Ridley Scott’s 1982 Sci-Fi/Noir film ‘Blade Runner,’ is a well notable text within the genre that represents women in various and different ways. To summarise, the representations of the characters that will be examined, Rachael (Sean Young), Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) and Pris (Daryl Hannah) are seen in a mostly negative, sexist light, however there are arguments to be made against this which counter these views in the context of the film. The argument being, that all three of these characters are replicants, so they are not ‘real’ human women. 

‘‘Replicants, because they are artificially made, draw attention to the fact that such gender distinctions can no longer be viewed as organic or natural but synthetic and manufactured. Men and women are literally ‘made-up’ in the film and as such human identity is shown to be always a matter of becoming rather than some fixed and rooted certainty.’’ (Redmond, 2008)

With this still in mind however the women are treated and viewed as being real women. Rachael is the main female character within the film the love interest of the protagonist Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) who is seen as the femme fatale character of the film in the noir landscape of the film. This is signified heavily with her look, being set apart from the other women of the film with her dark, sleek looking costume for one, and the use of her smoking is a common trope of many femme fatales. She is a lustful character, who gets the attention of Deckard who falls in love with her. 

‘’Rachael is a wholly fetishized vison of ‘the dark lady, the spider women’ (Place 1998: 47), the femme fatale who lies at the cynical heart of the film noir. And by drawing on the ingrained duplicitous connotations of this archetype, Scott instantly alerts the audience to approach Rachael with caution.’’ (Brooker, 2005)

Her role as the femme fatale is limited however in the scene where Deckard has sex with her. He tells her what to say and is rough with her, making her quite defenceless in front of him. This turns around the femme fatale idea and puts her in a dominated view of not just Deckard but the audience as well.

This is seen with the character of Zhora as well, a rogue replicant that Deckard is hunting down. She disguises herself as a stripper and when found by Deckard, she runs from him in a revealing transparent coat, before being shot and killed by him in public. Pris is similar, being dressed in a very short skirt – placing the female replicants as objects of the ‘male-gaze’ (Mulvey, 1975).

‘’The male replicants are menacing and strong while the females are provocative to the point of exaggeration. It is reasonable to expect a bleached blonde Pris-as-pleasure object to appear dressed in a short skirt revealing her garters. But is it really necessary for Zhora to die running through the city in panties, metallic bra, boots and transparent raincoat? The female replicants’ bodies become sexist images.’’ (Kerman, 1997)

Again this can be overlooked by the fact that these two characters are not real humans at all, and are artificial. However, the fact that Rachael shows much emotion and human realism in the film makes the replicants seem much more human like and perhaps they are more real than the audience expects. Zhora however, taking the disguise of a stripper adds to a stereotype that the film contains in the fact that women would be expected to be strippers within this world so we can again see the objectifying of women within both genres of this film.

Pris is an interesting character who adopts a more masculine role, especially when considered as part of this genre. Although she is ultimately killed by Deckard after a lengthy fight, she outsmarts him acting as a doll and manages to hurt him and overcome his strength many times throughout the fight. This could be due to her replicant abilities, but it does put her character in a more powerful representation in putting up such a fight and almost killing the hero – showing her as a dangerous character and is more then she looks. However, in relation to the above quote – her jumping round and somersaults make her a character to be looked at yet again as her costume becomes revealing.

A Summary of Critical and Theoretical Perspectives

As mentioned, Laura Mulvey and her ideas as part of “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’’ (1975) come into play with all three of the focused characters. The idea of the ‘male gaze’ becomes integral in this investigation as these women have many of connotations that suggest just as Deckard, that the audience should view these women as objects. ’Although the instinct is modified by other factors, in particular the constitution of the ego, it continues to exist as the erotic basis for pleasure in looking at another person as an object” (Mulvey, 1975). Due to the women not being ‘real’ in the film, we can easily ignore the fact that they have character to them, and the fact they aren’t real suggests they really are objects in this way. In this way it is as if the audience are Deckard, and we are given his view with his sexual desire for Rachael for example with this.

The investigation will also look into other texts within the genre to compare the women in ‘Blade Runner’ to. Texts such as the ‘Terminator’ series, the ‘Alien’ series and ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ (2015) feature characters who have more active roles for females, and take very different binary oppositions to Rachael, Zhora and Pris. Characters such as Ellen Ripley and Rey in these films take on the ‘mono’ myth idea and lead more positive representations of women compared to the ones in ‘Blade Runner’ but also hold many similarities to them as well – with Ellen Ripley also being a character created by Scott, we can make many similar comparisons with characters from his other films as well.

The investigation will also explore the source material of ‘Blade Runner’ with the text it is based off of: ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’ (1968) by Phillip K. Dick. Comparisons will be made between the novel and film and critical ideas will be applied to compare them, including Mulvey’s ideas but also a focus on perspectives shown in Judith B. Kerman’s ‘Retrofitting Blade Runner’ (1997) which examines the issues including the matter of sexism and gender between the two texts.

Bibliography 

Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP,

1999: 833-44.

Filmography