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Blade Runner vs. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

By 1318 in 1318's Diary
Sat Jul 09, 2005 at 04:59:18 AM EST
Tags: User Diary (all tags)
User Diary

Philip K. Dick's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP vs. Ridley Scott's BLADE RUNNER.


I've seen Blade Runner a few dozen times and read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep a few times and recently re-read it.

I was struck (again?) by the massive differences in the story line and how the book was true to what appear to me to be very "Dickian" themes and motifs.

For example, in Dick books the main character often has a fucked up job. In DADES the main character is not a cop, not even really a detective, his job is to find escaped robots.

His pay is miserably low and his bounty for killing the robots allows him brief shimmering moments into the respectable middle class world of owning a real animal (a sheep) instead of an electric one.

But why animals? DADES is structured around the fake religion of Mercerism which simply doesn't exist in BR. Mercerism is a strange cult that seems to exist for the sole purpose of affirming the "empathetic union" of life forms. Dick gives us a premise that empathy is a uniquely human quality but confounds this apparent assertion with another idea: what if robots could be fooled into believing they were human and themselves developed empathetic responses. Would they be alive?

The playing with the question of who is human and who is an android bubbles and flips back and forth a few times in classical dickian fashion. He doesn't hand us a simple scenario, build tension and release it. He hands us confusion, an apparent problem, another apparent interpretation of that problem and evidence that one or both may be wrong or suspect.

The TYRRELL corporation in the novel is active engaged in the attempt to subvert the VK test. It wants to confound Deckert and engages in some fumbled manipulative effort to confound him. BR has none of this.

In DADES the Pris character and Tyrrell's niece character are suggested as "doubles" of each other. Deckert sleeps with one of them to enable him to kill the other, we are lead to believe, on the advice of another bounty hunter who doesn't exist at all in BR. However this was a trick to make him lose his will to fight designed by the androids themselves! The classic Dick story reversal.

The most telling line in the novel, and the pinnacle of Dick's style, is when one of the run-away androids says something to the effect that "We're actually escaped mental patients from an east coast mental facility. We all suffer from massive loss of affect and this is all a collective delusion." In one line he undercuts the logical premise for every single action and we are left to ponder that this entire story is a meta-hallucination of the mental patients. And Dick takes this line no further, but instead we are dropped back into the sci-fi world of escaped androids and bounty cops.

In DADES there is a parallel android controlled police force that captures Deckert.

In DADES the performing android is not a stripper who has a synthetic snake perform sex acts on her but instead is an opera singer at the SF Opera House. This massively expresses the sentiment alluded to in the novel: the androids want to live real lives - to sing, to perform, to be loved by the public. They don't want to be off-world colony slaves.

Another huge back plot theme in DADES is that the earth has been fucked in a nuclear war and that radiation is a constant problem (thus the off world colonies which in BR have no point for existing). Loneliness and desolation are themes that punctuate DADES with the problem of massive apartments and housings filled with "kibble" - the effects of people long gone.

A strange recurring motif in Dick books is fertility: in the Game Players of Titan it is strong and in DADES lead cod pieces exist to protect fertility. But not just fertility in the sense of "having children" but in the sense of fertility threatened and strained. Fertility lost or nearly lost.

Women occupy an odd role in Dick books. They are definitely male-centric novels and DADES is no exception. Except that the main (male) characters are so pathetic and human that the poorly explored and portrayed female characters don't seem all that bad by comparison. Deckert's wife (who exists not at all in BR) is a mental case herself. The Penfield Mood Organ doesn't exist in BR.

DADES takes place in San Francisco, but BR is set in Los Angeles. In DADES the large buildings are explicitly empty but in BR it is ambiguosly the case.

In DADES the issue of "chicken heads" - people with radiation induced intelligence problems - is overt. It BR it goes away.

Isidore is a "chicken head" and is the one who befriends the androids. "J.F.Sebastian" is the stand in for Isidore and is made into a "genetic designer" instead with "accelerated decrepitute".
I can see how the Isidore/chicken head thing would be politically insensitive.

It is because of Mercerism and the sanctity of all life that the risk of "retiring" a human being is an amazingly huge criminal possibility.

The lack of empathy for other androids by androids is a telling sign, but then reflects on the problem: why doesn't Deckert care about them?

Overall I'd say that Blade Runner, while visually stunning, did almost no justice to the subtle complexity of the novel.

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I have read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
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Blade Runner vs. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? | 45 comments (45 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)
if you polished this (3.00 / 4) (#1)
by forgotten on Sat Jul 09, 2005 at 05:35:23 AM EST

it might be worth a submission.

--

I can tell you read the story really closely, Deck (2.00 / 3) (#2)
by I HATE TROLLS on Sat Jul 09, 2005 at 05:38:37 AM EST

ert.

+1 SP (none / 1) (#3)
by cygnet on Sat Jul 09, 2005 at 05:47:10 AM EST

Good stuff - perhaps could be more explicitly aimed at people who have seen the film but not read the book.

I love Dick. (3.00 / 5) (#4)
by daveybaby on Sat Jul 09, 2005 at 05:55:29 AM EST

He is one of my favourite authors.

Ah... hang on, i can see how that might sound wrong...

In Dick's books (3.00 / 3) (#5)
by blue car on Sat Jul 09, 2005 at 06:48:46 AM EST

The main character is always married or in the middle of getting divorced and his wife is a pain in the ass and manipulative and taking advantage of him. Women are always evil soulless controlling characters and are treacherous and traitorous.

MORE LIKE PHILLIP K DICKS IN YOUR MOUTH (1.80 / 5) (#6)
by Sigismund of Luxemburg on Sat Jul 09, 2005 at 07:22:34 AM EST

AM I RIGHT FOLKS?


PROPER LITERARY FORM REQUIRES THAT TITLES ARE PLACED IN

    1. ITALICS.

  • ANONYMISED
    Heres a link for you (3.00 / 2) (#12)
    by The Diary Section on Sat Jul 09, 2005 at 08:15:59 AM EST

    That might go some way to explain what Dick was thinking about when wrote DADES here.

    I would like then to ask this: what is it, in our behavior, that we can call specifically human? That is special to us as a living species? And what is it that, at least up to now, we can consign as merely machine behavior, or, by extension, insect behavior, or reflex behavior?

    Hope you find it of interest.
    Spend 10 minutes in the company of an American and you end up feeling like a Keats or a Shelley: Thin, brilliant, suave, and desperate for industrial-scale quantities of opium.

    Now hold on just a minute (3.00 / 2) (#13)
    by rusty on Sat Jul 09, 2005 at 09:03:27 AM EST

    Ok, a lot of the stuff you mention from the book is mostly or wholly absent from the movie (kibble, empty buildings, radiation waste, chickenheads, and some of the pervasive sense of lonliness). But as to whether the movie gets at the real core themes of the book, that depends very much on which version of the movie you watch.

    The released version, with the tacked-on "happy ending" is less clearly related to the book. The director's cut lacks that ending, and well as including a tiny scene that does exactly what Dick does with the "mental patients" bit. Near the end, Deckert finds an origami unicorn left for him by (I think) Tyrell's niece. This refers to an earlier dream he has of a unicorn. So how did she know about that? Is Deckert himself a replicant? It's not clear, but this confusion exactly captures the essence of the book.

    I think both the dream and the origami were cut from the release version, more or less neutering the film. I don't know which one you're writing about here, but it's worth seeing both versions to get a better picture of movie vs. book.

    ____
    Not the real rusty

    Clearly my sarcastic comment wasn't obvious enough (2.66 / 3) (#25)
    by I HATE TROLLS on Sat Jul 09, 2005 at 02:02:48 PM EST

    His goddamn name is DECKARD, for fuck's sake. Deckard. DECKARD. Not fucking "Deckert". What the fuck is that anyway, "Deckert"? Retarded is what.

    On a related note, is 'We Can Build You' (none / 1) (#34)
    by livus on Sat Jul 09, 2005 at 06:56:04 PM EST

    any good?

    I've been waiting for someone to bring up PKD again so I could ask.

    For some reason the title really catches my attention, and I can't find it in borders so I was thinking of getting it from amazon, but if it's one of those annoying ones (like, say, Radio Free Albemuth, which is far too judao-xtian for me) then I'd regret it.

    ---
    HIREZ substitute.
    be concrete asshole, or shut up. - CTS
    I guess I skipped school or something to drink on the internet? - lonelyhobo
    I'd like to hope that any impression you got about us from internet forums was incorrect. - debillitatus
    I consider myself trolled more or less just by visiting the site. HollyHopDrive

    Schism Explained: Check The Titles (3.00 / 2) (#37)
    by CheeseburgerBrown on Sat Jul 09, 2005 at 07:42:19 PM EST

    Well, I guess that's why the two works bear different titles.

    BR is not an adaptation of Dick's novel, it is a film based on Dick's novel.


    _____
    I am from a small, unknown country in the north called Ca-na-da. We are a simple, grease-loving people who enjoy le weeke
    I though the movie (none / 1) (#40)
    by JahToasted on Sat Jul 09, 2005 at 09:35:35 PM EST

    Made the point better. I don't remember the androids in DADES ever having empathy for anything, not even each other. But the scene where Roy lifts up Deckard really shows that. In blade runner you really see that Deckard doesn't really care about who is a replicant and who is a real person. And then you realise that deckard himself may be a replicant too. But by that point it doesn't really matter.

    in the book he just decides to keep a robot frog as a pet. Doesn't quite have the same impact, you know what I mean?
    ______
    "I wanna have my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames" -- Jim Morrison

    This Is a Perfect Example of... (none / 1) (#41)
    by Pluto on Sat Jul 09, 2005 at 11:09:56 PM EST

    A Diary entry that would make a really great and engaging article.

    Do you have any idea of how large the audience is for a discussion of this topic? BTW, some of your insights are brilliant; others may be a tad controversial -- particularly the SF significance of "Electric Sheep."

    Please repost for the larger community.
    _______________________________________
    Burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones... deliberately unsupervised playgrounds for technology itself. -- William Gibson

    Blade Runner vs. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? | 45 comments (45 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)
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