Themes Gonna Change Your Life, Dear Writer, Themes Gonna Change Your Life
Plus: Blade Runner's Hate-Fueled Sex
For the Literary Theory series:
shared Contrapoints video about Twilight just as I was pondering Blade Runner, which is basically the same movie. There have famously been many versions of Blade Runner, culminating in the 2007 Final Cut, which I embraced eagerly, but which bothered me increasingly over the years. The sex scene between Deckard and Rachael felt so violent and fueled by hate.1 Thus, clearly, Deckard was a vampire who couldn’t decide if he wanted to kill Rachael or take her to the prom.The point I'm considering is this: I’m interpreting the undertones of the scene based on the problems of society and not the problems faced by the characters. In doing so, have I missed the point?
Let’s discuss—and because this is Literary Salon—I’ll force in prose fiction somehow.
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Now let’s talk about sex and violence.
Table of contents:
“Blade Runner 2049 Tries to Make a Love Story Out of the First Blade Runner’s Violence”
The title of a 2017 Slate Magazine article
The discussion is usually about whether the sex scene was consensual or rape, and that’s what bothered me. Now? I won’t try to argue one way or the other. Instead, I’m putting a pin in that argument. It will be there when we get back. However we interpret the scene on screen, I’m going to give the writers and director credit enough to believe rape was not intended. The actual product we watch matters endlessly more than the intent behind its creation, but for now, the intent is relevant.
Why does Deckard act the way he does? At least in part, he’s motivated by hate and disgust.
What is Blade Runner about? It’s sci-fi noir about what it means to be human.
What is Blade Runner’s plot?
Deckard is a retired killer of replicants (artificial humans). He’s dragged back onto the job to hunt down four replicants who have smuggled themselves to earth in order to confront (and kill) their creator. It ends with (SPOILER) the final replicant saving Deckard’s life before sitting down to die. This is the main plot. The romance plot is meant to support the themes of the main plot, either through contrast of comparison. The replicant, Roy Batty, saves Deckard. As a reinforcing/comparison plot, Deckard saves Rachael. Both plots about what it means to be human within the brevity of our existence.
The lingering question about whether Deckard is a replicant is significant because, if he can’t tell whether he’s human or not, how significant is the difference? This could get into an interesting tangent on the nature of memory (as Rachael was given false memories), but that’s not really our focus.
By the nature of his job, Deckard hasn’t allowed himself to consider the possibility of the personhood of those he kills. When he determines that Rachael is a replicant, he asks Eldon Tyrell, “How can it not know what it is?”
The second of the renegade replicants gets the best of Deckard, and Rachel saves his life. They go back to his apartment, and he assures her that if she makes a run to the north, he won’t go after her. He falls asleep and wakes up to Rachael playing piano.
When he attempts to kiss her, she gets up to leave. He stops her. They kiss, and the kiss escalates into the infamous sex scene. If it’s intended to be consensual, was the action just whatever the director thought was hot or was their purpose to each movement?
I said Deckard was motivated by hate and disgust, but that’s conflicting with the softening of his feelings for her. He’s attracted to her and in her debt, and all of this is at odds with everything he’s told himself over the years. If she’s human enough to love, then so were all the others he killed.
The more Deckard falls in love with Rachael, the more he hates himself.
See what other essays I have to offer:
Shoehorned Literary References
The new movie, Mickey 17—based on the book Mickey 7—covers similar themes about what it means to be human. I haven’t seen it yet or read the book, but I have read a book by Mary Shelly called Frankenstein. I doubt you’ve heard of it. I think Shelly must have been familiar with Blade Runner because the themes are similar. Only, for Frankenstein’s artificially created human, there is no love to be found. He does flee to the north, though.
Blade Runner was based on a book set in the futuristic year of 1992. Future readers found that to be a problem so the year was changed to the far-off future of 2021.
(The movie, Blade Runner, was set in 2019.)
The book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, (SPOILERS) has a different subplot with Rachael. Also, Deckard is arrested in the line of duty and accused of being a android with implanted memories. Once he escapes, he has the test run on himself, proving he’s a human. The theme of uncertainty remains.
In this Rachael subplot, she sleeps with him to keep him from killing the others, but then admits that she’s slept with many bounty hunters, having been programmed to do so in order to stop the killing.2
At the end of the book, Deckard finds a toad in the wilderness (real animals are very rare), but it proves to be a robot. The books end with him taking care of it anyway.3
The book is about what it means to be real, to be human, to have empathy, and to buy really nice and expensive things.
Is Deckard Human?
Yes? No? It doesn’t matter.
What matters is that our humanity, our personhood, is something we assume and never have to prove to ourselves. Once doubted we see how flimsy our grasp on reality is.
I said we could go down a rabbit hole on memory alone, and part of that is there’s little difference between our “real” memories and having memories implanted. We don’t remember events so much as we remember having remembered them before. We create our memories. Yes, they’re based on real events, but they’re nearly as disconnected from those events as Rachael is from Tyrell’s niece.
That’s the thematic answer.
I always clung to the idea that Deckard was a replicant because that was the fun answer, and it made the movie about Deckard realizing he wasn’t human, which strikes at those same themes. However, in writing this, I see that it works better, thematically, if Deckard in a human who’s realizing that his humanity can be easily questioned and that he can find love with an artificially created person.
In the theatrical cut, we even see Deckard and Frankenstein running off together into the frozen north. It’s a beautiful moment.4
Thematic Theory
For the writer, the first benefit of theme is narrative cohesion.
I do have to ask if any writers work like Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation and sit down at the keyboard to ask: what are the themes? I’m not saying it’s bad if you do. A good process is whatever gets your best story written. I just want to hear if that’s you.
For me, theme comes out of the writing process. In one sense, story is about creating patterns, and those patterns create themes. You don’t have to agonize about what your themes will be but only look for those interesting story tidbits that you can repeat with variation. That repetition provides meaning.
I think of one writer who explained the symbolism in the story I was beta reading. He had great prose, but if I was beta reading for him all these years later, I would tell him that the meaning he described could exist for no one but him.
He wanted an eddy in the water to carry all this meaning, but for that to happen, the symbol of the eddy had to appear elsewhere in the story. The contexts in which these spirals occurred would assign them meaning.
Repetition creates meaning.
Don’t get me wrong. There are other ways, but in general, they’re all shortcuts that depend on the reader carrying patterns from literature or from life into the reading. These stock symbols generally come with preassigned meanings, but to build something organically from within your story, you’re going to need repetition.
If that repetition has an arc, now you’re looking at a theme. If that repetition presents a singular idea across variations, you have a theme: a child is lost in a department store, and when his parents find him, not realizing the trauma he’s been through, they announce they’re getting divorced; flash forward fifteen years—he rides with a friend to a college party but his friend ditches him to be with a girl; he’s at the party freaking out, but a girl calms him down and promises to drive him home; together, they find love, but he can’t shake the idea that she’ll leave him. That’s a theme of abandonment, and in this case, it’s a pattern in the character’s life that has shaped who he is and not in a good way. He’ll have to overcome his fear of abandonment in order to have his happily ever after.
Indulgent Rant
So often, when we’re taught a concept, people feel the need to dumb down its application. Every story requires a theme, they say: even if it’s just good vs. evil.
That is such nonsense. You’d have to look really hard to find a story whose only theme was good vs. evil. Teaching opens our perspectives, and statements like that shut it down again.
I suspect the teachers who say such things disrespect genre fiction and see it all as good vs. evil escapism. (I hate the word escapism, too.)
I love good writing, but I love genre stories too—and I believe the two go very well together. Even without intending to, you will create deep and meaningful themes. The main trick is to remember that you’re creating patterns.
Writer: Themes Will Change Your Life
Until you know your story’s central theme(s), you don’t know your story.
It’s not the plot. Your story is never about the plot, but once you know the pattern that’s key to your story, then you can do something amazing. You can answer the question: what’s your story about?
It’s about abandonment and learning to trust again when the opportunity for love arises.
See that? See how neat and tidy and inviting that description is? That’s not what writers usually do. Their minds are stuck in the plot:
Well it’s about this guy who gets lost in a department story when he’s young and his parents get divorced—not because of that, but they do—and he goes to this college party—when he’s older, not when he’s a kid, this is later—and the guy who drives him there leaves without him—and then he meets a girl, and they fall in love and—
That’s not what people are asking. When they ask what your story is about, even though they don’t know this, they’re asking about the central theme. And when you give them anything other than the genre and central theme, they think you’re weird.
I mean, we are weird, but they don’t have to think it.
But when we know our theme and can express is simply, you know what they think?
Oh, cool.
—Thaddeus Thomas
P.S. — Be prepared. This is only the opening salvo. Sometimes, people are rude enough to then ask for more information. After the genre and theme, then you can mention your setting, main character, and her central problem. If they still want more after that, you know you’ve hooked them. The stumbling block in our talking about our fiction has been removed as what we’ve done in the past is try to convey the theme by talking about the plot—while wondering why it’s so hard to express, like we don’t even know our own stories. This way, you’ve conveyed the broader message, and there’s less pressure to chase every detail. You can share whatever interesting tidbit you want.
The scene stuck out to me more in the Final Cut, but the issue may be there in previous versions.
Interestingly, the question of programming we see in the book’s Rachael subplot becomes the heartbreaking subplot for Blade Runner 2049’s Joi, although her programming is simply to be a companion, not to interfere with the job.
SPOILERS: In the book, Deckard is married. His wife is depressed, and he tries to cheer her up with a real goat he buys off the reward for the first three kills. Rachael kills the goat, and at the end of the book, it’s his wife, not Deckard, who takes care of the toad.
I have to clarify. I’m not a fan of the theatrical cut’s narration or its tacked-on ending.* I do like the factoid that both the ending’s overhead shots and Tyrell come from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
*You can’t add a foot note to a foot note, but while I never liked the narration, I didn’t mind the tacked-on ending until they removed it.
I'm REALLY big on theme. One of the best workshops I ever took was in 2017 with Sarah Gerard through Litreactor called "The Alchemy of Theme" (It was expensive, most of the class were severe dilettantes, and I was just there because I wanted HER opinions on theme, I already had all my own. Also, I really liked her work and wanted a crit from her.)
On the second assignment of a four week workshop when I broke down the possible thematic elements of a story so hard her only response was to the tune of "I don't know if ANYONE has ever looked at it that way, or that deeply" she pegged me as a semi-pro, or at least someone who was not fucking around (tm).
The interaction in most of the workshop was so bad (Rob Hart was still running the workshop coordination program for Litreactor at that point and I even brought up the lack of interaction with him, most of the class I felt like a man screaming alone into a void) I'm pretty sure it helped hasten her divorce and at the same time she was writing a series of articles about herself and her relationship with food, et al. for another lit site, and had started drinking a bunch of bourbon, which given how this workshop was going, I could see why. (She never did another workshop with Litreactor, she divorced her first husband, and I believe she teaches at The New School now) But anyway, the first embryonic draft of my short story Our Year came from that workshop.
She professionally ripped it to pieces in a way she did NOT treat anyone else's in the workshop (Someone pays you 500 bucks for 4 weeks of tautology you have to hedge or else it can fuck you. This is a problem with both paid independent editors, and people leading workshops, the workshop leads, the name draws, often pull their punches. A few negative student reviews can shit on your life), because I'd already signaled being there in a professional capacity. It took me from 2017 until 2024 to finish it, finally giving it a much deserved spit shine of an ending on a final sectional rewrite when I posted it to Substack (after reading her crit about fifty million times. I noted when final crits dropped for the final week that I was the only person she ripped to shreds in a field of, I will not lie, really shit stories, but I was also the only person she punctuated the gang fucking of my short story with "I look forward to seeing this in print."
Your breakdown here is excellent. I believe that theme can be baked in (but you have to know what you're doing) or it can be emergent. (Notice how in the last abusive parenthetical I say "you have to know what you're doing." What I mean by that is YOU REALLY MUST KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING AND BE VERY INTENTIONAL ABOUT IT.) And there are shortcuts, dirty tricks, I'd know, my bag is full of them. The only problem is, you also have to know HOW TO USE THOSE AS WELL.
So there's no easy way around it.
My personal way of working usually starts with either an idea, a sentence, or a bit of imagery. Sometimes it leads somewhere, sometimes not, but a plot is just the causal chain of your story, and if you plot too tightly, you're going to find yourself at some point having veered off track, something will almost inevitably go wrong, and you've stifled the discovery process.
I do believe in form. Genres and stories have forms and expectations. We've sublimated those things to the point of knowing whether a story "works" or not, just from reading it. We're that media and narrative saturated. The issue is these expectations aren't all written down in some book somewhere (sorry anyone looking for the magic solution) but they're what we figure out the hard way. One issue I see with a lot of writers starting out is they want to immediately go into something that is on the surface simple (genre, pick one, external arch plot genre, say, basic hero story, it pops up everywhere) and try to subvert it off the blocks. The issue is 99% of the time, they're trying to subvert something done so often it's already HARD to write in an innovative way, and not only, they're also trying to subvert something everyone knows. (I wish for all beat sheets to burn eternally) So, good luck, better hope you're the literary equivalent of an undiscovered Van Gogh.
But after I have my bit of imagery, scenes I want or events I want will start to cohere, what I want is a topology of the general form and shape of the story, not a paint by numbers. I'm almost never thinking more than 20-30 pages ahead unless I'm hitting an inflection point soon and I know it. And that inflection point may turn out not to be what I thought in the first place.
(Read the Hotel pieces on my Substack. Yeah, tight zero drafts. Before the before. That was all on the fly, as I went, a year and change later, I know the topology and there is more input from things written in the inbetween, now I know I'm going to have to completely rework the story from Point A to X, but some things will remain generally in some sort of form as they have already, mostly key events, King of Killers HAS to happen, the Lobby Assault HAS to happen, Introducing The Heavies and the Russians coming to the hotel mysteriously HAS to happen, but now I know part of WHY they're there, and how they came to be there. But this requires rewriting a lot of what now reads as clunk to me in those six pieces on my Substack.)
Or, closer to the now. I wrote My Name is My Name, based on a three word prompt. Barley, Replaceable, and Banter, were the words. It took me a MONTH to get to sitting down to bang out the story. But the very first image I had in my head was actually the last scene of the story. I knew I wanted to keep that scene, specifically the last sentence, because I took it to my moms (English lit BA) and we both agreed that it sang. It was short, but it sang. Another framing came into view though, and I was able to create something more interesting in the completion of it than I would have without that scene, which, if you read the story closely, is PACKED ON WITH THE THEMES OF THE STORY in one way or another.
Best lines of the essay:
"Until you know your story’s central theme(s), you don’t know your story.
It’s not the plot. Your story is never about the plot, but once you know the pattern that’s key to your story, then you can do something amazing. You can answer the question: what’s your story about?
It’s about abandonment and learning to trust again when the opportunity for love arises.
See that? See how neat and tidy and inviting that description is? That’s not what writers usually do. Their minds are stuck in the plot..."
EXCELLENT recap of theme. (posted on EKU Facebook page) However, would people read a book with the tag line:
The story is about a man who learns it is impossible to act nobly, or shamefully, without power.
Such simple words that obscure their complexity. (What kind of man, power, and definitions of nobility and shame are we talking about?) Yes, the writer should be able to answer the question, but the average reader describing the book to a customer who doesn't want to pay for a headache? Maybe not. The reason people hold on to emphasizing plot over theme, I suspect,is the inability of people to be objective; they'd rather hold onto stereotypes, and emotionalism because its safer and more comfortable. And that's probably best because, to destroy the moral universe of the average person is to destroy the pretenses they maintain in order to function is an irrational world.