Reflections in a Silver Eye: Lens and Mirror in BLADE RUNNER

Shetley Vernon, and Alissa Ferguson. "Reflections in a Silver Eye: Lens and Mirror in Blade Runner." Science Fiction Studies #83 = 28.1 (March 2001).[1]

Abstract. -- Blade Runner is a film centrally concerned with vision. Prostheses of vision — the Voigt-Kampff test and the Esper machine — permit detective Rick Deckard to probe physical and even mental space, and extend his search for android "replicants" into distant rooms and into the minds of the characters he encounters. In the Esper sequence, Deckard analyzes the photograph cherished by the replicant Leon, an analysis that turns on the presence of a convex mirror at the center of the image. This photograph echoes the mirror seen in Jan van Eyck’s famous painting, The Arnolfini Portrait. Both mirrors are signs of artistic self-consciousness, pointing to the way these works sustain an extended meditation on pictorial or cinematic vision. In Blade Runner, the form of vision embodied by the Esper machine—which is characterized as probing, dominating, and ultimately lethal—is played off against a mode of vision tentatively but crucially present in the moment when Rachael’s photograph "comes alive" in Deckard’s hands, a mode of vision that turns on imaginative empathy.