Blade Runner vs Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

A film about machines trying to become human, and a book about humans becoming machines

Last week, I read Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. As someone who’d seen and loved Blade Runner, a movie heavily inspired by/loosely based on the book, I couldn’t help but compare the two stories. Whatever you may say, they are definitely two different stories, rather than a book and its movie adaptation.

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WARNING: the rest of the post is going to be riddled with SPOILERS, so if you haven’t both read the book and seen the film, and rather wouldn’t know things ahead of time, read this post no further. Instead, go read DADoES, watch Blade Runner (in whichever order), then come back. For the rest of you, here goes.

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A short aside before I dive into comparisons – if I had to point out ONE thing from the book that never made it to the screen, but I enjoyed immensely, that would have to be mood organs. Seriously. Emotion and artificial lack thereof is one of my often-rambled-on subjects, but Actual Artificial Emotion? Beautifully horrible.

Now, comparison time…

I’m going to confess up front – I like the movie better. My original reason for this was genre-related. Blade Runner goes down as a gritty film noir. DADoES reads as, well, a dystopian science fiction classic. A completely different mood, completely different pace (even though the novel depicts just one day, from start to finish, it didn’t read as one of those stories when you inhale on page one and exhale when you reach the back cover) and, interestingly enough, completely different character. Book!Deckard and movie!Deckard are two very different individuals, and I personally think that the latter is MUCH better suited for his job.

Now, when I finished the book and had some time to think about it, I still preferred the movie, but my reasons for it went deeper than genre preference and presence/lack of Harrison Ford. That’s where we end up in the territory of two different stories that I’ve mentioned before.

Knowing the promise and the general gist of the plot from the movie certainly didn’t ruin the book for me. For one, I don’t mind spoilers, and I like examining same stories from different angles (I can hear my HP fanfiction days calling out to me…). As someone who knew the book was different, but didn’t know what to expect, exactly, I was thrown for a loop as early as the first few lines of Chapter One, where Deckard’s wife was mentioned. This is interesting, I thought. What about the whole running-away-with-replicant!Rachel business? (This is where you sci-fi veterans can pat past!me on the head and say ‘you don’t know the half of it, darling’.) Then the story weaved onwards. I found familiar settings, familiar names, familiar situations, and yet… something completely different.

It took some time for the summary of the differences to settle in my head, but now that it had, I can put it like this. Blade Runner is a story about androids, or replicants, or basically machines becoming so similar to humans that they start exhibiting human traits. Do Androids Dream of Electric Ship? is a story about humans gradually losing their humanity to the extent that they can be mistaken for machines.

In the book, another bounty hunter, Phil Resch, is so cold-hearted that Deckard is convinced he’s an android until the test conclusively proves otherwise. Is that an illustration of the consequences of fighting monsters? Perhaps Resch has stared into the abyss for too long. Perhaps so has J. R. Isidore, who, presented with a dying cat, automatically assumes it to be a malfunctioning robot rather than a sick animal. What about the androids? In the book, they ARE the abyss, complete with Pris who tortures a spider out of curiosity, and Rachel who murders Deckard’s pet sheep for revenge. Compare that to the film, where Roy Baty, having nearly killed Deckard for, one may say, a number of valid reasons, nevertheless saves his life in the end. Maybe so that the last thing he does before dying would be an act of mercy rather than coldness. Maybe so that there would be somewhere there as he dies. Both sentiments sooner human than rational. I wonder, if he was given the Voight-Kampff test right there, on that roof – what would the result be? And how many more years Paul Resch would go on before he would fail the same test?

This brings me to my next point. The story of the film is one where a character is put through hardships, danger and shocking discoveries – and changes forever for it. The story of the book is one where the character experiences similar things, yet in the end, changes very little. Despite thinking himself unable to kill androids after becoming intimate with Rachel, Deckard finishes his mission. In the end, the humans remain human, and the machines remain machines. It’s Rachel who hurts Deckard for revenge. It’s Iran, his wife, who looks out for him and tries to make him happy.

Doesn’t that happen all too often in life? Things happen, and they feel huge, shocking and important, and we think that there’s NO way the world, or even we ourselves, can continue unchanged after it, because the things that happened are just too huge, too important… And then the next day, the world is the same, and so are we. Little by little, big, earth-shattering things fade away, and everything goes back to the way they used to be.

I suppose, in a way, that makes the novel much more realistic, and all the more depressing for it. The fact that I prefer the film probably says a lot about me, too. Call me an idealist if you like. I’d just much rather believe
that every now and again, that sort of thing that just doesn’t happen, does.