Senescence - Moon, Blade Runner, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

trailer for Duncan Jones' Moon
a look at Ridley Scott's Blade Runner
wikipedia entry for Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Looking across Zach's bookshelf, over the various volumes of Sandman, some old novelizations of even older Doctor Who episodes, I saw this halfway ridiculous book, masquerading as something it was not. It's black, and boldly, cheesily emblazoned with BLADE RUNNER. Its cover is blearily printed with the movie's poster. The poster is impressive full sized, an awesome painted collage in the vein of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, but here it is too far reduced to make out much of anything except for Harrison Ford's drenched head and flashy little gun. Even more unfortunate is that the novel's real title is set in parentheses underneath BLADE RUNNER, as if it's some unwanted subheader, asking meekly, well, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Even without having seen Ridley Scott's cult sci-fi phenomenon in a good long while, I could tell that the book bore little resemblance to the movie. At this point I'm obligated to tell you that if there's anything you don't want to know about Blade Runner or the book it was based off of then read on with caution. I'll more strenuously warn you off of Moon spoilers, for those who want to see it. Right within the first few pages I see the same preoccupation with media and religion that makes up a large part of the Philip K Dick's speech that I posted earlier, both aspects which of course are stricken from the movie. Both the book and the movie have the same premise, that Deckard is responsible for getting rid of a small group of criminal replicants/androids.

In the novel, the androids are mostly human, except for a few physiological things. But they lack a cognitive ability to feel empathy, so in a sense they are all psychopaths. In the film this is barely limned, and if anything the short fall of the book is that it doesn't cause you to empathsize with the androids as well as the movie. Empathy is the whole point of the novel. The end of the film makes a point of having the replicant Roy Baty stop his murderous rampage to reflect on the loss of all of his being to the sweep of time, after only a scant four years of life (most of which was spent as a slave off-world), having no one to remember him and having no capacity, as has the rest of life, to have children. I still find this an affecting scene, even if the release of the white dove is hopelessly maudlin.

MOON SPOILERS from here on out

Roy Baty's death is something that he strives against for the duration of Blade Runner, whether that be death from a bounty hunter like Deckard or his failing physiology. In the end it's a quick, painless death as his body fails. The day I picked up Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? we went to see Moon. It was the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, so I almost felt obligated to go. In Moon, Sam Bell is alone, ensconced in a He3 mining facility on the far side of the moon. As his three year deployment winds down he is soon confronted with something that completely shatters his tiny world-- himself. He literally finds himself trapped in a vehicle outside on the lunar surface. The first Sam Bell, with whom the movie opens, is clearly ill. The second Sam Bell, fit, pragmatic, is disgusted by the sight of his doppleganger whose life he saved. Though this may irk some, I liked that the movie didn't dive into a pure existentialist crisis at this point. But what we come to learn is that the first Sam is never going to recover, and unlike Roy's nice poetic death, Sam I is deteriorating.

Senescence is a genetic process. In frogs, senescence causes the cells in a tadpole's tail to die, so that it may become a mature frog. Every cell has within itself the capacity to terminate its processes, a clock of checks and balances. Cancer is life without this clock. Sam II is the first to recognize that he and his new twin are clones, but it is only Sam I who comes to fully realize how short their lives are. Sam I is failing. After three years, his time is up. In one of the most sadly disturbing scenes, the two Sams find the vault which carries all of the clones needed to run the station. Sam II asks why there are so many of them, which Sam I ignores, not even having told him about the purpose of the room above them. They open one of the drawers and find a new Sam, arrayed around him all of the accoutrements of life, t-shirts wrapped in plastic, familiar mugs-- a reverse Egyptian burial. The Sams come to realize that it's not life they need, but a way to communicate to the generations of clones after them and to the world at large the true nature of their existence. All the while Sam I is wracked with fevers, spitting up teeth and blood, is getting weaker and weaker. It's quite frankly hard to watch. But they both plug on, and the end is upbeat considering their circumstances.

Afterwards as we walked around, the walker signals beeping and calling out in flat voices the streets we were crossing, I thought a lot about Blade Runner. The Sams had less time than Roy and the other replicants. Roy spent his time killing who he could around him to first escape slavery and then in an attempt to escape death. The Sams, also unknowing slaves, found and cared for each other, and through their work together tried to forge a new future for their successors, a lasting legacy. If only Roy could have had time to tell what he saw with those eyes.