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"I DON'T KNOW WHY A REPLICANT WOULD COLLECT PHOTOS-MAYBE they were like Rachel-they needed memories." In the role of the bounty hunter Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott's 1982 cult classic, Blade Runner, Harrison Ford utters these words with a bitter edge. Assigned to "terminate" the beautiful Rachel, an "android" especially menacing because she's almost (almost!) indistinguishable from a "real" person, Deckard lusts after her and wants to be sure she's human, not machinemade, before bedding her. Based on Phillip K. Dick's brilliant science fiction novel of 1968, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the film adds the bit of sentiment about collecting photographs to the otherwise unmitigated darkness of Phillip Dick's vision of a near future. The year is 2021, and by means of mechanical replication-the electric sheep of Dick's title-warm-blooded animal life has been all but totally replaced by replicants, copies or duplications of almost forgotten originals. Memories of real sheep and toads and living human flesh are struggling against the irresistible tide of a programmed second-order reality unburdened by personal or cultural memory.
In the film version memory survives paradoxically only as a faint reminder of itself, a remembered need to a memory and thereby an individual identity. Here's where the collected photographs come in. They answer to the need for at least an illusion of memory. Deckard vents his angst just after Rachel leaves his apartment in tears, her selfdelusion shattered by the hardboiled bounty-hunter's refusal to accept the presumptive snapshot of a mother and child fished from her purse as proof of human rather than laboratory birth. "Look," she had said, "here's me with my mother." But Deckard knows better; he has his own tests for androids or "humanoid robots." True, she's a special model, long-lasting and seductively beautiful but still a replicant. "Not your memories," Deckard had said to her, "but some else's," a "synthetic memory system" as fraudulent as the faked photo.
Crushed, Rachel leaves him musing at his piano, flipping through another set of faked "old" snapshots he had commandeered from another android. He has also spread his own family snapshots on the piano top, some faded, browned, curling with age and use. These photos are presumably the real thing, true memories of a past that actually happened....