e. Our memories are not ours but something ôimprintedö from the collective body.
The world of Blade Runner is one where artificial life forms are more capable of enjoying life than genuine human beings. In a world where materialism and images control even thinking and feeling, we are thrown into a world wherein we cannot trust what our senses tell us is reality is actually real. Vision motifs and references to eyes, photographs, mirrors and other visual images are prevalent through Blade Runner. This recurrent motif is used to enable the viewer to understand that we must often doubt what we experience with our eyes or senses. Vision does not guarantee we are seeing things clearly or truthfully. Like the simulated replicants, photographs, memory implants, artificial animals, and other forms of simulation are used to project a reality that seems real but is not. Photographs are used to provide replicants with a history and an origin. Memories are implanted that make replicants feel they have lived through childhood when they are only programmed to exist for four years before being ôterminated.ö In a sense, this impermanence and simulation of reality applies to mortality in the absence of salvation.
One exchange between Tyrell and Batty in Blade Runner demonstrates manÆs desire to escape mortality in the absence of some deep absolute meaning:
Tyrell: IÆm surprised you didnÆt come sooner.
Batty: ItÆs not an easy thing to meet your maker.
Batty: Can the maker repair what he makes?
The postmodern view sees mankind as abandoning the truth of mortality through the pursuit of materialism. In Simulacra and Simultations, Baudrillard argues that a capitalist world and reality are a fake world and reality, one wherein human beings reject the real world because of the more exciting world capitalism provides for them. People prefer to live in a fantasy existence rather than face the truths of reality. The world...