#57 = Volume 19, Part 2 = July 1992
REVIEW-ARTICLE
BOOKS IN REVIEW
Jake Jakaitis
Ridley Scott and Philip K. Dick
Judith B. Kerman, ed. Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott's
Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991. 291pp. $39.95
cloth, $19.95 paper.
This well-indexed collection of nineteen essays plus a rather complete bibliography of Blade
Runner and Androids criticism "attempts to look at the multitude of texts
and influences which converge in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner" (2). This
statement, appearing near the end of Kerman's two page introduction, accurately prepares
readers for a series of essays that, with few exceptions, privilege Scott's film while
defending it against charges that it is flawed or a lesser work than its source novel.
Kerman arranges the essays in four sections--"Social Implications: Blade Runner
as Thought Experiment"; "Genre Issues: Sources and Synthesis"; "Film Sources and
Adaptation Issues"; and "Aesthetics and the Creation of Science Fiction Worlds"-- that
by title further reflect the collection's emphasis on film. Despite this emphasis,
however, Retrofitting Blade Runner is as useful a collection of
essays for scholars and fans of Philip K. Dick as it is for those interested in Ridley
Scott's film and in adaptation issues.
To a large extent, this usefulness is created by Kerman's comprehensive index and
William M. Kolb's bibliography. Because of Kerman's thorough index, readers should have no
trouble correlating arguments regarding virtually any aspect of either film or novel
appearing in this collection; they should also have little difficulty locating further
discussions of both Blade Runner and Androids because of Kolb's annotated
bibliography. His annotating the entries through brief (or sometimes extended) quotes from
the essays, however, has limited value for researchers. Brief summaries of an essay's
broad emphases and purpose are generally more helpful than a few sentences quoted in
isolation as an attempt to cite a thesis.
While Kolb's approach to annotation might be the principal weakness of the collection's
apparatus, his other two presentations contribute significantly to the volume's strength.
His "Script to Screen: Blade Runner in Perspective" provides strong,
detailed discussion of the film as a collaborative effort, as well as an
informative summary of the early film reviews and criticism. His "Blade Runner Film Notes" is an
impressive, exceptionally detailed description of the film based on frame-by-frame studies
of both the film and the Criterion Collection CAV laserdisc. Kolb's keen eye for
details, his transcription of sometimes difficult to follow dialogue, and his
translations of "cityspeak" and foreign language make "Film Notes" an invaluable aid to students and
teachers of the film. I am puzzled, however, by Kerman's decision to place these notes at
the end of the "Film Sources and Adaptation Issues" section, for Kolb avoids
interpretive gestures and remains as objective as possible while relating the film's
details. In my view, this essay placed at the beginning of the section would objectively
aid readers in their responses to the other essays without privileging any particular view
of the film.
This raises yet another issue in the sequencing of the essays. The opening section,
"Social Implications: Blade Runner as Thought Experiment," collects essays
discussing broad philosophical connections between the film and current theoretical
concerns. While this emphasis certainly belongs in the collection, it might have been more
useful to first remind readers of the film's and novel's particulars before expanding to
their broad relation to cultural and philosophical critique. The principal effect,
however, of reserving these essays for later in the collection might have been to expose
them as the weakest among the nineteen essays. After reading Leonard G. Heldreth's
"The
Cutting Edges of Blade Runner" and David Desser's "The New Eve: The Influence
of Paradise Lost and Frankensteinon Blade Runner," essays that
firmly ground their analyses of both film and novel in textual evidence and that justify
discussions of sources and influences through specific allusions in the texts, Joseph Francavilla's
"The Android as Doppelganger" and Marlene Barr's "Metahuman 'Kipple' Or,
Do Male Movie Makers Dream of Electric Women?" seem both reductive and specious in their
reasoning. The former essays, both from "Genre Issues: Sources and Synthesis,"
foreground ambiguity as dominant in both film and novel while citing specific allusions to
Blake, Shelley, or Milton to justify their influence studies and discussions of thematic
concerns. Francavilla and Barr both seem to impose readings not necessarily justified by
either text, apparently because they begin with agendas, biases that they wish to use the
texts to support. Like Marilyn Gwaltney, whose "Androids as a Device for Reflections on
Personhood" also appears in the opening section, they begin with a pro-android bias, then
read events or bits of dialogue out of context while attempting to develop that bias.
While these three essays are provocative and do raise issues relevant to currently
fashionable cultural critiques, they remain unconvincing as responses to Blade Runner.
This tendency is most extreme in Gwaltney's essay. Discussing "personhood" in both
film and novel, Gwaltney ultimately re-conceives both texts as statements alerting us to
animal rights issues and the abuse of animals in laboratory research. At this point, we
have, in my view, exited the arena defined by issues in Scott's film and Dick's
novel. Too many of these opening essays revise the texts to suit their own ends, speak of
the novel only when it's necessary to support an argument not evidenced in the film (or
controverted by evidence in the film), and produce reductive analyses that deny those
ambiguities of identity and humanity central to both texts. Their principal strength,
then, might be in exposing the dangers sometimes inherent in succumbing to current desires
for cultural critique. The text's relevance to culture--both its overt commentary and its
implicit values--can sometimes be erased by a preconceived agenda.
Fortunately, Kerman's "Technology and Politics in the Blade Runner Dystopia"
fulfills the promise of the opening section through an intelligent political analysis that
assesses the implications of "indistinguishable" government and corporate power. She
ties the image of Tyrell as a man "whose fascination with science and his own creative
power totally overwhelms any moral scruples" (22-23) to the exploitation of skilled
subcontractors like Chew and Sebastian, suggesting "severe limits to populist hopes that
falling prices of high technology necessarily lead to 'trickling down' of power" (21).
Kerman's essay addresses technological, political, and moral issues implicit in genetic
engineering as free enterprise and does so through direct citations and convincing
discussion of particulars in the texts. This dual emphasis on close reading and broad
cultural analysis informs most of the remaining essays in the volume.
I have already mentioned the essays by Heldreth and Desser. While defending the film
against charges that it is "the ultimate noir nightmare" or a "film noir
overload," Heldreth examines its relation to three genres, displays a particular knowledge of both
Scott's film and Dick's novel, and stresses both texts' controlled ambiguity in their
treatment of empathy and the question, "What is human?" While Heldreth's distinctions
between noir elements and hard-boiled detective themes might be splitting hairs (his
hard-drinking, terse, but witty professional detective living in two worlds and distracted
by an alluring woman characterizes both film noir and hard-boiled detectives), his
analysis is otherwise pointed and well-argued. Heldreth does not commit the error of
assuming that androids have limited life-spans in both novel and film, as a few other
critics here do, and, unlike Francavilla, he relates his analysis of Batty and Deckard as
doubles or "shadows" to Dickian issues of empathy and the definition of humanity.
Desser's "The New Eve: The Influence of Paradise Lost and Frankenstein on
Blade Runner," one of the strongest essays in the volume, substantiates
virtually every claim with irrefutable textual evidence while situating Scott's film
within a tradition of "serious, philosophical, important works" (53). Desser is one of
only three critics in the volume (the others are C. Carter Colwell and Jack Boozer, Jr.)
to acknowledge that Roy Batty's comments to Chew are paraphrased from William Blake's
"America: A Prophecy" while discussing influences on the film. More important, while his
emphasis is not on feminist analysis, he supports a brief feminist reading of the film
through citations of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's analysis of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
and Linda Williams's Lacanian address to "the Other as an aspect of Self" while reading
women in horror films (63). That is, unlike the critics discussed earlier, Desser invokes
feminist readings and practices when they are clearly relevant to the intertextual issues
raised by both film and novel. The result is a provocative, yet controlled and insightful
cultural critique.
W. Russel Gray's "Entropy, Energy, Empathy: Blade Runner and Detective
Fiction" and Aaron Barlow's "Philip K. Dick's Androids: Victimized Victimizers," the
remaining essays in "Genre Issues: Sources and Synthesis," are also strong. Gray borrows
the concept of "bootlegging" from energy theorists to support his argument that Scott
and David Peoples and Hampton Fancher (the scriptwriters) "revitalize" the private eye
genre by "bootlegging" energy from SF (66-67). The entropy of a decaying popular genre
is delayed or averted, in his view, by a general infusion of SF elements and by
"Deckard's self-investigation, which parallels his outer quest" (63). This emphasis,
like Desser's, incorporates current theory by drawing precise relations among theory and
the basic concerns (empathy and humanity) of both texts. That Barlow's essay is one of the
few here to privilege Dick and his writings comes as no surprise, for his 1989
dissertation is titled "Reality, Religion, and Politics in Philip K. Dick's Fiction."
Barlow clearly identifies Dick as a questioner, not an answerer, and traces his shifting
positions on androids through a detailed survey of the early short stories. Unlike the
pro-android arguments presented in the earlier essays, Barlow's position convincingly
argues that the problem of "distinguishing the real from the fake" (85) is an address to
"androids as mask" (84). At stake in both Androids and Blade Runner,
then, is not the "personhood" of animals or the potential humanity of created beings,
but the question, "What are we?"
Barlow's essay is appropriately placed, for its emphasis on Dick assists the transition
to "Film Sources and Adaptation Issues." While the previous four essays engage intertextual issues, those that open this section stress Dick's personal relation and
reactions to the film while foregrounding filmmaking as a collaborative process. Brooks
Landon's "'There's Some of Me in You': Blade Runner and the Adaptation of
Science Fiction Literature into Film" unravels contradictory reports of Dick's reaction
to the film by noting that his various responses were to different versions of the script
and finally to viewing early film footage. Landon then overrules casual and uniformed
responses to the film as an adaptation through a concise explanation of Dudley Andrews's
three categories of adaptation: "borrowing, intersection, and fidelity of
transformation" (97). The result is an analysis that privileges neither film nor novel
while validating the strengths of both. Gregg Rickman draws on his previous interviews
with Dick to clarify Dick's views on the novel's principal thematic concern ("Deckard is
dehumanized through tracking down the androids" [107]) and to delineate the author's
changing views of the film and its scripts. As a result, Rickman's analysis complements
Landon's. These two essays, along with the contributions by Kolb discussed earlier, are
the strength of this section of the volume. Desser's second essay, "Race, Space and
Class: The Politics of SF Film from Metropolis to Blade Runner,"
attempts to discuss Blade Runner as an uncharacteristically political SF film by
addressing the three motifs listed in the essay's title. Unfortunately, this 11-page essay
only briefly discusses Scott's film before beginning an address to no fewer than a dozen
earlier examples, each evoking one or more of the motifs, but none of them in quite so
overtly political a manner as Blade Runner. The result is more of a catalog of
motifs than a cogent discussion, an essay far weaker than Desser's excellent earlier
analysis.
C. Carter Colwell's "Primitivism in the Movies of Ridley Scott: Alien& Blade
Runner," signals a further weak note in the sources and adaptation section, for his
relation of Benjamin Church's 1716 "tale of regeneration through violence" (127) and
Richard Slotkin's study, Regeneration Through Violence, to Scott's films recalls
the strategies of the essays that open the volume. While Colwell's argument is interesting
up to a point, it holds up more through an act of faith than through any precise relation
between the events of the films or their broad thematic emphases as they are understood by
other critics and Slotkin's theories. Fortunately, this section ends with Kolb's
"Blade
Runner Film Notes," which reaffirms the film's thematic and visual concerns. I
earlier argued that these notes might have been better placed at the beginning of this
section; however, their placement is purposeful, for it prepares us for the emphasis on
visual detail that governs the essays of the final section, "Aesthetics and the
Creation of Science Fiction Worlds."
The strengths of the five essays in this section reflect the strengths of the entire
volume, for despite their overt emphasis on aesthetic concerns in the film, collectively
they implicitly if not overtly enhance our understanding of the novel as well, while also
engaging in broad cultural analysis. Rebecca Warner's response to the film is a personal
interpretation discussing images of entropy, empathy, identity and humanity, themes
central to both Dick's novels and Blade Runner. She is the only writer here to
discuss at any length the role of "waste" in the film, thereby recalling Dick's
"kipple," although she does not apply that term herself. Her view of the film's final
scenes as evidence of "a valid human hope" to be "seen" or "recognized" by another
recalls the small, good things in the Deckard/Iran interaction at the end of Androids
that undercut the novel's final despairing moments. Similarly, Andrew Stiller's defense of
Blade Runner's much attacked Vangelis score evokes moments in the novel not
directly discussed by the critic, for Stiller discusses the background "Hum" everpresent
in Deckard's apartment as an important part of that score. Stiller capitalizes the word
because he believes that the hum "has a life of its own" and that "it radiates
stability, calm, and self-understanding" (200-01). This hum recalls the sound of kipple
that pervades Isidore's apartment complex in the novel and suggests connections not made
by Stiller. While relating Stiller's Hum to the mood of loneliness and despair evoked by
the sound of emptiness and waste in the novel might overrule Stiller's interpretation, it
nonetheless evidences one of the less obvious strengths of Retrofitting Blade
Runner. The strong essays in the volume revitalize our own views of the
novel and film even when we sometimes dispute their findings.
Even weaker essays, like Steve Carper's "Subverting the Disaffected City: Cityscape in
Blade Runner," can function in this manner. Carper argues that "Syd Mead's
brilliant future city proves to contain contradictory elements and fares poorly upon close
examination" (193) in an essay purporting to prove that "no sense of place ever develops
in Blade Runner" (187). His literal-minded critique of the film's set design and
model of the future ignores the traditional symbolic and metaphorical functions of setting
in science fiction. While looking for literal and practical justifications of Mead's
future city, Carper fails to recognize, yet implicitly directs our attention to, the
relation of Mead's "retrofit" cityscapes to the issues of empathy and humanity. John J. Pierce's
"Creative Synergy and the Art of World Creation" then affirms this response to
Carper's analysis by discussing the roles of dramatic exposition and setting in SF and
applauding the film's "visual texture" and "sense of concrete reality" (204) as
elements that contribute to the film's "controlling social vision" (208). Pierce--like
Landon, Rickman, and Kolb--stresses collaborative efforts in producing a total visual
effect that in turn establishes a sense of credibility.
The volume's final essay, Jack Boozer, Jr.'s "Crashing the Gates of Insight: Blade
Runner," is well placed, for it combines detailed textual analysis and discussions
of visual texture with the broad social and political concerns that govern the volume.
Boozer's thesis is "that Blade Runner does not give itself over entirely to
self-sufficient functions, that it does in fact make an issue of representation that
throws the spectator back onto problems of fragmentation and disconnection" (212). He
develops this thesis through both close reading of the film and reliance on the simulationist theories of Jean Baudrillard and the postmodern and political analyses of
Fredric Jameson. Through this analysis, he concludes that the story of Batty and Deckard
"becomes a parable illustrating the attainment of insight through a process of personal
and cultural re-evaluation and revelation" (225). Boozer's analysis reflects the many
strengths and counterpoints the few weaknesses of the entire collection. He applies theory
and cultural analysis when they are relevant to the text. Clearly, simulation is crucial
to both Dick's novels and Scott's film; clearly, we are urged by the texts to view Batty
and Deckard as shadows delineating through their relationship a search for insight and
identity. Boozer, unlike a few of the others in this volume, never forces connections,
never imposes only marginally relevant theoretical concerns on the text, but does produce
an insightful cultural analysis.
"Crashing the Gates of Insight," then, identifies the broad strengths of Kerman's
volume. Retrofitting Blade Runner is an invaluable aid to those
interested in broad issues of adaptation, Ridley Scott's film, Philip K. Dick's science
fiction, and the problematics of cultural analysis. Even when they falter, the essays in
this volume inspire re-evaluation and revelation, not only of Blade Runner and Do
Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but also of important issues in current critical
practices.
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