Abstract
This paper examines Ridley Scot’s 1982 film Blade Runner as a cautionary tale relating to the role of law in a technology augmented environment. Blade Runner presents a regime that uses law first in order to create beings with superior abilities and pre-determined longevity, and then to define them as non-human or non-beings, devoid of legal personhood, and thus exploitable. Blade Runner, alongside other cultural representations created within the science fiction genre, serves as illustration of a society that brings together technology and law, in order to maintain unaccountable and arbitrary employment of authorized power. It provides a warning against uninhibited use of technology in order to crate genetic inferiority, and calls for careful scrutiny of the overt and covert functions of law, as new technologies gradually become available.
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Notes
- 1.
It should be noted that Blade Runner has several versions. Two of the others are the 1982 version (Domestic Cut), and the 2007 version (Final Cut). For elaboration, see Bukatman (1997: 33–40).
- 2.
The correlation and the differences between the film and the novel gained much attention, see for example Heldreth (1991: 40–52).
- 3.
For a discussion on the test, which is called “Voight-Kampff test”, see Francavilla (1991: 12–13).
- 4.
‘The unicorn hallucination’ was added to the Director’s Cut version of 1992. Some maintain it implies that Deckard is a Replicant, see Bukatman (1997: 81–82).
- 5.
In the 1982 version Deckard and Rachael are floating over natural scenery in the last scene, and in the background one can hear Deckard say that Rachael has no expiration date. See the screenplay by Fancher and Peoples (1981: 23).
- 6.
The Webster dictionary (online) defines a robot as a machine able to perform a complex series of actions, sometimes resembling a human in outer appearance, but always incapable to human emotion. A Cyborg is a bionic human, a combination of flesh and blood and machine. An android is defined as a mobile robot, usually with a human form. The word ‘android’ derives from the Greek word androids, meaning ‘similar’. The similarity to humans makes the android more than a machine, but because it is similar and not identical, it remains less than human. In The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (online) an android is defined as an artificial creature made of biological material and having human characteristics, also called a humanoid. The android theme is present in the seminal Frankenstein narrative. The novel Frankenstein is considered as an inspirational source for several science fiction constituting themes. Among them is the notion that creating life in a lab is a dangerous, Hubris-laden act, which is bound to lead towards disastrous consequences.
- 7.
President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical Behavioural Research (1982: 27–28).
- 8.
Human, in this context is a signifier of entitlement to legal rights, and not a signifier for biological uniqueness that is required in order to deserve the legal rights. In that way the Replicants’ aspiration is not to become humans but to gain human rights.
- 9.
The authority to ‘kill and triumph’ the created entities is a fundamental element in Blade Runner as well as in Frankenstein: ‘You, my creator, would tear me to pieces, and triumph; remember that, and tell me why I should pity man more than he pities me? You would not call it murder, if you could precipitate me into one of those ice-rifts, and destroy my frame, the work of your own hands’ (Shelley 1974, orig. 1818: 141).
- 10.
‘I think, therefore I am’ are the famous words of seventeenth-century French philosopher Rene Descartes, also known as the ‘Cogito’ (meaning ‘I think’ in Latin).
- 11.
Human is? is both the title of the novel and the story. For elaboration on Philip K. Dick’s great interest in androids, see Barlow (1991).
- 12.
The question whether Deckard is a Replicant is the most common one among viewers. Some maintain that the 1992 director’s cut includes clues ascertaining that Deckard is indeed a Replicant. However, as Bukatman aptly posits, the question ‘who is human?’ is more about us than it is about Deckard, and in any case ambiguity about “real” status is essential to the narrative. See Bukatman (1997: 80–83), for elaboration see Žižek (1993).
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Almog, S. (2013). When a Robot Can Love – Blade Runner as a Cautionary Tale on Law and Technology. In: Hildebrandt, M., Gaakeer, J. (eds) Human Law and Computer Law: Comparative Perspectives. Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6314-2_9
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