Engl 831: Prof Cindy Selfe
03/05/01

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• Ethical responsibilities as creators and to our creations
• Frankenstein, Milton, Blake
• (sinner in hands of angry god-- HF dangling over edge)
• What does it mean to be human?
• Can machines be more human than humans?
• More humane
• Meaning of technological literacy
• Beyond binaries
• Implications of our uses of technology
• Being critical about our own relationship with technology
• Literacy as a means to transcending the class struggle
• Ridley Scott's focus on alienation (also in other movies such as Alien, Thelma and Louise)
• Struggle against entropy (Kipple)
• Division between humanities and sciences (MA/MAPC etc)
• Turin tests-- when do machines become human/alive?
• To what degree are humans turning into machines?  Syndromes where people think they are machines; need to be plugged in.
• Quest in Blade Runner for the father and for the origin (typical for identity)
• Shortened life span in BR (Also in RUR)  Is part of what makes us human our mortality?
• Master/slave stuff
• When Deckard sleeps with Rachel is this a suture-- point where cross-over happens?
• Possible Sutures I noticed watching the movie:
• The eye is the first horizon--our eye watches Baty's eye, watching the movie watch the landscape
• Roy tries to get Chew to empathize with him ("if you could only see what I've seen with your eyes") before they strip his coat off.
• When Deckard kills Zhora, he  recognizes he has a feeling, for Rachel
• Before he is shot by Rachel, Leon tries to get Deckard to empathize with his life: "How does it feel to live in fear?"  When he  dies, he falls over on top of Deckard in a parody of sexual embrace
• The first moment of real connection between Deckard and Rachel is when he sees her tears.  Soon after that, she flees his apt and he picks up the picture of her mom.  For a brief second the picture moves--an empathetic connection so strong the picture comes alive and into time.
• This is parallel in some way to the moment of suture when Roy pulls Deckard up from falling -- at that moment time is reversed as the tape is literally run backwards.
• I noticed last night that frequently the replicants function as teachers-- they keep trying to tell the humans how to identify with them..
• Where does our future lie?  (Heidigger-- go to the "standing reserve" to solve problems; begin sacrificing environment/ humans to solve problems)
• doesn't lie with humans, with nature
Post-apocalyptic rain, dominance of ads, commercial culture

QUESTIONS WE WANT TO TRY TO ANSWER

• Is Deckard a replicant?
• What's with the unicorns in the Director's Cut?
• What's with the eyes?
• I had some new thoughts here:  Could the red in the replicant's eyes also be thought of as their passion for life?  The first eye we see in the film has a fire reflected in it.  There is loads of fire imagery surrounding Roy-- "Fiery the angels fell"... "The light that burns half as long..."  This time through I noticed how often their eyes also seem glassy, as though there was nothing behind them..  But it would contradict the humanistic theme of the movie to say that they have no souls.  Again and again the replicants  request humans to see them through different eyes, or through their own eyes.  Deckard find Zhora though the eye of the camera, the fisheye of the mirror....  It would be ironic if part of what this movie is saying is that what makes us human is our ability to see and to look -- watching the movie makes us human??.

•  My Reading and Discussion Questions on Do Androids Dream and Blade Runner
• Blade Runner and The Postmodern City : Site for SF Film Class
• Topics for class Discussion on Blade Runner
  
  My Bibliography of Works by Philip K. Dick (contains plot summaries of all novels and lists of all short stories)
• Paul Brians Study Guide for the book, Do Androids Dream
• Chapter by Chapter Plot Summary of Book, Do Androids Dream for SF Class
  
  
• My (not totally completed) Site on Cyber-Punk and Donna Haraway for SF Class