Tears in the Rain

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Laughing at fate. Essay. 600 words, 3-minute read.

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Tears in the Rain

By Ray Tabler

I am a hopeless optimist. Anyone who has read my books will note that. As my mother told me, there’s a silver lining to every cloud, no matter how darn deep you have to dig to find it.

Often, I will look at a grim situation and that silver lining jumps out at me. Such is the case with Rutger Hauer’s dying speech in Blade Runner (1982):

“…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 Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die…”

These are the last words of Roy Batty, a replicant, an artificial person created to serve and then die early. Roy, and his ilk, are the ultimate in planned obsolescence. Roy and a few of his fellow replicants went off script as their end neared, seizing control of their own short lives for a little while.

Blade Runner is a dour tale. Harrison Ford plays a time-worn, cynical police detective, Deckard, hunting rogue replicants through a decaying, gray, rain-sodden future metropolis. At the climax, Deckard tracks Roy down in a derelict building for the final confrontation. The battle leaves Deckard dangling from a ledge high above the street with Roy deciding his fate. It looks like curtains for Deckard. Then Roy delivers his speech and spares our hero, peacefully passing on in the process. Roy the murderous replicant is human after all, capable of self-reflection and mercy.

I am not a scholar of the original author of the story, Philip K. Dick, or the film’s director, Ridley Scott. So, I don’t know their intentions or views of Roy Batty’s motivations. I must rely upon my own, possibly flawed, interpretation of what I saw and heard. And that interpretation changed as I aged. I was 21 when first I watched Blade Runner. The action and adventure, the futuristic setting, captured my attention like a stage magician’s distracting free hand. The subtle underlying messages slipped unnoticed into my psyche, to lie in wait for decades. Age supplies context for surprising perspectives down the road.

Deckard’s life, and the ugly, hopeless, corporate prison of a world he endures entangles him with chains of convention and duty. Even as it becomes achingly obvious that world doesn’t deserve Deckard’s devotion. But he “enjoys” at least more freedom than Roy and other replicants. And yet, Roy demonstrated that no prison can hold a truly free man. Roy rebelled and lived the remainder of his short, short life to the fullest extent. Freedom cost Roy. Cost him the (replicant) woman he lived. Cost him his life. All life ends in death. Roy figured that out. Have we?

Fate came for Roy sooner than for most. He knew his time was short and consciously decided to revel in his teardrop not despair. As best as he could, Roy tried to pass this insight on to Deckard. Is Roy Batty, renegade, rebel, fugitive, violent condemned criminal, the villain of the story or the hero? Or both at once? Perhaps Roy’s greatest crime was to see the truth and speak it, live it, openly.

Roy realized that all lives are like tears in the rain, objectively indistinguishable and fated to blend back into the endlessly recycling water of the world. That revelation can trigger depression and surrender, or it can inspire determination to find meaning in and wring joy from the raindrop, the teardrop, apportioned us by fate. The choice is yours.

END.

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