Man-gods, Male Auteurs and Mary Shelly: ‘Blade Runner’ & ‘Poor Things’
Creating life is a risky business, especially if you’re a man.
For a movie set in a decaying industrial dystopia, Blade Runner is strangely beautiful. The use of light is rich in meaning from the flat airless police station, through the palatial and emotionless calm of Tyrell’s office to JS Sebastian’s derelict and desolate apartment block, lit from above by giant adverts on a blimp. It reminds me of Jean-Jacques Beineix’ Diva, another 1980’s film of great visual style, except that Director Ridley Scott and Director of Photography Jordan Cronenweth’s exquisite photography is put to more substantial thematic use. Poor Things is also a visual delight, but Yorgos Lanthimos and Robbie Ryan flood the sound stage with light and colour to show off the film’s theatre styled art direction. Poor Things confidently captures a half-imaginary historical place with a look that pits Pre-Raphaelite reactionary idealism against the super modern irony of surrealism. In both Scott’s techno-noir and Lanthimos’ concrete symbolism, the form and the content combine to highlight the unnatural and artificial.
Blade Runner tells a near future story of ‘synthetic humans’ hunted down and summarily executed. Meanwhile, real humans are busy emigrating from a crumbling and exhausted Earth to colonies in space. A fictional machine designed to look and behave like a human is a metaphorical device aiming to examine human nature closely. As Cronenberg’s The Fly gives us an insight into ‘insect politics’, so The Matrix reveals a world view of sentient machines, but celluloid androids are always about exploring the boundary between what is human and what is not. The replicants in Blade Runner have become unpredictable and dangerous because their experiences have effectively traumatised them, giving rise to human-like emotional responses. Seeing ‘attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion’ has flipped droid leader Roy Batty’s tin lid. The replicants duly turn rogue as machines designed by humans to be like humans often do in stories that seek to reinterpret the Promethean myth.
Mary Shelly gave her 1818 novel Frankenstein the alternative title of ‘The Modern Prometheus’. The book retells this myth at a time of dramatic change, when the Enlightenment is giving way to modernism in European culture. Shelly’s respectable Dr Frankenstein starts out as the epitome of human reason in an age when a tsunami of rationality, empiricism and scientific discovery helped 19th Century elites beat down the superstition and religious habits of the masses. In her scepticism about the new mythology of the infallible male genius, Shelly draws on two key aspects of the Promethean allegory. Prometheus was a Titan, the primordial coarser gods ultimately overthrown by the elevated Olympians. Nevertheless, as a god, Prometheus was surely well within his rights to take clay from the ground and breathe life into it to create humans. Unfortunately, this is where his problems began. The creation of life brings with it a sense of responsibility and, perhaps, unexpected feelings of pity. Good intentions towards ‘his’ creatures led Prometheus to the myth’s second crucial aspect. Once again, as a god of fire, Prometheus may have felt justified in sharing this great power with humanity but power is the ultimate zero-sum game. I get more of it by ensuring others have less of it. The Olympians’ understanding of this basic equation is what unleashes Zeus’ awful punishment on Prometheus.
Promethean fire, as a metaphor, has come to stand for human knowledge and technological progress. Perhaps, elemental fire may be thought of as an early example of what Arthur C Clarke described as a ‘sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic’. As something stolen from the gods, fire establishes an early link between such magic and the divine. Mary Shelly was a contemporary of Michael Faraday, an exemplar of early pioneering experiments in electro-magnetism, perhaps the pre-eminent ‘sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic’ of that age. Faraday was also a chemist and it is chemistry, not electricity, that informs the god-like magic by which Shelly’s creation, Dr Frankenstein, makes life from lifelessness. That women possess the power of creating life naturally, with the blessing of all gods, is an everyday reality that somewhat taunts Frankenstein. To add salt to the wound, it’s the monster’s desire for a female to ‘complete’ him that finally blows up Frankenstein’s man-magic ego trip.
The myth of the tortured and solitary male genius looms over the history of western thought and discovery. The film Oppenheimer tells a twentieth century version of this tale. In both Blade Runner and Poor Things, it is paternalistic men that assume god like power and make sentient self-conscious creatures, while it is their female companions and creations that ultimately suffer. In a sense, any science fiction that involves the unnatural creation of life or life-like entities is, by default, in feminist terrain. One of the most interesting things about the Battlestar Galactica revisioning from the 2000s was the role of gender in Cylon culture. The original mechanical ‘Centurions’, denigrated by humans as ‘Toasters’, were sexless but performed masculinity at every opportunity. In order to beat us at our own game of genocide, the Cylons developed human like entities and made half of them female. The overall purpose is clearly infiltration but, as advanced Cylons, the humanoids also have the advantages of higher consciousness. With the sensations of the flesh comes empathy and the anticipation of human responses. This enables the capacity for strategic thinking and an emotional life of overall purpose, which leads to a spiritual dimension and the need for religion. The female Cylons appear to take a lead in this process of ‘self-improvement’. The quasi-Eves of Cylon femininity can apparently experience love and come equipped not just for sex but for conception; the aping of human reproduction. The role and agency of women come to the fore in all aspects of Battlestar Galactica but especially in the core thematic and metaphorical debate about the nature of gods, humans and the power of life giving.
Battlestar Galactica is Promethean in scope because the Cylons were made originally by humans with no thought of the consequences beyond the benefits of slave labour free from moral judgement. Poor Things leans into the feminist point of view of The Modern Prometheus by having a Dr Frankenstein avatar, Dr Goodwin Baxter, a stereotypical, if somewhat gruesome, Victorian male genius played by Willem Dafoe, create a female life to satisfy his own scientific curiosity. Once again, there is no thought of the consequences. Baxter gets the opportunity to engineer a new life from the unrelated suffering of the domestically abused Victoria Blessington and her unborn child at the hands of a hideous and fully toxic man. Poor Things’ monster feminism relies on a state of nature metaphor. Bella (Emma Stone) starts life as a total tabula rasa that absorbs everything as new knowledge and experience at an accelerated rate, but randomly, with no organising principles. The natural consequence is an innate resistance to the patriarchy, within both household and society, alongside an unrestricted expression of selfhood; for example, a shame free delight in masturbation and sex.
The original book author, screenwriter and director of Poor Things are all men and the film has come in for some concentrated feminist critique, particularly the suggestion that the film’s frequent sex scenes are infected with a ‘male gaze’; that is, broadly speaking, a voyeuristic enjoyment and objectification of the female body. Blade Runner, Oppenheimer, Battlestar Galactica; everything I’ve mentioned so far, save Mary Shelly’s novel, were also wholly authored by men. It goes without saying the film industry’s ridiculous gender disparity regarding key creative and producing roles makes this more likely, but is something about the nature of this particular metaphor also a factor. Are male creatives more inclined to take up narratives that explore the problems of men taking control of life making processes, while women just don’t feel the need? Do male auteurs perhaps share Dr Frankenstein’s subliminal feelings of inadequacy in the face of real-life baby making? Is Bella’s ultimate triumph a partial acknowledgement of these impulses?
The nominal difference between Blade Runner’s androids and Frankenstein’s monster is emotion. Both Blade Runner and Poor Things are interested in the power, unpredictability and irrationality of emotion in humans. How does a species whose progress relies on the logical application of knowledge in a social environment cope with such primitive passions? Androids, as machines, are normally identified with a complete lack of emotion, which can give rise to an apparent ruthlessness, but never anger. The monster is reanimated from human flesh and organs and so its emotions either metaphorically reside in the organs or are a result of the body’s biochemistry. Without the filter of a rational brain trained by life experience, monsters therefore display untrammelled raw emotion. For Shelly’s male monster, the emotions turn to aggression relatively quickly. Poor Things’ Bella, however, is hungry for sensation and exploration. Bella’s emotions often seem to be socially contextualised, she’s affected by the responses of others, while Frankenstein’s monster seems internally driven. The metaphorical gender difference may boil down less to Forbidden Planet’s ‘monsters from the id’ and more to the infantile ego free from any restraint by the id. In Blade Runner, the Voigt-Kampff test differentiates the Tyrell Corporation’s replicants from humans not, as might be expected, by their lack of response but by their inadequate efforts to cope with emotion. Like children, replicants seem at the mercy of their feelings, but unlike children they possess the great destructive power of the flesh monster. In a way, both Blade Runner and Poor Things explore this metaphorical landscape by putting a child’s ‘brain’ in an adult body. However, only the latter has been criticised for it, even though Blade Runner’s Pris (Daryl Hannah) is arguably a spiritual sister to Poor Things’ Bella.
In some ways the controversy illuminates a confusion around the use of metaphor in a scientific context. To translate ideas derived from languages such as mathematics into everyday speech, scientists use both metaphors and models, but these constructs don’t work in the same way. A model embodies a scientific theory, which is the most widely accepted explanation of the behaviour of a phenomenon that holds good for every example that occurs, until it doesn’t. The atom is a scientific model that seeks to explain specific properties of matter in certain defined situations. Scientists use metaphor to assist in contextualising the more obtuse aspects of models. As such, scientific metaphors are subject to the same limitations as metaphors used in any other circumstance. Describing DNA as a ‘genetic blueprint’ is a metaphor that helps to explain how it works, but the scientific model of biological life processes and evolution is far more complex and, therefore, in some areas the blueprint metaphor is misleading.
Unsurprisingly, story tellers play fast and loose with scientific metaphors and even models. In artistic contexts, such as literature and film, the limitations of the metaphor become its assets. The potential for varied interpretation, for misunderstanding, is part of the point. The artistic metaphor is sophisticated lateral thinking, a reckless indication of correlation between disparate concepts that fuels creativity in writer and reader. The model, in contrast, attempts a literal mapping of the sort you often see in complex world building. In this sense, 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale are not metaphors, they’re cautionary models of potential future societies that flow from characteristics of the current society. One of the most dismaying aspects of Lord of the Flies is that it’s both a metaphor and a model. Golding draws parallels between adult and ‘childish’ behaviour, but he also believed the events of Lord of the Flies would literally happen if the restraints of civilisation were removed in the way he describes.
The premise of Poor Things is not a model. It’s not seeking to demonstrate what happens when you put a child’s brain in an adult’s body and get some form of vicarious pleasure out of it. It’s a metaphor exploring the relationship between emotion, rationality and experience, a symbiosis which Tyrell experiments with in ‘vivo’ using Rachael’s false memories in Blade Runner. Frankenstein is less led by scientific metaphors and more a cautionary tale about scientists per se. Science fiction maintains this scepticism from Mary Shelly through to the 21st Century. Scientists are human, the dramatic rules of tragedy apply to them and so we return time and again in science fiction to the role of hubris in men’s downfall.
Regardless of its mythos of ivory towers, science is not isolated; it’s encultured and contextualised by society and its economy. Since the invention of tools, scientific discovery has been wedded to innovation and hence science fiction often features, as motivation, another great engine of human tragedy, greed. Whereas Frankenstein anticipates modernism, it doesn’t engage in any socio-economic critique. Blade Runner and Poor Things, on the other hand, share a connection to a seam of late 20th Century anti-corporate sci-fi that highlights increasing social inequality such as Ridley Scott’s own Alien, Robocop, Demolition Man, Minority Report, Elysium, Hunger Games and Snowpiercer.
“Commerce is our goal, more human than human is our motto”, pronounces Tyrell as he introduces Deckard (Harrison Ford) to Sean Young’s Rachael as if to make this point to a man ground down to the extent that he considers himself more machine than human. ‘More human’ almost translates as less extreme because mostly the replicants tend towards the rational and understandable, whereas humans remain mired in petty prejudice, greed and corruption. Blade Runner, like Elysium, features an earth abandoned by its elites and left to the great unwashed, perhaps foreshadowed by the investment in space travel by the likes of Musk and Bezos. Although a titan of a similar corporate industrial hegemony, a dreadful irony awaits Tyrell as he attempts to usurp the gods and create ‘life’ in his image. The hubris is all Tyrell’s as the patent absurdity of trying to make a powerful machine behave like a human meets its inevitable gory demise in an Olympian tower looking down over a mechanised blasted earth.
Poor Things steps in where Frankenstein can’t to clearly critique the comfortable living of the nineteenth century’s European middle classes as founded on the exploitation of the rest of the world and the creation of an urban underclass. Bella’s encounter with the exploitation of humans takes two forms. Firstly, she witnesses the excruciating labour of the desperate poor as they work themselves to death to avoid starvation. In a juicy irony, she tries to help by appropriating Wedderburn’s (Mark Ruffalo) winnings at gambling, a metaphor for the pre-eminent late-stage capitalist industry of high finance. Her attempts to ameliorate the suffering of the poor fall foul of another highly successful sector of the contemporary capitalist economy; criminal conspiracy. Secondly, in a seedy Parisian underworld, she volunteers to join the exploited underclass herself to sell her body, or rather the body that’s not her body, to men for their pleasure.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the Phillip K Dick novel on which Blade Runner is based, features the faddish religion Mercerism, a conceit that the film omits. The Mercer dream state is a depressing Sisyphean experience, which seems to mechanise human emotion through a lazy technologically enhanced pseudo-empathy of the sort Tyrell is trying to model in replicants. This speaks to a common theme in artificial life stories; as the machines become more human, so the humans become more like machines. This idea is blended brilliantly with the dehumanising aspects of modernist mass production in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. As biological science fictions, Frankenstein and Poor Things approach this theme in a different way. In a sense, to create a monster you have to be a monster, or alternatively the act of making a monster twists the human soul so it becomes indistinguishable from its creation. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World remains a devastating critique of the biological approach to dehumanisation and the mass production of human labour. The themes of monsters indistinguishable from their creators and the implications of mass production (cloning) of biological forms come together intriguingly in the revisioning of Battlestar Galactica.
On the question of the ultimate difference between human like machines and humanity itself Blade Runner is in broad agreement with Battlestar Galactica, as well as AI, Star Trek TNG, Bicentennial Man and Ex Machina. Frankenstein and Poor Things add reanimated corpses to this set. Only human men have the ambition, the subtle cruelty and the recklessness to gift self-awareness to machines. Only a human would create a shadow life with built in dissatisfaction, a Pinocchio that longs to be exactly like its creator in every way but cannot. The artificial life forms of Battlestar Galactica ultimately make their peace with this existential enigma. It’s never quite clear what the ‘God’ of the Cylons represents. If it somehow contains the ‘image’ of their creators, humans, then the Cylons try destroying their god, hating their god, loving their god, fucking their god to make a demi-god, negotiating with their god, and finally decide to coexist with their god. In a similar way, Bella gives absolution to her own tormented creator. The abused turned abuser, Dr Baxter, is forgiven on his deathbed and thanked for what little compassion he showed the souls and body he snatched from oblivion to forge his creation.
Blade Runner’s original release voice over suggests Roy (Rutger Hauer) spares Deckard out of a sudden awareness of the preciousness of life. However, Roy is fully aware of the preciousness of life throughout and comes to Earth at great risk for that reason, killing several humans on the way. Roy’s pursuit and eventual saving of Deckard surely offers a more complicated, multi-faceted symbolism: his ultimate elevation to creator himself by taking responsibility for a life; a final forgiveness for the original human sin of creating artificial life; and an escape from the frustration of forcibly imposed self-awareness, the last gracious wisdom that eludes both his fellow replicants and his demonic creators.
Roy’s ‘death’ scene, despite its magnificence, is not the coda of Blade Runner. Deckard has fallen in love with Rachael and his redemption lies in her rescue and their uncertain future together. Blade Runner 2049 retrofits that uncertainty with parenthood. As with Battlestar Galactica, the human men are rescued from their hubris by the feminine characteristics of their creations. In Poor Things, Bella entirely emasculates her toxic male tormentor and creates a domestic idyll with her husband and prostitute lover. For the male auteurs, the solution to the man, god and creation conundrum comes full circle to the capacity of female artificial lifeforms to become indistinguishable from real human females, particularly in the domain of sex and reproduction. Despite Poor Things and Battlestar Galactica wearing their feminist credentials on their sleeves, this is a reduction of female humanity to biology and not the empowerment which the stories strive to suggest. In the final analysis, only the female creator, Mary Shelly, is unequivocal: if men play god and get involved in creating unnatural life, then everything will go to absolute shit.
