Blade Runner & Dark City: What is it to be Human?

What Is It To Be Human?

• The essay explores science fiction conventions and themes in Blade Runner (1982) and Dark City (1998) and major philosophical issues surrounding the question, "What is it to be human?"

Dystopian Cities and Cyberpunk Genre

• Blade Runner and Dark City are set in dystopian cities, the former in a gloomy, rainy Los Angeles of 2019.
• Los Angeles has suffered environmental calamity with no real nature, only replications.
• The protagonist, Rick Deckard, is tasked with killing replicants who have returned to meet their maker, Tyrell.
• Tyrell Corporation is involved in genetic engineering of replicants for slave labor and other artificial creatures.
• Off-world colonies are advertised as lands of opportunity for those who can afford to leave Los Angeles.
• Dark City presents a sprawling metropolis perpetually in the gloom of night.
• The protagonist, John Murdoch, has erased memories and is pursued by extraterrestrials called Strangers.
• The Strangers exert control over the city and its inhabitants, and the city undergoes radical transformations nightly.
• Blade Runner and Dark City exemplify cyberpunk, a science fiction subgenre associated with a dark vision of the near future.
• Humans are influenced by electronic, informational, genetic, and other technologies.
• It is impossible to distinguish between what is real and what is artificially replicated.
• This applies to both living beings and memories of replicants and humans.

Science Fiction Meets Film Noir

• Both Blade Runner and Dark City use film noir conventions, including a detective figure, sinister characters, romantic uncertainty, and a bleak tone.
• Uncertainty is a recurring theme in both films
• John Murdoch doubts himself due to amnesia and incriminating evidence.
• Deckard initially presents as self-reliant but begins to doubt himself later in Blade Runner.
• Both protagonists become fugitives: Murdoch framed for murders, and Deckard and Rachael due to a change of heart about replicant rights.
• In both films, characters guard against capture while uncovering mysteries that concern identity.
• Both films explore the creation or manipulation of humanlike life by scientists or extraterrestrials.
• Tyrell aims to control replicant identities by making their identities subservient to primary functions.
• The Strangers manipulate the memories of the inhabitants.
• Deckard and Murdoch question which schemes they are involved in as they try to understand their identity.

Philosophical Themes

• Science fiction explores philosophical themes and topics, such as justice, love, and the conditions of personal identity.
• Blade Runner introduces what it is to be human based on the status of replicants.
• In Dark City, the Strangers perform experiments to discover what is unique about humans.
• Tyrell and J. F. Sebastian are able to engineer lifelike creatures.
• Replicants mimic humans in every way except for their emotions and desire to live as humans.
• Tyrell's goal is to create creatures who can act autonomously for specific tasks
• A failsafe was built in to prevent replicants from living long beyond their four-year lifespans.

Memory and Identity

• The Strangers experiment with complex memory injections in Dark City to test human identity.
• Implanted memories can change an individuals identity
• Blade Runner's replicants are given implanted memories for coherency.
• Memory is essential for action and provides a sense of value for each individual.
• Implanted memories give replicants a false, and concocted, sense of self
• The replicants' desire to project themselves into a future is the cause for the revolt of the Nexus 6 Models.
• Replicants's short lifespan is to prevent more complex emotional and personal relationships.
• Memories give replicants difficulty in controlling themselves, especially when those memories prove to not be real

Emotions and Memory

• Blade Runner and Dark City ask if memory plays a role in an individual's identity.
• When understood cognitively, feelings or emotions need not be involved at all.
• A central issue is whether the human or emotional aspect is what defines a human.
• Ultimately, the emotional aspect defines a human due to their ability to act for other's sake.

The Question of Human Identity

• Replicants and inhabitants demonstrate questions about the relationship between body and mind and memory in understanding human life.
• Memories can prove to be unreliable, but emotions dictate how one acts for a better experience.
• Both films focus on the physical evidence to back up the memories of the replicants and the humans.
• Dark City expands upon the physical evidence for the implanted or false memories.
• Deckard may or may not be wholly human.
• Despite the programming, both Deckard and Murdoch have emotional relationships.
• Both films suggest that memory isn't as important as the emotions and desires that prompt action.
• Blade Runner initially positions viewers in relation to Deckard with the implicit understanding that he is human.
• The film undermines and reverses this understanding so that we come to recognize the replicants as those who embody the values we believe define what it is to be human: empathy, trust, loyalty, love.
• Dark City presents us with a protagonist we might believe to be a serial murderer.
• The film reveals Murdoch to be a quite different individual whose future is also determined by his empathy, trust, loyalty and love.