30 years after its 1982 release I finally got around to seeing the sci-fi classic, Blade Runner. Despite its age, I found the film, which is based on the book "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", to be exceptionally relevant to our present age of questionable humanity. To situate it briefly, the dystopic plot resembles a kind of inverted Nazi Germany in which genetic engineers created a superior kind of human, Replicas, that are generally used for menial labor and dangerous missions on other planets. Banned from Earth for a vague reason (presumably fear of takeover), special police called blade runners hunt them down. The leader of a band of fugitive replicas, with blond hair and blue eyes, immediately calls to mind Aryan perfection as the Nazis might have idealized. This character, Roy, personifies Lucifer in his quest to meet his maker – that his maker might modify his biological structure to undo the four-year lifespan afforded to replicas as assurance that they won't overtake humans. Practically speaking, Roy desires to transcend his mortality by bargaining with God. Ascending into what the trope indicates should be heaven, Roy attempts to persuade Tyrell, his architect, to make the desired modification. Tyrell explains that it is impossible, for a living organization cannot be modified without immediately dooming it. He then caresses Roy's head as a father might sympathetically treat his "prodigal son". Realizing that he is powerless to transcend his mortality and that his other-worldly hope in beseeching God failed, Roy, now a lapsed ubermensch, seeks a Nietzschian "death of God". Roy gives Tyrell a kiss of death before gouging out his eyes – the windows to his soul – and ending Tyrell's life. As his maker's existence could no longer provide meaning, Roy had to destroy the source of false hope. Roy now descends from Tyrell's home ponderous of what meaning his life now has. He is met by the blade runner Deckard, whom he chases and playfully yet insidiously castigates – sporadically expounding on the ephemerality of life. Realizing his own imminent death as signified through unprompted contractions of his fingers, Roy places a stake through his hand in the manner of stigmata, effectively declaring his redemption. While Deckard is about to drop to his death, Roy catches him and, while Deckard cowers at Roy's mercy, he launches into a brief soliloquy on the transience of life and the imperative to live before finally expiring and releasing a dove from his hand. All moments are lost to time, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't make the most of it – as Tyrell previously advised Roy. In the end, Roy internalizes Tyrell's purpose for him in making the most of his remaining time as he makes the choice to save Deckard instead of culminating his destruction.
The theme of the reckless search for meaning and destruction begetting knowledge of creation plays out time and again throughout the great narratives of history and fantasy. We are presented with characters who so desperately want to live that they destroy everything in their paths searching for what purposive living entails. Then, when they finally realize it, they discover that they have destroyed the one thing that held the key to that realization through reification. It makes them all tragic heroes. They fail to realize, as Douglas Brooks has beautifully written, that life should be "an affirmation of the radical claim that the human experience is the point of having been born human. You are the point the universe has decided to make. Own that experience, receive that as the gift, never stop wanting to become more human: that is divine." Perhaps that is why so many of these tragic figures are cast as inhuman roles: to more aptly illustrate that we all aspire for humanity yet so few actually achieve it. Anakin Skywalker in Starwars; Agent Smith in The Matrix; Roy in Blade Runner; Ernest Hemingway in real life... the list can go on.
One of the appeals of seeing this dynamic play out on the screen is so that we don't have to do so ourselves. We are vicarious aspirants, not exactly living through others, but seeing how their stories play out so we can learn from them. It is the fan-crafted mythology that informs our lives as perhaps more temporally relevant retellings of classic motifs. Only through the perceived imminency of death and destruction does one have sufficient perspective to contemplate life. Georges Bataille reportedly spent hours a day for some time gazing at an image of a tortured Chinese man, quartered and bloodied, so as to inform his own isolated mortality. He writes that the man in the image "communicated his pain to me or perhaps the excessive nature of his pain, and it was precisely that which I was seeking, not to take pleasure in it, but in order to ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin." By this he means that he spent so much time studying the tortured image that, ignorant of such hopeless pain in his own life, he might come to know it vicariously and thus inform his lasting perspective on mortality.
The question of what makes one human has dominated the philosophy of science fiction for over half a century now. For the replicas of Blade Runner, one of the cardinal aspects that designates their inhumanity is their inability to genuinely experience human emotions – although Roy cites fear of death as his motivation for seeking to transcend it. We can perhaps see a modern version of such inhumanity in the driven obedience such attention-demanding drugs as Ritalin and Adderall have on mechanizing children into memorization and robots of directed control to the tasks at hand. This practice, as an article in today's NY Times argues, stymies and stultifies the development of children in the interest of societal expectations, thereby dampening their creative [and therefore human] development. Children are effectively re-programmed, as are stray programs in the movie Tron, or they face its equivalent of de-resolution – failure to make oneself useful to the system and sinking into unmitigated poverty. At stake here is the beginning of de-humanization and robotization of our species in the greater interest of societal values. How much humanity can be sacrificed before a person is only recognized as human aesthetically, but not by one's actions? How far before such humans stop identifying as humans and see themselves more as automatons?
Faced with such questions and realities in which much human labor has been outsourced to machines, we must attend to the existence of clones. A clone is by definition an imitation of an image – a picture of an image. As with the replicas in Blade Runner, some do not even know that they are replicas, as being programmed with the memories of their images and not told otherwise, they have no reason to suspect not being human. Even more terrifying is that they bleed just like humans. They are thus indistinguishable externally – through human appearance and actions – and internally – through the production of human blood. This fact makes clones effectively terrorists, as W. J. T. Mitchell argues in his book Cloning Terror. They look and act, modern cultural stereotypes withstanding, exactly like us until they reveal themselves to be otherwise. Thus unrecognizable even through familiar recognition, clones most grotesquely pervert humanity not due to their inhumanity, but because they would drive us to be paranoid about our own and that of our neighbors.
In the same spirit that we often must find out what we dislike in order to find out what we do like, so too is the maxim true of humanity in the science fiction age. We learn what it means to be human by negative definition of those characteristics that defy our intuitive conception of humanity. I _____, therefore, I am human, as this brief essay has indicated, could best be filled with verb forms of inclination toward creativity and avoidance of rote activities, elicitation of complex emotions, and acute awareness of and discomfort with one's mortality. With such an understanding, however, we could contend that Roy, despite being a replica, is the most human character in the film. Malcontent with his militant programming and dreading his biological expiration, he creatively thinks to beseech God for more life – as numerous characters have done across mythologies. Though it is never overtly spoken and only signified through imagery and action, Roy alone yokes himself religiously. He alone demonstrates the human proclivity toward meaning-making that has been the occupation par excellence of humankind from the earliest recorded histories. And when he finds his maker inadequate, he follows suit of countless individuals who have discarded insufficient theodicies in search of better ones.
Unless this understanding of humanity is misinformed, then the parabolic nature of much science fiction would appear to be well met. That is, by painting a picture of flawed non-humans striving for humanity, the audience can relate to their own imperfections – how none of them is an ubermensch – with respect to striving for meaning in a broken world (the telos of homo religiosus). Identity is constructed through the creative power of naming. By vocalizing his insecurity, Roy informs his telos, yoking it toward action and shaping his existential identity.
This dynamic might better be explicated through Tron. At the end of the film, CLU, Kevin Flynn's tyrannical turncoat surrogate, exclaims that he created the perfect system just as Flynn instructed him. Flynn responds, "The thing about perfection is that it's unknowable. It's impossible, but it's also right in front of us the entire time. You wouldn't know that because I didn't when I created you." This is all to say an obvious and very blasé point: that to be human is to be imperfect; but to be content is to recognize the perfection of imperfectability. And to embrace this radical view of humanity is, as Douglas Brooks said earlier, divine.
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