Memories in the Blade Runner 1
Like Freud’s theory, the memory plays a very important role in a human being’s whole life. Some people can develop their abilities through good experiences and memories. However some people can ruin their lives by painful memories such as discrimination, violence, or mistreat, without knowing that sometimes these are false memories. It is very dangerous to instill some ideas or memories constrainedly, because it can cause harmful effects. In Paul Verhoeven’s “Total Recall” adapted from Philip K. Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” the identity is threatened because of the collision between the implanted memory and the real memory.
Replicants of “Blade Runner” are the perfect robot ever created. They are reasonable enough to suffer from their recognition of artificial existence. Replicants as slaves have felt agony through their whole life spans, four years of slavery experiences and the fake childhood memories. They struggled to gain salvation from “God of biomechanics,” a greedy and mere human being. (They, robots, always wished to be a real human being. David in A.I. did, too) And in case of Rachel, one of the perfect replicants, she has felt so painful because she recognized that her childhood memories were a fake which had been infused into her. Then why on earth did the creator of the replicants give human-like androids emotions and memories for all that they are created to be used and served for only human being? Do they, machines, need to feel and think?
I would like to find the answers of these questions from Paul Verhoeven’s, “Robocop.” One policeman was killed and recreated into indestructible android in order to protect human security. However, he soon could regain humanity through the recollection of his oblivious experiences and memories. He is resurrected from a machine to a human being. He has the aim to attain and to live, even if it is a revenge. He can feel and think just like replicants in the world of “Blade Runner.” But his memories are totally different from these of replicants.
The motto of the Tyrell Corporation is to make androids more human than human. However, a robot that is so close to human being is finally a failure because artificial and fragmental memories cannot change androids into real human being. Nevertheless, I cannot erase the thought that replicants are much closer to human than human beings, because the existence of human being is also doubtful, supposing that Deckard is a replicant. Do not believe what you can see right now!