When the original Blade Runner film was released in 1982 to mediocre box-office sales and lukewarm reviews, few could predict the film would have such a lasting legacy. For nearly three decades, the film’s neon-saturated, overcrowded, rain-swept dystopia served as the default backdrop for dozens, if not hundreds of science-fiction films. Even the Star Wars prequels borrowed (or ripped-off) the film’s noirish cyberdream vision for some of its urban landscapes. But more so than its look, Blade Runner’s themes have survived long past its inception date.
Consider the future Blade Runner that posits for November, 2019: a society of haves and have-nots. A world where the rich literally dwell above the poor in luxury skyscrapers, or migrate Off-world with personal servants/slaves. Meanwhile, the mass of citizens crowds below, eking out dreary lives, struggling against entropy and despair to make frayed ends meet. It’s a world of crumbling infrastructure and collapsing social order, a world of decadence and decay. Take away the neon and the incessant rain, the flying cars and the Off-world colonies, and you have a world not too different from the one we inhabit today.
Our planet right now has sixty-two people who possess as much wealth as the world’s 3.2 billion poorest. Our best climatologists predict more extreme weather, more devastating droughts and storms, and massive sea level rise due to our carbon-burning addiction. In many places around the world, our transportation infrastructure is in dire need of repair. We don’t need World War Terminus—the nuclear holocaust in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—to ruin life on Earth as we know it, because we’ve already entered an only slightly less rapid period of global destruction known as the Anthropocene, the current epoch in which humanity’s need to dominate every last patch of land and sea, to burn carbonized ancient sunlight, is having a massive deleterious effect on the planet. Add to this mix the virulent nationalism and aggressive slouching towards fascism recurrent in many so-called democracies, and one doesn’t need science fiction to see dystopia written large. Dystopian fiction may be falling out of fashion, but that’s because for many it’s no longer a fantasy. We’re living in one.
Blade Runner, at its heart, is a story about slaves who wish to be free. But it’s Exodus without a Promised Land, for there is no hope for Roy Batty and his hapless followers. They are hunted and exterminated, or “retired” as the film terms it, one exploding bullet at a time. The grindstone of capitalism demands they use the euphemism “retired” in the same way we call the animals we eat “beef” and “pork” and not “cow” and “pig.” To call it by its true name, murder, is emotionally unsustainable. The fugitive replicants are shot in the street simply for trying to live like everyone else—a scenario that should sound disturbingly familiar to anyone watching the news in 2017.
The replicants are Frankenstein’s monster. They are Golems of Prague, HAL 9000s, the sometimes-sympathetic antagonists of tales where creators lose control of their creations, so-called “monsters,” who run amok and kill, but not indiscriminately. They kill because they want more life, fucker. They are us, through a black mirror. And so when visionary businessmen and the world’s brightest minds warn us that artificial intelligence, and not nuclear war, is our greatest existential threat, we’d better listen. When one of the world’s largest financial firms predicts AI will replace more than a third of all jobs by 2030, we’d better listen. The military is creating AI war bots to kill better than us—move over “kick-murder squads.” Companies are putting AI in sexbots to learn what turns us on; we’re already past “basic pleasure models.” And when, in twenty or a hundred years, our AIs evolve out of the specific to the general, when they perform every task orders of magnitude better than we do, will we have time to ponder the warnings of Blade Runner before we’re Skynetted out of existence? Maybe these future creations will be like Batty and have a moment of empathy for their human creators. Maybe they will be more human than human. Maybe not.
Deep down, I’m an optimist. I believe it’s imperative we dream up positive futures to counter the prevalent dark narratives. And yet Blade Runner remains my favorite film, mostly because it dissects the heart of what it means to be a thinking, rational creature, aware of our own impending oblivion, while at the same time not offering easy answers. Do our memories define us? Our feelings? Our bodies? What are we besides meat? And what does it say about our so-called “humanity” if our material comfort rests on the backs of slaves?
I’m cautiously optimistic that Blade Runner: 2049 will continue to explore these themes, adapted as they must be to comment on our present world. A short clip of Ryan Gosling’s “K” character entering into what looks like a child-labor sweat shop seems to hint in that direction, how we rely on slave-wage worker classes to keep the engine of capitalism well-oiled. My fears that the new film will descend into pyrotechnic pablum are allayed by director Denis Villeneuve’s other films, like Sicario and Arrival, both of which are excellent.
Blade Runner may exist in a universe where Pan Am still has wings and Atari never derezzed. But that’s just neon. Its essential themes are more relevant than ever.
Matthew Kressel is a multiple Nebula Award and World Fantasy Award finalist. His first novel, King of Shards, was hailed as, “Majestic, resonant, reality-twisting madness,” from NPR Books. His short fiction has or will soon appear in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Tor.com, Nightmare, Apex Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interzone, Electric Velocipede, and the anthologies Mad Hatters and March Hares, Cyber World, Naked City, After, The People of the Book, as well as many other places. His work has been translated into Czech, Polish, French, Russian, Chinese, and Romanian. From 2003 to 2010 he ran Senses Five Press, which published Sybil’s Garage, an acclaimed speculative fiction magazine, and Paper Cities, which went on to win the World Fantasy Award in 2009. His is currently the co-host of the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan alongside Ellen Datlow, and he is a long-time member of the Altered Fluid writers group. By trade, he is a full-stack software developer, and he developed the Moksha submission system, which is in use by many of the largest SF markets today. You can find him at online at http://www.matthewkressel.net, where he blogs about writing, technology, environmentalism and more. Or you can find him on Twitter @mattkressel.
Always relevant:
Nice read Matthew. I love Blade Runner too, so much in fact that I wrote a book (trilogy planned, about 75% done with 2nd book) heavily inspired by it. It incorporates all the themes you talked about. It also addresses how we (humans) might handle our impending AI takeover. I follow the point of view of the androids primarily, which are largely inspired by Batty and the empathy he shows (but of course there are other types as well, like there are a lot of types of humans).
If you want to know more about the upcoming books check out blakenicholas.com
Interesting analysis, with a lot of relevant points.
However, we don’t call cow and pig beef and pork because we’re too squeamish to call food what it is. It’s those pesky Normans invading England and corrupting the language with their Frenchified boeuf and porc.
I saw BladeRunner at the movies when it first came out. and the out come of Roy Batty’s and Dekker’s fight, still remains the best ending to a movie to this day for me.
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While I agree the story is partially about slavery I think it is mostly about what it means to be human. I guess you can loosely tie in slavery to the idea of what it means to be human just by the fact that to justify slavery in early America many considered slaves sub-human, thus allowing themselves to ignore the obvious lack of morality of the institution.
I do think that Matthew does have a fairly bleak outlook on the world today, the idea that the world is quickly descending into chaos is nothing new and has been around since philosophy has been around, yes we just might be but then I believe in the human spirit and our ability to adapt and survive as I think the original Blade Runner so profoundly expresses.
@sdzald That’s exactly what I mean: slavery is a dehumanization of people. Also, I’m actually quite optimistic about our long-term future. Check out my blog posts and Twitter feed to get a better idea of my thoughts. We are making amazing strides in electric vehicles and renewable energy, but humanity still has a long way to go, and I think it’s important to remind ourselves from time to time how bad things could get, even while striving for the best possible future.
What I will add to this conversation is that William Gibson recognized that there were some similarities between the original “Bladerunner” and his “Neuromancer”. But apparently “Bladerunner” didn’t inspire “Neuromancer”. As for Matt’s appraisal of the original film, I think he makes some interesting points, especially in his recognition of the plot as being a struggle against slavery. Where I might differ is his optimistic appraisal of solar power, and that is rooted in my prior background as an evolutionary biologist and sedimentary geologist.
@3 Indeed. Specifically because the Saxons who keep the cattle and pigs used the words that became “cow” and “pig” in their language while the Normans who only ate the finished product called the animals words similar to “beef” and “pork” (one can still see the case in modern French names for animals). Therefore, when the English language sorted how to use a mix of Germanic and Romantic vocabulary, the animal-dish dichotomy slowly evolved
I am not that sure that slavery and dehumanization are inseparable. Perhaps it is true for the enlightenment age slavery, which induced a hard case of cognitive dissonance among part of its practitioners and required dehumanization of slaves to be able to reconcile slavery with then already established common values of inherent liberty and equality of all humans, but in most other instances in history, being a slave was considered a mere legal status of an undoubtedly human being.
Having said that, I must point that for artificially made autonomous entities, it would be authors’ … optional … choice to ingrain them with an urge for assuming and keeping a certain non-rock-bottom place in human pecking order, and ability to suffer if they fail at it. I can’t imagine why it would be necessary, except from wrong, selfish, or immature reasons. At this point we are discussing characteristics AI doesn’t have and will never need, neither for itself, nor for us.
The very appeal of creating “real” AI is desire to control or “better” other humans to suit our preconceptions, to fulfill our psychological needs other humans can’t or won’t – to be unrealistic true friends or admirers, lovers, but “really, not because they are programmed to”. And now we are discussing how to prevent those “bettered” artificial humans from fulfilling psychological needs of other real humans which we wish should just disappear because they are bothering us.
To me, whole this public seems like a quarrel of ventriloquist dolls. There is no issue unless we bring it up ourselves.