Blade Runner

Sepia photograph. Faded, tattered and worn. It's interesting that the film chose these types of photos, despite the fact the given the date of Blade Runner, the characters parents and grandparents would appear in modern photographs. So the choice of medium was deliberate. Sepia is unreliable in the same way that human memory is: it gets blurry around the edges, fades in uneven patches and can be almost unrecognizable after the passage of many years. It would be interesting to see how the replicants' memories compared to human ones. Humans, and replicants, might define themselves by their memories, but memories are subjective, flawed, and easily distorted by time and new experiences. Whether human or artificially implanted all memories are for anyone is a "padding," a way to put current reality into some sort of context. Replicants are no less real because their memories happened to someone else. Everyone's memories happened to someone else-their younger selves who oftentimes are incredible different from the current "real" person. If their memories serve to shape their current personalities then they are just as authentic as anyone else's. The fascinating difference between book and movie is that in the movie only replicants have false memories. In the book, through Mercerism, humans share one another's experiences. Iran "remembers" the joy of getting a new animal, not through her own experiences, but through being connected mechanically to someone else. They are also "implanted" with Mercer's memories, which are doubly false, being not their own, and being not memories, but film stock. At least the replicants are receiving real human experiences. Are Rachel's memories of playing doctor with her brother and the spider outside her window any less real than Deckard's just because they happened to Tyrel's niece instead of her? In almost every respect she is Tyrel's niece. What we remember about ourselves helps us to define who we are at the moment. For humans memories fluctuated and warp in the passage of time. I suppose an argument could be made that what makes the replicants other than human, besides their construction, is the fact that they, having computers for brains, would not suffer the sort of memory degradation that afflicts human. It's interesting that in both book and movie the replicants are far superior to the rather pathetic humans. In the book, despite their short life spans it seems likely that the replicants, with their superior bodies and minds, are far more capable of withstanding the dust and kipple that cover the earth. In the movie the replicants are larger than life, living lives far grander and more exotic than that of the humans around them. "The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long." Despite their incredibly short life spans and their deficiencies in empathy, it is very easy to see the seductiveness of the replicants, and why humans despise them so greatly.