Falanga, Blade Runner

Blade Runner deals with the outcast in its relation with the humans and their relation to the androids, set in the dystopian universe run by the Tyrell corporation. The androids being created by humans for humans contains an interesting paradox as the androids contain many of the qualities that make humans unique, such as physicality, emotions, and mannerisms. The question then arises, what makes humans more human-like than the very androids we created, since we made them in our image. Since reality and perception of reality are such big motifs in our way of thinking, as exhibited by Freud in his note on the unconscious, the idea of an android being less real than a human is a tough question to answer. Considering humans perhaps don’t have the right to distinguish themselves as a higher power in a god like position to give certain things, such as androids, a place and name within reality. In Terri Murray’s “Our Post-Moral Future?” he claims “Over-emphasizing biological and genetic influences on human behavior implies a deterministic model of human nature that paves the way for conservative changes to society, especially forms of technological social control.” This perfectly describes how we innately look to our biological roots to enforce how we are superior to those around us; even to those we biologically make who are identical to us. The film does a good job at raising this issue in the openness and redundancy in how we enforce what makes a human and how possibly indistinguishable androids are to humans, as evident in the last scene with Roy giving the monologue which exerts powerful meaning and emotion, whilst Harrison Ford is continually neutral and only changes emotions to that of love with ironically, an android. Murray also mentions institutionalizing policies to things beyond people’s comprehension, such as what is real and what makes a human.