the anthropology and theology of bladerunner

(with acknowledgement to IMDb).

it is the year 2019.  the setting is los angeles.  despite the advances in technology (including flying cars), the images are dystopian.  the landscape is heavily industrialized.  rain falls incessantly and people wear thick coats against the apparent cold.  the streets are dark and filled with rubbish.  the commercial areas are crowded with people, but a sense of isolation and loneliness pervades.  most people seem to live in very old and decrepit apartment buildings with few if any fellow residents.

genetic engineering technology has made huge advances, to the point of creating synthetic beings called replicants, sophisticated androids that are virtually identical to humans.  replicants are designed and built by the tyrell corporation, a giant conglomerate headquartered in two pyramid-like towers.  replicant technology has entered a new phase with the nexus 6 model.  they are at least equal to humans in physical ability and strength, but more significantly they now have human emotions.  some have also been implanted with childhood memories despite being created as fully formed “adults”.  however, a 4 year life span has been encoded into their genes.

replicants are mostly used as manual labourers, soldiers and entertainers in the "off world" colonies out in space.  because of their advanced nature and possible instability and tendency towards violence, replicants have been outlawed on earth. specialized police units, called "bladerunners", are charged with the difficult task of detecting replicants who come to earth and executing, or "retiring" them.

rick deckard, played by harrison ford, is a retired bladerunner who is brought back to hunt a group of nexus 6 replicants who have made it to los angeles to seek out a way to extend their life span.  the leader of the group, roy, played by rutger hauer, uses a tyrell employee, jf sebastian, whose speciality is genetically engineered eyes, to trick his way into tyrell’s penthouse apartment in one of the company’s pyramid shaped towers.  roy confronts his maker, demanding an extension of lifespan.  tyrell explains that artificial beings like roy have been permanently designed not to live longer than their lifespan and that no known biological process has yet been able to change that.  he patronizes roy, saying that he has accomplished great things, but roy responds by killing him.

roy discovers that he is the only one left from the replicant group, and there is a final battle between him and deckard in which roy has the decided upper hand.  the fight ends up on an apartment building rooftop, and deckard is finally left hanging off the edge by one hand, two fingers of which roy had purposely broken earlier in the fight in revenge for the killing of his companions.  but roy has been showing signs of his impending expiry, which he knows he is helpless to prevent.

what ensues is one of my all time favourite movie scenes.

whatever the entertainment value of the movie, the subject matter and story have quite obvious theological allusions.  the role of god is clearly represented by tyrell, the genius inventor, though his ‘divinity’ is supported by the corporation that he heads, as well as the government and economic system that have enabled his corporation to become so powerful (this is not alluded to in the movie, but it could be interpreted as a picture of religious systems/institutions which ‘support’ the ‘idea of god’ in order to maintain their own power).  tyrell, as the creator god, has developed a technology for artificially manufacturing living creatures, and at the summit of this “creation” are the replicants, artificial humans.  the pinnacle of replicant technology is the nexus 6 model, and is it a just co-incidence that the model number matches the day on which humans were created in genesis 1?

nexus 6 replicants are a wonderful creation, strong and capable even beyond their human creator, who is rightly proud of them.  but though they are physically very good, almost perfect, they can be mentally unstable and have a tendency to violence.

the image of human beings portrayed here has much truth to it.  we are amazing and wonderful creatures, but just like the replicants we are prone to emotional instability and have more than a passing tendency to violence - not just physical violence, but also emotional, psychological and social violence, which are no less harmful.

note that violence of any kind is always an issue of control.  we hurt others to try to control them, or because we can’t control them and they do things we don’t want them to, or sometimes because we can control them and we despise them for it.  a clear implication of this is that there is no violence in god, since god is utterly free of the need to control.  this can to be a hard thing to grasp, because for human beings the will to power is inextricably tied to the need to control our lives and our surroundings, so we can only imagine absolute power being used to exert complete control.  but god’s power is entirely ‘other’ (ie. non-human), and god is completely unthreatened by anything that happens, so to speak of god in terms of wanting or needing to exert or maintain control is not just wrong but nonsensical.  the true biblical picture is of god holding creation “in the palm of his hand”, imparting life and love, wooing and drawing, not controlling and manipulating.

getting back to the story… because of their strength but tendency to violence, the replicants are perceived as a threat to human beings, maybe even to tyrell/god himself, so they are outlawed from earth, allowed to only live and work “off-world”.  not just that, but they are genetically encoded with a fixed 4 year lifespan.  this appears to be a clear allusion to the biblical story of the banishment of adam and eve from the garden of eden and the removal of their access to the tree of life, hence condemning them to live apart from their creator in servitude and then to die, much too soon.

in many ways, this treatment of the replicants seems very straightforward and natural, even as it should be.  after all, people need to be protected from potential threats.  but something more is going on behind the scenes.  there is a clear though unspoken rivalry between human beings and replicants, arising on the human side from envy, mixed with fear, of the strength and ability of the replicants.  the rivalry is resolved by banishing the replicants, who are made the scapegoats of the potential or actual (we are not told which) conflict with humans – despite (or maybe because of) the fact that humans are at least as prone to instability and violence as replicants.

how true a representation is this of the story of “the fall” in genesis 3?  from a human point of view, it could be argued that god initiated rivalry with humans by placing a tree in the garden from which the man and woman were forbidden to eat (as if to say, “this tree will remind you that i’m the one with the knowledge and power, and you better not forget it!”).  the serpent played on this theme, stoking the pride and envy of the man and woman, telling them god was lying to them and they really could have the same knowledge and power as god if they ate from the forbidden tree.  after they took the fruit, god confirmed the rivalrous nature of the events by reacting angrily, cursing the man and woman and casting them out of the garden.  thus all human beings are banished from the presence of God because we are unavoidably tainted by sin, and we are condemned to lives of endless striving and strife, ending all too soon in inescapable death.

though it might never be narrated in exactly this way, it’s my experience that elements of this storyline form a significant part of the beliefs of many christians concerning god’s relationship with human beings.  but the true story is close to the complete opposite.  unique to ancient accounts of creation, the first few chapters of Genesis are devoid of divine rivalry and violence.  the first man and woman were put in a beautiful garden – pure paradise – where they could relax and trust in the love and presence of god, not knowing why god put a forbidden tree in the garden, but content to know that god’s purpose towards them was entirely benign and entirely loving.  but they believed the serpent’s accusations that god was keeping something good from them, and thus set god up as a rival (not the other way around) and decided to take what they decided god was unfairly keeping from them.

and what was god’s response?  in the genesis narrative, god came “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (genesis 3:8, niv).  knowing what adam and eve had done, god didn’t pronounce judgement from afar, refusing to be tainted by proximity with these now sinful creatures.  it was the man and woman who hid from god, not god who withdrew from them.  and they proved their now rivalrous, non-trusting nature by answering god’s questions defensively, and by extending their rivalry towards each other by accusing rather than confessing, ultimately trying to put the blame back on god.  i’d like to think that they still had a chance at this point to return to full faith and trust in god by admitting their wrong, and it may be that by going to them god also held out hope for this.  but…

so god saw that the relationship was broken, but the next part of the story is perhaps the most misunderstood of all.  we are so used to thinking of god’s response in terms of wrath and punishment, but in fact there is no anger in god’s reaction, no desire to punish the guilty or demand appeasement.  such would be the reaction of “one of the gods”.  instead, the one true god responds with incredible love and mercy, beginning immediately to sow the seeds of redemption.  far from being arbitrary curses or punishments, god’s pronouncements of toil and strife are just descriptions of the inevitable consequences of adam & eve’s sin, because the world of trust and love in the garden had been replaced by a new social order defined by rivalry, envy, hate and violence.  but despite the pain of our sinful lives, and god’s sadness to see the suffering we bring on ourselves and each other, to not save us from the consequences of our sin is truly a mercy, because we need to take responsibility for our actions, and unless we experience the consequences we would never learn and grow, but would continue in our destructive ways unchecked and without remorse.

it is pertinent to note here that whenever “the wrath of god” is mentioned in the bible, what it means is “god not saving us from the consequences of our sins.”  the common misunderstanding that it refers to ‘god being angry with us’ arises first of all because the consequences of our sin are always painful (though not always immediately) and so it seems very much like punishment, which we only understand in the context of anger.  we also tend to demand that god intervenes and eliminates (or at least limits) the damage, and when that doesn’t happen (at least to our satisfaction) it is easy to believe it is because god is angry with us.  the problem is that anger is an emotion, which is a human response to a situation.  god is not human and is thus not subject to emotions, so to interpret god’s actions in terms of an emotional response is to falsely attribute a human characteristic to god.  furthermore, we get angry when something happens that we don’t want to happen, something over which we have no control and which gets in the way of a goal or purpose we have (conscious or otherwise).  and our almost inevitable response is to use violence (of some kind) to get back in control.  but god is never surprised, fazed or threatened by anything that happens, is never out of control, and nothing that happens can ultimately block god’s purposes.  so it really makes no sense to speak of god being angry.  of course, it is absolutely true that god wants things to be different for us, but the energy behind the desire for us to change is love, not anger, and the hope that we also learn to love, not the determination that we are punished for our disobedience.

to use an analogy, saying that god is angry with the things we do is like saying the amazon river is angry about little rocks it encounters in its path.  the rocks may in some tiny way impede the progress of the river, but slowly and inexorably the river will have its way with those rocks, moulding them to its purpose.  in the same way, the tiny resistance we make does not deflect the inexorable purpose of god’s love, which is always calling to us to become a part of the huge, benign, creative flow of life divine, and will ultimately have its way with us regardless of our resistance.

getting back to the genesis story, the second act of mercy god enacts after adam and eve’s sin is to grant us mortality.  just as for the replicants, this is perhaps the greatest grievance we have against god, but it is a mercy in at least two important ways: firstly, it puts a limit on our wickedness and its impact on others (just imagine an immortal hitler, pol pot or idi amin); secondly, I believe that our mortality is the beginning of our fellow-creaturely empathy and compassion.  this latter point is wonderfully exemplified by the “death scene” in the movie, where roy, knowing his time is expiring, reaches out and saves decker’s life.  as roy is running out of life, it becomes enormously precious to him, and I think in the same way, our common predicament of being destined to die enables us to see each other as precious, having value to each other because of the enormous gift of life we share.

well, what ensues in the movie is the outworking of the rivalry arising from the humans’ envy and fear.  a group of replicants decide they are not content with their lot and “storm the ramparts of heaven.”  they manage to get to earth, and roy finds a way to get into tyrell corporation to confront his maker, killing him when he can’t satisfy roy’s demands.  but that doesn’t solve any problems, and before long roy’s life expires.

this is where humanity finds itself at the beginning of the 21st century: we have proved our amazing ability to shape the earth and to improve our lives in incredible ways, but we are still banished from paradise and bound to die.  so we demand more time, pouring our efforts and energies into trying to increase the length of our lives.  we rage at god, metaphorically storming heaven in our minds and by our words and actions, and finally ‘kill’ god by declaring our independence, convincing ourselves that god is of no further use to us.  but it hasn’t made any difference.  despite amazing advances in computer and medical technology, we are stuck with our mortality, and our inescapable death casts its long shadow, defining and controlling the choices we make and ultimately the meaning we give to our lives.

such is the story of bladerunner, and there is no real glimmer of hope for humans or replicants in the movie, despite the killing of god/tyrell (and notwithstanding the incongruously ‘happy’ ending of the original cinema release version).  and such would be the hopeless state of humanity, inescapably controlled by rivalry, violence and death, if the scandalously gratuitous love of god, in whom is no rivalry, violence or death, had not broken into our doomed world in the person of jesus christ, in and by whom was inaugurated a new creation, a new way of being and living based on love, mercy and forgiveness.

but that is another story…