Blade Runner vs. DADOES, page 2
In the Film, one gets the impression that Rachael feels genuinely for Deckard. She does not manipulate and try to destroy his life as she does in the Novel. There is a lot less heartbreak for Deckard in the Film than there is in the Novel. Instead, the sympathies of the audience shift from the plight of Deckard to the plight of the androids. They are the ones that you feel sorry for while watching the Film, as they are the ones who seem to be facing their mortality head on and attempting to bring it to the table for others out of desperation for answers and a desire for greater longevity. They have become people too through an almost natural process of evolution, and they now want the same rights and privileges as humans.
It is clear in both the Film and the Novel that androids consider themselves people too. This is a central message in the Film, while in the Novel it is not entirely indicative of their motives or the validity of their actions. While reading the Novel, it is very difficult to feel that replicants are truly indistinguishable from humans, because they always seem to act without ever having a compassionate instinct. In the Film, Rachael appears to be sensitive to emotions and to have a heightened conscience, as does Roy. While trying to kill Deckard, Roy says, “It’s quite an experience to live in fear isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave.” During his final scene, before his death, Roy spares Deckard’s life and expresses a desire to live - as he does throughout the Film. This desire does not seem to be based in pure selfishness and lack of empathy, but in a belief that his human experience has been worth no less than Deckard’s. Roy forces Deckard to face his own mortality when he shouts, “Go to hell or go to heaven! Unless you’re alive, you can’t play, and if you can’t play…!” Roy never finishes his sentence, leaving the audience to glean their own interpretation of what his statement means. He really seems to be asking Deckard if there is a difference between the human desire to live and the desire of an android to live. Whether there is a real distinction between them aside from their ability to be free while living. Roy’s christlike appearance and spiritual statements at the end attempt to make up for the absence of spirituality and Mercerism for the remainder of the Film. The audience never finds out why Roy chooses to spare Deckard’s life, but it is implied that this is an act of compassion and humantiy.
In the Film, JF Sebastian (JR Isidore in the Novel) is an ingenious designer of artificial beings rather than a sub-IQ “chickenhead,” as he is in the Novel. JF works for the Tyrell Corporation instead of an artificial animal repair clinic. He is a close friend of Mr. Tyrell. JF has mice in his house. In the Novel, mice would have been extinct or near extinction. The issue of extinction is not addressed in the Film, once again departing from the greater concerns of the Novel. JF is portrayed as a man who wants to live a gentle existence. This is disrupted when his home is infiltrated by the androids, Pris and Roy. Pris approaches JF outside his apartment where she has been hiding underneath a heap of trash. She charms her way inside and once there, invites Roy to join her. They intend to use JF’s connection to gain access to Tyrell. JF is forced to go to the Tyrell Corporation with Roy, where Roy confronts Tyrell with questions about his mortality. Roy murders Tyrell, in what I assume is one more bid on Roy’s part to prove that mortality exists for both androids and humans, and that enslavement and certain death is not acceptable for either of them. JF is crushed as he witnesses this event, the same way that he is crushed in the Novel when Pris cuts the legs off of a spider that he had happily scooped up in his courtyard. JF shows the most powerful empathy out of anyone in the Film, creating the only real contrast to the androids and their lack of same. In the Novel, due to the consistent theme of empathy, this contrast is seen more frequently and with greater affect than in the Film.
In the Film, when Zhora, one of the replicants, is shot in the back by Deckard as she leaps through glass in a shopping center, and ends up on the ground in a bloody, half-naked heap wrapped in a clear plastic raincoat, the viewer feels sorry for her. We never saw her do anything that would make us feel as if she deserved to die. She was just trying to live her short life in spite of being an artificial woman who performs in an unarticulated act with an artificial snake. I imagine we are meant to feel empathy for these androids, as Deckard eventually does in the Film. He never reaches this point in the Novel. In the Novel, despite their likeness to humans, there is still something about these androids that is frighteningly different and leaves the reader and Deckard without much compassion for them.
For instance, in the Novel, after Rachael pushes Deckard’s brand new Nubian Goat off the roof of his house and Pris cuts the legs off of JR’s spider, it is difficult to feel any sympathy for these androids and their plight. However, in the Film, the differences between humans and androids are stripped away and by the end, we see almost no distinction at all.
There is a strong parallel between the Novel and the Film in the notion that we have created such perfect replicas of ourselves that the only way to control that invention is to keep it from living too long, by enslaving it and by killing it by any means once it poses a threat, that is before the whole morass reaches that apocalyptic stage where androids are integrating with human beings. But when it all comes to the forefront in the Film, androids are all that Deckard has either to love or to hate. And that is where we are brought to question whether or not it is really an issue of dangerous technology and artificiality, or having created a world where life is so incredibly bleak, that even love with an artificial being would be better than no love at all.
At the heart of the Film, the only thing that Deckard considers his enemy is also the only thing that means anything to him. The android. This differs from the Novel, where androids represent nothing aside from negative entities whose motives we cannot ultimately relate to, while Deckard searches for answers through a variety of other sources.
The Film asks the questions, “Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?” and “What would it do to our world if the real and the artificial ceased to be distinguishable?” while the Novel asks the question, “Does it matter what is real and what is fake if what has really been taken away from your life is a sense of what it is worth to be alive at all?” Obviously, the first question is easier for the audience to deal with and much easier for a two-hour film to tackle. Ridley Scott chose to make a love story and a commentary on mortality. I don’t believe it was Phillip K. Dick’s intention to make his Novel a love story, nor was it aimed squarely at mortality. Instead it is a story about what it is to be a man in a decrepit, war-ravaged world that is filled with reminders of death, and a real apocalypse. Not only a story about the threat to the constitution of humanity itself that androids joining the human race as equals would represent – that is a side-note to the devastation that has already taken place. Phillip K. Dick’s Rick Deckard is a man standing a millimeter away from vast desolation and bottomless despair. Not a man having a bad day because of the business of killing androids and being confronted by fleeting love and a chilling reminder of mortality along the way. This observation is not meant as a judgment on the plot of the Film or the message that it conveys, but only to highlight the profound difference between the Novel and the Film. The issues addressed in the Novel weigh far heavier on a global conscience than those of Ridley Scott’s Film, which takes place on a smaller scale due to the lack of questions concerning the fate of humanity and earth itself.
Copyright 2006 Maria Carreon, all rights reserved.
