Brett's Blade Runner Notes

Blade Runner (1982)

Background

According to producer Michael Deeley, the idea to make a movie out of PK Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? originated with executive producer Brian Kelly (it’s his only producer credit), son of a former governor and justice of the Supreme Court of Michigan.

Director Ridley Scott’s father was a Colonel in the British Army. Blade Runner was his first American film, i.e., first film with an American crew (Alien was filmed in Britain with a British crew). Appropriate, then, that it would be chock full of Illuminati content.

Douglas Trumbull supervised the special effects. See my notes in the Close Encounters of the Third Kind file.

Perhaps the vision of an Asianized got some impetus from Sir Run Run Shaw, the Hong Kong-based producer who put up some of the funds to finance the movie.

Movie

Dick was as interested in themes of power and control, especially vis-à-vis gnosticism, as he was in futurism/transhumanism. Deeley at least seemed intent on doing justice to the depth of these things, if not exactly in the same spirit. Fancher wrote an “environmentalist” script.

Wikipedia:

After Dick criticized an early version of Fancher's script in an article written for the Los Angeles Select TV Guide, the studio sent Dick the Peoples rewrite.[19] Although Dick died shortly before the film's release, he was pleased with the rewritten script and with a 20-minute special effects test reel that was screened for him when he was invited to the studio. Despite his well-known skepticism of Hollywood in principle, Dick enthused to Scott that the world created for the film looked exactly as he had imagined it.[20] He said, "I saw a segment of Douglas Trumbull's special effects for Blade Runner on the KNBC news. I recognized it immediately. It was my own interior world. They caught it perfectly." He also approved of the film's script, saying, "After I finished reading the screenplay, I got the novel out and looked through it. The two reinforce each other so that someone who started with the novel would enjoy the movie and someone who started with the movie would enjoy the novel."

Wikipedia:

Fancher's script focused more on environmental issues and less on issues of humanity and religion, which are prominent in the novel, and Scott wanted changes. Fancher found a cinema treatment by William S. Burroughs for Alan E. Nourse's novel The Bladerunner (1974), titled Blade Runner (a movie).[nb 2] Scott liked the name, so Deeley obtained the rights to the titles.[14] Eventually, he hired David Peoples to rewrite the script and Fancher left the job over the issue on December 21, 1980, although he later returned to contribute additional rewrites.

Jay Dyer, Esoteric Hollywood, 234: the “essential theme” of Blade Runner is a “gnostic myth or allegory.” P. 229:

The film operates on several levels: as the immediate story itself, the predictive future level with social critiques, the level of covert operations and mind control, and the deepest level, that of myths, archetypes, and alchemical occult initiatory transformation.

We definitely have Ken Ammi’s unholy trinity of occultism, evolution, and technology.

Anti-Anthropology

Blurring of lines between human-robot very much part of transhumanist and Luciferian agendas. Here sold to people through love story (“love is love,” even involving robots) and through cultivating sympathy for the renegade replicants as being with souls (consider the dove with Roy in his death scene). The upshot is that humans are not special or unique; they are just a stage in an evolutionary process, a process which, in this movie has been completely taken control of by Tyrell and Co. (consider the scene as he overlooks a completely synthetic creation below from the top of his pyramid), such that people are essentially experimental subjects.

Deckard is definitely a replicant. The unicorn origami proves it, showing that Gaff knew of the memories and dreams implanted in his head. The unicorn plays a prominent role in Ridley Scott’s Legend (1985).

Mind Control and Covert Ops

Dyer, 231:

…the Replicants seem to partly resemble the infamous plans of various states over the last century to create “supersoldiers,” mind controlled assassins in operations like MKUltra, BLUEBIRD and ARTICHOKE.

Replicant-detection test (“Voight-Kampff machine”) as cipher for psychiatric mind control. Note the anger the replicant in the opening scene, Leon, has when asked about his mother.

Outrunning the Turing Test

See essay.

Replicants as coded Monarch deltas and beta-deltas?

Dyer observes that Leon, in the opening scene, seems to be triggered by the words “tortoise” and “mother,” so possible twilight language.

Rachel is “doubled” (Deckard, she warns him, will have to kill a replicant that looks identical to her) [verify].

One of the questions Deckard asks her, during the replicant test, is what she’d do when presented with the “butterfly collection” of a “little boy,” “plus the killing jar.”

Daryl Hannah dresses and imitates (to hide from Deckard) a doll in Sebastian house. She’s obviously a beta-delta “pleasure bot,” or else a beta-delta. In a scene in Sebastian house, she’s dangling a legless Barbie doll by its hair.

A similar sci-fi trope concerning memory and identity is found in Dark City, which is unquestionably an MK or Monarch film. It’s explained here that “brain implants,” i.e., memory implants, make it more difficult for replicants to realize that they are replicants. Rachel, for example, is implanted with the memories of Tyrell’s niece.

The mind control valence of this theme is confirmed by Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. It’s apparent there that androids can be implanted with a “synthetic memory system” to convince them that they are human and thereby more effectively control them, but humans cannot and thus other systems of control are required (virtual reality, drugs, propaganda).

Gaff as a handler.

The mind control angle is picked up with a vengeance in Blade Runner 2049.

Blade Runner as Gnostic Myth of the Superclass

Gnosticism—replicants rebelling against their evil creator and seeking to kill him (Tyrell). Roy misquotes a poem from William Blake, beginning with “Fiery the angels fell,” identifying the renegade replicants as types of fallen angels, rebelling against God.

In the script, Tyrell himself is actually a clone of the real Tyrell, who died forty years earlier. So the Demiurge/Evil Creator is the transhumanist man-god, which is what the superclass aspires to. Tyrell’s tyranny consists at bottom of jealously depriving his creatures of the immortality which he has attained via self-deification.

The fact that this movie obviously reflects a superclass outlook but that the real bad guy is ostensibly the man, Tyrell, who embodies said class and outlook—This, in light of the red pill programming that usually accompanies gnostic plotlines, indicates that the story is a power-trip-for-the-powerless, a dissociative escape fantasy that culminates in blissful indifference in the protagonist as to whether or not he is a replicant (read, a mind-controlled slave) or that his girlfriend is a replicant (meaning that it is not real love but a simulation of love).

It segues into an open-ended lovers-on-the-run fantasy, and in one sense they are just psychologically on the run from the grim reality of their slavery.

On the other hand, if one identifies with the renegade replicant villains, then one gets to experience the faux-satisfaction of having destroyed the Evil Creator, only to die tragically-heroically in an otherwise unchanged world. Tyrell identifies Roy as a “prodigal son,” which is yet another example of the religious inversion at work in this film that is already saturated with Illuminati imagery. In this case, the son comes to kill the father and take his place—obviously a Satanic-Luciferian inversion of Christianity, complete with scriptural appropriations/reworkings, just as in ancient Gnosticism.

The other meaning here is that this is how the Illuminati/NWO operates, through cycles of tyranny and rebellion, in keeping with their dissolve-and-coagulate/problem-reaction-solution occult politics in general, which, by the way, explains why the civilization seems to be crumbling (and is beset with existential threats like superpowered replicants) despite the fact that it’s apparent ruler has attained the secret to immortality and lives in a giant pyramid.

Indeed, perhaps the real underlying theme of this movie is the quest for immortality: the renegade replicants and the toymaker want what Tyrell has, more “time,” more life, infinite life.

The false memory trope is important here, because, as Jay points out, the gnostic too believes that he has forgotten his true origins.

Assault on Feminine Sexuality and the Mother

The film offers a degraded portrait female sexuality. The “mother” as an ideal of femininity has been replaced by the whore. In the first scene, right after Leon says, “Let me tell you about my mother” and blasts away the auditor, we cut to a shot of the geisha (prostitute) on the video billboard, who displays and then apparently swallows a red pill. We cut to the same shot after Deckard and Rachel’s love scene. Remember that Scott worked in the British advertising industry in the 1970s, in the era when Wilson Brian Key wrote Subliminal Seduction, which deals with how sexuality is used in the advertising industry to affect consciousness.

Rachel tells a story, based on a false memory, of seeing baby spiders devouring a mother spider, after the mother spider spent weeks meticulously building the web and laying the eggs.

Note too that Deckard only kills women (Rachel kills Leon, and Roy simply expires).

In the book, Deckard has a wife. Monogamy barely seems to exist in the world of Scott’s Blade Runner.

Fear of Japanese-Asian takeover, as reflected in other films a little later, like Rising Sun.

Also reflects anticipated surge of Asian media into Western culture that would intensify in subsequent decades.

Predictive Programming

Dyer, 230: “For the viewer who has eyes to see, they are seeing the future itself, as well as the worldview of the ruling classes.”

A newspaper Decker is reading bears the headline, “Farming the Oceans, the Moon and Antarctica.” And right below that is a story with the title, “World Wide Computer Linkup Planned.” Predictively programming the Internet. And right below that, there's another story, "Privately Owned Rocket.” Obviously predicting Elon Musk/Space X-type tycoons. Consider Tyrell as future Elon Musk.

Illuminati and Occult Symbolism

Obvious pyramid symbolism in various places: Tyrell Corp is a pyramid;[1]pyramid décor in the building, pyramid designs scattered throughout.

The All-Seeing Eye and one-eye motif are therefore also liberally represented: eyes in replicant tests, detached eye in Hannibal Chu’s work room; etc. etc. etc. (too many to list). Roy tells Sebastian, “If only you could see what I’ve seen with your eyes.”  An attendant at a food truck wears an eye patch. The owl is shot with one-eye illuminated, and Pris is shot the same way in a few shots. Deckard ends up with one black eye in the last scene.

Dyer, 230:

The eye represents the viewer, and just as we witnessed in my analysis of Eyes Wide Shut, the viewing of the film itself will again constitute an initiatory experience. The viewer is going to be shown the elite plan, yet the eyes of most will remain shut.

Tyrell’s pet owl: the Owl of Minerva. Robot owl as in Clash of the Titans. On Sebastian’s and Tyrell’s chessboards are bird pieces, including owls.

Checker cabs. Otherwise checkerboard patterns (including the chessboards) in many places in movie, up to the ending, where Roy breaks through a checkerboard-tile wall.

“They slaughtered 23 people” in the off-world colony. 23 as number of chaos; their rebellion as a mission of chaos, which seems to accomplish nothing.

Note that neon star in the circle at the nightclub (pentagram).

There are neon dragons everywhere, befitting the Asianized cityscape. That these are meant to evoke the serpent is confirmed by the replicant with the snake.

Conclusions

From all this, I think we can conclude that this movie was supported in part as a vehicle to promote superclass, transhumanist values.

BR2049 connections

“In 2021, Ridley Scott said on Marc Maron's podcast that the main incentive to alter the film was an idea for the sequel, which would reframe protagonist Rick Deckard as a replicant capable of reproducing” (Wikipedia).

[1]Dyer, 230: “The cap of the pyramid is empty because the head of the system is secret”—also because the work is unfinished (same associations with the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States).