LeiLane Nishime’s essay The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future argues that SF cinema is so effective because it uses fantasy to tell stories about problematic social issues in our own reality. SF cinema can be more bold and take far more risks than if the story was set in the ‘real’ world. Effective SF cinema uses science to explore many of our own social issues.

The film Bladerunner fits perfectly into this general theme. It is widely regarded as a definitive SF cinema text on the exploration of what differentiates humans from machines. In the film the main character, Deckard, is led to question his own humanity several times. He even falls in love with a ‘replicant’ named Rachael.

Roy, the Marxist-philosophy spewing leader of the rogue replicants – played by über-Aryan Rutger Hauer – challenges our basic assumptions about humanity. Roy has the chance to kill Deckard but instead Roy – the ‘machine’ – saves Deckard’s life; thus transforming himself before his ‘time’ runs out.

An important component of Nishime’s argument is that cyborgs are often portrayed as our science-fiction slaves to mankind in the future. She reasons that because of this, cyborgs are the equivalent of today’s mulattos. She writes that the mulatto cyborg “promises a future of mixed-race subjectivity.”

Nishime makes a very astute observation about the real-life future of our society: race-mixing and multi-culturalism is clearly inevitable and even desirable, despite what the politically regressive elements in our society say. Mulattos are already becoming increasingly prominent and recognizable in society. Tune into any NBA or NFL game today and you are bound to see a few…

In Bladerunner, director Ridley Scott envisions a sort of quasi ‘Asian-Latin’ mixed-race future for humanity, based on some of the characters Deckard encounters and the images of advertising and entertainment portrayed in the film.

Machine as Messiah: Cyborgs, Morphs and the American Body Politic by Doran Larson and Viviane Casimir’s Data and Dick’s Deckard: Cyborg as Problematic Signifier each examines different aspects of the question: ‘What really makes us human?’

Casimir explores some of the deeper meanings of the man/machine interface depicted in SF cinema, and she contextualizes her analysis as a reflection of the increasingly blurred boundaries between the two in real life. She writes, “In a postmodern culture and cyberspace world, the question of ‘living’ is a matter of metaphor that needs to be questioned.”

Doran Larson looks at the representations of cyborgs in SF cinema from a more political standpoint. He uses the archetype of the ‘Liquid Metal Man’ (LMM) from James Cameron’s Terminator series to demonstrate the latent fascism inherent in in the cyborg motif. To Larson, the shape-shifting LMM signifies our modern-day attachment to consumerism, and his fluid nature represents the popular fear of democracy itself in the electronic age.

LMM embodies the “right-wing capitalist rigidity” status quo.

Computers are getting much faster, and more importantly: the rate at which they’re getting faster is increasing. Computers will only become more powerful. They will continue to develop until they are far more intelligent than we are: it is inevitable.

From Robocop to The Terminator and Bladerunner, no symbol better captures our deepest fears about technology than THE CYBORG. He is a tragic, dichotomous figure – part flesh, part metal; incorporating both a brain and electronics.

Many of us could already be considered cyborgs. What with all the knee, hip and shoulder replacements; pacemakers; hearing aids; prosthetic arms and legs for amputees – not to mention all the smart phones, headphones, heart monitors and step counters everyone is hooked up to.

We’re virtually there.

[Repost from 2015]