Another image of woman smoking is as a strong feminine character, this image is steeped in seductive posing that smoulders with sexual promise, the impenetrability of that promise and the image of a woman who will not stand for a domineering patriarchal society any longer. This image heralds from the mid twentieth century when women became a genuine consumer market for the tobacco companies and also when this image of women popped from the cigarette case of Marlene Dietrich.
In Blade Runner directed by Ridley Scott – and I am here talking of the 1991 directors cut – there is a scene early on when the Blade Runner Deckard interviews (Void-comp test) Rachael, ostensibly this is to see how the test reacts to humans, as opposed to the usual subject matter that are Replicants. As anyone who has seen the film knows, it is made explicit at the conclusion of the interview that Rachel is a Replicant, although she believes she is Human but suspects that she may be otherwise. So it is clear that Rachael is a woman caught in a precarious position of not knowing what she, Replicant or Human, endangered or simply normal.
At the out-set and during the interviews duration we are lead to believe that Rachel in human. She appears at first glance to be a strong and determined woman albeit with innocent inchoate eyes that are slightly cold, her dress is a clean fusion of 1930’s, where the cut of her clothing is fitted to her body’s curves, and the hypothesised synthetic styles of a Si-Fi 2019. But after a marathon interview Deckard concludes that Rachel is a Replicant to which the head of Tyrell Corporation replies that she suspects that she is.
During the course of the interview Rachel had been smoking and smoking played a large aesthetic part in the scene, not only did it help cultivate film noir styling at one point an edit was cut with an eddy of smoke as the segue. A question as to the motivation for Rachel’s smoking is lighten up if we consider why women smoke, at first glance Rachel smoking is indicative of a strong, emancipated and seductive woman in control of her situation but we also know that Rachel suspects that she is a Replicant and that the interview she is taking aims at determining her true nature. She has something to hide no doubt, so is her smoking more of a crutch for her emotions to help mask her inner most secret or a weapon of seduction?
This is an interesting little scene as it is a polemic mash-up, stylistically with the mingling of film noir and Si-Fi, the boundaries of the human and non-human and of particular interest here Rachel’s smoking, is she in command, as we are lead to believe, or is she for the duration of the interview trying to mask something. The implementation of the cigarette devise is wonderfully subversive. We the viewers are seduced and led, with the scripting of signifiers, up the garden path with the line of thought that Rachael is a strong and seductive woman and her smoking being the obvious tool of expressing this, but this garden path does a u-turn at the conclusion of the scene where we learn that Rachel was in fact trying to mask an inner secret in what in short amounts to an interrogation. It is in this light that the smoking signifier has now morphed into one of emotion support: an ever diminishing crutch, which by the scenes end can no longer support what Rachel desires to conceal.
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