REPLICANT EPIPHANIES
“I have seen myself backward.” Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly.
In Hampton Fancher’s original screen adaptation1 of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K Dick, Rick Deckard — a ‘blade-runner’ or police assassin hired to hunt down rogue androids — is instructed to go to the Tyrell Corporation headquarters to test their latest model, the Nexus 6. His task is to find out whether his equipment, the Voight-Kampff machine, still works on a state-of-the-art replicant produced by a corporation whose motto is ‘More human than human’. Has the difference between android and human now narrowed to the point where it can no longer be detected? Can technology still distinguish between natural human and designed replicant?
At the huge, pyramid-shaped Tyrell Corp building, Deckard is greeted by a poised, beautiful young woman and escorted into the presence of the CEO of the corporation, Dr Eldon Tyrell. The great man requests that Deckard run a control test on a human subject first. His assistant Rachael will oblige.
The Voight-Kampff test consists of a series of questions designed to elicit an emotional response. Rather like a lie-detector, the machine correlates questions and answers to involuntary physiological responses, in this case by detecting micro-movements of muscles around the eye, and measuring capillary dilation, fluctuation of the pupil and dilation of the iris.
The test on Rachael takes much longer than usual, suggested by the use of montage. In novice screenwriter Hampton Fancher’s original 1981 screenplay, when Deckard finally switches off the machine, Tyrell immediately asks him for his conclusion, and the two men proceed to discuss Rachael’s identity in front of her, with brutal insensitivity to her feelings. Rachael has been revealed — if the machine still works — to be a replicant. This is a devastating revelation for Rachael, who thinks she is a real person, with her own memories and dreams.
Deckard removes the adhesive discs from her cheeks and switches off his beam.
DECKARD: Lights please.
The lights come on.
TYRELL: Well?
DECKARD: If she is, the machine works.
TYRELL: The machine works. She is.
Rachael sits very still. Except her eyes — they go to Tyrell and hang on.
He stares back at her as he speaks.
TYRELL: How many questions did it take?
DECKARD: Thirteen.
Rachael sits rigidly in her chair, as the ground crumbles around her, her big mermaid eyes locked with Tyrell. His voice is quiet and strong, mesmerizing. She’s hanging by a thread.
Deckard watches with a bad taste in his mouth.
DECKARD: She didn’t know?
TYRELL: Memory implant. She was programmed. But I think she has transcended her conditioning. I think she was beginning to suspect.
Rachael nods fixedly. Careful not to let go her grasp.
TYRELL: How many questions does it usually take, Mr. Deckard?
DECKARD: Five, maybe six.
Slowly, carefully, Tyrell unlocks his gaze from Rachael and turns towards Deckard, who is starting to put away his equipment.
Rachael sits there very pale and expressionless, her feet flat on the floor; alone is the word.
After seven months of script development (prolonged by ongoing industrial action at the studio) the relationship between Fancher and the director Ridley Scott, two brilliant but demanding men, had deteriorated to the point where the writer walked off the project. At that point Scott called in David Peoples, a screen-writer with a long list of credits, to complete the changes that he still thought necessary.
Peoples found the script quite brilliant, and retained most of it as it stood.2 The changes he did make are all the more interesting because they are relatively few. Sometimes he adds a line or two of dialogue, such as the additional question in the Voight-Kampff test undergone by the replicant Leon in the opening scene.
HOLDEN: Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about… your mother.
LEON’s response, taking its final form only in the shooting script, is perfect:
My mother? Let me tell you about my mother.
Explosive gun-shots, deafening in the confined space, confuse us for a moment, and Holden is already reeling backwards in his chair before the viewer realizes what has happened. Now Leon stands, and puts another bullet in him.
A number of Peoples’ changes consist of breaking up longer scenes into shorter ones and interleaving them to ‘delay the pay-off’. Rachael’s Voight-Kampff test is a case in point. As brilliantly as Fancher evokes Rachael’s sensations as she learns the truth about herself — that she is not, as she thought, a real human, but rather a designed commercial product — he does it mainly through narration. For Peoples it won’t do, dramatically. For one thing, the emotional impact of the revelation is entirely internal, conveyed through Fancher’s narrative, and needs to be externalised somehow, or go to waste. Secondly, this moment, the intense pathos of the replicant’s awakening to reality, is just too beautiful to consume in a single scene. It must be savored a little longer, dramatized, made more playable.
So at the end of the test Peoples has Tyrell ask Rachael to leave the room before any more is said. Looking somewhat offended, she wordlessly complies, the rhythm of her high heels on the floor loud in the silence. Now the creator and the natural enemy of this beautiful golem will discuss her in private, and the combination of her hurt expression as she leaves and Peoples’ crisp, rich dialogue conveys the pathos of her situation without yet revealing her own response.
DECKARD: She really doesn’t know?
TYRELL: She’s beginning to suspect, I think.
DECKARD: Suspect! How can she not know what she is?
TYRELL: Well, we began to notice in them a strange obsession.
Tyrell is pacing now, lecturing.
This obsession, he goes on to explain, is with the past, with memories as the source of identity. But replicants, hatched in adult form, have a life-span of only four years, not enough time to develop a stable sense of identity. Beyond four years, they have a tendency to develop dangerous emotional responses to their situation: they rebel.
“After all, they are emotionally inexperienced, with only a few years to store up the experiences which you and I take for granted. If we gift them with a past… we create a cushion or pillow for their emotions… and we can control them better. In the case of Rachael, I simply copied and regenerated cells from the brain of my sixteen-year-old niece. Rachael remembers what my little niece remembers.”
As Deckard remarks, we’ve come a long way from Dr Frankenstein.
Memory implantation and erasure is a motif in Philip K Dick’s science fiction, associated with a powerful theme of identity – and the breakdown of identity – throughout his work. It is pervasive in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel from which Fancher distilled his original ‘Dangerous Days’ screenplay, which eventually became Blade Runner. Dick’s original vision was broader in the novel than Fancher has time to explore in his screenplay. There was a state religion, a whole culture built around simulation, and the main development in the plot was that Deckard came to realise that he wasn’t just pursuing a handful of rogue androids but that in fact the city had been completely infiltrated by replicants, who had duplicated all its key institutions. There was a police department and a replicant police department, a City Hall and a replicant City Hall, and so on. Dick’s vision, then, was of a burgeoning parahuman world, replicating exponentially. Fancher’s script had to cut most of this material while retaining enough to make a sense of dizzying replication continue in the mind of the viewer, and to radically focus these ideas into a cinematically engaging plot.
The most spectacular choice he makes is to retro-style the storyworld as futuristic film noir, creating a cyber-punk feel which Ridley Scott is able to exploit brilliantly in painting a simultaneously futuristic and dilapidated Los Angeles which is both strange and completely convincing. The central character is remodelled as a cynical private eye along the lines of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. This enables him to plug into two powerful narrative archetypes which electrify the plot, though the second of these only emerges through the collaborations with Peoples and Scott (Fancher having rejoined the project after the falling out over script revisions). The final product’s haunting originality comes in large part from the fact that it ranges beyond the ‘Monster’ archetype implicit in this story-type, from the Jewish golem legends through to the latest science fiction.
What Fancher does is root the story much more firmly in the narrative archetype3 of Comedy: that is, the love story, as in La Comedia Divina de Dante. The original novel has a much weaker archetypal anchor, and drifts badly as a result. Fancher reached into that mess and pulled out a plot well known in theatre from Roman times. Two lovers yearn to be together but cannot, usually for reasons of who they are, and usually enforced by a dark, unrelenting father or other patriarchal figure. One of the lovers is from the wrong class, or the wrong family, or is poor, or a slave — or, in this iteration, one of them is not actually human. Romeo and Juliet, The Great Gatsby, Avatar. Lots of intrigue, lots of disguise — playing rich, playing dead, playing blue. That’s how it is when you’re in love with the ‘wrong’ person. The farce will resolve, in the end, to wild joy, but either way you have to laugh, and that’s how this type of story became known as Comedy.
The deep theme of this archetype is always identity. If a love story doesn’t have this theme, it lacks archetypal power. Our multiplying identity issues must be resolved. You cannot expect to find true love, to paraphrase Christopher Booker in The Seven Basic Plots, if you don’t know who you truly are.
As in Blade Runner.
She’s on his kill-list. She doesn’t know who she is. Still refuses to believe it. She comes to Deckard’s apartment to show him a photograph of herself as a little girl, with her mother. (It’s David Peoples who is threading this ‘mother’ leitmotif throughout the screenplay.) And Deckard, wearily, proves to her that her life-story is not hers and she is therefore not real, by quoting examples of her intimate childhood memories in a beautiful passage of dialogue, ending with another little chime on the bell of the mother.
DECKARD: Remember that bush outside your window with the spider in it?
Rachael looks up at him.
DECKARD: Green body, orange legs… you watched her build a web all summer.
RACHAEL: Yes.
Her voice is getting very small.
DECKARD: One day there was an egg in the web.
Rachel nods faintly.
RACHAEL: After a while, the egg hatched and hundreds of baby spiders came out and ate her. That made quite an impression on me, Mr Deckard.
DECKARD: You still don’t get it? […] Implants. They’re not your memories, they’re Tyrell’s sixteen-year-old niece’s.
Rachael doesn’t say anything — she can’t.
DECKARD: He’s very proud of them. He ran them on a scanner for me.
Rachael just stares at him, stunned and barely holding on.
And Deckard lets her run. Her disillusionment is not his problem. He’s already done her a favour by not killing her. She’s not even human, after all: a simulacrum; a replicant. A ‘relational object’.
As she now knows. She’s had her awaakening, her anagnorisis. She’s staggering under it, clinging to an old photograph, knowing none of it’s real. The plot now must proceed by steps to the point where it is finally proved to Deckard that he too has, shall we say, identity issues.
As do I.
And as do you.
The difference between life and story is that the awakening doesn’t happen all at once. With me it took many years. The Western middle classes, I now know, became the most deluded, self-deceiving people in the world, and that’s where I come from.
The generation born in the post-war years was a threat to the psychopathic elites, the exploiters and enslavers who feed on human suffering and are sustained by the war-system we live under. Numerous, healthy, prosperous, educated, the Baby Boomers had to be managed, and we were: diverted, hoodwinked and sent down a blind alley — or rather a labyrinth where we wandered for years. And that was the Counterculture, or rather the Counter-Counterculture with its pantheon of charismatic spooks and sexy surrogates, its ‘life-time actors’ and ‘agents in tie-dye’, deployed to pre-empt our challenge with chemistry and weaponised anthropology, in an extraordinary example of social engineering.
You see, ‘peace and love’ was never exactly what it was about, that huge mobilisation — beat-poets and social theorists, chemists and anthropologists, freak-dancers and Young Turks, sound-engineers and disc-jockeys, TV-presenters and underground magazines and artists and hair-dressers and cult-leaders. None of it would have happened without the drugs, and the drug culture wasn’t blowback but an engineered vector through which ‘entheogenics’ and ‘psychedelics’ (new names for psychotogenic or psychotomimetic drugs — i.e., substances which induce or mimic the effects of psychosis) were to enter society, along with a new sexual paradigm designed to destroy the family, and a new aesthetic to debase the culture through an ‘archaic revival’ and New Age mysticism. It was exhilarating but ultimately destructive, or deconstructionist by intention, a highly effective intervention to divert a generation and undermine the anti-war movement; to produce dissociation and ultimately social atomisation; to isolate and target the young, alienating them from their elders; to ‘unfreeze’ social structures, in preparation for deep change.
It was author and ethno-mycologist Jan Irvin, building on the ground-breaking work of the late lamented Dave McGowan in his books Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon and Programmed to Kill, who discovered the smoking gun when it comes to deep-state involvement in seeding the drug culture. In researching the work of John Allegro, the Dead Sea Scrolls scholar whom Irvin also publishes, he stumbled across documents which revealed beyond any doubt that the banker and journalist Gordon Wasson was working for the CIA when he undertook his heavily publicised trip to Mexico to ‘discover’ the magic mushroom in 1957; Henry Luce’s Life magazine featured the adventure as its cover story, ‘Seeking the Magic Mushroom’, May 13th, 1957. Wasson, in fact, was engaged in Sub-project 58 of MK-ULTRA.
Irvin’s discovery confirmed with documentary evidence what McGowan suspected: that MK-ULTRA was not just a project to create robotic killers, couriers and sex slaves, but something much broader, a social engineering project on a vast scale — a project, in fact, to redesign society. Irvin has continued to unearth facts which force us to re-evaluate not just our concepts of government, society and culture, but our stories about ourselves.
His research also brought interesting results at the architectural level of MK-ULTRA, by mapping connections around institutions such as the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, the Bohemian Grove and its sister institution the Century Club in London, and key players like Edward Bernays and Marshall McLuhan. In doing so, he has made what may turn out to be a second major discovery: that right at the centre of this web, we find none other than Aldous Huxley. Was he merely observing developments, or did he, as Irvin speculates, participate as one of the architects of the psycho-social cultural engineering project called MK-ULTRA?
Huxley came from the famous Darwin-Wedgwood-Huxley dynasty, closely associated with eugenics. His brother Julian was an evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and internationalist and one of the founders of the United Nations. Brave New World is presented by the author as a prescient warning, the prophecy of a future whose anti-human horror will be disguised by consumerism, hedonism, bio-engineering and conditioning. In view of his insider status, we should understand that in Huxley we are not looking at prescience, exactly: unless you can call a blueprint the architect’s amazing premonition of the building.
As Irvin says, drugs were the counter-culture; none of it would have happened without LSD; we already knew that Timothy Leary was a CIA asset; more shockingly, we now find evidence suggesting that Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg were ‘agents in tie-dye’ as well. The Doors and Frank Zappa and ‘Papa’ John Phillips and Dave Crosby and virtually all the leaders of the West coast hippy movement seem to have been placements, parachuted into LA along with all the logistical support they needed. There are varying degrees of certainty about the performers and musicians who gravitated towards Laurel Canyon; and of course there are different levels of participation, witting and unwitting agents and so on. The social, commercial and technological contexts (the venues and contracts and session musicians and dance troupes and FM radio and strobe lights and sound systems) sprung up around the new music with remarkable rapidity. And we know that the scene was riddled with weird crime and cult activity, Charlie Manson’s Family et al, and that there was also a strange military presence, not just in the family backgrounds of the key players, but physically in the form of Lookout Mountain Air Force Base, which housed state-of-the-art film studios with lavish production facilities. The swirling creative mess of the Counterculture was not spontaneously seeding itself but being subjected to steerage, and at the same time its growth and impact was being massively accelerated and amplified.
Legions of pied pipers were deployed; they had the soundtrack, the attitude, the look and the vibe, to lure the children away from the village. And I was one of them, of course — how would I not be? But it turns out I never rebelled, as I thought I was doing, but enthusiastically followed instructions – or ‘suggestions’, shall we say? All they had to do was show me a forbidden path, and I was gone.
And there’s the epiphany. It’s not easy to live with. The knowledge itself is psychotogenic, you might say. I fell for it, hook, line and sinker. Through drugs and music, the project altered my outlook and shaped my life, turning me, over time, through pseudo-psychosis and addiction, into a force for disintegration.
As Dick puts it in A Scanner Darkly:
Substance D is for Dumbness, Despair and Desertion – desertion of you from your friends, your friends from you, everyone from everyone. Isolation and loneliness… and D is finally Death. Slow death from the head down.
Part of the fascination of Philip K Dick, in retrospect, is the way he intuited the realities of his own time in ways not appreciated until much later. His most interesting figurations often turn out to be real, a fact of which we are becoming increasingly aware: real, already, in the fifties and sixties, when the mind control projects of MK-ULTRA were taking effect. What was coming was already there, but all presented futuristically, of course. Memory erasure. Memory insertion. Screen memories. With the technology that existed now, you could make anyone remember anything. Hell, you could make a man remember walking on the moon.
How did he know? What little Bluebird sang to the Horse-lover? How did Mr Fat see into the heart of the Artichoke?
Professor Darrell Hamamoto, formerly of UC Davis, makes the point that as a child Dick lived in Berkeley and traveled to San Francisco every week to attend weekly therapy sessions at the Langley-Porter clinic, the elite extension of UC Berkeley Medical School and the same clinic attended by Allen Ginsberg.
‘Probably an early example of what later became known as the indigo children. [Dick] was a genius as a child and he was being tested very early on for possible intelligence work, just as people with extraordinary athletic ability like Eldrick (‘Tiger’) Woods was being tested very early on through his father Earl Woods, whom we know was in the intelligence area.”
So when you begin to understand that what came out about the CIA’s MK-ULTRA project in congressional inquiries in the 70s was just the tiny tip of a gargantuan iceberg, that the super-soldiers and sex-slaves and torture-proof couriers were just its most spectacular victims, and that the scope of the project was a wholesale reconfiguration of society, the re-engineering of values, norms and relationships… and that you too were an experimental subject, and still are…
When you begin to get an inkling of how everything was weaponised, woven into webs to snare your psyche — music, art, novels, psychology, anthropology, chemistry, entertainment, celebrity, everything —
When it dawns on you how you were gamed and moulded, seduced and traduced by artists of the lie and guides to nowhere… That even your ‘rebellions’ were predicted and promoted, the sub-project of a sub-project of a sub-project…
What will you do?
We weren’t the first generation to undergo radical remodelling, nor the last. The psy-ops never stop; they just keep rolling in, like waves on the beach. These days the mind control is automated, and comes without merry pranksters handing out acid tabs at rock festivals. Like everything else, it’s gone online. It’s all dataism, now that we’re all just hackable animals, in Yuval Harari’s despicable phrase. Robert Epstein calls it S & M — Surveillance and Manipulation. It’s dull stuff, but highly effective. But with the new mind control something has become clear, which wasn’t, to me, until recently.
‘Who would have thought I was so important?’ asked a skeptical friend of mine. Indeed — who’d have thought it? But he is, I am, you are.
David Peoples nailed it with the killer line he gives to Rachel, once the reality of who she really is has sunken in. She has just saved Deckard’s life by shooting Leon. Back at Deckard’s apartment, she watches him pour himself a drink. His hands are shaking. “It’s part of the business,” he tells her. “I get it bad.”
And she answers, coolly, bitterly.
“I’m not in the business…
I am the business.”
And that goes for all of us, now.
That realisation activates a second narrative archetype, which has been operative on a subliminal level from the beginning of the film — the archetype of awakening, of rebirth, in which the protagonist is found initially in a suspended state, neither dead nor fully alive: sick, or imprisoned; emotionally dead, comatose or entranced; disconnected from reality. Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, The Snow Queen… Peer Gynt, A Christmas Carol, Crime and Punishment, Death and the Maiden. Clues have been threaded through the narrative, depending partly on Rachael’s questions — Have you ever taken the test yourself, Mr Deckard? — and conclusively through the oblique commentary on events provided by Deckard’s police handler, Gaff, and his habit of making little origami figures out of silver foil, or whatever is to hand. We see three — a chicken, when Deckard is trying to avoid the assignment; a stick-man with an erection, when he is falling for Rachael; and finally, in the last scene of the film, a unicorn. Earlier the audience has been privy to a reverie in which Deckard imagines a beautiful wild unicorn — the thought came out of nowhere, and nobody else knows about it — but somehow Officer Gaff does. Which means… Screen memories. Implants. He’s very proud of them. He ran them on a scanner for me.
So when you understand how you were turned into an obedient golem, an innocent Eloi, zoned-out zombie-child at the coming-out party of the Hellfire clubs… When you finally see how the culture has been engineered, and through it, you… And when you begin to wonder who designed your mind, who scratched the Aleph on your forehead and can erase it too…
That’s your replicant epiphany.
Blade Runner is about the mass-production of synthetic human beings.
Natural human beings are unique. They are born from their culture — the culture is the mother. It evolved naturally in a particular race or people in a particular time and place, developed over time as a collective response to nature and situation and climate and history and other species and neighbouring societies. And somehow, out of the random sorting of recombinant strands, randomly, organically, miraculously, came you.
Didn’t you?
Or was the culture supplanted by something else?
You thought you were accidental, natural. Just the way you are.
You thought you were human.
What will you do? When you understand that you, too, were mass-produced?
You’ve got a choice. You can sit rigidly in your chair while the floor crumbles around you. Or you can stare for a moment at the tinfoil unicorn in your hand, nod as if this merely confirms what you were beginning to suspect — and head for the elevator where a beautiful woman of your own kind is waiting for you.
Or you can look up at your interrogator, and say: “My mother? Let me tell you about my mother.”
Blade Runner screenplay by Hampton Fancher, 24th July 1980
Blade Runner screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, 23rd February 1981
I’m drawing here on the framework elaborated by the late great Christopher Booker in his superb taxonomy of narrative archetypes, The Seven Basic Plots — Or, Why We Tell Stories, Continuum 2004.
Another fantastic piece there Lethal. It's my son's 14th birthday today and I think we'll watch Bladerunner to go with the birthday cake, snacks and Dad's special spaghetti recipe. He's a smart kid and knows how I think, so he'll probably guess the end before it's half way through.
It's not just us as individuals who are replicants is it? It's our culture too, both the one we grew up in and rebelled against, and also the one we were artificially induced to create. It was the same for our parents who marched off with guns and shot at other kids parents who they too had been artificially induced to regard as evil, and vice versa. Our grandparent's too faced similar social conditioning. Everything, our selves, our culture, our history and our perception of reality are all replicants based on implanted memories. Each generation implanted with new and updated historical memories to suit the new replication of history and culture that the social engineers design for us. Each generation believing the conceit that these changes are just the natural caprices of nature and arise organically from themselves. They don't. It is all meticulously planned and ruthlessly implemented to achieve the desired outcome. What we believe is our culture is really the invisible bars of our cage.
Beyond a certain point in history the fog of deception brought about by these constant adaptations and resets becomes so opaque that it becomes impossible to see and know what really happened. Indeed, so complete is the illusory reality replicated in the media that we can't really even be sure what is happening today. This condition is not new. It has been the mechanism of control since the dawn of history, whenever and whatever that actually was.
So, to answer your question:
"What will you do? When you understand that you, too, were mass-produced?"
I can only speak for myself. It was a long, lonely and arduous journey. Indeed, akin to the hero's journey. A journey which involved the often painful unravelling of almost everything I thought I knew and believed. A journey whose end lies not in some kind of Valhalla, but rather in a wasteland. I felt utterly unmoored in both space and time. None of the normal reference points with which I had described my image of the world held up to scrutiny. It was shocking. But then, it slowly dawned on me that it was also liberating. Letting go of attachment to what turns out to be a tissue of lies and a sticky web of deceit frees us to start afresh and see the world anew. Yes, the world of human material desires is controlled by a global organised crime syndicate, a gang of thieves, murderers and fraudsters, who have long perfected the art of conology. I call them variously the Criminocracy or the Conjuror Kings. So what? That is the sordid nature of material desire. It can be no other way. At least now I recognise and know not to believe their lies. That is no small blessing.
What to do about it?
There is nothing I can do. Each must take the journey for themselves. I cannot wrest the world from their malevolent clutches. I can only free my own mind. I can write about it, but I don't know if that helps. However, allowing myself to be dragged down by the unquestioning masses whose willful ignorance and mental cowardice is so profound that it amounts to collaboration with their oppressors, certainly won't help either. In fact, I'm getting tired of the topic now. I'm trying to find something else to write about nowadays. I know that the vision will always be there, implicit if not directly stated, in everything I say. And that will have to do for now.
I appreciate your analysis. There is good reason why this story is so over analyzed.
It’s like the 9/11 story. It was either an inside job, or it might as well have been as the results in either case seem identical.
So we’re either biomech fabrications or we might as well be, as the consequences in either case are indistinguishable.
Therefore, a clear, transcendent distinction between good and evil is necessary. ~C.G.