THE IMPORTANCE OF MEMORY

From culturespace

All Those Moments Will Be Lost in Time, Like Tears in Rain

In the climax of Ridley Scott's 1982 science-fiction classic, Blade Runner, Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) sits on a roof in the rain after having unexpectedly saved the life of his nemesis, Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). The year is 2019, and Batty is a replicant, an android designed to resemble a human in every way except the capacity to emote. But replicants, as their human designers found out, can in fact develop emotion, and so they are given a four-year life span to prevent them from becoming completely human. Batty has spent most of his life fighting to understand who he is, desperately struggling with his existence as he experiences it through the passage of time. When he realizes that his end is imminent, he achieves emotional clarity and elicits a sorrowful yet poetic summary of his experiences:

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 Tannhauser Gate.
All those moments ... will be lost ... in time ... like tears in rain.

The musical cadences with which Hauer delivers these famous lines make them touching and beautiful, but it's in their thematic elucidation that the words are most impressive. Just like humans, the film suggests, Batty's identity is based on his past experiences and his memories.

………The themes in the film that fascinate me the most are those of identity and what I call "lived time," the sense of experience through memory, as opposed to the constructed time of calendars. They fascinate me because I empathize with Batty's plight. He, not Deckard, is the real protagonist of this movie, or, in the very least, Scott and his screenwriters have rearranged many of the traditional protagonist-antagonist elements. Batty is the one who truly struggles, experiencing a common, time-worn dilemma: in his emerging self-awareness, he desires to meet his maker, to ask and understand why he exists and how long he will live. He tells his creator, the enigmatic intellectual Tyrell (Joe Turkel), that he wants more life, and, when Tyrell explains that it is scientifically impossible to grant such a wish, Batty rebels violently, lashing out in recognition of his inevitable, impending decrepitude. He and his fellow replicants seem to suffer from what E. M. Cioran once called "the temptation to exist." It is a temptation so profound that it consumes them, almost to the point where they want to hurl themselves at the universe; when Pris (Daryl Hannah) is shot by Deckard, she flails and screams and pounds the floor with her hands and feet, not so much because she is in pain, but because she is hysterical over her finality, over the fact that she has reached her end, that she knows she will be no more.

Through Batty and other replicants, Scott establishes the importance of memory to existence. Although replicants are created as adults without memories, in their attempt to become more human, they begin basing who they are on assumed, adopted pasts. Leon, a combat android, has a stockpile of photos that give him a sense of lived time. At one point, Batty asks Leon if he was able to get his "precious" photos, and his inflection on the qualifier underscores the emotional significance that the photos have for Leon. The importance of memory can also be seen in Batty's reaction to Leon's death. Batty whimpers like a child (he is still learning to emote, after all), but his sorrow illustrates how grief is partly a function of memory, for it is in the act of grieving that we remember how our loved ones once were. Most of all, though, there is Rachael. She is Tyrell's pet project, and in his quest to create something "more human than human," he implanted Rachael with memories, with mental images of a mother and a brother, of a moment at the age of six when she witnessed the hatching of a spider's egg, of piano lessons, of front-yard porches and a variety of childhood events. Our identities are based on our experiences through time, Tyrell explains to Deckard, and these experiences help us deal with our emotions. But Rachael, being artificial, lacks experience and cannot control her emotions, so Tyrell gives her a past and, in doing so, makes her believe that she is human.