically rewritten. The omnipotent creator has been killed by his son but the space left in his wake is neither void nor unproductive. It is in the absence of Tyrell, the dissolution of facile classification and the yearning reach toward new manifestations of connection that new creativity emerges. In the end of the film, the replicant Rachel and Deckard escape together. Their future is unknown, their destination vague. The audience is left with a sense of pure, although hard-won, possibility. The end of the story, in its confusion, makes itself into a beginning--the door is wide open on chaotic becoming. The power of this movement rises from the ground--from these small, awkward and subversive unions between human and replicant in a confusion of creator and created.

Conclusion

Film offers the terrain of spectatorship in which to follow these questions of human identity and divine relationship, opening into the rabbit holes that erupt before them. Blade Runner does this with a special magic--the contemporary experience of contour confusion at the boundary of the "human" is reflected not only in the narrative content and techniques of representation but in the spectator experience as well. The film's preoccupation with creation is expressed in the way it represents beings, made and making, in specific relationship to sight, reflection, and replication. Because in film the audience identity is determined by the action of spectatorship, the disruption of this practice reverberates through our identity--when we do not know what we are seeing, we also become unsure of who we are. The film itself seems to push us headlong into this uncertainty, into the very tohu vabohu that precedes creation. We watch, unsure of a link of identification, of how to classify the beings before us, of how we are seeing them and, ultimately, of how to classify ourselves.

Calling the spectator into the process of self-subversion works against the conclusion-drawing that ultimately bolsters the establishment of a secure subjectivity. Rather than find and fix ourselves to a concrete place, we are opened to the flux that precedes, follows and runs beneath our ephemeral distinctions. We are called to engage burgeoning chaos, to see ourselves in the monstrous apparition of primordial flux. Our sight is refused solid ground and the expected cinematic script of identification. Our subjectivity is undermined. We are called back to the plane of immanence, the birthing ground of creation, the initial chaos.

As Gregory Flaxman notes, this is a site of terror: "the abolition of the dogmatic image ... is a terrifying outcome, an exile to an outpost of suffering where endless attempts to 'pull things together' are measured against the inevitable disinheritance of the world of meaning." (26) Spectators, confronted with their own work, are placed, like the biblical Job, on the edge of an intelligible existence. Face to face with the monstrosity of chaos, we simultaneously recognize ourselves as momentary distinctions and are returned to originality. We crash through the illusion of our distinction from our reflections and reproductions and find ourselves, images among many other images, not at the moment of death but in the constant process of unfolding creation. The work of production is unleashed from its ties to a singular, omnipotent and distinct creator and folded into the ground of its own becoming.

This is not a site of safety, as Blade Runner makes clear. While full of potential, the chaos we find in our contemporary socio-political situation is one that takes lives. However, new understandings of chaos can undermine the practice of dehumanization against all those that herald the disruption of order. As Keller writes: "From the vantage point of the colonizing episteme, the evil is always disorder rather than unjust order; anarchy rather than control; darkness rather than pallor ... Yet those who wear the mark of chaos, the skins of darkness, the genders of unspeakable openings--those Others of Order keep finding voice." (27) We can take hope in knowing that despite thousands of years of trying to the slay beasts of chaos, our cultural imaginations refuse their death. Monsters persistently threaten systems and subjectivities that posit stability and dominance. They guide us to establishing new, audacious, excessive and dynamic subjectivities that do not claim stability, singularity, closure or completion. We reach instead for the territory of creation, for it is there, before we find clear distinction as a self from others/Others, that we come into being in mutual transformation. Rather than deny our brokenness, incoherence, injuries and injuring lives, we are called to more deeply root ourselves in the chaos of their fractures. From that ungrounded place we can become in beginning, returning to our original intimacy with the God who will be.

Notes

1. Blade Runner, DVD, directed by Ridley Scott (1991; Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2003).

2. Sharon Gravett, "The Sacred and the Profane: Examining the Religious Subtext of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner," Literature/Film Quarterly 26, no. 1 (1998): 42.

3. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 59.

4. Ibid, 20.

5. Ibid, 20-21.

6. Ibid, 33.

7. Ibid, 37-38.

8. Rebecca Warner, "A Silver-Paper Unicorn," Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, ed. Judith Kerman (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997), 178.

9. Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003), 9.

10. Ibid.

11. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 36.

12. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans, and forward by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 23.

13. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 39.

14. Deleuze, Cinema I, 18.

15. Will Brooker, "Internet Fandom and the Continuing Narratives of Star Wars, Blade Runner, and Alien," in Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science-Fiction Cinema, ed. Annette Kuhn (New York: Verso, 1999), 52.

16. Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Everest, 1981) cited in Timothy K. Beal, Religion and its Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2002), 54.

17. Keller, Face of the Deep, 6.

18. Ibid, 186.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. "The shot/reverse shot pattern involves an initial shot from one angle favoring one character, followed by another shot, from another angle favoring the other character." Belton, American Cinema/American Culture, 352.

22. Vernon Shetley and Alissa Ferguson, "Reflections in a Silver Eye: Lens and Mirror in Blade Runner," Science Fiction Studies 28, no. 1 (2001): 66.

23. Hassan Melehy, "Images Without: Deleuzian Becoming, Science Fiction Cinema in the Eighties," Postmodern Culture: An Electronic Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism 5, no. 2 (1995): 7.

24. Ibid, 11.

25. Ibid.

26. Gregory Flaxman, "Introduction," in The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 46.

27. Keller, Face of the Deep, 6.