“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.” — Roy Batty’s last words, Blade Runner
Or is it “tears in the rain?”
Cinephiles have been arguing about whether Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), leader of the bio-robotic replicants in Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade Runner, elided “the” or not. Either way, Hauer’s monologue made his career and those 42 (or 43) words have come to symbolize the futility of taking one’s transitory life too seriously.
Hauer, who died in 2019, the same year his character dies in the movie, deserves kudos for not just delivering these lines with incredible sincerity, but also for massaging the original screenplay dialogue, where the monologue ran to 125 words. (He did that the night before filming, without telling the director. How many movie monologues deserve their own Wikipedia entry?) It’s a great movie, complemented by Vangelis’ haunting score.
Let’s consider those stark “moments” Batty remembers. Because he’s a replicant, his brain approximates that of regular, boring, humans, including memory functions. Meaning he’d be stuck with the “brain filter” paradox: Every second, your sensory system processes a billion bits of information, yet you actually think at a rate of about 10 bits per second — that is, you can only be aware of about 1 10-millionth of what your senses are registering.
Why the mismatch between sensory input and thinking output? Perhaps the earliest creatures with a nervous system were only interested in navigation (toward food, away from danger), so brains evolved to follow just one path, filtering out any excess information, like a chess player who can only evaluate one set of moves at a time. Any more than the bare minimum and the human brain is overloaded to the point of psychosis — if you’ve experienced a bad acid trip, you know what I’m talking about.
That 10 bits per second isn’t just the operating speed of our brains, it’s the maximum rate at which we can make memories. But, of course, we don’t remember every moment of our lives; try to remember what it was like brushing your teeth this morning. So we end up remembering the moments that stand out in our experience, the good, the bad and the ugly. But what about lost memories? Are memories ever truly lost? How often has an odd fragrance or snippet of a song brought back a long-forgotten moment of your life? (I imagine a tiny tangle of memory neurons patiently waiting to be woken.) When we think we’ve forgotten something, maybe it’s just that we’ve lost easy access to it.
We can go a lot further with this line of thinking. In theory, even when a memory does seem to be gone forever — after Roy Batty has died, for instance — it’s still recoverable. Like the Star Trek transporter, which scans not just Kirk’s body but the 85 billion neurons in his brain, an insanely complicated (read: impossible) scanner could capture the position and velocity of every atom in a dead person’s brain. And since the laws of physics are deterministic, the state of someone’s brain long after they’re dead can be reconstructed to any time in the past. Recovering wiped memory from a computer hard disk is child’s play in comparison.
So next time you’re out in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate and you’re suddenly aware of those glittery C-beams, know that the moment will never be completely lost, whatever Roy Batty says.
Barry Evans (he/him, barryevans9@yahoo.com)(substack.com/@barryevans9) rues the fact that painful memories seem to crowd out the happy ones.
This article appears in No Kings II.