Bladerunner’s ‘Tears in the Rain’ Death Monologue and the Inner World of this Writer
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die. ~ Rutger Hauer as ‘Roy Batty,’ the Replicant rebel leader in Ridley Scott’s ‘Bladerunner’ (1982)
Thus saith Roy Batty, the rebel replicant leader, played by the late, great Rutger Hauer (23 Jan 1944–19 Jul 2019), at the close of his death scene in Ridley Scott’s ‘Bladerunner.’ Both the original novel by Phillip K. Dick and the screenplay included a longer, more techno-speak version of the soliloquy, but Hauer disliked it as burdensome, unlikely dialogue. He felt the scripted dialogue didn’t fit with the poetry of the rest of the movie. He came up with his own, acclaimed monologue to replace the ‘operatic’ techno-speak the night before he was scheduled to deliver the lines. Ridley Scott (and the rest of the cast and crew) loved it, so it stayed.
To me, the first time I saw it in 1982 and every time since, Bladerunner was just plain gorgeous. The music, the dreamy weirdness, the bitten down romantic despair. Hauer’s doomed character’s final scene comes after he utters the immortal words, “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” This wisdom is delivered moments before the Luciferian replicant saves the life of Decker, played by Harrison Ford, in a Christ-like act of self-sacrifice.
I based one of my settings/sequences/experiential descriptions in my book, ‘The Cup of Mari Anu’ (1995), squarely on this monologue. I’d seen it over a decade previously; it had always stayed with me because it chimed on my early childhood memories of experiencing awesomely beautiful sights from onboard my family’s 45-foot deep-sea sailing ketch, the Rhode, during our trans-Atlantic travels.
“During the time she was at sea, LuSin saw sights she couldn’t have dreamed of. She saw flying fish and dolphins that playfully dogged the prow of the ship. She saw great flocks of sea birds, cranes and pelicans. Towering masses of cloud, painted pink in the evening, marched south outside the Gate of the Rock in the west, following the great tide to the equator. She saw the lights and fires of tiny villages and settlements that climbed the hills of the many islands and inlets they visited. She saw sudden, fierce storms rise up and chase them into sheltering harbours; she saw the entire sea painted blood red in the dawn.” ~ The Cup of Mari Anu, pp. 19–20.
‘The Cup of Mari Anu’ is a coming-of-sacred-womanhood-age story for women and girls, but this one paragraph, I felt, added an element of real majesty to the depiction of the protagonist’s (Lu Sin’s) inner world and perceptions. Ancient Celtic bardic elegies have been lauded for their austere, minimalist delivery, ‘tragedy at a white heat,’ and that’s what I recognized, and so admired, in Hauer’s improvisation.
That said, my description of my protagonist’s inner world experiences is way longer than Roy’s death monologue after Hauer had so rigorously modified and sharpened it. It’s my documentation of an otherwise indescribably awe-filled childhood experience of strangeness and beauty. But, though longer overall, I owe the brevity and succinctness of my episode’s sentences to Rutger Hauer and his elegiacal delivery style for his all-important final scene in Bladerunner.
Roy’s ‘Tears in the Rain’ soliloquy also serves as the film’s final proof that the replicants are ‘human’ for all intents and purposes — the equals of those who hunt and murder them. It answers the movie’s central question; are the replicants in possession of human souls? In Rutger Hauer’s improvised death monologue, it becomes obvious that they are. Since the ancient Greeks at least, the capacity for poetry and a susceptibility to beauty have served as proof of the soul.
