Continuities
Posted by admin on October 10, 2008, 3:41 pm
Give a reading of either Blade Runner or The Sandman that connects it in a significant way to a work we have discussed earlier in the semester.
4 Responses to “Continuities”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
October 22nd, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Although upon primary consideration, it may appear that the replicants in Bladerunner are concrete examples of cyborgs, when we consider the definition of cyborg supplied by Donna Haraway, it becomes clear that the replicants depicted in the film are not cyborgs at all, but yet another form of human-machine hybrid with their own set of norms, physical, intellectual, and emotional.
Several of the basic tenets comprising Donna Haraway’s definition of cyborg are in direct conflict with the characteristics exhibited by the Bladerunner replicants. Primarily, although Haraway specifies that “the cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world,” viewers see numerous gender-specific traits in both male and female replicants in the film. Not only do the replicants consciously perform traditional gender roles, as can be noted in Pris’ flirtation with J.F. and Zhora’s career as a stripper, but they were initially manufactured to physically fit gender-specific norms of modern society. Thus, it is no coincidence that Pris, Zhora, and Rachael would all be considered “beautiful women” and Batty and Leon “handsome men” by societal standards today. Furthermore, one of Haraway’s stipulations is that “the cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence,” and although Zhora engages in a career some might deem “perverse,” Rachael appears to be extremely innocent about sexual acts and the concepts of love and attachment, with regards to her complex relationship with Decker. Haraway notes that,
…unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family.
Nevertheless, Pris and Batty appear to have a somewhat heterosexual relationship, and Rachael certainly has an emotional attachment to Deckard. In addition, Rachael is heartbroken to discover that her memory of her family is fabricated, which infers her desire to repeat what she understands to be the natural formation of a family.
Some final key differences worth mentioning include the potential political power the replicants yield, and their desire for full identities and life experiences, all directly in conflict with Haraway’s arguments.
Thus, ultimately we can conclude that the replicants are an intermediate form, comprised half-cyborg, half-other, that both limits their life possibilities yet allows them numerous freedoms from the constraints of purely human life.
December 1st, 2008 at 3:51 am
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner can be seen to connected in a very significant way to Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. On a superficial level both stories follow a similar plot: both begin with a creator seeking to recreate life and ultimately creating imperfect beings. The works also end the same way: with the created life ironically causing the death of the person that created it. However far more interesting than the similarities between creators is the similarity in how the artificial life is received in the real world.
In both works artificial life attempts to live within society, however in both cases society spurns the creations and refuses accept them. One might make the argument that Blade Runner’s replicants were not rejected by society. However the replicants were only allowed to exist as slaves on a distant world and explicitly prohibited from living with humans on Earth. As Deckard said after Roy’s death “All [the creatures] wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where do I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got?” And yet in both cases society refuses to entertain these questions as relevant, choosing instead to simply brand the creations as “different” and “lesser,” thus unworthy of the pursuit of the same questions human beings ask of themselves.
Even more telling though is the fact that both Tyrell and Frankenstein are cruel towards their own creations, and yet it is these creations, not the creators, who are persecuted. As a reader we develop sympathy towards both Roy and Frankenstein’s creature. We see them as inherently benign creatures that become violent only through interaction with our human society. As Frankenstein’s creature says: “There was non among the myriads of men that existed who would pity or assist me; and should I feel kindness towards my enemies? No: from that moment I declared everlasting war against the species, and, more than all, against him who had formed me and sent me forth to this insupportable misery.” Thus both creations serve to tell us more about the ugliness of ourselves than they do about the created.
December 12th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
One view of Blade Runner can relate to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and the role of women as both secondary characters in the narratives, yet necesary to the continuation of life.
In Blade Runner, Rachel is introduced as a character who is there as an assitant to Tyrell - and through Deckard’s inqusition of her learn she to is a replicant. Through this knowledge, Rachel loses much of her strength as a woman, and depends solely on Deckard, in many ways her male counterpart, to have the will to keep living.
Ironically though, without Rachel’s love, Deckard may not have been able to run away and try to escape the world they were being held captive in. While Rachel seems to rely on Deckard and his masculinity and defined as truly a woman through her sexual relationship with Deckard, she is the one with whom Deckard seems to accompany him if he wants to not only continue his life, but be able to create new life in a world outside the boundaries of Tyrell.
In Frankenstein, Elizabeth and Justine both take background roles, yet they are both necessary for the birth of new life. Even though both Tyrell and Victor try to be creators independent of women, they fail.
Though Victor tried to shun Elizabeth and Tyrell thought that Rachel was just an assisant, it is only through them that true creation can occur. Victor even realizes the power of women through his decision not to create a female mate for his creature because then the “new species” would be out of his hands. And while Tyrell never acknowledges Rachel’s power, there is something telling in that Rachel is considered a threat. Why would they need to reign her in if she was so powerless?
Ultimately, BladeRunner, if viewed through a feminist lens and compared with Shelley’s work, can be seen as a commentary on a patriarchial society, and the limitations the society burends itself with if they limit the roles women can play.
December 12th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Philip K. Dick writes that science fiction is “not merely a story set in the future, and it not merely a story featuring high technology…It entails a “fictitious world” that “comes out of our world, the one we know: This world must be different from the given one in at least one way… sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society…There must be a coherent idea involved in this dislocation…so that as a result a new society is generated in the author’s mind, transferred to paper, and from paper it occurs as a convulsive shock in the reader’s mind, the shock of dysrecognition.”
The dislocation of Blade Runner is just a premise: What if we created sentient beings, possessing all the qualities of humanity, which are yet artificial? This has, of course, already been done with test tube babies. The difference is an application of a very basic anthropological distinction that every reader can recognize: Us vs. Them. These test tube babies are accepted as human—us. Androids and the monster are, for somewhat abstract reasons, them.
They resent this isolation. An android could ask, like Shylock, Hath not an android hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Of course, this would just undermine the Android/ monster position. Shylock is forced to ask that question because he has found himself on the wrong side of the Us vs. Them dichotomy. It seems almost human nature to continually find the other, on the basis of religion, race, and sex. Why?
By rejecting the other, we create our own identity. Frankenstein and the Blade Runners define what it is to be human. Us vs. Them is an extremely basic and closely held distinction, common to many ancient cultures. In ancient Egypt, the word ‘Egyptian’ also meant ‘human’. Victor is afraid of giving a mate to the monster for fear that it would eventually destroy humanity. Would he similarly deprive a giant stitched-together hamster of the same? I think one of the main parallels between Blade Runner and Frankenstein is the fear of creatures of sentience married to unnatural physical powers. A strain of fear and jealousy exists because, having recognized these essentially human characters as other, there humanness threatens our very central notion of uniqueness. It is for this reason that we cannot simply allow androids to live, let the monster to himself. They are either us, or they are undermining us—no middle ground. The forces that retire the androids are called Blade Runners. The name is appropriate—they hunt along the knife’s edge separating humans and androids.
Mary Shelley had a preoccupation with abandonment of dependant relationships that she wrote into Frankenstein. The reason that the monster cannot be embraced is left to the reader’s supposition; ugliness, which is the most frequently commented characteristic of the creature, is unsatisfactory. First of all, Victor specifically undermines the supposed grotesqueness of the monster immediately before he gives it life. Secondly, he had worked on the thing for months without any qualms.
It is clearer in Blade Runner why the android can never be accepted, and it sheds light on the monster’s predicament. The replicant is so nearly human that his abjection must be even greater. He exists very nearly on the edge of the blade, separating unique humans from the Other. The line in the sand extends to cover test-tube babies, but not replicants. The android cannot be embraced because he can just a little more easily be made. They can be duplicated, standardized, and by that virtue they become commodities. Their perfection, beauty, and strength only enhance their otherness, and offend the assumed superiority of naturally-limited humans.
Turning human beings into commodities still hits modern man’s nerve. It offends our preconceived uniqueness. Mary Shelley’s audience was in the thick of the Industrial Revolution, and the advent of the total economy. In her nascent Market Society, the economy was given primacy in order to allow the State to compete with other nations. The idea of the fictitious commodity—Land, Labor, and Capital, none of which are actually produced—was invented a short time before she began writing, in order to include those factors of production into the economic purview. The economic formula had to include every resource for peak productivity. What is labor, but people? Frankenstein’s commodification of human beings would have deeply worried her audience with threats they could only just have begun to understand. The almost-divine human was on the verge of being dethroned, and Mary Shelley was one of the first to see it.