Blade Runner (1982) - 8 questions

Question: One of the things I've never been able to figure out. When Roy's hand is clenching why does he shove the nail through it? Beyond the obvious reference to Christ, does the pain shock his nerves into working briefly again or what?

Answer: Exactly. His body is shutting down and he's trying to hold that off long enough to finish his battle with Deckard. His hand starts to freeze up, so he uses the pain from the spike to get it working again temporarily.

Question: How exactly does the Voight-Kampff test work?

Answer: It measures a number of involuntary physical responses, like heart-rate, breathing, eye movement and pupil dilation in response to questions designed to provoke an emotional response. By examining the intensity of these responses over a series of different questions, the subject's empathy and emotional response levels can be measured, allowing those running the test to determine the true nature of the test subject.

Question: Is Rick Dicker (from The Incredibles) supposed to be a parody of Rick Deckard? Thanks.

Answer: There doesn't appear to be any evidence for that. The names are vaguely similar, but, other than that, there's nothing to link the two.

Question: Has there ever been an explanation given as to what purpose the fire belching towers seen in the initial opening scene of Los Angeles serve?

Answer: The suggestion in the future Bladerunner universe is that the planet is so over populated, that you have living areas and industry all in the same areas, hence the towers with fire.

Question: Is there any reason why the sushi chef bothers haggling with Deckard in his native language when it's revealed not two seconds later he actually speaks perfect English?

Answer: Why shouldn't he? Just because he speaks English, it doesn't automatically mean that he must therefore bow to the linguistic preferences of others and use it. Many people take pride in their native tongues and prefer to use it. And if it puts Deckard at some small disadvantage in the haggling, so much the better.

Question: Deckard has access to two sets of photographs, one from Leon's room in which he finds the lead to the replicant 'snake woman' and the other set belonging to Rachel. Yet Rachel's set also contains this same photograph - which is of an apparently empty room. I understand the reason for each to have their own 'precious' photos (as Roy calls them), but why would both Leon's set and Rachel's set contain the same empty room photo?

Answer: The only photo of Rachel's that Deckard has is the fake one of her family. The "empty room" photo is seen again as Deckard leafs through Leon's photos.

Question: I'm aware that there is debate on whether or not Deckard was a replicant, but as I was watching the movie, I couldn't see any clues as to why anybody would think this. Did I miss something obvious? Why do people think this?

Answer: The two most notable hints are as follows. The first (which is only in the Director's Cut) is that after Deckard dreams of a unicorn, Graf makes an origami unicorn and leaves it at Deckard's apartment. Some people interpret this as suggesting that they're aware of the memories that have been given to Deckard to prevent him realising his true nature. The second hint is that replicant eyes glow in certain lights - at one point in the film, Deckard's eyes can be seen glowing in the same fashion. Ridley Scott has stated on several occasions that, as far as he's concerned, Deckard is a replicant, but he does concede that they deliberately left it as somewhat ambiguous - the viewer should decide for themselves.

Question: Does Voigt Kampff (sp?) mean anything?

Answer: Not specifically named for anything, but the following snippets of an essay called "Philip K Dicks Human Vision" by Kyla Bremner, shed some light on possible influences on the name: "The German and Italian names of these tests perhaps allude to the fascist regimes of Hitler (Mein Kampf perhaps?)...and the crimes against humanity which [were] perpetrated less than thirty years before Dick was writing this novel...Deckard and Bryant's discussion of Lurie Kampff, who modified Voight's scale to make the Voight-Kampff Altered Scale...[he] is deliberately portrayed as a psychiatrist in the mould of the likes of late nineteenth-century sexual psychologists such as Havelock Ellis or Richard von Krafft-Ebing, both of whom were instrumental in laying down the foundation from which Sigmund Freud developed his theories...The curious similarity between the name of the Voight-Kampff test, Krafft-Ebing's name, and Hitler's manifesto, Mein Kampf, seems to link the three in a manner that suggest they are all interrelated..."