April 05, 2006
Wargasm of Death
The science fiction version of the future has already come to pass. We are living its aftermath. Judge for yourself whether or not it was utopian. Whatever you decide, one thing we can probably all agree on is that the future did not grow old gracefully. Neither did Harrison Ford for that matter. His trademark pose, that all-purpose squint-eyed, tortured WASP-wince of his, got tired looking real fast. Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner, on the other hand, is just as gorgeous as ever! To his credit Scott did not, strictly speaking, stick to Phil Dick’s 1968 story, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. In fact, Dick went on the record to point out that, as much as he liked the movie, it didn’t really have a whole lot to do with his story. There were some little discrepancies that needed to get pointed out. For starters, key terms like “Replicant” and “Blade Runner” never appeared in the novel once. Scott has gone so far as to say that he never even read Dick’s book, the title came from a story by Alan E. Nourse. William Burroughs liked the Nourse story so much he, in turn, had used it for a screenplay of his own. It’s not clear which Scott discovered first. Both are listed in the credits. “Replicant” was a term coined by the screenwriters to replace “android.” There are other littler things, like the fact that Dick’s story takes place in San Francisco, while the movie is set in Los Angeles; the androids are manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation not the Rosen Association; etc. Whether or not it is true that the director couldn’t have been bothered to read the book, there’s no question the movie is based on Dick’s novel. The major differences between the two have to do more with the basic messages they send than anything else. One way to look at Dick’s book, for example, is as a wry assessment of the challenges of being human in our modern times. What separates Dick’s worldview from Scott’s is that it is largely informed by the inhumanity of post-WWII industrial idealism. Mostly Dick is considering the paradox of a middle class value system that has traded its humanity in for the empty promises of consumer society. It isn’t the post-hippy agenda of blurring the lines between all things in the way Scott’s and K.W. Jeter’s later versions pick up on the story. What Dick zeros in on is the willingness of an entire culture to aspire to the anti-consciousness of household appliances. By extension one could make the argument that the androids in the book are those folks Rick Deckard must “retire” because they have internalized the system just a bit too well. Dick’s characters are not cartoon heroes. His protagonist’s credentials are dubious at best. Deckard is a somewhat hapless wage-slave struggling to maintain domestic harmony with his emotional livewire of a wife, Iran; in a post-apocalyptic world where social status depends on the kind of animal one owns, the bounty hunter is obsessed with replacing his mechanical goat with a real, organic pet; he is a man who is hoping to find his true self through the thinly disguised Christianity of Mercerism; and being a killer weighs on his conscience all the time, yet how else is he supposed to pay the mortgage? He doesn’t even really dislike the androids he has to kill. Taken at face value, his main point of contention with the artificial organism would seem utterly trivial. Nevertheless it is key to decoding the story. What Deckard dislikes most about the androids is their “resignation”, their “mechanical, intellectual acceptance” of their fate. One of the only times, if not the only time, he really loses his temper is when he screams at Rachel, “I can’t stand the way you androids give up!” The only thing about the artificial people that really seems to bother him is how much they remind him of how close he is himself to throwing in the towel and losing his sense of self. Intellectuals have wasted a lot of time arguing which was better, the individual or the social group. It is one of those stupid ideological questions that manage to divide up folks who would otherwise agree on most everything else. A ridiculously long time has had to pass for former opponents to finally agree that, taken in part, there actually is merit to both sides. Science fiction is always a good barometer of what popular attitudes are to abstract, intellectual thought. It might seem like cliché, but among the most persistent symbol of repression in the highly industrialized world is the criminalization of emotion. The 2002 movie Equilibrium is a perfect example of the cliché of the middle class abreaction to totalitarian macro-think. Christian Bale plays special officer John Preston whose martial-arts mastery over the laws of probability makes him an impervious killing machine. His job is to wipe out the sentimental, nostalgic, rebel art-lovers, and for a while at least he carries out his orders with an unparalleled, state-approved homicidal thoroughness and zeal. Until, of course, he realizes the error of his ways. In the end, he turns all that killing power against the police state that trained him. Empathy, after all, is a cornerstone of middle class values and must at all cost remain protected. For the last one hundred years, at least, art has dealt with similar phantoms: is it supposed to make you think, or feel? Dick is particularly interested in the illusions we need to keep us going. In his short story “Precious Artifact”, his main character is a human slave sent to Mars to build a new world by a conquering race of aliens called the Proxmen. To flag the increasing hopelessness among the human engineers the protagonist is invited back to Earth to see for himself that the aliens have not totally destroyed his home planet. It is a question of the rock bottom measure a person needs to feel human. The bare minimum Milt Biskle needs is a kitten. In the end it is revealed that all that the aliens have shown Biskle is false. The ruins he has seen of his former capitol were illusion. The cat they gave him to take back to Mars with him was artificial. It is all lies. Dick is curious about the very least we can accept. Is a lie enough? Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ends with a similar scenario. Deckard discovers that a toad he has taken home with him from the wilderness is not real. Is that the kind of fact he will, for the sake of his own sanity, allow himself to overlook? Scott and Jeter are both similarly attracted to the extent to which we ultimately need to believe in our illusions, no matter how poisonous to us they are.