Different androids, different humans
Analysis on different mindsets of Rick Deckard
“I wish I could do to you what you did to me, he wished. But it can’t be done to an android because they don’t care … It can all be traced back to that and to my going to bed with you. Anyhow you were correct about one thing; it did change me. But not in the way you predicted.”
– Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep? Chapter 21
“…Do you love me?
I love you.
Do you trust me?
I trust you.”
– Blade Runner
The endings of Phillip K. Dick’s masterpiece, Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep (Androids hereafter), and its adapted movie, Blade Runner, show an interesting and enormous difference after protagonists’ a day of hunting replicants. In the novel, after going to bed with Rachael, a replicant, and finishing hunting the rest replicants only to find his precious goat was murdered by Rachel, the bounty hunter, Rick Deckard, was caught with frustration and void. While in the movie, a different Deckard fell in love with the replicant, taking her away to escape.
The general plots of the novel and the adapted movie are basically the same: Rick Dickard, the bounty hunter/blade runner, is asked to hunt rebelled replicants, and during the process he met Rachael, the most advanced replicant, ignorant of her real identity. How could the two Deckards have such a different ending after the hunting? This essay tries to analyse factors resulting in Rick Deckards’ change of mental stages and leading to different endings.
One cannot analyse the behaviour and the mentality of protagonists in the novel without learning Philip K. Dick, the original author. Born in Chicago in 1928, his twin sister died about six week later after their birth – which, turned out to be a nightmare hunting Dick for decades and influenced his topic greatly. When he was five, his parents divorced. He had five marriages, and none of them survived longer than ten years. Link (2009) describes him as a “voracious consumer of ideas and a lover of philosophy”, which highlights notable philosophical elements in his work.
Being a postmodernist, Dick focused on the deconstruction on individual identities – like we see on Deckard, his self-recognition as a bounty hunter has faded and collapsed after the day, and he finally emerged himself with Mercer, the hypothetical religious metaphor. Such loss of identity originates from the topic that lines between reality and artificial manifestation are often blurred, leaving the protagonist swinging between reality and its contrast.
This can be well observed in Androids, where replicants are consistently evolving so that the Voigt-Kampff Altered Scale remains the only effective measurement to distinguish replicants from human beings. Boundaries between human intelligence and artificial intelligence have been nearly erased. When it comes to Rachael, by implanting fake memories, she can even simulate complex emotions so that no one is able to distinguish her from human without the V-K Scale. Another interesting point about it is that when hunting Luba, Deckard started to question about the reason killing her. “She was really a superb singer…I don’t get it, how can a talent like that be a liability to our society?” (Chapter 12) From this point, he came to realize that he started to feel empathy on androids. Such empathy, according to Link, is human’s unique characteristics against androids on other beings. However, the “beings” should not include androids that are artificial and non-living in the common sense (reality), if one could distinguish them. Therefore, the only reason Deckard starts to feel such empathy is because the indistinguishability stops him from discriminating androids or taking it for granted to kill (neutralize) them.
Such empathy leads to his doom end. After going to bed with Rachael, her confess of the purpose tempting Deckard throws him to the hell. His empathy has been proven to be wrong, and the indistinguishability he just realized earlier the day severely contrasts with the distinguishability shown by Rachael. What I mean distinguishability here is that Deckard has realized that she is designed to have emotions, and she does not have the emotion because she wants to, but solely to tempt bounty hunters and disable them from hunting replicants. She is only programmed. Therefore, Deckard’s idea that replicants have the initiative to become human is disproved. He realizes that the indistinguishability he witnessed is only the surface of replicants, while the fundamental part of replicant is still distinguishable.
Therefore, in the novel, Deckard has experienced two denials: his original idea as a bounty hunter has been denied by indistinguishability of replicants, which is denied again by Rachael thanks to her distinguishable core identity. After two denials, he has completely lost his faith, and becomes void, which leads to his tragic ending. More tragically, when realizing the toad he got is an artificial one, he knows that he finally loses the ability to distinguish artificial life, nor the ability to be a bounty hunter. Like I mentioned above, Dick deconstructed Deckard’s identity finally in Androids.
However, in Blade Runner, things are different. Androids are much more aggressive and fatal in the movie, with their appearance, talking, and actions can be easily distinguished from humans (except Rachael, which I will talk about later).
Blade Runner, being one of the earliest Cyberpunk mainstream movies, emphasizes on conflicts. Firstly, as a mainstream movie, it must fulfil audiences’ need, that to tell an exciting and attracting story in less than two hours, with classic cinema elements like romantics. In this case, the long philosophical process of deconstruction in the novel is a burden to the movie instead, and the plot needs to adapt to fit in the styles of the movie – short, straight, and attracting.
Further, to be a Cyberpunk movie, Blade Runner should also make changes to characters and backgrounds. Although there are Cyberpunk elements in Androids, it focuses more on postmodern perspectives along with their experimental application to characters, and therefore should not be considered a Cyberpunk novel in my opinion. A typical Cyberpunk story includes protagonist(s) struggling to “survive in a constantly changing environment where control and power shift rapidly” (Senior, 1996), a giant tech company that controls people’s daily lives, and a self-ruled society without laws.
To analyse Deckard in such a Cyberpunk society, we need to be clear about two narratives of Deckard. The first is that Deckard lives in a society described as “high tech, low life”, that makes him sensitive to danger, especially to fatal replicants. Secondly, Deckard is a loner unable to fit in the society; he is also retired and single, which are all determinative factors in his love with Rachael.
The first aspect, along with initially aggressive and distinguishable androids, make Deckard hard to feel empathy with replicants like what happens in the novel. Never can he empathise with rebelled replicants who want to kill humans consistently. Therefore, the first denial happens to Deckard in Androids is not applicable to the blade runner Deckard.
And Rachael in Blade Runner is different. Firstly, she is truly ignorant of her real identity and believes herself to be human. Her realization of being an android doesn’t stop her being like a woman. Rather, she becomes more fragile, more sensitive, more women-like. What’s more, she’s quite different from the aggressive replicants, she is harmless to human and can even help Deckard to hunt replicants. Her contrast with other replicants emphasizes her value to Deckard, that she’s a unique replicant that can bring him comfort. That’s where the lonely, unfitable Deckard runs in to take Rachael’s love. Butler (2020) describes their love as: “Deckard’s restoration requires Rachael’s entrenchment in lesser-valued femininity—she is now his property.” He has sex with her, almost raping, claiming his authority on her. Contrast to the relationship between the couple in Androids, where Rachael takes the leadership, Deckard in the movie shows his parental authority. Therefore, the second denial of Deckard in the novel also fails to apply on the blade runner Deckard.
Both the denials don’t happen to Deckard in the movie, thanks to the difference of indistinguishability of replicants and different roles of Rachel. Therefore, without disproving himself repeatedly until losing faith, the blade runner Deckard retains his identity, leading to a “happy ending” with Rachael.
To conclude, two main factors influence Deckards’ change of mindsets and lead to different endings. The first is their different styles, one being a postmodern SF while another being a Cyberpunk mainstream movie. The second is the different illustrations on Rachael and other replicants. Nevertheless, both provide their respective insight into a future society with robot ethics, raising concerns about the possible rebellions of androids, and warning humanity of our dystopia future.
I’d like to finish the essay with Dick’s quote:
all responsible writers, to some degree, have become involuntary criers of doom, because doom is in the wind; but science fiction writers more so, since science fiction has always been a protest medium. In science fiction, a writer is not merely inclined to act out the Cassandra role; he is absolutely obliged to.
Be the protest “minority”. Be an alert for humanity consistently.
References
Butler, A.M. (2020) ‘Early Cyberpunk Film’, in McFarlane, A. et al. (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 119–127.
Link, E. C. (2009) Understanding Philip K. Dick. 1st ed. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Senior, W. A. (1996) ‘Blade Runner and Cyberpunk Visions of Humanity’. Film criticism. 21 (1), pp. 1–12. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44019023