What is your opinion of the relationship between character persona and theme addressed by this author?

Please respond to the following discussion topics regarding the sample essay posted below:

# 1 Do you agree or disagree with the author’s thesis? Why?

#2 What is your opinion of the relationship between character persona and theme addressed by this author?

#3 How has the author met the requirements set out in the assignment?

#4 What other aspects of this essay do you find of interest?

Dystopic Chaos and Meaning in Blade Runner

On page 135 of Philip Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,
Rick Deckard asks Phil Resch, “Do you think androids have souls?” A few
pages later Deckard confirms his capacity for empathy with a female
android and concludes that it is his (misplaced) response to his
work, and not his ruthless counterpart’s, that is abnormal. Deckard’s
confusion of emotion brings to mind psychologist Harry F. Harlow’s
seminal experiments with monkeys in the late 1950s. Harlow demonstrated
that infant monkeys formed lasting bonds of affection with an artificial
monkey mother surrogate made of wire mesh, terrycloth and a baby bottle
full of formula. What, Harlow seemed to be asking, is this thing called
“love”?

Contemplation of the nature of love or, more specifically, of the
human traits that make love possible is at the core of Dick’s novel and
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Unlike Mary Shelley’s refined yet
morally obtuse Victor Frankenstein, who is oblivious in his scientist’s
arrogance to any ethical considerations attached to creating human life,
Dick’s brutal executioner Rick Deckard is haunted by the implications
of destroying life – any life. Dick’s novel and Scott’s film adaptations
delve into the psychological and philosophical questions of what it is
to be “human” – of how we define the essence of our humanity – and
herein lies the implicit meaning of the story in all its permutations:
that ambiguity prevails and self-knowledge defies understanding. It is a
familiar theme echoed not only in Frankenstein (the character of
Dr. Tyrel/Eldon Rosen bears striking similarities to Shelley’s
protagonist), but also throughout the science fiction genre in works
such as Fahrenheit 451, The Time Machine and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Yet those other stories provide more simplistic and predictable
conclusions regarding our distinctive human nature – conclusions which
ultimately reassure the reader/audience. Dick’s ending (and Scott’s, to
varying degrees in the two film adaptations) is darker and more
ambiguous.

Otherworldly settings/circumstances in science fiction provide the
alien and dislocating contexts for self-reflective meaning and
allegorical treatment of the subject of human identity. In Blade Runner,
the moral and philosophical chaos that attends the protagonist’s crisis
of identity is embodied in the dissonance of his dystopic environment.
Like Fritz Lange’s Metropolis, Blade Runner is as much about the semiotics of its urban landscape as it is anything else. The futuristic Los Angeles of Blade Runner
is a cold, alien and hostile-looking setting that juxtaposes things
familiar and mundane with a hellish architecture of excess technology,
scale out of proportion, fire and rain. The film’s unnatural environment
is ominous, threatening and oppressive in the way it disorients,
overloads, and confuses the senses with imagery. The culture-shocking
mixture of Asian and Western motifs, the addition of Japanese noh
vocalizations to the sonic texture of these scenes, the theme of nature
out of balance, all evoke the unnatural and confused identity of this
futuristic vision and seem to ask at what kind of inhuman, surrogate
teat this postindustrial society has suckled. The setting also alerts us
to the treachery of sensory experience. One can easily be misled by
appearances. In this superficial postmodern world of image and
duplication, otherness and authenticity may defy identification.

Against this bleak backdrop Deckard, whose job it is to identify
and destroy renegade pseudo-humans, ponders the implications of his work
(more in Dick’s novel than in Scott’s films) while employing an empathy
test that identifies the other through ascertaining not what the other
is, but what it isn’t. It is not opposable thumbs, a large cranium or a
capacity for reason that makes us human. Replicants (or androids)
possess all of these traits. More, they are aware of their own
existence, even capable of certain emotions. Yet, they are incomplete
because they lack the essential human ability to identify with another –
to perceive, understand, care and form bonds of affection. This
capacity for empathy is the singular trait that cannot be programmed
into the replicants and that verifies one’s humanity. Neither Dick nor
Scott are troubled by the fact that monkeys, dogs, birds and other
social animals also form bonds of affection, will come to another’s aid
or mourn another’s death. We are expected to accept (as we are elsewhere
in the genre) that it is this empathic capacity, this ennobling
sensibility, which breathes a sacred soul into us and creates us,
metaphorically, in God’s “image”.

In Scott’s original 1982 film, Deckard ironically observes:
“Somebody once said that man makes machines in his own image” – a
voice-over line that exists in neither Dick’s novel nor the 1992
“director’s cut”. It is a clear reference to Victor Frankenstein’s
hubris and identifies the presumption of technology – the very human
flaw that underlies the moral/ethical bankruptcy of Blade Runner’s
dystopic society. Hybridization of genre and differences between film
versions, and between film versions and novel, underscore the complexity
of the identity theme. Dick’s novel ironically contrasts the valuing of
(natural) animal life with the devaluing of (unnatural) human-like life
and degrees of humanness are alluded to in the social
classification of “specials” according to their intelligence.
Furthermore, there is the implication that a more perfect Nexus 7 with
empathic properties would pose a greater threat, being indistinguishable
from “natural” humans. That the Nexus 7 might, in any meaningful way, be
human is beside the point. This confusion and perversion of values is
embodied in the bogus, cult aspects of animal fetishism and implied by
the use of the lower case “g” in a line on page 171 of the novel. As
Rick and his wife ascend to the roof of their building to see their
prized, “real” goat, Dick wryly comments, “He entered the elevator and
they moved closer to god” and the salesman that sells Rick his goat
reminds us of nothing so much as a huckster selling cars. On page 178,
Rick observes enviously that though Mercer suffers, “at least he doesn’t
have to violate his own identity” (by killing another life form) and by
page 230 he reflects ironically, “everything about me has become
unnatural”.

Whereas Dick’s protagonist suffers a sickness of the soul (not unlike Montag’s in Fahrenheit 451) that causes him to question himself, Scott’s Deckard has the relatively banal moral certainty of a film noir
gumshoe. The baffling, thought-provoking, parallel mirror-universe of
the android Hall of Justice is left out of the film and the Deckard of Blade Runner
dispatches Zhora (far less developed and sympathetic a character than
Luba Luft) without hesitation or reservation. In fact, he seems to
perform his task with prejudice and satisfaction. Significantly, Zhora
dies among the mannequins in the store window through which she crashes.
Accordingly, the evolution of Deckard’s self-knowledge in the films is
less clear and appears to be based on a relatively pedestrian epiphany
that he has the hots for the replicant Rachael. In Blade Runner,
it is not until the lyrical death of the film’s (relatively)
suspiciously empathic Roy Batty (he caresses Pris” corpse and spares
Deckard that he might be understood) that Deckard’s education is
complete. Only then do we infer that Deckard grasps the innate worth of
androids and realizes how less “human” his own ideology has rendered
him. It is at this point that he and Rachael make their separate peace –
happily in the classical Hollywood style close to the 1982 film,
ambiguously in the more postmodern 1992 version. In contrast, Dick’s
novel ends on a less ambiguous but even more fatalistic note. Deckard
has come to terms with his own nature and that of the androids but
resolves to go on as before. Understanding has been achieved but,
finally, there is nothing to be done.

The disorienting chaos of Blade Runner’s setting serves yet
another purpose in helping to construct the film’s narrative style. The
viewer’s ability to infer the nature of the diegetic story-world in
off-screen space is restricted by the unfamiliarity of the dystopic,
futuristic cityscape. The theme of uncertainty and ambiguity is
reinforced by the unknowable nature of so bizarre and fantastic an
environment. Restricted narration serves the conventions of a detective
mystery or thriller, which, in many respects, is what Blade Runner is. In fact, far more than Dick’s novel, the films are mongrel conflations of mystery, detective, film noir,
suspense, action, and science fiction genre conventions which,
collectively, help to create their exotica motifs. Whether or not the
selection of Harrison Ford, a dyed-in-the-wool action hero, to play the
part of Deckard was primarily a marketing decision, the effect of his
persona in the role significantly alters the film’s meaning for its
viewers as compared to the novel’s meaning for its readers. Mercerism,
Dick’s dystopian satire on mass media and cults, would have no place in a
hard-boiled noir detective tale. Blade Runner is more
about solving a riddle and suspense – less about interior exploration
than the novel from which it springs. What is the true nature of the
Nexus 6? What motivates the replicants to do what they do? How will
Deckard deal with the menace they pose (especially Roy)? What will
Deckard discover about them by the film’s climax? Ford’s Deckard
searches a hotel room for clues. Like the audience, he is kept in the
dark and (unlike Dick’s character) stumbles and bumbles to the climax
like every good film noir protagonist with each replicant, in
turn, getting the drop on him. Zhora, Leon, Pris and Roy each take him
by surprise and Rachael even saves his bacon at one point in the films.
The mysterious femme fatale (Rachael even looks like a 1940’s vamp) and the all too human detective with his foibles are staples of the noir
genre along with the low key lighting, mist and silhouettes, booze,
hats, Venetian blinds, detective’s voice-over narration (in the 1982
film), and moral ambiguity.

Genre films work by exploiting recognizable conventions and
stereotypes to create expectations about theme, meaning and story
structure. They are usually reflective of social trends and cultural
ideology so that their meanings are symptomatic of the times in which
they are made. One of the social functions of genre is to reinforce
existing attitudes and reassure audiences of their beliefs. Because of
the expectations created by clichéd iconography and style, writers and
directors are able to play off those expectations by altering accepted
convention to surprise audiences and comment on accepted attitudes. This
is the case, for example with the innovation of the “adult western” in
the 1950’s and the anti-hero in later westerns such as Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.
But there is a difference between such evolutionary modification of
recognizable form and the free mixing of forms from multiple genres. The
latter amounts to a wholesale dismemberment that renders the original
unrecognizable and creates from disparate parts a kind of Frankenstein’s
monster that is neither fish nor fowl but some entirely new entity that
resembles many things on its surface but is definable as none. By
restricting audience knowledge to that of Deckard’s point of view, Scott
employs elements of the detective film; through our unrestricted
knowledge of Roy’s malice and violence in his encounters with various
characters, of suspense and horror films; through running battles and
showdowns, of action films. By mixing these elements with the
incongruous iconography of science fiction Scott has created a kind of
post-modern, futuristic, film noir whose dissonant semiotics are a fitting metaphor for Dick’s theme of indefinable nature.

In Dick’s novel, the irony of Deckard’s dilemma is that he is too
human for his job. Phil Resch, by contrast, reminds us of an SS officer.
With his misplaced empathy (he loves his squirrel but feels nothing for
androids) he is the more “efficient”, one might say psychopathic,
android-like predator. Dick’s message, like that of other dystopian
writers, is a cautionary, humanistic one. Resch relies on “lower order”
human traits of rationality and cold reason to achieve his level of
“professionalism”. Once Deckard knows that his prey is man-made he
should have no more qualms about terminating “it” than a farmer has
about dispatching a chicken, but Deckard anthropomorphizes his female
prey. He cannot dismiss her value any more than he can dismiss the value
of his goat, a spider or a toad. Deckard is a man whose very human
qualities have, like Montag in Fahrenheit 451, made him a fish
out of water in his brave new world. Dick concludes with Deckard
resigned to conforming. His wife arranges for the toad, discovered to be
electrical, to become his new pet.

In Scott’s film, Deckard’s crisis comes to a head with Roy’s
tragic, even noble, death. He returns to retrieve Rachael and tells her
that he loves her. She replies in kind. His crisis of identity is
suggested through Blade Runner’s style and narrative structure
but only becomes evident when he falls for Rachael. His conflict is
resolved when he validates his own nature by accepting Rachael and
rejecting the warped logic of his graphically distorted and chaotic
world. She may only be wire, terrycloth and nipples but, hey, if its
love . . . As Mulligan says to Jerry/Daphne at the end of Some Like it Hot, “Nobody’s perfect.”

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