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Sexuality and Surveillance;
Categories and Degrees of Existence: Human as a Gradual
Substance.
Women, Art, Film: A Gendered View of the Replicant
Preface
Early
in the 21st Century, the Tyrrel
Corporation advanced robot evolution
into the Nexus phase--a being virtually
identical to a human--known as a replicant.
The Nexus 6 replicants
were superior
in strength and agility, and at least equal
in intelligence to the genetic engineers
who created them.
Replicants
were used off-world as
slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and
colonization of other planets.
After
a bloody mutiny by a Nexus 6
combat team in an off-world colony,
replicants were declared illegal
on Earth--under penalty of death.
Special
Police squads--Blade Runner
Units--had orders to shoot to kill upon
detection, any trespassing replicant.
This
was not called execution.
It
was called retirement. |
When
the above information finishes rolling up the screen,
Blade Runner starts properly: with the image
of a gigantic eye, its deep-blue pupil reflecting an
aerial view of Los Angeles during the year 2019. Much
has been made of it. Critics attribute that eye to be
either "the Maker's" or the film's Aryan angel/devil's:
the replicant Roy Batty's. However, I would postulate
that eye to be the director's. That eye would be Ridley
Scott's authoritative claim to a somehow ideal viewpoint:
sub specie aeternitatis.
God's viewpoint (the "view
from nowhere") affords not only what we came to
believe to be (idealized as) one of "detached objectivity;"
God's viewpoint brings also the terrifying awareness
of the absurd meaninglessness of existence. There is
hope, however: Albert Camus claims that that very vision,
and the consciousness of impotent futility it brings,
can be vanquished. "There is no fate that cannot
be overcome by scorn."
Ridley Scott's eye on
the postmodern condition is scornful, but it is also
resistant. "We can salvage our dignity.
. . by shaking a fist at the world which is deaf to
our pleas, and continuing to live in spite of it. This
will not make our lives un-absurd, but it will lend
them a certain nobility." Obviously, "doing
something about it" removes the agent from that
viewpoint, as it erases all objectivity--but that is
the only salvation.
Ridley Scott is caught
in the spiderweb of time, space, . . . and history.
He is "a man of his time." A time of confused,
maybe fatally mistaken parameters. How does "the
man of his time" create his text? In The Myth
of Sisyphus, Camus vowed to take his own life if
he could not find a way of removing the deceiving net
of instantaneous but permanent reality. That would provide
an escape from that web in which Ridley Scott (and any
other real artist of this so real a time, if indeed
s/he were a "real" artist) scornfully, thus
angrily, is trapped.
By The Myth of Sisyphus'
end, Camus had pronounced the way out to be art. If
we identified the existentialists as postmodernism's
(fore)wisemen, would that indicate that Ridley Scott
seeks with his movies the definite harbor of the homecoming?
Maybe finding existential justification through art
is a well-succeeded Odyssey, one removes oneself
from that sense of absurd (Sartre's nausée) with
the lucid political denunciation of what one sees as
both likely to happen and outrageous. Nevertheless,
art, because of language--that is: text--is at risk
of becoming no more than Nagel's angry fist. One cannot
denounce--or for that matter see--the outrageous that
is likely to happen, when one fails to see the outrageous
that is presently happening, the outrageousness that
has historically been happening, the outrageous that
the "witness' blindness" helps to happen.
Ridley Scott, with his
opening (eye-opening) eye, might be telling the viewer
that postmodern reality--its future version, as "magisterially"
portrayed in the film--is rapidly leading humankind
to become what we see through that eye. His designs
are obscure, however: Ridley Scott has been accused
of having made shameful concessions to the Hollywood
establishment in exchange for the birth of his artwork.
That might not be very far from the truth, for the British
director has since released a new version, Blade Runner:
The Director's Cut, (on which this paper is based),
with important modifications.
Perhaps the truth is a
gradual entity, an ever-developing entity, and travels
in time as well. Perhaps Scott's artwork develops in
a serial form, and each next one comments, and improves
the other. It burns with each life, and it refines and
purifies the next product. Artwork/product = Postmodernism.
So, Ridley Scot is a man
trapped in the spiderweb of this time in history, shaking
a fist to his time, place (space), and particular instant
of history, while angrily trying to develop his serial
version of the truth.
There is ambiguity in
Blade Runner. This ambiguity can as well be seen as
another symptom (or effect) of the postmodern condition.
Blade Runner reads as the non differentiation between
the artwork and the mere product. It speaks of the commodification
of everything, and it says it with its very existence:
Blade Runner, the film, is that postmodern art/object/commodity.
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