RATIONALISTS DON'T KNOW DICK:

Blade Runner: What It Means to Be Human: When it opened in 1982, Ridley Scott’s movie “Blade Runner” was a box office flop. But the world’s top scientists recently voted it best science fiction film ever. Maybe now the film will finally gain the audience it deserves. (John W. Whitehead, 9/15/04, Godspy)

The importance of Blade Runner is that it reaches for higher truths. Thus, it cannot be understood without comprehending the deeply felt moral, philosophical, ecological and sociological concerns that are interwoven throughout the story.

Three key, yet profound, questions contribute to the core of Blade Runner: Who am I? Why am I here? What does it mean to be human? These are the same basic questions that humanity has faced since the dawn of time. The eternal problems in the film are, thus, essentially moral ones. That is, should replicants kill to gain more life? Should the blade runners kill the replicants simply because they want to exist?

Defining what it means to be human provides most of Blade Runner's philosophical focus. This is increasingly the dilemma faced by contemporary society—that is, the most vital question confronting us is how to maintain humanness in the human race in the face of overwhelming technology that tends to dehumanize us.

The film is based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? "Sheep stemmed from my basic interest in the problem of differentiating the authentic human being from the reflexive machine, which I call an android," Dick once said. "In my mind android is a metaphor for people who are psychologically human but behaving in a nonhuman way."

During research for an earlier work, Dick had discovered diaries by SS men stationed in Poland. One sentence in particular had a profound effect on him. That sentence read, "We are kept awake at night by the cries of starving children." As he explained, "There is obviously something wrong with the man who wrote that. I later realized that, with the Nazis, what we were essentially dealing with was a defective group mind, a mind so emotionally defective that the word 'human' could not be applied to them."

"Worse," Dick noted, "I felt that this was not necessarily a sole German trait. This deficiency had been exported into the world after World War II and could be picked up by people anywhere, at any time."

The dilemma is even more acute now than when Dick was penning Sheep for we have moved deeper into the methodological terrain of a new world—one more than ever dominated by what we believe to be the machine. And with the daily bombardment of entertainment distractions, it is no wonder that only a few realize what is happening to them.

The ultimate relevance of Blade Runner lies in its challenge of what it means to be human. It raises the eternal gnawing doubt as to our own humanity or lack of it. These are the same issues raised by the great religions and philosophies of the past.

Mr. Dick, though not always the most coherent of authors, also raised such troubling questions in
We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (1966), which was made into Total Recall, and the original story on which Minority Report was based.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 14, 2004 10:58 AM