The final monologue between Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) and Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) in The Blade Runner (1982) is one of the most memorable of cinema, in my opinion, due to the context in which it takes place. Roy Batty is an android that, in the words of his creator, has “burnt so very, very brightly,” referring to the fact that Batty has excelled at optimizing all his skills in half the time that it would take a “normal” android. The Blade Runner is an epic tale of a dystopic cosmopolitan society that has left on Earth those who are considered the remnants of an older social and biological order that hinders the futuristic goals of the new architects of life across the cosmos. Those who have watched the film know that Deckard is a human special agent whose mission is tracking and capturing androids who have become rebels. The monologue takes place right when it seems that Deckard is about to capture Batty, but the strength of the leader of the android rebellion pushes Deckard to a near dying situation. It is both the mercy and empathy of Batty that makes him save a defeated Deckard, who amidst confusion and fear, witnesses Batty’s monologue, which begins with the android stating that “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” referring to the catastrophic war scenes and the beauty that he has captured in his memory over the time of his cosmic endeavors. The scene, and the film as a whole, constantly establishes an irremediable division between human and non-human entities, suggesting a near-future global scenario that will witness the emergence of Artificial Intelligence as a key driver of evolutionary transformation based on individual skills.
In a previous essay (“Ray Bradbury On War, Recycling, And Artificial Intelligence”), quoting Bryan Walsh, I posed the technological dilemma of being invisibly controlled by forms of Artificial Intelligence that find useless to develop empathy towards humans as a necessary moral tool to achieve their goals. Roy Batty incarnates so to speak an Artificial Intelligence that suddenly expresses a radical form of empathy towards an “enemy” agent whose ultimate goal is to destroy him. Nevertheless, Batty’s reaction – when Deckard’s fate is in his hands – is to forgive his life and use that moment to display a form of consciousness that goes beyond the comprehension of human intelligence, at least during war times. Even though Batty ultimately dies, although not under the control of Deckard, the vital experience of the leader of the androids somehow echoes Dante’s journey in the Divina Commedia (1320), as after going through a strenuous time of constant cosmic revolt, he is able to finally seek an afterlife beyond the dystopic scenarios that have determined his existence. The last verse of the Inferno narrates the exit of both Dante and Virgil from hell, and as if a cosmic image was awaiting the arrival of those who have undertaken the sort of vital journey narrated in the Divina Commedia, once they reached the instant that comes after the end of hell, the reader is presented a final, yet also foundational, image, “E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle” (“And then we exited [Hell] to see the stars”). The simplicity of the image, drawn in the 14th century, echoes – as I suggested above – Batty’s journey, who in his monologue mentions among the things that people wouldn’t believe to be real, “[I watched] Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” As Dante draws in the final scene of the Inferno, what Batty paints off his memory is a sort of epitaph contained in astral scenes of both war and aesthetic beauty.
Following this philological lead, among the first verses of the Paradiso, Dante suggests, “Perchè, appressando se al suo disire,/Nostro intelletto si profonda tanto,/Che retro la memoria non può ire” (“Because, once near our desires,/our intellect reaches such depths,/that our memory cannot follow them”). Here Dante not only suggests that the intellect is faster than memory, but also that there are experiences that can only be contained within the layers of intellectual labor, experiences that ultimately will escape from our mnemonic mechanisms. In the case of The Blade Runner, what Batty desires is to live longer, for he is in the final stage of his life right in the moment when he has mastered his individual skills and has developed a kind of affection towards a female android that cannot be compared to the ways humans understand affection or even love. Nevertheless, as his creator explained to Batty, the fact that he has optimized himself in half the time that a normal android has also exasperated his vital energy, for in order to perform a task in half the time is required to consume energy at a faster pace.
The social landscape where The Blade Runner is staged is that of a decaying economy anchored in a post-industrial urban design that exposes individuals to an irremediably polluted biological system. Even though the film is staged in a futuristic scenario, among the urban dystopic scenes that the audience is presented, it remains in the memory of those which portray the combusting flames that emerge from the pipes of what seems to be an oil refinery. Again, the image echoes scenes of horror and punishment from Dante’s Divina Commedia, as if the social division drawn in Dante’s masterpiece had been thought as a paradigmatic archetype of urban design inherent to modernity. There are various centuries of distance between the early modern period of Dante’s Divina Commedia and the post-modern stage of The Blade Runner. However, a philological approach would render visible what at a first glance seems to lack foundations. As a corollary, and in order to incite a philological debate, I would suggest – as a working theory – that on the one hand we could situate an incipient formulation of Artificial Intelligence within the early modern period using Dante’s Divina Commedia as a departing stage, while, on the other hand, as The Blade Runner portrays and despite the centuries of distance, the postmodern period – thinking about it from Lyotard’s theorization – cannot erase the social divisions rooted in the expression of intelligence established and enacted since the early modern period.
In a form, in both the Divina Commedia and The Blade Runner individuals often lose their social identity and status to become – at least temporarily – someone who they are not to experience social situations that otherwise they wouldn’t. Nevertheless, what ultimately sets the ontological-inflection-point amidst this socially confusing landscape is the impotence and frustration that humans incorporate into their experience while they have to confront android/artificial intelligence/skills. Both forms of life/intelligence may share the same sociobiological landscapes, as it happens when Deckard is fighting Batty, but the consequences for both will follow different pathways, precisely because each departed from an equidistant intelligent design also with different purposes. When Roy Batty is reciting his monologue in front of a defeated Rick Deckard, who is lying down exhausted on the ground, the mere action of remembering the cosmic scenes that he has witnessed/experienced infuses Batty with a kind of vital energy that Deckard is unable to fathom. Intellectual imagery, which is a form of philological witchcraft, is what sets androids and humans apart – as it happens between Batty and Deckard-, I mean, the precious skill of fixing in one’s memory the aesthetic elements that populate our historical experience and, as Batty does, the ability to bring those memories to the present time, even when death seems to be approaching, or in Dante’s words, the final yet conciliatory moment in which we “uscimmo a riveder le stelle”.
REFERENCES
La Divina Commedia, Dante Alighieri. Edizione Terza Romana di Baldassarre Lombardi. Roma, Nella Stamperia de Romanis: 1822.
The Blade Runner, dir. Ridley Scott, 1982.
“Ray Bradbury On War, Recycling, And Artificial Intelligence,” Franco Laguna Correa. JSTOR Daily/Public Books: January, 2020.
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