Time to die — Bladerunner and the human condition

In Ridley Scott’s science fiction masterpiece Bladerunner, the replicant Roy Batty utters what I consider to be the most articulate existential statement in the history of art:

‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.’

I actually have trouble writing about it without crying a little. This quote has such power over me that I figured it about time that I explained what it means to me.

But first, some plot is necessary.

Bladerunner is set in the distant future where humanoid clones called replicants perform many unpleasant functions, including military duties and off-world mining. Replicants have an extremely short life-span. They consequently struggle to come to full consciousness, and do not appear to possess strong emotional responses. They are implanted with memories to convince them they are human until they die. A test administered to determine whether an individual is a replicant revolves around eliciting an emotional response. Those that exhibit sociopathic tendencies are likely replicants.

The movie explores what it means to be human, and gives an answer that is more profound than any I have come across outside extremely high level philosophy.

To be human is to yearn for meaning, for being. It is to understand that you must die but to be deeply unsettled by that fact. Perhaps more importantly it is to understand your insignificance and yet persevere regardless.

Batty laments the fact that all those things in life and the universe that were meaningful, memorable and special to him—that constituted his life and his identity—are meaningless to everyone else, and to the universe. When he dies all those things that he thought important will be lost (like tears in the rain). They will be absorbed into the collective history of the particles and electronic signals of the universe, and disappear. These things he finds so important, and yet they are not.

Despite the meaningfulness of those moments to him, and despite all his efforts and all the suffering this thought has caused him, there is nothing he can do about it. It is time to die.

This is the human condition. To be conscious. To want to understand. To want to have purpose. To want to grasp the universe and hold it fast for just a moment. To want to live just a little longer so that you might make a bit more sense of what is going on around you—to make a little more sense of yourself.

The drive to life—the desire to live longer—is not so much about the fear of death or even about the desire to live longer as about the desire to have more time to make sense of everything. As we grow older our consciousness grows as well. We coalesce as a being—we grow closer to being. When Roy Batty tells the creator of the replicants ‘I want more life, father!’ He is not struggling against death so much as the collapse of his ability to grasp his being and that of the world.

Something that I really like about Bladerunner is that Batty’s story is ambiguous. It depicts life as neither absurd nor sensible. There is meaning in the world but it must be fought for and will inevitably elude us in some part. This is the essence of the philosophy of Simone De Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre, and expresses precisely what I consider incorrect about Camus’ philosophy. Life is not absurd, but it is not intelligible either. It is ambiguous. We must work very hard indeed to make sense of it. Batty fought till the bitter end and only then did he accept death; calmly, peacefully, with dignity. This is the way I want to live and the way I want to respond to death. Batty is an absolute inspiration to me.

‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.’