Science fiction as creative mythology

Rating: Null/10 (19 April 2002)

We've all seen Blade Runner a thousand times. It's a movie with universal appeal. But the really intriguing question is, Why? What makes us want to watch it again and again?
I think that Blade Runner's universal appeal lies in its ability to tap powerfully into our collective mythological subconscious: in particular, its reification of two fundamental psychic forces, represented in Greek mythology by Gaia (mother earth) and Ouranos (father sky). It has the power of a religious truth that bears repeating over and over.

Consider the warm, dark, moist, dank feel of the film. Wet and warm and dark, one feels the feminine energy of the womb. The architecture is massive and heavy, suggesting feminine emotional centeredness, power, and gravity. In one scene, there are supporting beams of enormous girth, stretching proudly upward from the ground. But they are literally engulfed by their dark moist surroundings, and the energy of their strength and girth upward thrust seem puny by comparison. Blade Runner has a distinctly vaginal setting, an amazingly powerful backdrop to all the masculine energy that ensues.
All the men in Blade Runner interact with artifacts. None of them is aware of the warm smell of the earth; nor are they intimately connected to her (the earth) as son to mother. Instead, they interact with each other, or things. Men treat other men as things. They no longer need women for procreation. They no longer need to relate to their own feminine anima (at least, they think they don't need to): they need, or they think they need, their toys, their instruments of power and control.
Notice also that the act of creation has been usurped from women, residing also, perhaps primarily, in men's hands. In the Hebrew Scriptures, there was always the divine `wisdom' or `Sophia' in the background with Yahweh, identical to the creative impulse of Yahweh. In the Biblical proverbs, she speaks and says that `when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was with him, as a master workman.' Creation was a feminine impulse. But while watching Blade Runner, it feels as though men are acting out of envy of women  call it `vaginal envy' as opposed to Freud's `penis envy'  and an impulse both to dominate, and even exceed, women's creative powers. In Blade Runner, it's a masculine psychosis on a worldwide scale.

Which is why Blade Runner is such a timely tragedy about the consequences of male phallic dominance. `Blade' is, of course, a highly phallic symbol. One is reminded of Odysseus's famous encounter with Circe, two polarized representatives of the feminine and masculine, Gaia and Ouranos, wherein they approach each other in a competitive relationship. One or the other is bound to lose. In fact, both do: they remain polarized in their sex roles, and forfeit much of their human potential. So Hermes, helping he hero dominate and control the woman, gave Odysseus this advice just before his encounter with the seductress:
When she turns cruel, coming near With her long stick to whip you out of doors, Then let your cutting blade appear, Let instant death upon it shine, And she will cower and yield her bed.
A blade is the instrument of Odysseus's domination. Yet behind this masculine `need' to dominate lay his fear of castration, and his fear of women's creative power. Man must control the blade, the power, or the evil woman will take away his manhood. The male fear of castration is, in fact, a powerfully effective undercurrent in the film. The replicants, who are in many respects superior to their human creators, are nevertheless dissatisfied with the nature that their human creators gave them; so, they seek to deny mankind their power of creation. They want to castrate mankind as Saturn castrated Ouranos.
There isn't a clear ray of sunshine in the entire film. Why? Because man is his own sun. By the light of his own intellect and reason he has seen things that ancient Helios hasn't seen. Man has eclipsed the sun as Saturn of Greek mythology (father of Zeus) eclipsed his father Ouranos. As a human audience, we feel the power and hope of such divine power. We even feel sympathy for the Eldon Tyrell, master replicant designer, when Roy squishes his head between his hands, going straight for the creative genius of his maker, the source of his generative power. It's a beautiful thing, after all, to have such creative power.
So in Blade Runner, man lives in the shadow of his own image. Having externalized the creative power of his own feminine anima onto the things he has made, he remains disconnected from himself, existing on a lower moral plane than his own creation, the replicants, who, though dissatisfied with their own nature, at least remain true to it. In fact, mankind is the aggressor in human-replicant relations, having projected their own dark side onto them, not unlike Yahweh and his faithful servant Job.

Thus Blade Runner is much more than a science fiction flick. Jung said that `One doesn't become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." Blade Runner brings the darkness of our own phallic assumptions about human progress to light. And seeing our dark impulses in the light of day, we become enlightened.