What Does the Voight-Kampff Test Even Do, Anyways?

It certainly doesn't measure empathy - so what's the point?

You have been brought into an office for a test. You will be asked a series of questions; answer quickly, as response time is a factor. If you fail this test, your life is forfeit. What do you do?

The test, of course, is the Voight-Kampff test from the original Blade Runner. The purpose of the test, we are told, is to determine whether or not someone is a replicant - a kind of robot or artificial human. This is done by asking the subject a series of questions in order to measure their empathy; empathy is apparently the only detectable difference between replicants and humans. 

But how unempathetic are the replicants in the film? They do commit acts of violence but they are largely driven by their attempts to escape slavery and their impending premature deaths. We are told that the quartet of replicants that Deckard, the protagonist, is hired to ‘retire’ killed twenty-three people in the process of fleeing the colonies, but we do not see evidence of this on-screen - and given that this rebellion took place on an off-world colony, the possibility lingers that these victims were actively involved in the enslavement of the replicants. Zhora, the first replicant killed by Deckard, seems to have abandoned whatever plan the other replicants have, and is working as an exotic dancer; she attacks Deckard, but presumably only because she’s figured out that he is a blade runner. Later, after discovering that there is no way for replicants to escape their early deaths, Roy kills Eldon Tyrell, the head of the Tyrell corporation and the man most responsible for the replicants’ fate. The only death that is both confirmed and seems truly unconscionable is the death of JF Sebastian, a genetic designer that the replicants befriend (or feigned befriending) in their attempts to reach Tyrell. And even he, as an employee of the Tyrell corporation, was an active agent of their oppression.

And the replicants do display empathy, both to themselves and to others. One of the replicants, Leon, attempts to retrieve photographs from his apartment - presumably because Zhora is in the photos, and if they are discovered she could be tracked down by a blade runner. When Zhora is fleeing Deckard, she doesn’t attack anyone else or use the crowd as human shields. Pris, one of the replicants who ends up living with Sebastian, does seem genuine in her friendship with him; when she learns of his rapid aging because of Methusalah syndrome, she seems to recognize him as a kindred spirit. During his confrontation with Tyrell, Roy admits to doing “questionable things” and he seems to genuinely mourn the deaths of Zhora and of Pris in particular. And in the climax of the film Roy saves Deckard’s life, pulling him up from a ledge when he easily could have let him fall.

But most telling of all is the case of Rachael, the replicant who initially believes that she is human. Rachael is apparently barely detectable by the Voight-Kampff test; normally it takes twenty to thirty questions to determine if someone is a replicant, but it takes one hundred to identify her, and Deckard still doesn’t seem sure after testing her, as he asks Tyrell for confirmation. How fine-grained is the difference in empathy that the Voight-Kampff is supposed to detect? Later, Rachael saves Deckard from Leon, shooting him in the head even though allowing him to kill Deckard would have bought her more time to go into hiding. And she’s clearly devastated by what she did, telling Deckard back at his apartment that she can’t stop shaking.

And in the film, humanity itself is acutely unempathetic to replicants. Replicants are employed as slave labor in interstellar colonies, working dangerous and humiliating jobs. They are deliberately programmed to have shortened lifespans, living for only four years. One replicant is given false memories as part of a pilot program to make the replicants more docile. And any replicant who steps foot on Earth life is forfeit; they are subject to murder by the film’s titular blade runners, an act which is euphemistically called ‘retirement.’ 

So what is the Voight-Kampff test even doing, then? Part of the test involves the scanning of the eye, and the test explicitly involves monitoring physiological responses; rather than using these responses to measure empathetic response, the test may be checking for ways in which the replicants’ bodies are subtly different from humans. While the replicants are mostly physically identical to humans, there are differences, such as enhanced strength and resistance to extreme temperatures¹, and replicant animals are explicitly marked with serial numbers. And Sebastian is able to identify Pris and Roy as replicants without using a Voight-Kampff test at all; as a genetic designer, he might’ve been aware of other tells in the replicants’ bodies or behavior to look for. And with the exception of Rachael, the replicants do seem more emotionally dysregulated; Pris and Roy have childlike affects and emotional responses, certainly. Rachael’s relatively stronger emotional regulation could be the result of her false memories; Tyrell notes that “After all they are emotional inexperienced with only a few years in which to store up the experiences which you and I take for granted. If we gift them the past we create a cushion or pillow for their emotions and consequently we can control them better.” This could explain Leon’s extreme reaction to the test. When he is asked to describe his mother, his murder of the blade runner interviewing might be because of the emotional reaction triggered by the question - he doesn’t have a mother, and to describe this experience that he has been robbed of might be viscerally upsetting. But emotional response, too, is hugely variable even within humans, and some of the replicants’ reactions are the plainly result of their desperate circumstances. But all of this begs the question: if the Voight-Kampff test is not about empathy, why go through all the trouble of masking how it actually functions?

In his book Slayers and Their Vampires, Bruce McClelland posits a mechanism in which “ordinarily just or humane persons can come to subscribe to the collective attribution of evil in order to act out vengeance and rage on the abject body.” The abject other is a figure which society deems to be so reprehensible that any level of violence is acceptable in dealing with them. In the past, accusations of being a witch could render a person abject and subject to unspeakable state violence; in modern times, we see the same with terms like ‘terrorist.’ Replicants function as an abject body both because their lives are considered to be worth so much less than humans and because they are so hard to distinguish from humans. Abject bodies are not simply people who violence can be done to with impunity; they are people who could be anyone. Throughout Blade Runner, one of the police officers who Deckard has been working with, Gaff, is seen making various origami figures. In the last scene, Deckard discovers an origami unicorn - and he had previously dreamed of a unicorn, thus implying that, like Rachael, Deckard’s memories are false and he is a replicant. Anyone and everyone in the society of Blade Runner might be a replicant, and thus anyone and everyone is potentially subject to elimination by state violence. Anyone could be a replicant. You could have memories, friends, colleagues and you still might be a replicant.

This creates a society in which the state can enact violence against anyone and it can’t be questioned, as anyone might be abject. When Deckard is pursuing Zhora, the crowd is mostly unperturbed, not reacting even when he is chasing after her and brandishing a gun. They only really notice when he finally shoots her, watching him from afar as he examines her body. When a police officer questions Deckard, all it takes for him to back off is for Deckard to say that he’s a blade runner and show his identification. The officer needs no confirmation that she was a replicant; all it took was the word of a different enforcer of state violence. It did not actually matter whether Zhora was a replicant or not; simply knowing that the person who killed her was authorized to do so was enough. Within the world of Blade Runner, “replicant” is comparable to “terrorist”: defined vaguely enough that it can be applied to anyone, and allowing violence to be enacted with near impunity.

What ultimately justifies all of this is the dehumanization - the abjection - of the replicants, via the Voight-Kampff test. The claim that they have detectably less empathy than humans is part of this process. They are slaves. They understand that they are slaves. The replicants ask that they be afforded the empathy that they have not been given. When Leon attacks Deckard, he says “painful to live in fear, isn’t it?”; during this scene, it seems to mostly be Leon taunting Deckard. But later, during the fight with Roy, Roy echoes the line but adds to it: “Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” They are slaves who are claimed to be fundamentally different from humans, despite all available evidence. And the system that polices the replicants recognizes this. If Deckard is a replicant, as suggested by the ending scene, then humanity has attempted to wash its hands of the violence that it commits against them. Like the Ottoman Christians who required that a vampire slayer be Turkish or Roma, the humans of Blade Runner understand how the violence of the system they have created stains them and seek to abjure themselves of it by hoisting it onto their victims. When Deckard hears about the murders of Tyrell and Sebastian, he goes to Sebastian’s apartment to investigate it. While waiting in his car, he is approached by a police officer who says that the area is closed and threatens him with arrest - but when Deckard reveals that he is a blade runner, the police officer not only lets him be, he departs entirely. When Deckard confronts Roy and Pris, he receives no back up, nor does he request it. It is possible that his entire life has been manufactured to culminate in this specific moment, his memories of working and retiring artificial, his coworkers play-acting at having known him in order to point him like a loaded gun at the other replicants that have arrived on earth. He is a weapon created not because humans are unable to kill replicants, but because they do not wish to do so, as doing so would force them to confront the fundamental monstrousness of their actions. 

Or - perhaps he isn’t. Perhaps he isn’t, and Rachael isn’t either. Neither of them seem to have the superstrength or the relative resistance to pain that the confirmed replicants have. The unicorn that suggests that Deckard is a replicant also suggests that Rachael might not be; If false memories can be implanted in the mind of a replicant, then could they not also be implanted in a regular human? Or perhaps it doesn’t even require that. Consider “replicant” as a social category rather than a purely biophysical one. A replicant is an un-person, someone subject to violence at any time, violence that has an entire apparatus - the Voight-Kampff test - of dubious utility to justify it. Keeping the exact boundary between a replicant and a human blurry is exactly the point, as it means that anyone, human or otherwise, can potentially be declared a replicant and subject to “retirement.” That’s what the Voight-Kampff test really does - it never had anything to do with empathy at all.

1. There’s also the matter of the replicants’ glowing eyes, but they are presumably not diegetic, as they would render the entire Voight-Kampff test moot.