When the dust of World War II had settled, the world was left with two superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. More importantly, the world was left with two major, opposing, worldviews, assigned names according to their economic systems. The United States represented capitalism – the so-called First World – while the Soviet Union represented communism, the Second World. The ensuing Cold War was not a war, but a period of tension between the two superpowers with armed conflict on the peripheries, and mostly by proxy. Citizens of the United States lived fear of a nuclear attack or invasion from the Soviet Union. Such divisive figures as Joseph McCarthy conducted intensive searches for Soviet spies in the U.S. government. Some threats were real; others were imagined by a paranoia that the Soviet Union was behind every anti-American, anti-Capitalist movement around the world and within the United States.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) concerns itself as much with the post-war world as the pre-war world. The period before World War II enjoyed a great rise in the popularity of fascism as a political system. George Orwell was only too aware of this fascist tendency, having fought with POUM, el partido obrero de unidad marxista (United Marxist Workers’ Party) during the Spanish Civil War. From 1936 to 1939 the legitimate, democratic government of Spain fought against the incursion of the so-called Nationalists, led by Francisco Franco. That war was won by the fascists in 1939 and Franco enjoyed complete control over Spain until his death in 1975. With Italy having elected Mussolini in 1921 and Germany having elected Hitler in 1933, the tendency toward liberal democracy that dominated after the French Revolution seemed to have changed. Three major Western countries, all of them democracies, had become dictatorships, and two of them had willingly elected dictators into power. Orwell was deeply concerned about this trend. “Totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences,” he wrote of his intentions in Nineteen Eighty-Four (qtd. in Lewis 114). Indeed, in the novel, Emmanuel Goldstein’s “history” of the world before 1984 is an embodiment of Orwell’s fears. In his book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, the book upon which the Party bases its principles, Goldstein writes that
by the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realizable. Every new political theory, by whatever name it called itself, led back to hierarchy and regimentation. (210)
This fictional history of the twentieth century, written by one of the creators of an oppressive future regime, represents Orwell’s fear of totalitarianism; in the history he creates for Nineteen Eighty-Four, his anxiety about fascism proves correct and the world becomes immersed in autocracy. Out of his fear of the prevalence of totalitarian systems (Stalinism, fascism, Nazism), Orwell creates a world that is dominated by three equally totalitarian regimes: Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia, the social systems of which are “not distinguishable at all” from each other (Orwell 202). Numerous scholars have identified James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941) as the model for this tripartite world. Burnham’s book characterizes World War II as unlike any previous war and – prior to the war’s end – predicts “the rise of centralised bureaucratic super-states on the Stalinist or Nazi models” (Seed 69). Orwell himself was directly influenced by Burnham’s work, writing, “For Burnham’s geographical picture of the new world has turned out to be correct. More and more obviously the surface of the earth is being parceled off into three great empires” (qtd. in Crick 44). To the liberal philosopher living in the 1940s, a sudden rise of centralized totalitarian states can only mean that the world has entered a new historical trend, one in which brutal state practices might be “tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive,” as described by Goldstein (Orwell 210).
These three super-states of Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia are in a state of constant war. Orwell creates a world in which World War II never ended, allowing a totalitarian state to take control: “the era of post-war austerity, severe rationing, unrepaired bomb damage, shabbiness, weariness, and shortages of such things as razor blades and cigarettes, forms the dingy background of 1984” (Lewis 112; see also Crick 21). Constant war is important for maintaining control of the populace and keeping them in a state of constant fear and separated from Eastasia and Eurasia, the other two super-states. Goldstein advises that a Party member “should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist” (197). War justifies the stoppage of everything for the “war effort.” The society stagnates. Progress stops, and with the stoppage of progress, also prevented is any kind of action or thought directed toward the future that might threaten the Party’s control. Later on, Goldstein writes:
When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed. (203)
One of the key requirements of fascism is a drive for militarism and through this militarism, an irrational hatred of anyone who does not belong to that fascist society. This, too, is to be found in Oceania. “It is absolutely necessary to [the super-states’] structure,” writes Goldstein, “that there should be no contact with foreigners except, to a limited extent, with war prisoners and colored slaves” (201). Having never gotten to know their enemies as people, and thus never being able to identify or sympathize with them, the citizens of each super-state can vilify the faceless citizens of the other super-states as barbarians and savages who should be exterminated. Constant war gives citizens an object of hatred, something around which they can all rally and direct their energies. A state-required “Two Minutes’ Hate” program every morning renews Party members’ vilification of Emmanuel Goldstein, an alleged party traitor, gathering them together in a frenzied quasi-religious ceremony of “fear and invectiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces with a sledge hammer” (14). Like the citizens of a fascist state, Party members create a fictional Other against which they can unify in common hatred. A Party member “is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party” (217).
Critics have seen Nineteen Eighty-Four as an indictment of Stalinism as well as fascism. Stalin’s multiple-year plans (echoed by Orwell when the telescreen talks about the Ninth Three-Year Plan [2]) and collectivization schemes were ultimately responsible for the deaths of millions (some figures have him responsible for the deaths of more people than Hitler), mostly through starvation. Nevertheless, the Oceanic propaganda machine runs at full strength all the time, and no matter what conditions are like, numbers are adjusted to make it appear that production has increased from the previous year. One of the tasks that we watch Winston perform is the modification of numbers from the Ministry of Plenty. He alters forecasts from the previous quarter for the amount of boots produced to show that the Ministry exceeded its expectations, when in fact it had not met them. Although in the end, thinks Winston, “Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot” (42). As in Stalin’s Russia, religion is prohibited for Party members, and only state-sanctioned media are ever seen by the public. There is no freedom of speech or of the press; the Party maintains a monopoly on knowledge, but this is not a metaphorical monopoly on knowledge. The Party is, in actuality, the only source of knowledge for Party members. No one who did not live before the Party came to power can be sure of what the world was like before then, since the Party controls history.
Early in the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were the only two countries with “ The Bomb,” a trope used to describe atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, or nuclear missiles.[2] Given what the world knew from Hiroshima and Nagasaki about the horror that could be unleashed by a single atomic bomb, there was even more cause for concern as both the Americans and the Russians eventually stockpiled thousands of nuclear weapons that could, ostensibly, destroy the world. Science fiction literature – of which dystopian literature is frequently part – took this fear of The Bomb and ran with it. Isaac Asimov observed, “The dropping of the atomic bomb in 1945 made science fiction respectable” (qtd. in Seed 8). If dystopian literature extrapolates contemporary fears, certainly this was a gold mine for inspiration: the possibility that the push of a button could destroy all human life on Earth. When it came to The Bomb, however, the reading public knew that what they were reading was not that far from fiction: there did exist a figurative button somewhere that could destroy all human life on Earth. Dystopian literature of the post-war period invariably deals with the fear of a nuclear holocaust. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Both O’Brien and Goldstein’s book make cryptic references to a nuclear war: “. . . the ravages of the atomic war of the Nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired” (193); “. . . atomic bombs first appeared as early as the Nineteen-forties, and were first used on a large scale about ten years later. At that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on industrial centers, chiefly in European Russia, Western Europe, and North America” (199). Part of the reason that the world exists the way it does in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the extensive use of atomic bombs. Nuclear weapons created mass destruction and mass confusion, putting the world into a state that was powerless to resist the ascension of the Party into power. After these bombs were used as much as they could be without seriously damaging the populace, they were locked away never to be used again, only to be stockpiled. Orwell’s treatment about The Bomb, borrowed partially from another volume by James Burnham, The Struggle for the World (1947), is prophetic in that it depicts exactly what did happen during the Cold War: two sides, each unconquerable by the other, amass nuclear weapons as bargaining chips, all the while preparing for war but not actually going to war (Seed 69). “All three powers continue to produce atomic bombs and store them up against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come sooner or later,” writes Goldstein (199). The Bomb is used in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as it would come to be used later in the Cold War, as a veiled threat, a suggestion that its awesome power could be used if it were necessary.
The most prevalent fear in dystopian literature of the post-war era was the fear of technology. After World War II, technology – most notably the computer – took off, becoming more and more useful, but also generating more and more problems in the eyes of satirists. During the Cold War, technology was used by the West as a weapon against the Soviet Union. During World War II, computers were discussed in terms of how they could aid the military. Computer research was funded by the War Department, as computers were used in fighting the war (Edwards 44). This changed little in the transition from World War to Cold War: technology was evaluated in terms of how it helped the United States maintain superiority over the Soviet Union. The military continued to be the party that funded most computer research. In 1950, the federal government contributed $15-20 million per year to computer research (most of this from the military), while private industry contributed only $5 million (61). Such a heavy contribution by the military to technological research in “peacetime” was considered suspect by dystopian writers of the Cold War, and they spun stories in which technology oppressed rather than helped.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, technology is used to keep the populace in check. Party propaganda comes largely through the telescreen, a television screen that is capable of both sending and receiving information simultaneously. It allows the Party to keep an eye – literally – on the activities of Party members, ensuring that they do nothing that is not outside the boundaries of Party approval. The telescreen is a science fiction extrapolation of the television, which had begun to be produced commercially by 1945. In his introduction to a 1984 edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bernard Crick discusses Orwell’s disapproval of television: “Orwell feared what its effect would be: the two-way screen is fanciful satire, [but] television itself was to Orwell an awful enough reality. Certainly he thought it would be used for surveillance, but also – like the other mass media – for cultural debasement on which control of the proles depends” (14). With the advent of the telescreen, records Goldstein, “Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed” (Orwell 211).
Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952), like Nineteen Eighty-Four, takes place sometime after World War II. Like Nineteen Eighty-Four, it makes a synecdoche out of post-war events, turning them into a possible future. Unlike Orwell, however, Vonnegut depicts the United States as somewhat utopic. The world of the post-war economic boom has become the default standard of living. A complex national computer system makes sure that everyone has enough of everything, ensuring that there is no poverty or hunger. Everything is centrally controlled. Vonnegut has created an anti-utopia: a utopian world with dystopic implications. Ilium, New York, the setting for Player Piano, is used to represent the whole of the United States, as most towns are like it. Bureaucrats and engineers have teamed up with technology to take over the country, and while their intentions do not create the overt oppression of Nineteen Eighty-Four, neither do they create the utopia that they were hoping for.
The society of technology that Vonnegut envisions came out of his fictional version of the end of World War II, when computers were increasingly given more power over American society so as to better regulate the war effort. The laws of inertia being what they are, power was not returned to human beings once the war was over. Instead, EPICAC[3], the nerve center of a nationwide computer network, remained in control and assumed other functions beyond its original design. Housed in Carlsbad Caverns, EPICAC grows as its duties increase, and it decides “how many refrigerators, how many lamps, how many turbine-generators, how many hub caps, how many dinner plates, how many door knobs, how many rubber heels, how many television sets, how many pinochle decks – how many everything America and her customers could have and how much they would cost” (118). America is mechanized, with machines doing most repetitive tasks and even skilled craftwork. Factory workers – who attended machines after the first Industrial Revolution – have nothing to do. Their options are to join the army or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps (R&RC), a group composed of unemployed former factory workers who undertake public works projects – not of the Hoover Dam variety, but of the busy-work type that give people something to do every day.
The primary storyline of the novel, that of Paul Proteus, is contrasted with the secondary storyline, which focuses on the visiting Shah of the fictional country of Bratpuhr. The Shah, who comes from an ostensibly more primitive society than that of the United States, acts as an external critic of the new technological order. The fact that he has no prior understanding of how this society works allows him to be an objective observer. In viewing such a large government role in private industry, he calls it kuppo, “communism” in his language. His escort, Ewing Halyard, is quick to dispel such an idea. He also refers to the members of the R&RC as takaru – “slave” (20-23). Certainly his observations can be motivated by a lack of social understanding and problems with translation, but in a novel of social criticism, these are no mere errors. Vonnegut wants his readers to consider the communistic implications of Player Piano’s America. The centralized planning of EPICAC (see above), in which a computer decides how much of everything should be produced, is socialism without human intervention. There are no planning committees or multi-year plans; EPICAC decides what to produce and how much of it to produce.
At the same time that Vonnegut critiques a Soviet-style centralized state, he also criticizes private industry. The events in Player Piano point to a second Industrial Revolution, says M. Keith Booker: “Whereas in the original Industrial Revolution human muscle was replaced by machine, in this new Industrial Revolution routine human thought is replaced by machines” (101). Even the President of the United States is a figurehead who has no real job to do, thanks to EPICAC. The President, Jonathan Lynn, is “boyish, tall, beautiful, and disarming” and possesses “an endearing, adolescent combination of brashness and shyness” but never even graduated from high school (119). Halyard considers him “a gorgeous dummy” whose only job is to “read whatever was handed to him on state occasions: to be suitably awed and reverent, as he said, for all the ordinary, stupid people who’d elected him to office, to run wisdom from somewhere else through that resonant voicebox and between those even, pearly choppers” (120). The function of industry in Player Piano is, as in Brave New World, to produce things for consumers to buy. In this hypercapitalist world, “modern technology has made production so efficient that humans are more and more becoming necessary not as workers who produce goods, but as consumers who buy them” (Booker 101).
In the polarized post-war world, either the Soviets or the Americans were going to win the ideological battle for the world economy, and Vonnegut posits that, given contemporary technological developments, Americans would win that war but would simultaneously surrender their freedoms to technology. Thomas Wymer says, “Vonnegut goes beyond a simple attack on technology by suggesting that the real tragedy is that man has defined himself in a way that makes him replaceable by machines, that man has defined his own value as he defines the value of an object” (qtd. in Booker 104). Vonnegut is not criticizing technology, but the human tendency to go beyond using technology as a tool and allowing themselves to be replaced by technology. During the first Industrial Revolution, manual labor was replaced by machines. In Player Piano, “routine mental work” (14) that caused the “annoyance or boredom that people used to experience in routine jobs” (52) is replaced by machines. There is even a hint that, perhaps, someday, there will be a third Industrial Revolution in which human thought is replaced by machines (14-15). Vonnegut is aware of current trends in the development of computers, mentioning Norbert Weiner by name in the first chapter (14). Weiner, an MIT mathematician, believed that “there is a second industrial revolution in the making whose object is the replacement of the human brain” (Ellul 42).
The post-war world is not the only thing that is polarized. Post-war America is also severely polarized. One the one hand are the haves: the bureaucrats and the engineers. On the other hand are the have-nots: the R&RC members, the members of the Army. Technology has created a new aristocratic class that justifies its existence not by how much wealth it has or what kind of nobility it has, but by its intelligence. I.Q. is everything. A person without a college degree is guaranteed to amount to nothing. But as the revolutionary Reverend Lasher points out, what is in question here is not necessarily intelligence but obedience: “Not only must a person be bright, but he must be bright in certain approved, useful directions: basically, management or engineering” (93). Paul’s friend Finnerty is portrayed as a genius. “Finnerty could be anything he wanted to be, and be brilliant at it. Whatever the times might have called for, Finnerty would have been among the best,” says Paul of Finnerty (35). Finnerty, however, is a proverbial loose cannon who does not like to play by the rules, and for this reason he does not belong anywhere. No one will take him since no one wants to put up with his unorthodoxy. The end result of this society operated by technology is class polarization, despite attempts to equalize the playing field a little bit. Offering another Marxist critique of America, Vonnegut suggests that it doesn’t matter what the intentions of the people are who make machines. The advantage will always be theirs, since they own the machines. They will give themselves a larger salary because they are in charge. They will value themselves more highly than anyone else, and as a result, everyone else will, too.
The Revolution predicted by Vonnegut comes to fruition two or three times over in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). The fear of The Bomb has become a reality, as we learn that the world has only recently recovered from a nuclear war. Dick paints a terrible picture of post-apocalyptic horror:
The morning air, spilling over with radioactive motes, gray and sun-beclouding, belched about him, haunting his nose; he sniffed involuntarily the taint of death. Well, that was too strong a description for it, he decided as he made his way to the particular plot of sod which he owned along with the unduly large apartment below. The legacy of World War Terminus had diminished in potency; those who could not survive the dust had passed into oblivion years ago, and the dust, weaker now and confronting the strong survivors, only deranged minds and genetic properties. (8)
Just as we always feared, there has been a nuclear war. It has ravaged most of the world, destroying animal species to such a degree that everyone is required by law to own an animal in order to re-populate the planet with animals.
The post-Apocalyptic setting, however, only provides a justification for the existence of androids, sophisticated automatons that mimic humans in almost every way. Life on Earth has become so bad that humans have started moving to other planets – Mars, in particular (a favorite location for Dick stories). These humans have taken androids with them to be their servants. Androids in the year 2021 are so life-like that an elaborate test, the Voigt-Kampff test, is the only way to determine whether a person is human or android, outside of an inspection of the person’s bone marrow. Eldon Rosen, president of the Rosen Association, which manufactures the Nexus-6 androids that the book focuses on, explains that it was the colonists who demanded life-like androids, and if the Rosen Association hadn’t bowed to customers’ demands, they would have gone out of business (54).
The prospect of an artificial, lifelike computer (the book suggests that androids are part biological and part electronic[4]) contained inside a human being could only become a reality if computers – previously relegated to vacuum tubes – could become smaller and able to be integrated into something the size of a human brain. Throughout the 1960s, Dick’s own time, scientists at Intel and Texas Instruments were attempting to integrate all the functions of cumbersome vacuum tubes into small chips, eliminating the need for room-sized computers. In 1971, Intel released the first “computer in a chip,” the Intel 4004. Clearly, the notion that a computer could fit onto something that could fit in the palm of a hand was not science fiction when Dick was writing Electric Sheep.
Nor was the so-called Turing Test (“The Imitation Game”), devised in 1950 by the philosopher Alan Turing. Turing’s test is a method of determining whether or not artificial intelligence (AI) has become equal to human intelligence. He proposes placing a computer and a human in a separate room from another human, the interrogator. The interrogator knows the human and computer only as “X” and “Y,” not knowing which is the human and which is the computer. The interrogator asks questions of X and Y, attempting to discern through the answers which one is the computer. The computer’s goal is to appear so human-like in its responses that it fools the interrogator into thinking that it is the human (Oppy and Dow). Turing was so confident in the growth of AI that he believed
that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10 9, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. . . . I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. (Oppy and Dow)
Artificial intelligence has, in the world of Electric Sheep, progressed to the point where it is nearly impossible to distinguish between humans and androids without the Voigt-Kampff test. Deckard’s concern is that the new generation of androids, the Nexus-6, may be able to beat the test. The Voigt-Kampff is a test of empathy. It gauges the respondent’s emotional responses to various situations (“You are given a calf-skin wallet on your birthday,” “You have a little boy and he shows you his butterfly collection, including his killing jar,” “In a magazine you come across a full-page color picture of a nude girl” [48-49]) and through these responses, the test operator is able to determine whether or not the respondent is an android.
Dick’s novel presents its reader with a moral dilemma for the computer age: What if an organism could be created that was so human-like that it were almost impossible to distinguish between the two? At what point does it actually become something approximating human? The government on Earth considers androids to be machines, property. They are not permitted on Earth, only on off-world colonies. The narrative in Electric Sheep takes us through Deckard’s attempt to “retire” six Nexus-6 androids that have escaped from Mars and his moral dilemma with killing something that looks and acts so human.
In Dick’s own lifetime, the microprocessor became a reality. Computers would not be relegated to entire rooms. A computer could be placed inside a brain. Or a brain could be made out of a computer. With a little science-fiction creativity, Dick fashioned a narrative about sophisticated robots that looked and acted like human beings. His rhetorical question is, “At what point does the robot cease being a machine and start being human?” With the advent of Intel’s 4-bit processor, the question became less and less rhetorical and more and more pragmatic. Dick posits that within sixty years machines will become self-aware. Through the character of Deckard, he raises the question of ethics: is it right to kill something that is, as far as he can tell, human? Deckard even goes so far as to fall in love with Rachael Rosen, another Nexus-6 android.
The parallel between humans and machines is not unique to the twentieth century. Since at least the seventeenth century, philosophers have equated human beings with automatons (literally, “self movement,” though taken in that time to refer to mechanical – not electrical – devices which behaved as though they were moving by themselves). Dick is not the first person to equate humans and machines, but he does ask, “How do we know we are not machines ourselves?” Writers in the seventeenth century had to use a good deal of imagination to create a fanciful scenario in which such automatons existed, but with recent technological advances, the scenario became more pressing for Dick. Science was, potentially, on the cusp of actually creating automatons.
In his First Meditation, Rene Descartes wonders how he can be sure God is not intentionally manipulating his reality so as to deceive him into thinking that he sees is real, when in fact it is not. “It is possible that God has wished that I should be deceived every time I add two and three or count the sides of a square, or form some judgement even simpler, if anything simpler than that can be imagined,” Descartes says (98). This notion of “How do I know I am not being deceived?” comes up again in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Time and time again, the audience and the characters themselves are asked to call into question what may or may not be a real human being. The science fictional device of an almost perfectly human automaton allows this questioning to occur: there is no way of knowing whether anyone else is an android, or, for that matter, of knowing whether I am an android. At one point, Deckard even takes the Voight-Kampff test just to objectively ensure that he is not an android. In the world of the novel, such a test is definitive proof of humanity. For Descartes, and for the rest of us, there is no such test. There is no way of knowing whether or not we are being deceived – either in the sense that God is deceiving us into believing that what we experience with our senses is true or in the sense that everyone else is deceiving us into believing that we are not androids.
Empathy is chosen as the distinction between androids and humans. Humans are capable of empathy; androids are not. But the human capacity for empathy and non-empathy is called into question in the case of Phil Resch, another bounty hunter who ruthlessly kills the android Luba Luft. “There is a defect in your empathic, role-taking ability. One which we don’t test for. Your feelings toward androids,” says Deckard to Resch (140). He later changes his mind and concludes, “There’s nothing unnatural or unhuman [sic] about Phil Resch’s reactions: it’s me” (142). Being human is not merely about having empathy: it is also about being able to suspend that empathy in order to kill something that, as far as anyone else is concerned, is a human being.
Ironically, the creation of an empathy/non-empathy hierarchy between humans and androids exposes human beings’ startling lack of empathy. If a non-human is defined as a being with the inability to demonstrate empathy, then what is Phil Resch in the moment that he kills an android? A human being with the ability to switch empathy on and off is not the perfect human being. Only a machine – which can be programmed with empathy or not – would make a perfect human being, for it would never be able to turn its empathy off (although in this case, the androids can never turn their empathy on).
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was adapted into the film Blade Runner by Ridley Scott in 1982. Made fourteen years after the publication of Dick’s novel, the film has an entirely different focus from the book. Blade Runner does not concern itself with the hypocrisy of human empathy. It is, instead, more concerned with the androids: their mortality and their capacity for love. Roy Batty is on a quest to find his creator and answers to questions about himself. In a voice-over from the theatrical version, Deckard hypothesizes about why Batty saved his life:
I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life, anybody's life, my life. All he'd wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do was sit there and watch him die.
Unlike human beings, Roy Batty and the other androids have the ability to meet their creators personally and come close to understanding their purpose. Batty and the rest of the escaped androids have a limited amount of time to find these answers, as the Tyrell Corporation (the company that makes androids, analogous to the Rosen Association) has given them four-year life spans as a failsafe in case they escape. We are meant to understand Batty and the other androids’ escape from an off-world colony as an attempt to learn more about themselves and their reason for existing. At the same time, they hope that their creator will be able to extend their life spans. Unfortunately, the androids are almost pathological in their desire to know why they are alive. When Tyrell tells Roy Batty that he cannot extend his life, Roy kills him.
Blade Runner focuses also on the similarity between androids and human beings. It makes more of the relationship between Rachael and Deckard, asking us what the ethics are of falling in love with a machine that is so human-like that it might as well be human. Such a relationship may be allowed in a humanist ethical system, but the prevailing cultural norms of 21st-century Los Angeles will not allow it. This is why Deckard and Rachael leave the city, with the other blade runner, Gaff, leaving his trademark paper unicorn behind to let them know that he was at Deckard’s apartment but did not kill Rachael, since he understood Deckard’s emotional predicament. The director’s cut of Blade Runner ends with Deckard and Rachael leaving his apartment toward some uncertain future, but the original theatrical version ended with the two of them in a natural environment outside the city, away from the interference of human beings, laws, and technology. Vivian Sobchack criticizes this original ending as nothing more than an imaginary experience, since human experience in the postmodern era is never “unmediated, immediate, ‘natural’”:
This new sense we have that everything in our lives is mediated and cultural explains, perhaps, why Deckard and Rachael’s escape into the ‘natural’ landscape at the end of Blade Runner seems so implausible and artificial. The landscape seems completely imaginary – unnatural in its “naturalness,” its lack of the “real” social density we have previously experienced. Thus the “nature” cinematography strikes us as an inauthentic “special effect” compared to the technical special effects we have seen and accepted as authentically “natural” – and we become reluctantly aware of both cinema and narrative straining in their work to produce a traditionally “happy” ending. (237)
The subsequent director’s cut of Blade Runner – which ostensibly more closely mirrors Ridley Scott’s vision for the film (for the production of a film involves numerous people other than the director, and frequently such decisions about how to end a film are made with audience reception in mind rather than thematic consistency; the director’s cut more accurately reflects what the director really wanted the film to look like) – does not feature an idealized Golden Country; rather, it shuns the phoniness of a “happy ending” in favor of an ending in which Deckard, an android bounty-hunter, and Rachael, his android lover, face an uncertain future which could be granted more certainty by the audience. The time is coming, says Scott to his audience, when we will have to decide whether androids are human or not, and what happens to Deckard and Rachael at the end of the film is up to you to decide based upon your future attitudes.
[2] Nuclear weapons technology progressed from the atomic bomb (A-bomb) to the hydrogen bomb (H-bomb) to the medium-range missile armed with a nuclear warhead to, finally, the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which could travel across the planet to hit its target.
[3] The name “EPICAC” is a Vonnegut-esque pun which refers to ENIAC, a computer built for the War Department and unveiled in 1946, and Ipecac, a substance that induces vomiting. Cf. James Van Der Spiegel, et al., “The ENIAC: History, Operation, and Reconstruction in VLSI,” The First Computers: History and Architectures, eds. Raúl Rojas and Ulf Hashagen (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000), 123-27.
[4] A description of an android’s Nexus-6 unit being destroyed suggests that there are electrical as well as biological components inside an android: “The Nexus-6 unit which operated it blew into pieces, a raging, mad wind which carried throughout the car. Bits of it, like radioactive dust itself, whirled down on Rick” (93).
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