Part II: Investigating Notions of Embodiment in Philip K. Dick’s

What has proven interesting Ridley Scott’s The Final Cut is that it is considered the most comprehensive, according to Mark Robinson “the main differences between the latter two [The Director’s Cut and The Final Cut] are the loss of the hard-boiled detective voiceover, and the ‘happy ending’” (Robinson 46). Essentially, the keeping of the unicorn dream sequence in the film is important for the audience to question whether or not Deckard himself is actually a replicant. The dream sequence for this particular purpose is to compel the audience to consider what is considered real and what is not. In addition, the dream sequence with the unicorn can also be interpreted as Deckard’s desire to search for meaning and selfhood. In a world with electronic animals, it is acknowledged that the unicorn could not possibly exist. What this scene indicates is that like the animals, humans are unsure of their own existence as humans. It could also signal for an audience member that Ridley Scott’s faith in the continued existence of organic human beings is non-existent. Scott avoids mentioning any sort of religious dogmatism in his film. His adaptation relinquishes Mercerism altogether.¹⁰ Scott’s intentions to remove the cult of Mercer in Blade Runner was most likely executed to amplify the dystopic atmosphere of the film. Scott’s sprawling images of a post-industrial and degraded wasteland (Los Angeles, as Dick maintains in the novel) demonstrates the degree in which humans have not only destroyed their planet, but have also clung to insidious and sellable cults in order to reestablish emotions and selfhood. It is no surprise that Dick’s and Scott’s characters feel an unfathomable amount of loss because their humanist framework for defining themselves has disintegrated.

In going back to female embodiment in Blade Runner, the audience should note that although Scott has removed Deckard’s hard-boiled detective voice over, the sense of voyeurism and the male gaze is still present indirectly through the presence of varying camera shots. The removal of the voice over is important because it eliminates the strong male presence that takes over the viewing experience for the audience. The voice over is prevented from intervening in the space. Another important aspect of Scott’s film itself in terms of how particular film techniques allow Scott to make Blade Runner more realistic. The significance of realism here is that Scott is able to convince his audience that this geography of lost selfhood, but also of reinforced gender hierarchies is still very visible.

What is important also in reference to the Final Cut is the superimposing of the face of the actress Joanna Cassidy onto the character Zhora when she flees through a window and experiences her final death to Deckard’s bullet (Robinson 49). This precision in terms of maintaining the particular actress’ face on the stunt double means to create an even greater sense of realism in the film, and in addition, add that sense of realism to the incredibly violent death that Zhora is subjected to.¹¹ The realism here connotes something very violent as well, that Deckard’s act of shooting both Zhora and Pris demonstrate that the audience is given a particular type of violence enacted on female cyborgs. The deaths are both incredibly violent and gratuitously gory. This subtle filmic change illustrates Scott’s desire to make the female cyborg death as filmic and spectacular as possible. Because neither android is considered human, it is very easy for the protagonist Deckard (played by Harrison Ford in the film) is able to, without duress, simply annihilate these two female characters.

For the female cyborg body, the notion of spectacle/visibility and performativity is incredibly crucial it seems, especially in phallocentric science fiction works. In Scott’s Final Cut version, especially when either Zhora or Pris are killed there is no indication that they are androids, at least not on their physical surfaces. There are also no visuals of the inside body of Rachael– the audience is not able to confirm that her cells are her organs are human. We are told simply that they (Pris and Zhora) are escaped androids/replicants from an outside colony and that they are attempting to hide in amongst the humans in a denigrated Californian wasteland. Their visibility, as far as the camera is concerned is restricted to various eroticized camera shots: “Rachael, Pris and Zhora are in different ways eroticized, fetishized and subjected to point-of-view shots that reduce them to fully realized objects of beauty or to a series of fractured bodily parts, with shots of their legs, faces, eyes, torsos” (Redmond 58). This objectification juxtaposed next to Deckard’s inner monologue in Dick’s novel about the inexistence or non-life of electric animals demonstrates that Scott is also very uncertain of how the selfhood exists within the text. Selfhood, Scott argues, is in many ways defined by the very possession of a body.

The mention of the various fractured parts of female bodies in Scott’s film demonstrates that Scott’s impetus to continue to reinforce may mean that he is either following Dick’s text quite closely, or that he is attempting to demonstrate for his audience that he himself (as a director) has no answer. Therefore, he reverts back to commodifying the female body through gratuitously voyeuristic camera shots of fragmented torsos. This is the easiest for his audience to relate to.

What can be gleaned specifically from Deckard’s inner monologue in Dick’s text is that he too is meditating on the actual definition of human. In the scene in Dick’s novel where Deckard first encounters Eldon Rosen and Rachael Rosen, he makes an observation about “andys” as non-beings:¹²

He thought about his need too, about his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object… It doesn’t know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another…., the android could be regarded as a highly developed, evolved version of the ersatz animal.¹³(Dick 42)

From this particular quotation, a reader can assume then that Deckard regards the replicants as no more than an object. For the film, this acknowledgment of the “object[s]” (42) emphasizes Deckard’s not only misogynistic view of replicants. It also overstates his objectification of female cyborgs who are inherently tied to their sexuality and are thus bound to their “object” corporealization. Although the machinic parts are not visible on Pris or Rachael, because they are bioengineered they are not necessarily considered ‘’eye candy’’ to the male gaze. They are not considered real human women. However, their bodies are still, in a more human sense beautiful and are codified by particular markers of gender: slim figures and demure statures.¹⁴ This acknowledgment in the text of androids as unworthy subjects gives justification for Deckard’s violent destruction of them in the film. Because they are not human, they do not deserve to die like a human.

The body of Molly Millions in Gibson’s Neuromancer is remarkably hyper-sexualized just within the confines of the first twenty-five pages of his novel. Molly’s visually enhanced eye lenses and extended talon-like blade fingernails create a sort of sexual-fetishism for the male gaze who sees this mechanical penetration (Stevenson 87) of the female body as sexually arousing. It is with the description of Molly’s outfit “[the] silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones…. She wore tight gloveleather jeans, … and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails” (Gibson 24-5) that the reader is able to visualize quite heavily Molly’s gender. Molly, in this instance, becomes a receptacle for male desire. Descriptions of her body to this degree emphasize on Gibson’s part a desire to sexualize the cyborg. Because her bodily modifications are exotic and strange, Gibson automatically applies a certain sexual appeal to her. If the character were a man, Gibson would have a harder time of appealing to his audience. In essence, it is particularly easy to hyper-sexualize the cyborg because the assumption follows that she is not entirely human. Her humanity is not relinquished in any way because the male gaze reifies her. The actual description is in and of itself a performance and spectacle of gender. This reification also reiterates a compulsory heterosexuality.

According to Judith Butler in Bodies that Matter, the proliferation of particular power relations, especially misogynistic ones, means that their interplay with these relations creates particular patters. This means that for the female cyborg body: “’Sex’ is always produced as a reiteration of hegemonic norms. This productive reiteration can be read as a kind of performativity” (Butler 43). It is this “discursive performativity [which] appears to produce that which it names, to enact its own referent” (43). The corporealization of the female cyborg body means that it is inherently spectacle because it ultimately takes on every idyllic notion of feminine perfection for the pleasure of the heterosexist male gaze. Part of this “discursive performativity” (43) that Butler mentions is present in the referent of Pris’s model number. She is called a “basic pleasure model” (Blade Runner). This engagement in the language or referent of sex, a “pleasure model”, means to structure a sort of spectacle of the female body even though the body is not necessarily on display. In other words, the female android has not chosen to be displayed. The referent itself through a phallocentric discourse places Pris’s subjectivity within the confines of her body– she is called into her sex.

Butler’s argument about performativity can be placed alongside the physical descriptions of both Pris and Rachael in Dick’s text as well. We presume that both are the same type of android because Pris originally calls herself Rachael Rosen. The text also deals with the subject of intercourse. Essentially, sexual intercourse with an android is fetishized within Dick’s novel, further adding to these constructions of female gender that structure this phallocentric hegemony. In the novel, the officer Phil Resch and Deckard talk about androids who are made specifically for the act of sexual intercourse. The act of intercourse coincides, it seems, directly with death. The android female cannot experience sensual pleasures because she is both prohibited by her gender and limited by her engineering. Towards the end of the novel, Phil Resch and Deckard have this particular conversation while in the elevator after Resch asks Deckard if he has ever slept with an android:

‘If it’s love toward a woman or an android imitation, it’s sex. Wake up and face yourself, Deckard. You wanted to go to bed with a female type of android-nothing more, nothing less…. What’s happened is that you’ve got your order reversed. Don’t kill her- or be present when she’s killed’…. Rick stared at him. ‘Go to bed with her first-‘ ‘-and then kill her” Phil Resch said. (Dick 143-4)

Because the reader is aware at some point in the novel later on that Resch is an android, it seems unusual that he would say something so inherently misogynistic and, in fact, human. Essentially, the deaths of both Pris and Zhora are justified in Scott’s film while paralleled next to this particular excerpt from Dick’s novel. Because Zhora is an exotic dancer and Pris is merely a pleasure model (or prostitute), it is only necessary that they die for partaking in the acts of sexual behavior. Because they have been programmed with this function, they are further constricted by it. It is their functions, as cyborgs, to be codified by whatever their body is programmed to iterate, by extension a deviant sexuality. What is ironic about this point, however, is that Rachael does engage in sexual intercourse with Deckard in the novel. In contrast, Rachael is not killed, potentially, we may argue, because she fits a particular form of pure femininity. What salvages Rachael is her submission to Deckard’s desire for her.

The justification for Rachael’s life, or the justification for her being able to live is sustained by the genre in which Scott’s film Blade Runner is rendered. Because it is filmed in the genre of film noir, Rachael is framed consequently as the “archetypal femme fetale, [who] seductively enters the film dressed in high heels [and], a sharp, tight business suit” (Redmond 58). According to Redmond, Rachael is represented as a character with an inherent duality of character. While viewed through the genre of film-noir, she “appears to be both a Madonna and a Whore type figure-… Rachael visually speaks the language of female sexual danger…. But she also come to be seen as pure, untouched” (58). In this statement, Rachael, Redmond argues comes across to the viewer as incredibly virginal. The subject perceiving Rachael is still incredibly voyeuristic.

This contradiction serves to sexualize Rachael’s body even moreso than Dick has gone at length to do in the book. In Dick’s novel Rachael is portrayed innocently and almost childlike as she is consistently referred to as a “girl” by Dr. Rosen. This infantilization is also a part of this reiteration of domination through gendered codification. Where the film creates Rachael as a goddess figure with a sort of mysterious sexual prowess, in Dick’s novel, she is more easily taken advantage of by Deckard because of her child-likeness. This is evident in a passage where Deckard is remembering his first encounter with Rachael, she becomes the object of his sexual desire although there is no apparent desire from him: “For example: Rachael Rosen. No, he decided; she’s too thin. No real development, especially in the bust. A figure like a child’s, flat and tame. He could do better” (Dick 95). Her body is thus written upon again by a heterosexual male gaze which reifies her and confines her to particular masculine space.

The discursive action of defining the identities of these women/replicants continues to subvert their bodies and consequently their agency to the domination of what had been previously mentioned by Butler as “hegemonic norms” (43). The reader and voyeur should understand that in both Dick’s settings and Scott’s film that these norms are constructed and are concrete. The creator has embodied a hegemonic state within the bodies of the cyborg women, and the filter through which the reader views these characters is blatantly voyeuristic. It would be very difficult to argue that a post-humanist framework provides some liberation to these female replicants–this means that their lack of cultural experience (and thus, a lack of gender) indicates that they also lack agency. The reason mainly is that these android subjectivities are always dependent on a phallocentric discourse. Not only are their physical appearances and bodily-awarenesses defined by hegemonic masculininites, they are determined to die if a particular mode of sexuality is not met.

In regards to the deaths of both Zhora and Pris in Scott’s film, it is evident that both are shockingly violent and disturbing. These incidents both provide opportunities in the film for spectacle and for exploitation. According to Redmond, “Blade Runner suggests that patriarchy is natural and that any challenges to this need to be put down” (Redmond 59).

The death that each female replicant experiences in Scott’s film is incredibly visceral and brutal. In Zhora’s slaughter, the audience witnesses her running through a set of plate-glass windows and then getting impaled by a bullet from Deckard’s gun. Pris is shot several times as she vaults above Deckard’s head like a gymnast and then is seen writhing in agony on the floor until Deckard finally destroys her (Blade Runner). This scene with Pris in particular is important because Deckard is seen standing above her and as he is placed by the particular camera angle seems the savior, to put Pris out of her misery, to provide her with mercy. This sympathetic viewing of Deckard again can be juxtaposed with the image of Pris’s dead body lying motionless and alone on her back. Her body again becomes the extension for which male power can form hegemony over any female subject. The bullet penetrates her in an act of brutal murder and an act of a reification and codification of her body that she was not able to escape. This reiteration forms not only a terrible murder scene, but also that of a spectacle for which the male gaze is previewed to and implicit in.

The answer to the question of Blade Runner is complex. How can the replicant/android can be transgressive if she in no way can mold her body into a deviant form? It is evident in both Dick’s novel and Scott’s film that deviant sexual forms and behaviors are controlled intricately by the relations of phallocentric power. Both the filter of Scott’s camera and Dick’s omniscient narrator assure that the female replicant stays firmly tethered to her body. In addition, the removal of choice for the android body is critical as it prevents her from transcending her own physicality.

If this form of feminine spectacle and objectification occurs in both Blade Runner The Final Cut and Do Androids, is it possible to come up with ethics for the cyborg? This depends primarily on the cyborg or replicant’s agency. Because the android has already been filtered as a subordinate to codifications of male power, or is seen as a performative of female gender constructions, it is possible that she is not capable of being moral— primarily because she is not human. As far as Dick’s novel is concerned, androids are not capable of morality. This is in keeping with humanism, which posits that all sentient human beings have the capacity for ethics. The scene in Dick’s novel toward his conclusion features Pris sitting at J.R Isodore’s table annihilating a spider leg-by-leg as Isodore watches. This scene emphasizes Pris’ lack of morality. She senselessly destroys the spider without a thought to its suffering. The scene is brutal in the imagination because Pris feels no remorse for her actions:

‘It probably won’t run as fast,’ she said, ‘but there’s nothing for it to catch around here anyhow. It’ll die anyway.’ She reached for the scissors…. With the scissors, Pris snapped off one of the spider’s legs…. Pris had now cut three legs from the spider, which crept about miserably on the kitchen table, seeking a way out, a path to freedom. It found none. (Dick 206-207)

Pris’ destruction of the spider in this part of the novel demonstrates that she is not in possession of a code of ethics. Ironically, Pris rationalizes that the spider has no chance of living and therefore it will die anyway. The very act of rationalization is an affirmation of Pris’ humanity, but on the same token, her ineffectual maiming of the spider demonstrates her incapacity to reason ethically. Dick suggests that Pris has been programmed to perform these particular actions. There is little regard made by Irmgard Baty or Roy Baty in this scene as to the torture that Pris is implication on the spider. ¹⁵ This scene can be eloquently juxtaposed alongside the rendering of Pris in Scott’s film. She is scene towards the middle of the film sitting next to Roy Baty and observing decapitated doll heads. She pulls the doll’s head towards her and is bewildered by it (Blade Runner). In Scott’s film, however, Pris does not destroy the dolls, she merely observes them with wonderment and amusement. If indeed Pris’ moral codes were programmed, it is sufficient to argue that her understandings of pain are incredibly skewed. Dick wants his reader to acknowledge that although Pris has been programmed with a type of rationality, this does not mean that she has empathy. Therefore, he argues that rationality and ethical consciousness are non-programmable. Extending from this, the female replicant is not capable of possessing morals and is, therefore, not human.

The next chapter will focus exclusively on Molly from Gibson’s Neuromancer and will go into a discussion of her embodiment based on arguments made by theorists Jean Baudrillard and Sherryl Vint.

What is essential for the contextualization of Gibson’s text is that much of the novel takes place in cyberspace. This cyberspace relinquishes particular subjectivities, it deconstructs them at is simply a vacuum of space- at least in Gibson’s novel is to mediate a particular consciousness¹⁶. In this space the body is removed of all signification as it becomes data. Baudrillard’s explanation of the simulation is probably the most accurate here to detail the experience of this particular place/time. According to Baudrillard the simulation is constituted as a space removed of all signification: “the imaginary of representation” (Baudrillard 3) is annihilated. And so, there is

No more imaginary coextensivity: it is genetic miniaturization of that is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control– and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational…. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere. (Baudrillard 3)

Cyberspace can be thought of as this infinite space of data, but of data that in no way can be necessarily re-organized into particular structures of power. According to Sherryl Vint, “the appeal of cyberspace is linked directly to the repression of the material body in cyberpunk fiction” (Vint 103). This simulation provides a unique space for the interplay of sexual codification and bodily awareness.

The substitution of the body for data seems to be intimately linked to transcendence of a codified body and demonstrates again an interplay of “hegemonic norms” (Butler 43) as argued by Judith Butler. In Molly’s case, however, there is some sense of choice in her bodily modifications. Vint also summarizes Molly’s implants, her eyes more specifically, as well as the “razor blades implanted beneath her fingers, and adjustments made to her reflexes, to increase her fighting ability” (Vint 108). This notion of the powerful female android character is substantially sexualized and deters any kind of feminist hope for liberation.

Part of this lack of female cyborg liberation can be attributed to the voyeuristic descriptions of Molly’s body. In Gibson’s gratuitous sex scene at the beginning of the novel, he certainly does not spare his audience and instead gives them full detail. The details, however, are predominantly hegemonic insofar that they do not give any focus on female desire but instead to Case’s desires, obviously the masculine. It is possible that because Molly’s character presents a form of deviant sexuality– she works as a prostitute that she is already codified with particular assumptions about her gender. It is these assumptions that create a gratuitous scene for the heterosexual male spectator.

The act of sexual intercourse further reifies Molly. In the text she can be observed “impaling herself”(Gibson 33), as if the act of sexual pleasure is a mortifying act. It pairs the words of violence with sexual pleasure, creating a duality of enjoyment and death, although Case is the only individual who benefits directly from the union. After the hyper-sexualized description of Molly’s body from the narrator, the reader is privy only to the male’s experience of orgasm, as though Molly is classified simply as an object or conduit for Case’s fulfillment of desire. This is reiterated by Gibson’s description of Case’s “orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space” (33).

Molly is not necessarily able to escape her body the way that Case is able to. The most prominent and most widely cited incident in the novel is when Case connects to Molly’s consciousness through the sim-stim connection. Vint contends that “Both Case and Molly believe that they have agency when they use the body as a technological tool- Case’s neural interfaces and Molly’s cyborg body– and both feel decentered by the notion of being trapped in the exploitable meat” (Vint 108). What is evident though is that although Molly has a particular agency over her body, Case serves as a voyeur in her consciousness visibly watching every move. He commands her eyes through her consciousness although he is not able to actual control her. What continues this tethering of bodies, although the reader is aware that Case is within a cyberspace construct, is Molly’s check to initiate whether or not that he had connected via simstim:

Her body language was disorienting, her style foreign. She seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out of her way, stepped sideways, made room. ‘How you doing Case?’ He heard the words and felt her form them. She slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling a nipple under warm silk. The sensation made him catch his breath. She laughed. But the link was one-way. (Gibson 56)

Although the transcendence of the body occurs in some form for both character in that they are technologically linked together, the constructs that tether Molly’s body to her gender are still inevitably intact. While she is able to control her body to mitigate where and when she needs to be somewhere, Case, while engaged in the sim-stim connection, is able to feel every sensation (Gibson 56), as if the most private parts of her sexual desire are privy to his vision:

‘How you doing, Case?’ He heard the words and felt her form them. She slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling a nipple under warm silk. The sensation made him catch his breath. She laughed. But the link was one-way. He had no way to reply…. What did he know about her? The she was another professional; that she said her being, like his, was the thing she did to make a living. He knew the way she’d moved against him, earlier, when she woke, their mutual grunt of unity when he’d entered her. (Gibson 56)

This particular excerpt demonstrates that the transmission of sexual pleasure must to a degree be mitigated through phallocentric understandings of female desire. The reader understands that Case is transmitting his desires for Molly. Case is aware that Molly was a prostitute. Part of the reminiscing in Case’s thought process is in many ways connected to Molly’s. Case’s thought process is at this time connected to Molly’s, like a split consciousness.

Evidently, the female cyborg in Molly’s case is fragmented insofar that her identity would shift in cyberspace, but the codifications of her body and the objectifications of her body are still in place to divorce her from a transcendent experience. These codifications may or may not be linked directly to the notion of fragmented identities in cyberspace and their mediation through technology. For Claire Sponsler, Baudrillard’s meditation on reality provides some satisfactory answer, she states:

This is a radically mediated world [cyberspace], where no one can trust that the reality he or she encounters is ever really real. It is, tellingly, a world much like Baudrillard’s description of our own, in which the individual ‘can no longer produce the limits of his own being, can no longer play nor stage himself, can no longer produce himself as mirror. He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence’. (Baudrillard qtd in Sponsler 633)

The significance of Sponsler’s statement is that the body frames itself as a sort of reflective surface. Meaning cannot be simplified to the point where all constructions come from the individual’s own creation. Meanings of gender and selfhood are produced by the structures and relations of power surrounding the individual selfhood is defined by the particular experience of reflecting off inscriptions of power onto the body. Cyberspace provides that infinite simulation wherein the individual experiences the interplay of various meanings, but, like Case is still trapped insofar that the individual is unable to inadvertently create and regulate their own meanings.

If identities then become fluid, Molly’s identity is mainly produced through codifications of her as a feminine cyborg. Not only is her body fetishized– the act of having sexual intercourse with an android/cyborg commands a particular fetishism– her body is also presented in a voyeuristic fashion. Case is not able to control her body via sim-stim connection, allowing Molly to feel every sensation, even her desire. In cyberspace, one could argue that these particular gender codifications are destabilized.

Therefore, if cyberspace relinquishes any willed constructs of identity or bodily awareness, then it is true that a cyborg would indeed be freed from gender. However, because Gibson’s Neuromancer provides no other alternative, it is difficult to assume that most phallocentric science fiction would provide a female cyborg with a particularly subversive identity, or one that seeks to recodify herself.

Now that Pris, Rachael, and Molly have been covered extensively, the next section will continue the dialogue pertaining to the dialectic between humanism and post-humanism. This section’s aim is to outline the main goals of each theory and explain how post-humanism, to an extent is more useful to explaining issues of gender deconstruction within a twenty-first century context. Theories of post-humanism are critical to exploring Gibson’s Neuromancer, Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner because they [theories of post-humanism] make clear a new hybrid version of humanness. That humans cannot solely be defined by their rationality and their moral capabilities.

Although many scholars have already been exhaustive in terms of their analysis of cyborg theory (such as Haraway’s “Manifesto”) many have avoided the subject of android/cyborg agency altogether. Especially in regards to willful body modifications chosen by the cyborgs themselves.