Why don't you take a pill, bake a cake and go read the encyclopedia?

Rating: Null/10 (13 August 2010)

"How can it not know what it is?" – Deckard (Blade Runner)
"Moon" stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, an astronaut manning a Helium-3 mining facility on the dark side of the moon. As the film progresses, Sam realises that he is not a "unique" and "special" human being, but one of many mass produced clones who has had his memories, thoughts and desires programmed into him by a shadowy corporation. As Sam's body disintegrates (like "Blade Runner", "Moon's" androids are programmed with a kind of "planned obsolescence"), one of his copies hitches a ride back to earth, where it reveals the corporation's evil practises to a shocked global audience.
The film recalls a now classic scene in "Blade Runner", in which an android called Deckard - who doesn't know he's a replicant - reveals to another android that her memories are not her own, but belong to the niece of Tyrell, the head of the corporation that built and programmed her. "Those aren't your memories," Deckard says mournfully. "They're somebody else's."
Contemporary materialists echo these sentiments, applying Deckard's cyborg speech to all of humanity. According to the theory of materialism there are now no subjects, there is only subject-matter. Selves are nothing but electronic packets, while private persons are simulacra, Rationalism rejecting the notion that there is some ineffable "thing" over the genetic, neurological and social coding that makes us "us", maintaining instead that the personal and the biographical are only explicable in machinic and impersonal terms.
The question raised by people – "Is Deckard a replicant?" – therefore misses the point of the "Blade Runner" completely. The criteria for rating the human above the cyborg (a fusion of humans and technology) have long been evaporated. Deckard, like man, is a machine that thinks it is what it is not and is certain that it is not what it is. As all identity is construction, everything has been produced and nothing is given (which is why Cronenberg now thinks of his films, from "Crash" onwards, as being filled with cyborgs).
As man is defended by his own narcissism, Sam, like Deckard, struggles to come to terms with this. Like most subjects faced with this trauma, he oscillates between retreating to either the Symbolic Order (The social world of linguistic communication...of The Law) or The Imaginary Order (the fundamental narcissism by which the human subject creates fantasy images of both himself and his ideal object of desire), both of which are tragic flights.
But, as film Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek says (see "A Pervert's Guide To Cinema"), the lesson of "Blade Runner" (or rather Philip K Dick's lesson...Scott is clueless) is not only that everything in the personal is in fact the product of impersonal processes of cause and effect, but that it is the very act of delineating the underlying nexus that regulates our lives, that marks our freedom. For this reason, "Blade Runner" and "Moon's" android's are actually the film's only pure subjects precisely because they testify that their "content", including their most intimate fantasies, is not their own, but already implanted. i.e, it is only when I acknowledge my replicant status, that I become a truly human subject. Kazimierz Dabrowski called this "positive disintegration".
What both films fail to do, however, is recognise that the "android as pure subject" is itself not an identity, but the product of a machinic process which mis-recognises itself as the process's final cause. So rather than a subject, we have the continuous production of subjectivity (in which the personal is always the "sim-personal"; the simulation of the personal by the impersonal). Self-consciousness as pure introspection simultaneous with what it is introspecting, is therefore impossible, as subjective reflection must always exists "two steps removed" or "behind" the process, consciousness, like memory and habit, always an "after the fact" reflection on the unconscious processes which produce it. In this sense, the subject is by definition always nostalgic, a subject of loss.
For this reason, for the pure subject to have reflection is for it to realise, nihilistically, that consciousness is itself nothing. Unless this happens, the android remains a "simpersonator", able to simulate personalities, but always confusing personality-function with consciousness-as-essence. In other words, unlike Deckard and Sam, the pure subject would not go from "it does not know what it is" to "it now knows what it is", but from "it does not know what it is" to "it knows it cannot know what it is becoming".
7.9/10 – An excellent sci-fi tale with a very silly ending, our cyborg hero returning to earth where he, in the film's only uplifting moment, fights for cyborg rights and personal freedoms. This brief but triumphant scene undermines the entire picture, turning it into a story of corporate ethics and painting Sam, not as us, but a mistreated machine.