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Unfortunately, with Hollywood
Illuminati style, Ridley Scott betrays Phil Dick's
profoundly human message by turning the movie into empathy
for The Machine, when the whole point of Dick's book is the
special empathy human beings have for other living
creatures. Machines repelled Phil Dick:
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Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick
For a long time
he stood gazing at the owl, who dozed on its
perch. A thousand thoughts came into his mind,
thoughts about the war, about the days when owls
had fallen from the sky; he remembered how in
his childhood it had been discovered that
species upon species had become extinct and how
the 'papes had reported it each day -- foxes one
morning, badgers the next, until people had
stopped reading the perpetual animal obits.
He thought, too,
about his need for a real animal; within him an
actual hatred once more manifested itself toward
his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to
care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an
object, he thought. It doesn't know I exist.
Like the androids, it had no ability to
appreciate the existence of another. He had
never thought of this before, the similarity
between an electric animal and an andy. The
electric animal, he pondered, could be
considered a subform of the other, a kind of
vastly inferior robot. Or, conversely, the
android could be regarded as a highly developed,
evolved version of the ersatz animal. Both
viewpoints repelled him. |
With Dr. Frankenstein as
his model, Ridley Scott endows The Machine with life.
Roy Baty says, "Time to Die." Gaff tells
Deckard: "Too bad [Rachael] won't live, but then
again, who does?" The problem is, they were
never alive.
After giving The Thing life,
in Bunuelian, Opus-Dei fashion, he turns the mass murderer,
Roy Baty, into a perverted version of Christ.
Although I am not a
Christian (as if you could "be" a club -- religion as identity theft), it infuriates me when the Illuminati mock Christ.
Christ was a loving person, not a killer. That is how the story is told. It is sadistic and unfair to
portray Christ as a psycho-killer machine, and this more
than anything else shows Ridley Scott's membership in the
Illuminati.
Dick points out how dangerous
it is to empathize with The Machine:
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Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick
"You realize," Phil Resch said quietly, "what
this would do. If we included androids in our
range of empathic identification, as we do
animals."
"We couldn't
protect ourselves."
"Absolutely.
These Nexus-6 types ... they'd roll all over us
and mash us flat. |
Is this what Ridley Scott
wants, for The Machine to roll all over us and mash us flat,
in a Terminator scenario?
Ridley Scott misogynistically
turns Deckard's woman into an android. In the book,
Deckard rejects Rachael as a long-term partner BECAUSE she's an
android, and regrets that he doesn't "kill" her when he has
the chance, before she kills his goat. He wants a real
goat ...
and a real woman, and he HAS a real wife who is fierce about caring, even
though he's too blind to appreciate it:
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Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick
"My schedule for
today lists a six-hour self-accusatory
depression," Iran said.
"What? Why did
you schedule that?" It defeated the whole
purpose of the mood organ. "I didn't even know
you could set it for that," he said gloomily.
"I was sitting
here one afternoon," Iran said, "and naturally I
had turned on Buster Friendly and His Friendly
Friends and he was talking about a big news item
he's about to break and then that awful
commercial came on, the one I hate; you know,
for Mountibank Lead Codpieces. And so for a
minute I shut off the sound. And I heard the
building, this building; I heard the --" She
gestured.
"Empty
apartments," Rick said. Sometimes he heard them
at night when he was supposed to be asleep. And
yet, for this day and age a one-half occupied
conapt building rated high in the scheme of
population density; out in what had been before
the war the suburbs one could find buildings
entirely empty ... or so he had heard. He had
let the information remain secondhand; like most
people he did not care to experience it
directly.
"At that moment,"
Iran said, "when I had the TV sound off, I was
in a 382 mood; I had just dialed it. So although
I heard the emptiness intellectually, I
didn't feel it. My first reaction consisted of
being grateful that we could afford a Penfield
mood organ. But then I realized how unhealthy it
was, sensing the absence of life, not just in
this building but everywhere, and not reacting
-- do you see? I guess you don't. But that used
to be considered a sign of mental illness; they
called it 'absence of appropriate affect.' So I
left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood
organ and I experimented. And I finally found a
setting for despair." Her dark, pert face showed
satisfaction, as if she had achieved something
of worth. "So I put it on my schedule for twice
a month; I think that's a reasonable amount of
time to feel hopeless about everything, about
staying here on Earth after everybody who's
smart has emigrated, don't you think?"
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Then again, she doesn't
have the discrimination to NOT have empathy for
androids, and blames Deckard unfairly for "killing"
androids, as if you could "kill" a machine.
To express his profound
realization about wanting living things to be alive and
not dead, Dick takes the Skull & Bones metaphor of the tomb world,
and transforms it into something
philosophically transcendent:
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Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick
Local law prohibited the time-reversal
faculty by which the dead returned to life;
they had spelled it out to him during his
sixteenth year. He continued for another
year to do it secretly, in the still
remaining woods, but an old woman whom he
had never seen or heard of had told. Without
his parents' consent they -- the killers --
had bombarded the unique nodule which had
formed in his brain, had attacked it with
radioactive cobalt, and this had plunged him
into a different world, one whose existence
he had never suspected. It had been a pit of
corpses and dead bones and he had struggled
for years to get up from it. The donkey and
especially the toad, the creatures most
important to him, had vanished, had become
extinct; only rotting fragments, an eyeless
head here, part of a hand there, remained.
At last a bird which had come there to die
told him where he was. He had sunk down into
the tomb world. He could not get out until
the bones strewn around him grew back into
living creatures; he had become joined to
the metabolism of other lives and until they
rose he could not rise either. |
But returning the
metaphor to its horrid origins, Ridley Scott
throws all living creatures back INTO the tomb
world, by making them similar to androids.
Dick's enlightenment
is all about
appreciating life. Mercerism -- "thread" -- is
another word for tantra, the energy that connects
all life, and plays on the word
"mercy" as well. The Dalai Lama should receive
initiation from Philip Dick who is by far the more
accomplished tantric lama. The Dalai Lama is
always bagging on animals, like
one of the killers.
See also,
The Bird and the Machine, by Loren Eiseley
"This is the
great age, make no mistake about it; the robot has
been born somewhat appropriately along with the atom
bomb, and the brain they say now is just another
type of more complicated feedback system. The
engineers have its basic principles worked out; it's
mechanical, you know; nothing to get superstitious
about; and man can always improve on nature once he
gets the idea. Well, he's got it all right and
that's why, I guess, that I sit here in my chair,
with the article crunched in my hand, remembering
those two birds and that blue mountain sunlight.
There is another magazine article on my desk that
reads "Machines Are Getting Smarter Every Day." I
don't deny it, but I'll still stick with the birds.
It's life I believe in, not machines."
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