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Article Excerpt
"I DON'T KNOW WHY A REPLICANT WOULD COLLECT PHOTOS--MAYBE they were like Rachel--they needed memories." In the role of the bounty hunter Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott's 1982 cult classic, Blade Runner, Harrison Ford utters these words with a bitter edge. Assigned to "terminate" the beautiful Rachel, an "android" especially menacing because she's almost (almost!) indistinguishable from a "real" person, Deckard lusts after her and wants to be sure she's human, not machine-made, before bedding her. Based on Phillip K. Dick's brilliant science fiction novel of 1968, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the film adds the bit of sentiment about collecting photographs to the otherwise unmitigated darkness of Phillip Dick's vision of a near future. The year is 2021, and by means of mechanical replication--the electric sheep of Dick's title--warm-blooded animal life has been all but totally replaced by replicants, copies or duplications of almost forgotten originals. Memories of real sheep and toads and living human flesh are struggling against the irresistible tide of a programmed second-order reality unburdened by personal or cultural memory.
In the film version memory survives paradoxically only as a faint reminder of itself, a remembered need to a memory and thereby an individual identity. Here's where the collected photographs come in. They answer to the need for at least an illusion of memory. Deckard vents his angst just after Rachel leaves his apartment in tears, her self-delusion shattered by the hardboiled bounty-hunter's refusal to accept the presumptive snapshot of a mother and child fished from her purse as proof of human rather than laboratory birth. "Look," she had said, "here's me with my mother." But Deckard knows better, he has his own tests for androids or "humanoid robots." True, she's a special model, long-lasting and seductively beautiful but still a replicant. "Not your memories," Deckard had said to her, "but some else's," a "synthetic memory system" as fraudulent as the faked photo.
Crushed, Rachel leaves him musing at his piano, flipping through another set of faked "old" snapshots he had commandeered from another android. He has also spread his own family snapshots on the piano top, some faded, browned, curling with age and use. These photos are presumably the real thing, true memories of a past that actually happened. Replicants collect photos because they need memories in order to believe they are human, a need itself programmed into their system. The photos in the film are something like the electric sheep in the novel, fake pets in the absence of real ones. In such a world, where the photograph has lost its ground of reference in the past, where the surrogate assumes the look and force of the real, Deckard's faded personal photos represent pure nostalgia; they are symbols of a life already lived, a dream of the human persisting in the nightmare world of replicants dreaming of electric sheep.
With its cult status as book and film, the story has an aura of foreknowing coming events in real-world genetic engineering and robotics. The pathos of the photograph as faked memory strikes an especially prescient note. As far as we can tell, the photos collected by the androids were made by actual cameras, with lenses and film. The chief point is that their fakery lies in their use, their implied captions or texts and narratives, the fictions that falsely identify them as memories of a past that never was. Yet many of the pictures Deckard holds in his hand seem to have been made by the replicants themselves, of their rooms, of one another--all the more ironic and pathetic examples of futile and abortive yeaming for human emotion, attachment to things and persons who can be thought to represent a tangible past. The film accepts the traditional idea of the photograph as reliable proof that something once existed before a lens. What is false about the pictures is not what is pictured but the implied story about what is pictured: "Look, here's me with my mother." In fact, Deckard has such faith in the first-order reliability of photographs that he uses an enhancement on a digital scanner of a tiny section of one of the commandeered snapshots to identify one of the rebellious androids he is assigned to destroy. In the film, digital scanners serve to deconstruct images in order to see more of what is there, rather than to reconstruct an image of something that is nowhere else but in the image. In this sense the film seems to stand firmly within the horizon of conventional photography, even as it envisions the limits of that horizon, the end of the era of the photograph as memory in the old, familiar sense.
As represented in Blade Runner the kind of picture known as "photograph" (written in light, literally) conveys the traditional association of memory and history with photography. Today that simple idea of a light-based transparent nexus between photograph and a determinate past is undergoing radical reappraisal. The digital revolution, as probably everybody on earth now realizes, has eroded the old confidence in that transparency. We and our comfortably reliable old paper photographs now live alongside the all-pervasive digital method of producing replicas, virtual replicants, of the old photographic image without the old apparatus of lenses and film, or indeed of anything we need believe was ever to be photographed.
Calling these new instruments "electronic photography" or "digital camera," we employ metaphors in hope of easing the passage into a new regime of picturing the putative "real world." But as William J. Mitchell points out in his recent book, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era, this particular metaphor misleads, obscures the digital difference. He writes: "Although a digital image may look just like a photograph when it is published in a newspaper, it actually differs as profoundly from a traditional photograph as does a photograph from a painting" (1992: 4). Based on changes in chemical emulsions caused by exposure to light, old-style photographs are analog or continuous tone images; computer-generated images are digital, based on discrete units called pixels, entirely the product of computer programs.
These programs may include actual photographs converted into digital images, which then can be altered, reprocessed, or recombined to produce an image as if made in the old manner of light-generated images. The hardware for producing such electronic images has swept the mass market: Kodak's Photo CD Player, for example, converts snapshots into still video, and electronic cameras can digitize the image as it is being recorded by light. The image can be manipulated even as it is being "captured." As a result, writes Mitchell, we...
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