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Treasure of the Rubbermaids 20: Failing the Voight-Kampff Test

The on-going discoveries of priceless books and comics found in a stack of Rubbermaid containers previously stored and forgotten at my parent’s house and untouched for almost 20 years. Thanks to my father dumping them back on me, I now spend my spare time unearthing lost treasures from their plastic depths.

In the spirit of Phillip K. Dick‘s questioning of reality and identity, it’s fitting that there are two versions of this story. One is the novel he wrote in which a police bounty hunter tracks down and destroys androids while he tries to earn enough money to buy a real animal to snap his wife out of a depression. The other is a film version in which a disillusioned ‘blade runner� is forced to track down and kill dangerous replicants despite his growing sympathy for them. I also like to think that PKD would probably get a laugh because of the approximately one thousand different director’s cuts of the movie available to further confuse us as to which is the ‘real� story.

The world is pretty much a wasteland after a nuclear war, and the smart people are getting off the planet. Human-like androids have been developed to help with colonizing other worlds, but they have a habit of returning to Earth illegally and trying to hide. Police bounty hunters use an empathy test to identify them and then kill them on the spot. Rick Deckard is called in after the senior bounty hunter was nearly killed while hunting a group of a new type of android. Deckard is anxious for the big payday that he’d get because he’s embarrassed at not being able to afford a new animal to replace the fake sheep he bought after his real one died. He hopes that being able to get a real animal again will snap his wife out of the depression she’s in that even their mood organ device can’t fix.

If you’re hoping for futuristic tech in this, you’re going to be disappointed. PKD’s strength wasn’t in envisioning what the future would look like, and the idea that Deckard’s electric sheep has actual audio tape in it to simulate noises seems laughable now. Flying cars and laser tubes seem like the kind of sci-fi you’d get from any pulp writer of the era.

But that wasn’t the point, and PKD’s tech was always just an excuse to get at the more interesting issues of questioning reality and identity. In this one, the question is what it means to be human, and the hunt for the androids is used to explore the idea of empathy. It’s also a nice touch that with most of the animals killed by the nuclear fall-out, that owning a real one is the ultimate status symbol and any type of mistreatment is a shocking taboo. Deckard longs for an animal to care for while killing things with human faces. Are they too deserving of sympathy or is their humanity a mask over an overwhelming desire for self-preservation that essentially makes them all sociopaths? That’s the interesting stuff in this book.

Even though the Blade Runner movies adopts the basic story as well as several other elements, it’s not really a faithful adaptation of the book. It’s a sci-fi classic that became the template for the look of dystopian futures in film, but while the two share DNA, they feel like different beings in a lot of ways. (I think that Richard Linklater’s Rotoscoped verson of A Scanner Darkly is probably the best adaption of PKD’s work in capturing it’s tone and theme.)