Andrew Bartlett abstract

Vulnerability and Mortality: A Puzzle from the World of Artificial Humans on Film

1 In the science fiction film Blade Runner (1982), the artificial human Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) leads a small cadre of rebellious outlaw "replicants" on a violent journey from their outer space labour station back to planet earth. Roy's goal is to meet his maker (literally) -- to confront the scientist Tyrell, head of Tyrell corporation, who programmed Roy's line of artificial humans to die young. Roy desires "more life" in his quest to become equal to humans: he experiences his mortality as a curse.

2 In Bicentennial Man (1999), the domestic robot Andrew (Robin Williams) surprises his owner, the father of an American family whom he serves with comical non-human gentleness, by demonstrating human abilities not intentionally programmed into his mechanical brain by the manufacturers. Given his unique-among-robots nature, Andrew goes on a quest is to equip himself technologically with all the components essential to human being (e.g., a capacity for sex). The final hurdle is a governing Council that refuses to grant him "human" status because robots never die. Andrew desires "less life": he experiences his immortality as an obstacle.

3 The artificial human in Blade Runner is condemned to brevity of life, in BiCentennial Man, to longevity of life. Is the desire for more life more or less "human" than the desire for less life? Witness the replicant Roy Batty at the end of Blade Runner renouncing his violence against Rick Dekkard (Harrison Ford), the policeman assigned to hunt him down. Witness the robot Andrew lying down in bed, his dying (human) wife beside him, grateful to be connected to an apparatus that has enabled him to age and die. To what extent ought we to consider mortality -- the mere condition of finiteness of life -- a form of vulnerability?

4 In putting to work selected concepts from the originary thinking of Eric Gans, a thinker greatly indebted to the work of Rene Girard, I will analyse these movies with a view to answering the question just posed. My argument (subject to revision) will be something like this. The esthetic intution shared by the films is that the minimal form of "vulnerability" inherent in "mortality" derives not so much from a concrete bodily condition as from the threat of being expelled from, or suffering the sacrificial violence of, human communities. The minimal model of our desire for "immortality" is the experience of the sign as transcendent, human language as that which creates an immaterial level of being. My aim is to introduce these notions while doing "fundamental anthropology" with two memorable movies about the artificial human.

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Andrew Bartlett lives in Vancouver, Canada, and teaches composition and literary analysis at Kwantlen University College. He has published in Contagion and in Anthropoetics: the Electronic Journal of Generative Anthropology. He has attended and presented work at COV&R conferences in Chicago, Stanford, Indiana, New Mexico, Koblenz, and Ottawa.

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