Film Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

Film Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

This film is much more than just an acceptable homage to Philip K

Dick, author of many original science fiction novels, often laced with

philosophical perspectives on reality and human dependencies. The

book, published in 1968, deals with the very postmodern theme of

cultural fatigue in relation to our humanity, of the essential human

quality of empathy, its limits and its contrasts. Human beings

remaining on Earth are propped up by dependence on artificial pets and

their feelings towards one another is contrasted to explore the ironic

nature of how we place our emotions in order to survive. This is the

device and purpose of the concept of androids:

He had wondered as had most people at one time or another precisely

why an android bounced helplessly about when confronted by an

empathy-measuring test. Empathy, evidently, existed only within the

human community, whereas intelligence to some degree could be found

throughout every phylum and order including the arachnida. For one

thing, the empathic faculty probably required an unimpaired group

instinct; a solitary organism, such as a spider, would have no use for

it; in fact it would tend to abort a spider's ability to survive. It

would make him conscious of the desire to live on the part of his

prey. Hence all predators, even highly developed mammals such as cats,

would starve.

Empathy, he once had decided, must be limited to herbivores or anyhow

omnivores who could depart from a meat diet. Because, ultimately, the

empathic gift blurred the boundaries between hunter and victim,

between the successful and the defeated. (p.28)

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...biguity by subtracting the ill-fitting,

unnecessary happy ending. Instead we may wonder whether the unicorn of

hope, love and purity (my interpretation) can live, or deserve to

live, outside the dream and inside such an exhausted, dead-end of a

world. This film is serious; both far-fetched and realistic, bleak in

setting but finally unresolved, hopeful even, striking a powerful

chord with its searching, struggling characters. Crucial aspects of

the human condition are here on display in surely what is a fine

creation.

This essay does not include the vast religious parallels that can be

read into the characters and their actions eg. the replicants as

fallen angels returning to Earth to confront their maker, Batty as a

symbol of mankind, Deckard as God's agent of death and Sebastian as an

intermediary Jesus Christ.