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How is human identity represented in the science fiction films

Alien and Blade Runner?

Introduction

Our lives today rely on technology. In every sector of society, from education to

medicine, work and leisure, people constantly resort to technology as a tool to get the job

done. Whole infrastructures also rely on foundations of technology; running numbers of

databases and delicate programmes, which if were to fail would result in drastic

consequences. Therefore, we cannot ignore technology; our lives constantly revolve

around it and we are infatuated with it. This dissertation paper aims to show how the

human identity is represented in the science fiction films Alien (1979) and Blade Runner

(1982) and its relation to today’s world where we have become one with technology. In

his book Theories of the information society, Schiller acknowledges the tremendous

increased presence of information and ICTs (Information Computer Technology) in the

modern developed world;

It is evident to anyone, even to those taking only a cursory look, that, for example, there are many more images than ever before and, of course, there is a large range of new media technologies transmitting them. It is also obvious that information networks now traverse the globe, operating in real time and handling volumes of information with an unprecedented velocity, which makes the telegram and telephony of the 1970s appear way out of date

p. 79, Schiller, 2002

Science fiction cinema can be seen as an expression of the modern human’s impulse

towards technology and repulsion away from it. Sci-fi film illustrates our love and fear

anxiety of the mechanical and the electronic, and helps us build a vivid picture of who we

are in relation to technology. In many ways the science fiction films we make, come to

express explicitly our identity as individuals and our collective identity as a society.

The films I have decided to focus on are Alien and Blade Runner, which are both

directed by Ridley Scott. The first of these films was released just before a huge boom in

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the android and robot orientated science fiction films of the 1980s through to the 1990s,

namely: Android (1982), The Terminator films (1984, 1991), DARYL (1985), the Short

Circuit films (1986, 1988), Making Mr. Right (1987) the Robocop films (1987, 1990,

1993), Cherry 2000 (1988), Cyborg (1989), Hardware (1990), Eve of Destruction (1991),

The Guyver (1992), Universal Soldier (1992), to name a few (Telotte, pg 3., 1995).

2. The (post)modern identity, sci-fi cinema and society

Through their reference of the future, Alien and Blade Runner both seem to

represent this era of film and the conflicting elements of the modern human identity.

However, as early as 1958, Hanna Arendt had noted in her book The Human Condition

the changing nature of the modern human identity. After the post-WWII nuclear ‘boom’

of the 1950s, it seems Arendt had prematurely prophesised the huge identity crisis that

lay ahead throughout the war/peace conflicts of 1960-70s. The dismal 1980s was time to

look to the future with the advent of Thatcherism, ‘Reaganomics’, gadgets, product-

placement, the Stock Exchange and new trade industry. The grown-up offspring of the

1950s ‘baby boomers’ generation were becoming the iconic Generation X; faced with an

identity clash and what seemed to be a dystopic future as seen in many of the pre-

mentioned films. Arendt could be referring to the 1980s cyber-punk movement when she

discusses the destruction and decadence of nature over technology;

The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment, but life itself is outside this artificial world, and through life man remains related to all other living organisms. For some time now, a great many scientific endeavours have been directed toward making life also ‘artificial’, toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature… There is no reason to doubt our abilities to accomplish such an exchange, just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to destroy all organic life on Earth.

(p. 46, 1958)

However through the induction of new technology the cyberpunk movement has now

changed, digressing into a new wave ‘wireless’ movement1 integrating the philosophy of

cyber-punk with the theory of post-modernism. This is emphasised in the Wachowski

1 further explained on page 4

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Brother’s world of, The Matrix (1999), where humans live in a problem-free, sterile,

computer-based, dream world. The main characters in the film- Neo, Morpheus and

Trinity- have to rely on plenty of emulation, software and simulation to enter The Matrix

world. This is exemplified when Morpheus shows Neo the ‘construct’, where programs,

clothes and guns can simply be loaded on to an individual at the click of a button. The

process is clean and simple; something not normally associated to the graphic and

sometimes horrific nature of earlier cyber-punk films like Tetsuo (1988, Tsukamoto) and

Brazil (1985, Gilliam)

J.P. Telotte opens his book Replications (pg 1, 1995) with a discussion on the

problematic nature of being human by referring to a line from the 1982 film, The Thing

(Carpenter). In the film, MacReady, the film’s main character, becomes anxious and

worried over the presence of the monster (The Thing) amongst his men. The monster can

disguise itself as the men around it, so MacReady reassures himself- by pronouncing “I

know I’m human”. This shows his uneasiness with his identity and humanity. According

to Lacan, the mirror stage is when, at eighteen months or so, the child first sees his own

reflection in the mirror. The child recognises that he or she is simultaneously part of and

separate from the rest of the world (Lancan, 1977). In the sense of Lacan’s mirror stage,

the line quoted from The Thing helps illustrate how we often evaluate our world through

ourselves as a mirror. In many ways, robots and cyborgs are also a reflection of the

human identity, attempting to mirror human feeling, emotion and thought. In I, Robot

(Proyas, 2004) and Artificial Intelligence: A.I (Spielberg, 2001) robots are accepted in

wider society as ‘virtually’ human and even trialled in court as legitimately human

beings. They even have to contend with prejudice and forms of ‘robophobia’2 from the

public.

Human identity can be created through; gender, ethnicity, faith/religion, occupation

and class, yet it seems that modern society has formed a post-modern complex for

individuals. Literally, what you are has become more important than whom you are.

2 Fear of robots

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Examples can be seen in Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) when the schizophrenic alter-ego of

Tyler Durden states;

You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world

The modern world is an object-obsessed material world which has left humanity

behind. In Consumer Society (1970), Baudrillard states “Today, we are everywhere

surrounded by the remarkable conspicuousness of consumption and affluence, established

by the multiplication of objects, services and material goods” (p. 131). Furthermore we

have become human products ourselves, mere images and reflections of the demi-gods of

the television and advertising campaigns. This is typified by the barcodes tattooed on the

bodies of the characters in Alien 3 (Fincher, 1993) and The Matrix. The image of the

barcode recalls that of the numbered prisoner and concentration camp detainee, where

one’s entire existence is determined by a number, over the pure culture of the name. Like

the bodies grown in ‘farms’ in The Matrix, we appear to be closer to cold and calculated

statistics than the warm blooded mammals we are told to associate our species with. And

still, we are treating ourselves like products, allowing science and technology to master

our bodies for us- genetic engineering and cloning ensuring us a ‘better life’.

The modern human can now physically change their appearance, be bent and

shaped, through cosmetic and plastic surgery. Psychologically, we also have abandoned

our own personal development in the reassurance that we can rely on the extents of the

medicine of psychotherapy and counselling. Modern religions like the Church of

Scientology have become obsessed with ‘mutating’ the identity, attempting to change the

individual under the conviction that they are already misguided. According to the “online

stress test” at the official Scientology website;

Here are answers to your questions about yourself. There are ways to get definite

results. Taking this test is the first step to gaining control of your life

(Authors bold, http://www.scientology.org)

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Playing off our obsession with the new, recent religious groups like Scientology, offer to

create a new ‘you’, a new person. The faith is also sold like a product through its

endorsement from various famous actors and celebrities. The Church also offers all its

‘religious’ literature for sale via the website, The Fundamentals of Thought, by L. Ron

Hubbard, currently costing $33. The Company of the Church of Scientology appears to

be very prolific for a movement which professes to be concerned with changing people

from the inside out; and not the inverse as it appears to honestly be.

Our modern emotionless, face-paced lives have confused us. We now place great

importance on communication, creating multiple networks to please our desire of

knowing that everyone is only seconds away, yet we seem to be more isolated than ever.

Physical contact has been literally severed by the communication boom of the 1980s and

90s with the onslaught of the Internet and mobile telephones. Even in the home for

example, computer games (virtual reality) have replaced some playing outside in “the

fresh air” for children. With the occurrence of the Internet, we no hardly need to venture

outside to the bookstore or supermarket, when everything we need is merely one click

away from being done through the World Wide Web and e-commerce. If for Baudrillard

the shopping mall was a hyper-reality, e-commerce must be a hyper-non-reality as the

shopping mall now only exists virtually, through software. Yet, such theory can only

apply to societies which rely heavily on technology, namely those which reside in the

‘first world’. It appears that in other less-developed counties, culture manages to replace

the functions that technology fulfils for people in the West. ‘Online socialisation’

(Internet chat-rooms, instant messaging, e-mail) has begun to replace more old-fashioned

forms of socialisation for people in technologically developed societies, whilst those who

lack such technological advances still to rely on more tried and tested methods, yet aspire

to becoming akin to those in the developed world.

This super-network that most people in the world can now connect to, has united us

all in to one seamless organism. Such a network is supported by wireless mini-networks

like credit cards, ID cards and more obscure items like store loyalty-cards. Substance,

represented by the physical hardware of the 1980s, has become replaced with the

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worthless data of software. In The Cube (Natali, 1997) 7 characters, all from different

walks of life, wake up to a mysterious cube maze and left to escape by combining their

knowledge. The cube maze is a nonsensical task that requires a near impossible maths

problem to be solved for the character to be released. The cube maze is similar to modern

society, in that it is a worthless, futile puzzle. In the film, Worth (David Hewlett), a

computer programmer, explains the purpose of the Cube to the rest of the group:

Worth: There is no conspiracy. Nobody is in charge. It's a headless blunder

operating under the illusion of a master plan.

In many ways our society can be seen as a networked wireless amalgamation attached to

television, personal computers, mobile telephones and the mass media. Like Orwell’s

novel 1984 (1948), we suffer from the paranoia of constantly being watched through

these technologies. Yet we create our own entertainment through “the watch” and “the

look”, with Reality-based TV and entire television shows based on CCTV systems.

Additionally, a brash image and treatment of violence and sex in the mass media has

diluted a lot of meaning, whilst increasing our desire. We currently spend our lives

becoming seduced in to being avid consumers. The human “soul” has become lost and all

that remains is a ‘ready made’ shell which is filled with superficial and artificial content.

Theorist Baudrillard in his essay Simulacra and Simulations (1981) commented on this

process, labelling it as a form of self-consumption. In what he described as “the desert of

the real”, Baudrillard noted that people have began, in effect, to consume themselves in

the form of images and abstractions through which their desires, sense of identity, and

memories are replicated and then sold back to them as products (be it a television show or

a technological gadget).

The overindulgence of science, demonstrated by cloning, stem-cell and cellular

research and genetic engineering has even caused the psychical body to become looked

upon as material, a textile. An individual now represents an object (as in Baudrillard’s

System of Objects, 1968), a meat-like product that has lost its true value and has become a

commodity. In the film Alien, the crew resolve to fire weaponry to get rid of the Alien

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intruder; almost as if they regress to the tools and technology of the primitive human

even though they inhabit a high-technology futuristic spacecraft. The modern humans in

the film appear to have regressed back in to a primitive condition, away from the shallow,

if technologically advanced state, they live in.

3. Blade Runner and the postmodern identity crisis

Baudrillard highlighted the phenomenon of the reproduced and “simulated” reality

replacing the more “natural” and “substantial” forms of the “real” as the “precession of

simulacra”. However, he explains that only his last order of simulacra- “the simulacra of

simulation, founded on information, the model, the cybernetic game- total operationality,

hyperreality, aim of total control” (1981, pg 121)- can truly interest us in modern science

fiction (ibid, pg 127). What Baudrillard seems to be referring to is that although science

fiction films can consist of a combination of other genres (comedy, romance, horror and

action films), the strongest and most important theme in science fiction today is the

obsession with simulation. Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982) is a film pursuing

exactly this interest. Like The Thing, Blade Runner asks what it means to be a human,

who we are and how we know it. In raising such questions, Blade Runner makes use of

the ‘replicant’, or android, as a sense of the ‘Other’- the reflection in the mirror. The plot

of the film is driven by the replicants’ desire to return to Earth to confront their makers in

to prolonging their four-year lifespan. However, it appears that the root of the replicants’

identity problem does not lie in the length of their lives, but in their quality. They

constantly try to create identities for themselves, anxiously hoping to become more

human. This in turn creates the supposition for potential hyper-reality in their characters

as they become constructs of pre-programmed fantasies. Deckard, a blade runner (bounty

hunter) hired to ‘retire’ replicants, also faces a similar crisis with his own identity, whilst

the film ambiguously hints at the possibility of Deckard being a replicant himself.

If we cannot be sure about ourselves, if we are plagued with anxieties about what we are, how can we ever act human?

p. 2, Telotte, 1995

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In his early work, The System of Objects (1968), Jean Baudrillard discusses his theory of

the consumer society from a neo-Marxist perspective, relying on both Lacanian

psychoanalysis and Saussurean structuralism to develop his main theme; that

consumption has become the chief basis of the social order. He suggests that consumer

objects structure behaviour through a linguistic sign function. For example, in

advertising, which has taken over "the moral responsibility for all of society and

replace[d] a puritan morality with a hedonistic morality of pure satisfaction, like a new

state of nature at the heart of hypercivilization," (pp. 12-13).

This theory can be seen prolifically in the dystopian world of Blade Runner, a

society which specifically revolves around image, the look and seeing (or the sign). It is a

post-modern time which is “governed by a new technology of operational simulation, in

which cybernetic systems of binary oppositions organise everyday life” (p. 31, Denzin,

1991). It is a place where the fake seems real and the real no longer seems to exist. Only

a “romantic nostalgia remains” (p. 33, Ibid). The film’s main location, Los Angeles in the

year 2019, is much like Baudrillard’s vision of modern society in that it is totally built on

the “unarticulated, instantaneous form, without a past, without a future” (Baudrillard,

reference pending) advertising. Huge signs tower above the streets promoting major

corporations and brands- Coca-Cola, TDK, Atari, Jim-Bean, Trident, even a huge video

screen features a Japanese geisha popping a pill. The overwhelming presence and

importance of the image is also implied through the various gadgets (another of

Baudrillard’s fascinations) of Blade Runner, like video phones, the photo-enhancing

ESPER machine and the pupil scanning Voight-Kampff test.

Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) is an exotic dancer in a downtown strip-club, dressed in

sparkling make-up and skimpy clothing. She certainly looks real, she also looks human,

but she is a replicant. Previously Deckard had found a small piece of scaly skin which he

took to be examined and is told that it comes from a replicant snake bought by Zhora. As

Deckard enters her dressing room the snake swans about Zhora’s neck in a loving way.

Like Zhora, the snake also looks real- writhing with life about the architecture of Zhora’s

body. In a way, Zhora uses the snake to enhance her realness, even if the animal is false,

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looking at it in a caring way and caressing it with Motherness- a human condition.

Similarly with modern humans, our possessions are a sign of who we are and what we

stand for. Zhora’s snake also has its own symbolism, even if it is a mixed one. On one

side the snake can represent life (like Zhora’s breasts, which are exposed in the scene and

appear as a sign of nurture) as the snake sheds and grows its own skin. On the other hand,

the snake can be seen as a form of evil (the Devil) as symbolised in the Bible. In this case

it appears that the snake is signifying some kind of evil, as Zhora double-crosses Deckard

by punching him in the face and trying to kill him by strangulation. Likewise, the main

replicant character, Roy (Rutger Hauer) holds a white dove (also a Biblical animal

representation), symbolising the character’s purity and innocence. According to Tyrell,

Roy is also the “prodigal son”; Roy even figuratively inserts a nail in to his palm to

prolong his life- connecting him with the pure, and the image of crucified Christ. At the

end of the film, Roy saves Deckard’s life and launches the Dove upwards, the camera

turning to the heavens as he slowly faces his death- giving further reference to the image

of martyrs and saviours.

Rachael (Sean Young) is Tyrell’s latest experiment and unlike the other Nexus-6

replicants, she has memories implanted in to her brain, which are based on the life of

Tyrell’s niece. To quote her maker Tyrell, she is “more human than human”, especially as

she also has the added feature of not being aware of her replicant status. Deckard

administers the replicant-detecting Voight-Kampff test on Rachael, but it takes five times

as long to recognise her as a replicant. Tyrell reveals that;

Rachael is an experiment, nothing more. We began to recognize in them a strange obsession. After all, they are emotionally inexperienced with only a few years in which to store up the experiences which you and I take for granted. If we give them the past, we create a cushion or pillow for their emotions and consequently we can control them better.

It is revealed that Rachael’s life is a cruel trick, a mere experimental pet-project of

Tyrell’s, but in his words he reveals something important about memory. Like fellow

replicant Leon, and (debatably human) Deckard, Rachael has a set of photographs which

link to her memories. The replicants use the images to support the history that they have

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not experienced. This can also be said of the modern human, who also has the tendency

to place great importance on this type of image. Although they are just flat, two-

dimensional representations, we often trust photographs as a means of nailing things

down- history, identity and reality. Roland Barthes has been quoted as saying “a sort of

umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze” (p.5, 1981).

Children, whose close members of the family may have passed away before they were

born, can look back through photographs (and more recently home-videos) using the

imagery to help construct and replace (replay) what is missing from their identity much

like the replicants do in the film. Avant-garde home-movie artist Jonas Mekas picks up on

this idea, having constantly filmed his everyday life for his film compilations; resulting in

a feeling of Motherly nurture for the recorded image.

Roland Barthes admits in Camera Lucida when looking at a photograph of

Napoleon’s brother he realised; “I am looking at the eyes that looked at the emperor” (p.

3). The photograph exemplifies the formation of identity and the conformation of being

alive. However, photographs alone are just signs, empty signifiers, easily destroyed or

manipulated. The fact that Rachael does not need photographs to be content, unlike Leon

who seems devastated when he realises “the police” have taken his “precious photos”,

proves she is far more human-like. The indelible nature of the memory itself is what

keeps Rachael alive.

We notice that Deckard also relies strongly on the photograph, his collection

positioned romantically around his piano. Music is often associated with human

expression and the soul, for example with lonely Harry Caul’s saxophone in The

Conversation (Coppola, 1974). Deckard’s photo collection appears as a reference that he

is still a human being, however the statement becomes ironic since replicants also possess

similar photo collections.

Replicants aren't supposed to be emotional, but because Rachael is “more human

than human”, tears can well up in her eyes, and literally flow down her cheeks. Her face

melts after Deckard brutally and cruelly pounds in the truth that her memories are only

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implants, and that she is just a robot with emotions. When Deckard leaves the room to get

Rachael a drink, she flees the apartment devastated. As he picks up her discarded

snapshot (of Tyrell's niece as a child with her mother), the shadows on the porch in the

picture move as if real for a moment or two, and the faint sounds of laughing children are

heard. The picture of Rachael with her mother seems to briefly flicker to life suggesting

the image creates a simulation possibly more real than reality.

According to Baudrillard, Rachael can be seen as being symbolic of the hyperreal

human condition- her past is based on simulated images, signs and stories. Rachael has

very little of her own free will and relies on other human beings to control it for her.

When Deckard prompts Rachael “Do you love me? ... Do you trust me?” her

monosyllabic replies seem just as static and programmed as when she is asked by

Deckard to say “Kiss me”. It is in the nature of the human being to question and discover

their personal limits. This is given as an example by Plato on Empiricism (The Allegory

of the Cave, In The Republic) that our learning curve is created through experimenting

with our senses and analysing things through our thoughts. Rachael’s limits have been

pre-set and her boundaries of identity have already been defined. This constant

questioning is what makes us human:

When the map covers the whole territory, something like the principle of reality

disappears.

(Author’s italics, p. 123, Baudrillard, 1981)

The ambiguity of Deckard’s replicant status is vital and central to Blade Runner as a

successful work. For Slavoj Žižek (pp. 9-44, 1993), Deckard standing revealed as a

replicant makes Blade Runner valuable in that it stages a confrontation with our own

“replicant-status”. When we watch Deckard we query our own construction through

Deckard as a mirror, whilst also becoming acutely reminded of the emptiness that we

sense in the recognition of the void between “our” and “selves” after the initial mirror

process. According to Francavilla (1991):

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These replicants function as mirrors for people, by allowing examination and moral scrutiny of ourselves, our technology, and our treatment of other beings, and by defining in their tragic struggle what is truly human

(p. 14)

What is truly human? The concept of humanity has become blurred throughout time due

to our constant questioning and objectifying of human life and reality- through creating

purpose for meaning. In the film, Pris recites the famous Descartes theorem of “I think,

therefore I am” however it seems that Deckard (also homophone for Descartes, Žižek

points out (1993)) is the true reflection of this saying, as he is the representation of the

identity crisis. Rachael asks Deckard if he has ever ‘retired’ a human by mistake, and

whether he has ever taken the Voight-Kampff test himself, prompting him to question his

identity as a human or replicant.

1980’s solo artist Gary Numan also appears to echo many of the identity issues

raised in Blade Runner, through his cyber-punk infused electro music3. Such song titles

as “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?” and “Me! I Disconnect From You” (Replicas, 1979)

demonstrate the crisis and alienated feelings of many people coming to terms with their

identities during the time. Likewise in Blade Runner, even Rachael’s replicant hands can

play the piano just as beautifully as Deckard’s, somewhat degrading the act of playing to

a mechanical, rather than emotional, art; exactly what Numan appears to also portray

with his assortment of modern electrical synthesisers.

Deckard’s character is hard, distant, and that of a cold-blooded killer. Even his ex-

wife refers to him as “sushi… cold fish”. He is nothing more than a sophisticated

replicant. Deckard appears as an alienated, lost, white male in a sprawling futuristic city

made up of outcast Orientals, replicants, punks and midgets. All the “superior” white

people seem to have moved away to the Off-World, even J.F. Sebastian (William

Sanderson) is kept back on Earth as an outcast due to his “Methuselah syndrome”, a

genetic disorder which accelerates ageing.

3 Interesting to note that Blade Runner has also often been categorised as a Cyber-punk film (see Kadrey & McCaffery, chapter “Cyberpunk 101” in Storming the Reality Studio)

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In Blade Runner Deckard seems to go through a period of revelation and discovery

over his identity. When Deckard shoots Zhora in the back we hear Deckard in a voice-

over narration (another sign that he is constantly re-examining his surroundings and

behaviour) “there it was again, feeling, in myself, for her, for Rachael”. The blade runner

realises that he is falling in love with what he is told to destroy. Through her influence,

Deckard develops emotionally and empathically, questioning his actions and priorities.

He begins to observe the parallels between the replicants and himself, indicating the

process of change: “Replicants weren’t supposed to have feelings. Neither were blade

runners. What the hell was happening to me?” Deckard is demonstrating the human

ability to have a rebirth in consciousness- or self-realisation.

According to theorist Francavilla (1991), Deckard achieves further self discovery

through Roy, who effectively is revealed as Deckard’s double or ‘doppelganger’.

Francavilla begins by suggesting that the route of the double extends to when “early man

saw the shadow or reflection as a defence against death, in the form of a guardian spirit or

an immortal soul”. He examines the double: “the intimate, unbreakable bond between

doubles indicates an empathetic, love-hate relationship whose development goes well

beyond mere coincidence or chance” (p. 5, 1991). It seems that Deckard and Roy are two

halves of a perfect being, each lacking half of what the other has. Deckard is a dry, dull

character with a typical film noir hard-boiled exterior, a “killer”. Roy is also a killer but

on the other hand is intelligent, humorous, flamboyant and most importantly empathetic.

Roy tells Sebastian that he worries Pris (his girlfriend) will die (rather than himself). On

the other hand, Deckard seems to simplify his bloody replicant murders as “part of the

business”. Roy is also poetic and witty about life, whereas Deckard appears to be full of

repressed emotions about his existence and identity. Perhaps Roy values life more as a

hyper-real being because of his situation unlike Deckard who appears too drawn-up about

being human. Only when Roy turns the tables and hunts down Deckard, is the blade

runner forced to emphasise with the replicants and confront the ethics of his occupation.

Roy becomes like an intuitive twin, somehow knowing Deckard’s name and managing to

predict Deckard’s movements in the final chase scene. The rooftop ‘dance’ finally

resolves with Roy facing the imminent death of his four year life-span, whilst also giving

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Deckard the chance to live. Roy is the “harbinger of death”, of humans, the symbol of

man’s inhumanity, whilst also paradoxically fulfilling the role as the “guardian saviour”

(Francavilla, p. 11, 1991).

In Blade Runner, there is a strong notion that Deckard is under the strict control of

his superior, Bryant (Emmet Walsh). As Deckard is forced to re-evaluate his work and

comes to realise that he is exterminating potentially intelligent and organic beings, he

reaches something of a crisis stating “Replicants weren't supposed to have feelings.

Neither were blade runners. What the hell was happening to me?” Detective Bryant

comes to symbolise Capitalism, and Deckard as Capitalism’s dehumanised and lost

worker, buried in the system of mechanisation and bureaucracy. After Bryant’s threat

about ‘victims’ and ‘little people’ Deckard makes the choice to continue his work, even

though he has a ‘bellyful of killing’. This is exactly what forces Deckard to make new life

decisions and change in the face of the corporation, reforming his identity and

transforming his outlook on the replicants that he is ordered to kill. This instance in the

film illustrates the importance of occupation and how it can dictate and control identity.

n Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), we see a similar case with Sam Lowry (Jonathan

Price) who is a civil servant for a techno-bureaucratic company in the future. Sam Lowry

is a low level office worker and is portrayed literally as one small cog in the system. Sam

becomes frustrated in his work and life which results in him creating day-dreams and

fantasies of another life outside of the controlled world he lives in. Sam dreams about

being with his ideal perfect woman and of being a super-hero which comes to

characterise his persona as a trapped, lonely and frustrated male like Deckard in Blade

Runner. In many ways Ripley in Alien suffers from the same psychological complex;

however the difference being that the film does not allow Ripley to show any of her faults

for the fear that her male counterparts might see her as a stereotypical “weak” female. All

three films display elements of the cyber-punk ethics of anti-corporatism and anti-

capitalism. Larry McCaffery explains in his book Storming the Reality Studio;

The cyberpunks presented themselves as “techno-urban-guerrilla” artists announcing that both the technological dreams and nightmares envisioned by

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previous generation of SF artists were already in place … Cyberpunk … became a significant movement within post-modernism because of its ability to present an intense, vital, and often darkly humorous vision on the world space of multinational capitalism.

(p. 16, 1991)

4. Age as part of the postmodern identity

Age is a factor of the human identity which many people are constantly trying to

battle against. Our culture’s obsession with the image coincides accurately with its

constant attempt to remain “forever young”. There appears to be a number of advances in

modern technology and medicine which contribute to fighting the anti-aging process.

Namely;

- Skin creams and lotions that aim to remove wrinkles and increase the skin’s

elasticity

-Surgical processes which add shape and form back into aging features e.g.

liposuction, plastic surgery, collagen and acid peels. Alternatively, chemicals

which paralyse muscle movement to reduce wrinkling e.g. Botox (a pleasant trade

name for botulinum toxin A).

- Dietary supplements (pro-vitamins, minerals, oils etc)

Are the above processes helping to build a more android-looking human race? Through

enhanced surgical processes people start to look more similar, more robot-like, we begin

notice a loss in our individual identities and “look”. Such processes challenge what it

means to be “old” and redefine the boundaries of who we accept as “old”. As the elderly

begin to emulate the youth of society and the youth attempt to stay forever young, it

seems that we are almost witnessing a dying breed of elderly humans whilst

simultaneously further reinforcing age as taboo subject. It appears that rather than sort

out our inner and societal conflicts with age we are instead treating it as an illness. The

postmodern identity has blown our natural fear of death out of proportion causing us to

constantly bombard it with surgical procedures and miracle cures. Possibly one day we

will be able to avoid aging, but how will this contribute to the future construction of our

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identities? Who will replace the role of the elderly in society; the wise, the experienced, if

the old cease to physically exist? For now, the battle continues as we witness a series of

test subject, scores of future androids, equipped with out-of-proportion facial features and

arrays of odd-looking implants. The elderly are slowly beginning to change their

appearance in to a new breed, one of an androgynous and simulated-youth appearance.

Science is slowly creating the android from within our own race by developing this

super-human, hyper-human. Yet it still appears that everything that has a beginning must

have an end, and that ultimately death will always remain the inevitable. This is

exemplified in Blade Runner where replicants have had their lives restricted down to four

years, since otherwise they could possibly live forever.

Another science fiction film which comments directly on society’s reaction to age

is Anderson’s Logan’s Run (1976). The film is set in year 2274 when a nuclear holocaust

has decimated the earth and the survivors have sealed themselves into a domed city. To

maintain the population balance, the computers that run the city have decreed that all

people must die at age 30. This system is enforced by "sandmen”: police operatives who

terminate "runners" or those who attempt to live beyond 30. Logan (Michael York), a

sandman, is sent on a mission to find "sanctuary", a place to which runners have been

escaping. Logan begins to question the system he serves and after seeing for himself that

there is life beyond the dome, he returns to enlighten others. It appears that this film has a

discourse which comments on how we treat aging as a concept in a modern society. In the

film, people aged 30 are placed into the “Carousel”, a type of auditorium which draws

members closely in and executes them with lasers. During this ceremony spectators can

be heard shouting “Renewal, renewal!”. This scene in particular appears to parody

modern science by using the laser as a purposely futuristic looking device, to which

scores of people almost worship during the “renewal” (death) ritual. In today’s society we

often see famous doctors or therapists hailed as god-like figures and who accumulate

groups of devoted followers. They are often worshipped, like the Carousel, for the

“miracles” they create and the cures they administer.

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5. Alien : the corporation, the mother and the other

Ridley Scott’s pre-Blade Runner science fiction film Alien (1979) also has a

strong sense of the corporation and the company. Yet this time round the film’s

protagonist is a female character, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), a woman cast as the lead

hero- conventionally a role played by and written for a male character. Ripley is third

officer of the commercial space craft Nostromo, a claustrophobic, intergalactic space

cargo/scavenger ship that is bringing twenty million tons of mineral ore back to Earth.

However, unknown to the crew, the Company have a secret agenda to recover a

potentially deadly Alien to aid their ‘weapons program’, also indicating that the crew are

somewhat expendable in the process. The film comes to represent the late Capitalist

society, where the worker is encouraged to be a company man/woman yet not have any

control or understanding of the work they commit to. The Alien and the mechanisation

and technology of the space craft, affectionately named Mother, become contrasted with

the humanity of the workers. In Alien the Other is fatal, inhuman and destructive, in

contrast to Blade Runner, where the humans assume this role. Ash, the films’ only

android, proclaims the Alien as a perfect organism “unclouded by conscious, remorse, or

delusions of morality”. Ash on the other hand is like the rest of the company’s machinery,

with imperfections and faults, eventually exploding after a malfunction. Unlike Blade

Runner, Alien appears to have a vision of the future where the humans still rule over the

Other; the film climaxes with Ripley blasting the Alien out in to space.

Initially the mothership represents protection from the Other, but slowly it

becomes the Other, working with the android Ash (Ian Holm). Both entities equally do

not portray emotion, instead creating a void between them and the humans on board. As

established from the beginning by a tour through the apparently lifeless Nostromo,

floating through a vast and empty space, the crew emerge as if from a womb, of Mother,

the ship's computer. Like children totally dependant on Mother, the scene indicates the

characters’ fragility and utter dependence on technology. It is no coincidence that this

computer system they rely on to control missions, also manages their hyper-sleep. Mother

literally puts the crew to bed like her children. However, the computer system is simply a

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tool in the hands of a corporate entity, the Company, which dictates that the crew is

expendable in the pursuit of profit. Yet interestingly, it is the Company’s technology and

equipment used, to stalk the profit, the Alien intruder, that fails. The gadgets either

misinterpret movements by other crew or the ship’s cat, often malfunctioning altogether

at critical times. The technology on the ship comes to represent the failure and letdown of

modern technological inventions and devices that often prove to be useless, hardly

making any improvement in life. In the case of Alien, the technology fails the Company

and eventually destroys all hopes of its business incentive. Recently, businesses have

increasingly relied on technology- like the Internet for example- and consequently

suffered when the ‘bubble’ burst and technologies collapsed under their feet.

The android Ash is a servant, the modern version of a Victorian slave. He also

functions as an appliance, an object. Ash can represent our fetishist desire to possess the

latest object, purely for the reason of having it. On the ambiguity of advertising,

Baudrillard writes in The System of Objects (1968)

…it provokes us to compete; yet, through this imaginary competition, it already invokes a profound monotony, a uniformula (postulation uniforme), a devolution in the bliss of consuming masses.

(Authors italics, p. 11)

And in many ways, this system of consumption and objects creates an idea of freedom,

although a simulated one. Indeed man can buy back childhood memories, buy the latest

car etc. and project his real desires onto produced goods. Consumers can certainly make

themselves happy by surrounding themselves with goods and using them as a mask for

their true needs and feelings. In the words of Baudrillard “[Man can] accept being only a

complex of intermediate drives and be satisfied with their satisfaction” (Ibid. p. 13).

Figuratively, Ash is also the modern male dehumanised by his work in the face of

the corporation, similar to the character of Deckard seen in Blade Runner. Such

characters must be strong, motionless and competent, without fear or human response in

the face of the Company. Deckard, who works in service of the Tyrell Corporation, must

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have the qualities of a replicant in order to do his job well. Metaphorically Ash in Alien is

made of a white blood substance, which it could be said stands for a pure species that is

untainted by emotion. The white blood is the petroleum fuel of the android, the grease in

the cogs and wheels of the mechanised body or the machine that is the Company. The

white blood, like the android, is a perfected simulation of all which is human. The human

blood of the crew, emphasised by Kane’s exploding chest scene, is red; representing love,

spontaneous reaction and passion. The human figure is also vulnerable to intrusion and

the human blood, unlike the deadly green acidic Alien blood; is psychically harmless,

symbolic of the life-force and of the real. The Alien’s green blood, more like the green of

Nature, represents natural defence mechanisms and organic weapons of highly evolved

species like the venom of the scorpion or cobra. Like Ash, the Alien does not suffer from

emotion. This makes the Alien the most advanced species in the film, the envy of both

human and android. The Alien still has the edge of Mother Nature, possessing more

advanced characteristics in evolution and adaptation.

According to Barbra Creed, the Alien stands as “the archaic mother, that is, the

image of the mother in her generative function- the mother as the origin of all life” (p.

129, 1986). In today’s society the male is the dominant, as the Alien symbolises this

oddly through a female perspective; as the powerful insect queen of the hive. The Alien

shows how archaic society functioned through the Mother by exemplifying insect worlds,

where males function as workers to serve and protect the queen. This opposes today’s

society, pure Capitalism, where the Father is strong and powerful. In archaic society

Mother was strong, representing birth, care, nurture and life and through Capitalism,

Mother has been downgraded to the home, where she remains underpaid in society and

underappreciated. For this reason the Alien’s threatening phallic and penetrative imagery

can also represent the female fear and rejection of the male. In Capitalism Mother is only

promoted to excel in sexuality, which Father still tries to steal away from her, through the

feminisation of the male; the proliferation of androgynous fashion and hybridisation of

the sexes through cosmetic alteration. Alien tries to challenge this notion by allowing

Ripley to steal the stereotypically male role, making her strong, charismatic and

dominating over the more traditional passive female character. Mother has literally

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become defunct in a society that can easily recreate, synthesise, simulate and generate

beings that duplicate her primary functions. Father has begun to take on board Mother’s

characteristics as well as his own, which can be seen to result in today’s post-modern

male complex with identity. Today’s Father, like Doctor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s

novel Frankenstein, feels the urge to create monsters, or androids to fulfil his desire and

lack of Mother. Only time can tell whether the monster will reject his Father to seek his

own Mother, to be loved, to feel care and to experience other qualities that only Mother

can truly offer, as demonstrated by Frankenstein’s Monster. Or, as in Blade Runner, the

sexless androids that man creates could eventually turn on their maker in search of

answers about their post-human identity.

After the Alien has cocooned him, Dallas repeatedly begs Ripley to kill him,

which she does with her flame-thrower, burning the entire Alien lair. From the scene it

appears that the Alien kidnaps its victims and entombs them so that they will become host

for more of their Alien kind. If Ripley and her flamethrower had not interrupted the

process, Brett and Dallas would have become Alien wombs. The Alien is a superior being

and engulfs the human into becoming a simulated Alien womb. The Alien attempts to

make Others more like itself. Parallels can be seen during the Imperialist period, where

the British attempted to colonise allegedly ‘inferior’ nations and make them more British

and ‘civilised’, or ‘human’. It is human nature to alienate oneself through species and

ethnicity, creating Others which comprise of characteristics differing from what is

considered the human norm. In Alien, the closed white male body, first penetrated,

infected, and exploded in the case of crewman Kane, now develops a more profound

transformation, the transmutation in to the Other.

Like the replicants in Blade Runner, the Aliens work as a unit or group. Similar to

insect species, they willingly sacrifice themselves to ensure the survival of their kind.

This is contrasted with the humans, who possess a Darwinian ethic of ‘survival of the

fittest’. Human individuals fight against each other in a primitive and unorganised way in

reaction to their hyper-emotional fears of death. The human also lives segregated and

alienated (an odd word, since the Alien is so un-alienated from itself), constantly fighting

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against its own race. Similar to our creation of the Other through science fiction movies

as the Alien, images of refugees and asylum seekers in the mass media build tension

between the human race, creating the Other, as if to provide some grounds of difference

and thus some purpose to the ‘self’. Since this Other only seems to exist, in most cases,

through the propagation of the image, it could be said that it is a Hyper-Other. However,

the hate in which the modern individual generates for the Hyper-Other is indefinitely real

as it causes war, discrimination and destruction amongst the species.

The black male, Parker (Yaphet Kotto), comes to represent a further Other, that of

inequality. Like Ripley, Parker is singled out noticeably as the other physically ‘different’

crewmember. It is interesting in Alien that the black male is still ridden with cliché and

not a particularly high status member of the clan. He truly represents the early 1980s

interpretation of the urban, working class black male. Parker’s character plays the joke-

ridden, laid back, gum chewing ‘cool guy’ routine, in this case coupled with accordingly

lower-class dress; an open shirt and blue headband. Solely for the reason that Parker is

the only black person in the film, causes him to become a parody of the industry at the

time. The parody film GayNiggers From Outer Space (Lindberg, 1992) puts emphasis not

only on black peoples’ mistreatment in the media by darkly referring to them as

‘niggers’- but further stresses their alienation by branding them as gay and from outer

space. In general between 1980 and 2000 most films, especially the science fiction and

horror film genres, featured ‘token’ black actors. Before that period black people hardly

featured as central characters at all. Like many Blaxploitation films of the 1970s, the low-

budget GayNiggers comes to symbolise the clear ethnic identity crisis of the 1980-90s

and the awfully low presence of non-whites figures in the media. In Alien, Parker

becomes endorsed as the new face of science fiction- the black male. Even though

Parker’s character traits are slightly jaded, Ridley Scott seems to be making a point with

Parker’s presence by choosing him to last almost until the end of the film alongside

heroine Ripley.

Alien stands up in comparison with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn (Meyer) from

the same year and the later I, Robot (Proyas, 2004). Star Trek II attempts to ignore

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inequality and instead suggest a vision of the future where only equal opportunity can-

allegedly- exist. Black character Terrell becomes successfully assimilated in to the

adeptly named ‘Enterprise’ ship, where he and Sulu (Asian) and Chekhov (Russian) all

work loyally under Captain Kirk’s command- notably the white male-superior (Byers,

1987, p. 46). Likewise, I, Robot can also regress away from new ideas in filmmaking and

of the future. The plot, which offers nothing new (and a lot less) since Kubrick’s 2001: A

Space Odyssey (1968), casts known black actor (Will Smith) as the male lead yet denies

his character to have so much as a slither of a romance with the white female lead

(Bridget Moynahan) - as if to suggest an inter-racial romance would deny I, Robot box-

office success. Proyas attempts to redeem Smith’s character by issuing him with a gun

and badge, but that same old ‘funny black guy’ cliché still rings true; sad, in a film which

could potentially deal with a lot of material regarding discrimination, androids and the

future.

Parker in Alien works on Nostromo typically as a mechanic and his class status is

further promoted by fellow mechanic Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), a typical white

working-class male; his appearance being grotty and dirty, his voice accented with a

slurring mid-western American tone. His stereotypical working-class misogynist views

also help construct his character, playing off the slightly more classy female character

Lambert. Like Ash, Parker and Brett also represent the mentality of the labourer, who

repeat (like a parrot) the commands of the boss and do not have much say in the work

they carry out;

Ripley: Whenever he says anything you say "right," Brett, you know that? Brett: Right. Ripley: Parker, what do you think? Your staff just follows you around and says "right", like a regular parrot. Parker: [laughs] Yeah, shape up. What are you some kind of parrot? Brett: Right.

In Alien, Ripley becomes aware of the fragility and dependence of the crew on Mother,

the spacecraft. She begins to take the mission into her own hands, in somewhat a

revolutionary nature, shunning the Company’s plans to obtain the Alien and blasting it in

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to outer space. In a threatening male world, Ripley comes to possess the identity

characteristics that modern women could aspire to: strong and independent. She is

expected to check her femininity along with her emotion at the door. Ripley is surrounded

by men in the film, the only woman being Lambert (Veronica Cartwright). Ripley’s

persona is more male than Lambert’s. In fact Ripley is almost an androgynous character,

her gender identity becoming blurred further as the film progresses. Lambert lets her

femininity ooze through the cracks in her façade. She’s nervous and impatient, and not so

comfortable being one of the guys. She is a stereotypical high-maintenance female. It’s

clear that she lacks the fortitude to function reliably in her position, and she comes across

as whiny and annoying. As the story develops, she falls to pieces quickly, the typical and

obviously fragile female. Ripley is signalled early in the film as more stable than Lambert

and more intelligent than her male counter-part, Dallas (Tom Skerritt). Ripley rightly

opposes Dallas’ decision to let impregnated Kane through contamination and on to the

ship.

Yet Ash, who is secretly working on behalf of the Company, overrides Ripley’s

opinion. Ash is under Mother’s direct instruction, and begins to act like an obedient son,

doing as he is told by Mother to protect the Alien. Ash, the image of the Company,

appears to symbolise the discriminating boss that tries to stop women from succeeding.

When Ash tries to kill Ripley, he throws her into a cabin bed, the background of which is

pasted full of pornographic images. Ash then attempts to choke Ripley by ramming a

phallic-rolled-up pornographic magazine down her throat; the pornography referencing

an industry where women are devalued to the image, and act powerless under male

control. Suggesting further that Ripley (as a female minority) is trying to claim her

rightful place in the ship’s male hierarchy, Parker, the film’s only black character comes

to her rescue- eventually decapitating Ash (or symbolically, the Company). Ripley is now

free from her oppressor, the Company, and goes on to try to kill the Alien, which is now

threatening her life. Ripley as a woman has become a major threat to many

establishments; the Company’s financial interest, the male world, the Father and

Capitalism.

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In order to further reinforce her femininity, Ripley goes in search of the ship’s cat,

Jones, for no other reason but that she likes him and doesn’t want him to die. She finds

and secures him in the nick of time, but we quickly learn that her compassionate efforts

have allowed the Alien time to enter the escape pod. After the pod is jettisoned from the

Nostromo, Ripley does another classically female thing: she becomes vulnerable.

Thinking she has finally escaped, she undresses and prepares to sleep; her semi-naked

female body put on show to reaffirm her femininity; curvaceous and erotic. Ripley then

notices that the Alien has come along for the ride and her concern for Jones and the

letting down of her guard have put her in grave danger. Her survival depends on her

ability to be cool and calculating despite her terror. In the end, Ripley saves herself by

overcoming any vestige of femininity and devoting her entire being to killing her enemy.

She may look like a woman on the outside, but inside she’s all man. This in effect creates

a tangent between the traditional problem of gender and the modern aspect of the

problem-complex of human identity prevalent in the science fiction film.

6. Conclusion

What is at stake in Alien, with respect to the questions it poses philosophically, is

not the question of whether alien life forms exist or whether androids could be made to

seem as intelligent as Ash - that is all part of the 'taken for granted' metaphysics implied

by the genre of the film - but rather whether we find ourselves troubled by the issues that

trouble Ripley and her fellow crewmates. What is frightening in the film is the

precariousness of their lives in the isolation of space and in the face of the monster; but

what horrifies us, through the film, is the recognition of our own affinity with this

apparently alien situation. It is the fear of penetration, and at the same time the

recognition of masculine sexuality in the alien's mode of penetration; it is the impassive

and yet unrelenting drive of the alien that frightens, and at the same time the recognition

that this unrelenting drive that treats individual organisms as essentially passive vessels

for its own continuation is a natural drive, not dissimilar to our own nature.

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Replicants are the perfect creations we hope for, replications of ourselves. We

envy their perfections; strength, diligence and flawlessness. Furthermore they satisfy our

wishes for immortality, one day we are hopeful that we can transfer our memories into a

new body, just like Tyrell implants his niece’s memories into Rachael. However, androids

are also projections of our fears concerning science and scientific creativity gone out of

control. Through images we see on television, films and the like, we generate fears of

modern technology; the nuclear bomb, cloning, genetic engineering, automation and

mechanisation. Not to mention, that many see it as a sin to imitate God, as Tyrell does by

creating life for profit and self-gratification. The replicant as a ‘double’ also seems to

accurately express our repressed guilt about the atrocities we have already caused, like

the near total extinction of many animal species, as demonstrated in Blade Runner by the

proliferation of replicant animals. The ‘double’ also highlights our guilt of the future. We

can imagine (Blade Runner demonstrates also) how we may use these new artificial life-

forms as virtual slaves and in colonies, doing to them what we have done to previous

generations of ‘Others’ in the past: the native Africans, North and South Americans,

Indians and more. Where as before the hierarchy of society was based on class and

ethnicity, a new future hierarchy could be constructed around those who own the most

virtual life forms and can produce most efficiently.

Perhaps the most frightening fact about Alien and Blade Runner is how they make

us feel as individuals. Both films not only question our identities but question our

awareness of the real and the simulation. Audience members who manage to understand

the explicit and implicit discourses in both films may leave the cinema enlightened, but at

the same time worried for the future and suffering from a sense of guilt about the future.

However, since the majority of viewers do not draw such major conclusions from texts

like Blade Runner and Alien, we can rest assured that society will not experience any

moral panic concerning future dystopia before it is too late.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) shares the discourse with Alien and Blade Runner

in that technology has made man and now it can destroy him. 2001 opens with man in his

primitive state in the Pleistocene era, four million years ago, where the viewer is

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introduced to the Monolith, a sleek and tall monument which comes to be the man-apes’

obsession. As if it is some higher force or being, the Otherness of the Monolith is huge. It

is constantly an ominous object that emanates instruction and guidance. The film then

develops into a story surrounding further Monoliths; first one that is accidentally found

on the Moon and one that is later discovered by Jupiter. As if in some kind of delirium,

man is seen to constantly search for the next Monolith as if it could possible help explain

the meaning of the self and the other. Kubrick made the Monolith’s meaning purposely

ambiguous so that it could become a metaphor for technology, extra-terrestrials, or God,

all vehicles for us to question our own existence and analyse that of who we are.

2001 creates a canvas for discussion about the changing role of technology in our

society. The film literally takes the subject from the root, showing early-man learning to

use a bone to kill tapirs for meat and his own kind. 2001 eventually manages to reflect on

modern mans’ heavy reliance on technology through referring to its connections with the

corporation and capitalism. In 2001, the main computer on board HAL 9000 has the same

purpose as Mother and Ash in Alien; to monitor the workers on their mission into space.

HAL is also like the replicants in Blade Runner in that he is “more real than real”,

designed to be fool-proof and totally free of error. However, HAL and all forms of

artificial intelligence from all three films eventually malfunction and end up as enemy of

the humans. It is exactly at this point that the human identity is exposed and left stranded

and the films manage to demonstrate how we construct our identities and modern culture

too often around forms of artificial-intelligence and machinery, especially through those

that are not yet fully reliable. In 2001 the stranded humans in space are like fish out of

water. The irony gradually emerges that computers and other forms of artificial

intelligence do not need to breathe to live- computers can be built that can outlive man

and eventually that will outwit man as well. Even thought 2001 concludes on a happier

note, that man might be able to evolve to a higher being above conscious machines like

HAL 9000, the film still resides alongside Blade Runner and Alien as a heavy reminder of

the future of the human and the artificial identity coexisting together.

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In How we became posthuman (1999) Hayles puts forward the idea of the

posthuman, a human state altered by the huge presence of technology in modern society,

as a possible answer, remarking that “The posthuman view configures human being so

that it can be articulated with intelligent machine” (ibid, p. 3). She goes on to explain that

“in the posthuman, there are no essential differences between bodily existence and

computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology

and human goals” (ibid, p. 3). It appears that Hayles has provided an accurate conclusion

to the perplexed postmodern identity by actively linking it to a new state of mind and

being. Hayles suggests that humans must learn to live along side the intelligent machine,

literally remarking that she dreams of such a partnership (ibid, p. 5), so that cybernetics

can extend liberal humanism rather than subvert it. Possibly there is a future for the

human race other than that demonstrated in Alien and Blade Runner. A future where we

can exist alongside machine in a positive way with room for freedom, error, birth, death,

aging and all the other things that make us human.

The posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice

(ibid, p. 286)

Word count: 10, 126

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7. Sources

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arendt, H., The Human Condition, 1958, Uni. Of Chicago Press, USA

Baudrillard, J.,The system of objects (Paris, Gallimard, 1968); pp. 10-28 in Mark Poster,

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Consumer Society (Paris, Gallimard, 1970); pp. 29-56, in Mark Poster, ed., 1988,

Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, Stanford, USA

Simulacra and Simulation, 1981, translated by Glaser, 1994,

University of Michigan Press, USA.

Barthes, R., Camera Lucida, translated by R. Howard, 1981, Hill and Wang, USA

Bukatman, S., Blade Runner, 1997, British Film Institute, UK

Byers, T. Commodity Futures, 1987 in: Alien Zone, Annette Kuhn (ed.), Verso,

1990, UK

Creed, B., Alien and the Monstrous- Feminine, (1986) in: Alien Zone, Kuhn, A.,

Verso, 1990, UK

Denzin, N., Images of Postmodern Society, 1991, Sage Publications, UK

Francavilla, J.,The Android as Doppelganger, In: Retrofitting Blade Runner, 1991,

Kerman, J., (Ed), Bowling Green State University Popular Press,

USA

Hayles, N., How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature

and Informatics, 1999, The University of Chicago Press, USA

Kerman, J., Retrofitting Blade Runner, 1991, Bowling Green State University Popular

Press, USA

Lancan, J., Ecrites: a selection, 1977, Routledge, UK

McCaffery, L.,Storming the Reality Studio. A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern

Fiction, 1991, Duke University Press, USA

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soul in science fiction films, 1993, New York University Press,

USA

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Schiller, H., Information and advance capitalism, Chapter 5 in: Webster, F., Theories

of the information society, second edition, 2002, Routledge, UK

Telotte, J.P, Replications, 1995, University of Illinois Press, USA

Žižek, S., Tarrying with the negative: Kant, Hegel and the critique of ideology,

1993, Duke University Press, USA

FILMOGRAPHY

Anderson, M., Logan’s Run, 1976, USA

Coppola, F., The Conversation, 1974, USA

Fincher, D., Alien3, 1992, USA

Fight club, 1999, USA

Gillian, T., Brazil, 1985, UK

Kubrick, S., A Space Odyssey, 1968, USA

Lindberg, M., GayNiggers From Outer Space, 1992, Denmark

Natali, V., The Cube, 1997, USA

Proyas, A., I, Robot, 2004, USA

Schaffner, F., Planet of the Apes, 1968, USA

Scott, R., Alien, 1979, USA

Blade Runner, 1982, USA

Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut, 1992, USA

Tsukamoto S., Tetsuo, 1988, Japan

Wachowski A., & L The Matrix, 1999, USA

INTERNET

The Internet Movie Database (used solely as a reference point for film data)http://www.imdb.com

Scientology, Official Church of scientology sitehttp://www.scientology.org

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