Blade Runners, Replicants, & Humans

1. Blade Runners, Replicants, & Humans

2. A Technological World Until Blade Runner, most Sci-Fi films depicted the Future and future technology as clean, rational, modernist. Blade Runner was (probably) the first SF film to imagine a technological future that was so dirty, run-down, crime-ridden, crowded. Beginnings of Cyberpunk.

3. A Simulated World • Cluttered with images, signs, reproductions that take the place of "natural" world. • These images & signs are technological: like film/video, they are reproductions, copies of the real. Simulations. • Technology makes these reproductions possible: images, signs, videos, but also replicants.

4. Noir City • Cyberpunk Los Angeles: crowded, dense, corrupt urban environment. A Dystopian vision of the future, but not based on overly rational technology. • Draws from “Film Noir” of 1940s (Noir = Black, Dark), almost always set in cities, often L.A. • Similarities to classic Noir? • Plays on common fears of the City, urban areas, as dangerous, crime-ridden, mixed, “dark.” For more info on Film Noir, click here

5. Film Noir • Characteristics of Film Noir: • Formal: Shadows, fog, dark/night settings, strong contrast between dark and light. Neon lights reflecting on wet streets, alleys, smoke-filled bars. Urban. • Thematic: Violence, dangerous sexuality (femme fatale), crime, corruption, sense of decay, chaos, lawlessness.

6. Future Noir • This idea of City as dark, dangerous, crime-filled mix, out of control is . . . • Linked to racial & cultural mixture. Mixture of races (and languages) in Blade Runner’s LA presented negatively, as evidence of decaying society. • In contrast, replicants appear highly Aryan, but • They are also compared to African-Americans: slaves, hunted down, called “skin jobs” which--the voiceover in original tells us--is similar to “N-word.”

7. Technological Reproduction, Replication • Noir-like, technologized city, with mixture of technologically reproduced images, copies, and signs-- portrayed negatively: as out-of-control, overpowering nature and humans. • Linked to the Replicants (who are compared to rebellious slaves—note racial overtones), and who • Are technologically reproduced beings, copies: also no longer under human control.

8. Reproduction & Mothers • Made without “natural” sexual reproduction. Without mothers. • Creators Tyrell, Sebastian, Chu: aging, largely asexual men; Tyrell & Sebastian live alone. • Fathers? Roy calls Tyrell “Father.” Tyrell calls Roy "the prodigal son." • Absence of mothers (and children) in Blade Runner.

9. “Let me tell you about my mother . . .” • Question of the mother, memory of mother, prompts Leon's violent reaction. Why at mention of mother? • Remember also: Rachel’s “memories.”

10. Women • Role of women in film? • If strong, portrayed as dangerous, out of control. • Zhora the stripper tries to strangle Deckard; Pris’s leg scissors on Deckard's head. • Rachel: Only replicant who isn’t seen as dangerous? • Is this because she “submits” to Deckard? • She is only one who survives.

11. Fear of Replication • Anxiety over replicants similar to anxieties over gender, race, technology. • Not threatening when under control, when it "submits" and is subordinate to "Man." • Frightening when it is "out of control," when it takes on a mind of its own, a life of its own.

12. The Threat of Replication • But what is threatened by the replicants? • Fear that humans will be replaced? Made obsolete? • But even more basic fear: that humans are replaceable: not unique, original, not different from replicants. • If we can’t tell the difference between replicant and human, "humanity" is in question. • Thus: the need to identify replicants, to distinguish replicants from humans.

13. How to tell a Replicant from a Human? • Voight-Kampff test, which looks at eye for emotional response? • Typical emotional vs. mechanical opposition. • But Replicants are emotional? • Do they "develop emotions"? Can emotions be programmed, implanted? • Emotions closely related to memory.

14. Human / Technological • Role of Memory? Natural vs. Artificial • Plato: Artificial Memory = Mnemotechnics • Memory as a matter of Images, Photos?

15. Eyes, Vision, Images

16. "I've seen things . . ." • Emphasis on vision, images, seeing, reminds us that Cinema too is technologically reproduced, a kind of replication or simulation. Cinema as artificial memory.

17. Human and Technological • The question is not whether Deckard is a replicant. • The question is whether we are replicants. • Perhaps we, like Rachael, don't know we are replicants. How do we know? • Haven't we been "made" by the images stored in our memories? By what we've seen? • Can we really be so sure that human and technological are as different as we might like to believe?

18. Ghost in the Shell(Kokaku kidotai) 1995/96directed Mamoru Oshii, from the manga by Masamune Shirow.