How Blade Runner Changed my Life

(As seen in .)

Sitting in the New Yorker Theater on 88th street and Broadway, having been intrigued and fascinated by the long-running previews, I saw Blade Runner for the first time. I was just out of eighth grade, about to move on to high school, and trying to hold on to a middle-school friendship with a girl named Angela. We'd met to see Ridley Scott's new movie with Harrison Ford. Earlier in the summer, I'd seen 70mm booming previews in the giant Loews' Theaters around Manhattan. My head was still filled with dark-skied images of a dark urban future mixed with muted 1940's radio music. Harrison Ford was a hard-boiled detective in an ever-raining city, dwarfed by several-hundred-story spacescrapers and color TV billboards, with musical accompaniment by the Ink Spots.

I thought the film was quite a failure. There were several voiceovers and explanations in dialogue that insulted the viewers' intelligence, and a few last-minute, fear-driven decisions to lighten the touch and the message of the story. Visually, it was a masterpiece, but I would not have been drawn back to the film by its cinematography alone.

Although my grades at the time were still in their pre-highschool mediocrity, and I had only just started that year to read books for pleasure, I was beginning to fancy myself a young intellectual of sorts. I'd grown up assuming my family had money and was just keeping it from me. I had only ever had one torn blazer to wear to school with my plastic clip-on tie and sneakers, but how many kids have the good fortune to attend private school in the first place? I resented not having the money for better clothes, but didn't think I was poor. The five dollars I could never get for the movies struck me as excessive selfishness on the part of my mother; it never occurred to me that she didn't have it. I later learned that our large Manhattan apartment was Columbia University's faculty housing -- that our family was somehow considered Columbia faculty -- and that my private school education was the last evidence of my late grandfather's savings. The cold winter's week-long, left-over, Campbell's casseroles and my mother's non-jokes about the poverty level and single-digit incomes suddenly fit a coherent scheme of reality for me, and I came to understand that our claim to the middle-class of America was not at all economic, but based on old ties to the university system. Not wanting to lose touch with my newly discovered background, I came to think of my education as a personally important thing, far more profound and significant than the drudgery of middle school. I felt the need to meet the expectations of both my father, a Shakespearean scholar, who had turned from teacher to art dealer to unpublished author and eccentric wanderer in recent years, and my mother, a psychologist (still studying for her Ph.D.), whom I hadn't yet recognized as the soulful, intelligent woman she is. I wanted to realize their expectations while seeming to ignore or reject them. One way to do this was to show a strong aesthetic and critical sense with literature and film. Blade Runner had raised moral and philosophical questions I couldn't ignore.

In brief, a Blade Runner is a cop whose job it is to "retire" fully self-aware humanoid bio-robots -- called replicants -- who have illegally broken ties with their employer/masters. Retirement is enforced by death. Harrison Ford plays a Blade Runner who falls in love with a woman named Rachel, an employee of a megacorporation that designs and produces these human-like androids. Of course, Rachel turns out to be the latest and most sophisticated model of replicant. She doesn't know she's not human, and when he convinces her of her assembly-line history by recounting to her her own "secret memories" -- implants of events which never took place -- she runs away from her corporate employer, hurtling our hero into all the moral dilemmas the movie wants to make evident.

Critical of the movie artistically, I still felt moved by the issues it raises. This is how it was when I began my late-night phone debates with my friend and fellow pre-philosopher, David Miller. We argued about science and astrology, swords and sorcery, and the philosophical consequences of science fiction scenarios. The famous line which I've always felt to be the turning point in my intellectual life was David's "Better a Blade Runner than an Assassin !"

To David, the philosophical questions raised by the story weren't really moral dilemmas at all. Replicants aren't human and it is a person's humanity that makes that person's life sacred. This struck me as a future form of racism -- judging one's worth by genetic or biological background rather than individual responsibility or accomplishments. I was horrified by David's conclusions -- which struck me as an ironic stance for a politically aware, New York black -- and we began to debate the subject for a year. The questions discussed in the Philosophy of Mind are exactly these: who is a person? what is mind? what is self-awareness? how do our physically determined bio-mechanical systems relate to our sense of having a soul, thoughts, freedom, etc.? How do we reconcile mechanism and responsibility?

The summer before entering college, I was drawn to a book called The Mind's I, a collection of essays, debates, and stories about the issues just mentioned. The book helped me shape the course of my Haverford education. Freshman year, I matched Intro. Philosophy with Intro. Computer Science and Intro. Psychology. In semesters since, my major in Philosophy has involved a number of other departments.

I helped design the Computer Science concentration for the Philosophy Department, and have worked and studied with a Psychology professor who organized a forum on The Evolution of Intelligence. The cross-listed Biology and Psychology course I'm taking with him should be called Mind and Mechanism, but is instead called Biological Psychology. We're studying the biological mechanisms of life and behavior, including some learning and locomotive models of artificial intelligence and robotics.

I am presently a teaching assistant for a Bryn Mawr philosophy professor, running problem sessions for his Introductory Logic class. I'm beginning to realize an enthusiasm for teaching, and a definite interest in pursuing it as a long-term goal.

I have seen Blade Runner well over a dozen times. I've studied it so carefully, I sometimes think I know every frame. I still feel it's an amazing piece of visual directing, and I've come to love the characters and story-line as well. The voice-overs and last-minute explanations I've come to ignore, and I watch the film with a nostalgic fondness and respect. Its strongest effect upon me was certainly philosophical, but I can see other influences as well. My general aesthetic is high-tech, dark and ominous.

I've come to think of the anachronistic, multi-cultural and sensuous, post-Information Age world of Ridley Scott and Cyberpunk as a rich playground for the imagination. Granted, this may all seem old-hat and backwards to my 21st-century students when I finally become a professor in a liberal philosophy department somewhere, but I'll keep my finger on the pulse of future philosophy and questions of mind and sentience, long after the science fiction scenarios of my youth have either become the familiar background of a new generation or the cynical prophecy of a past century.