In the 1908 Edison film The Thieving Hand, a wealthy passer-by takes pity on an armless beggar and buys him a prosthetic arm. As the beggar soon discovers, however, the arm has memories of its own. Because the arm remembers its own thieving, it snatches people’s possessions as they walk by. Dismayed, the beggar sells his arm at a pawnshop. But the arm sidles out of the shop, finds the beggar out on the street, and reattaches itself to him. The beggar’s victims, meanwhile, have contacted a police officer who finds the beggar and carts him off to jail. In the jail cell, the arm finds its rightful owner – the ‘proper’ thieving body – a one-armed criminal, and attaches itself to him.
This moment in early cinema anticipates dramatically a preoccupation in more contemporary science fiction with what I would like to call ‘prosthetic memories’. By prosthetic memories I mean memories which do not come from a person’s lived experience in any strict sense. These are implanted memories, and the unsettled boundaries between real and simulated ones are frequently accompanied by another disruption: of the human body, its flesh, its subjective autonomy, its difference from both the animal and the technological.
Furthermore, through the prosthetic arm the beggar’s body manifests memories of actions that it, or he, never actually committed. In fact, his memories are radically divorced from lived experience and yet they motivate his actions. Because the hand’s memories – which the beggar himself wears – prescribe actions in the present, they make a beggar into a thief. In other words, it is precisely the memories of thieving which construct an identity for him. We might say then that the film underscores the way in which memory is constitutive of identity. This in itself is not surprising. What is surprising is the position the film takes on the relationship between memory, experience and identity.
What might the ‘otherness’ of prosthetic memory that The Thieving Hand displays tell us about how persons come ordinarily to feel that they possess, rather than are possessed by, their memories? We rely on our memories to validate our experiences. The experience of memory actually becomes the index of experience: if we have the memory, we must have had the experience it represents. But what about the armless beggar? He has the memory without having lived the experience. If memory is the precondition for identity or individuality – if what we claim as our memories defines who we are – then the idea of a prosthetic memory problematises any concept of memory that posits it as essential, stable or organically grounded. In addition, it makes impossible the wish that a person owns her/his memories as inalienable property.
As it happens, we don’t know anything about the beggar’s real past. Memories, it seems, are the domain of the present. The beggar’s prosthetic memories offer him a course of action to live by. Surprisingly enough, memories are less about validating or authenticating the past than they are about organising the present and constructing strategies with which one might imagine a livable future. Memory, this essay will argue, is not a means for closure – is not a strategy for closing or finishing the past – but on the contrary, memory emerges as a generative force, a force which propels us not backward but forwards.
But in the case of The Thieving Hand, the slippage the film opens up with the prosthetic hand – the rupture between experience, memory and identity – gets sealed up at the end of the film, in jail, when the thieving hand reattaches itself to what we are meant to recognise as the real or authentic thieving body, the one-armed criminal. In other words, despite the film’s flirtation with the idea that memories might be permanently transportable, The Thieving Hand ends by rejecting that possibility, in that the hand itself chooses to be with its proper owner.
I have begun with The Thieving Hand to demonstrate that, as with all mediated forms of knowledge, prosthetic memory has a history. Although memory might always have been prosthetic, the mass media – technologies which structure and circumscribe experience – bring the texture and contours of prosthetic memory into dramatic relief. Because the mass media fundamentally alter our notion of what counts as experience, they might be a privileged arena for the production and circulation of prosthetic memories. The cinema, in particular, as an institution which makes available images for mass consumption, has long been aware of its ability to generate experiences and to install memories of them – memories which become experiences that film consumers both possess and feel possessed by. We might then read these films which thematise prosthetic memories as an allegory for the power of the mass media to create experiences and to implant memories, the experience of which we have never lived. Because the mass media are a privileged site for the production of such memories, they might be an undertheorised force in the production of identities. If a film like The Thieving Hand eventually insists that bodily memories have rightful owners, more recent science fiction texts like Blade Runner and Total Recall have begun to imagine otherwise.
In Paul Verhoeven’s film Total Recall (1990), Douglas Quade (Arnold Schwarzenegger) purchases a set of implanted memories of a trip to Mars. Not only might he buy the memories for a trip he has never taken, but he might elect to go on the trip as someone other than himself. Quade has an urge to go to Mars as a secret agent – or rather, to remember having gone as a secret agent. But the implant procedure does not go smoothly. While strapped in his seat memories begin to break through – memories, we learn, that have been layered over by ‘the Agency’. As it turns out, Quade is not an ‘authentic identity’, but one based on memories implanted by the intelligence agency on Mars.
In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (director’s cut, 1993), Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a member of a special police squad – a blade runner unit – and has been called in to try to capture and ‘retire’ a group of replicants recently landed on earth. Replicants, advanced robots created by the Tyrell Corporation as slave labour for the off-world colonies, are ‘being[s] virtually identical to human[s]’. The most advanced replicants, like Rachael (Sean Young), an employee at the Tyrell Corporation who eventually falls for Deckard, are designed so that they don’t know they are replicants. As Mr Tyrell explains to Deckard, ‘If we give them a past we create a cushion for their emotions and consequently we can control them better.’ ‘Memories’, Deckard responds incredulously, ‘you’re talking about memories.’ Both of these films, as we shall see, offer provocative examples of individuals who identify with memories which are not their own.
If the idea of prosthetic memory complicates the relationship between memory and experience, then we might use films that literalise prosthetic memory to disrupt some postmodernist assumptions about experience. With postmodernity, Fredric Jameson asserts, we see ‘the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way’ (1991: 21). He claims that in post-modernity, experience is dead. ‘Nostalgia films’, he suggests, invoke a sense of ‘pastness’ instead of engaging with ‘real history’. He therefore finds a fundamental ‘incompatibility of a postmodernist nostalgia and language with genuine historicity’ (1991: 19). Not only does his account participate in a nostalgia of its own – nostalgia for that prelapsarian moment when we all actually experienced history in some real way – but, as I will argue, it offers a rather narrow version of experience. The flipside of Jameson’s point is Jean Baudrillard’s (1983) claim that the proliferation of different media and mediations – simulations – which have permeated many aspects of contemporary society, have dissolved the dichotomy between the real and the simulacrum, between the authentic and the inauthentic. He argues that with the proliferation of different forms of media in the twentieth century, people’s actual relationship to events – what we are to understand as authentic experience – has become so mediated, that we can no longer distinguish between the real – something mappable – and what he calls the hyperreal – ‘the generation by models of a real without origin’ (Baudrillard 1983: 2). For Baudrillard, we live in a world of simulation, a world hopelessly detached from the ‘real’. Or, to put it another way, postmodern society is characterised by an absence of ‘real’ experience. But Baudrillard’s argument clings tenaciously to a real; he desperately needs a real to recognise that we are in a land of simulation. Both assumptions unwittingly betray a nostalgia for a prelapsarian moment when there was a real. But the real has always been mediated through information cultures and through narrative. What does it mean for memories to be ‘real’? Were they ever ‘real’? This essay refuses such a categorisation, but also shows the costs of such a refusal.
I would like to set this notion of the death of the real – particularly the death of real experience – against what I perceive as a veritable explosion of, or popular obsession with, experience of the real. From the hugely attended D-Day reenactments of 1994 to what I would like to call ‘experiential museums’, like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, it seems to me that the experiential real is anything but dead. In fact, the popularity of these experiential events bespeaks a popular longing to experience history in a personal and even bodily way. They offer strategies for making history into personal memories. They provide individuals with the collective opportunity of having an experiential relationship to a collective or cultural past they either did or did not experience. I would like to suggest that what we have embarked upon in the postmodern is a new relationship to experience which relies less on categories like the authentic and sympathy than on categories like responsibility and empathy.
This postmodern relationship to experience has significant political ramifications. If this fascination with the experiential might be imagined as an act of prosthesis – of prosthetically appropriating memories of a cultural or collective past – then these particular histories or pasts might be available for consumption across existing stratifications of race, class and gender. These prosthetic memories, then, might become the grounds for political alliances. As Donna Haraway (1991) has powerfully argued with her articulation of cyborg identity, we need to construct political alliances that are not based on natural or essential affinities.1 Cyborg identity recognises the complicated process of identity formation, that we are multiply hailed subjects, and thus embraces the idea of ‘partial identities’. The pasts that we claim and ‘use’ are part of this process.
If the real has always been mediated through collectivised forms of identity, why then, does the sensual in the cinema – the experiential nature of the spectator’s engagement with the image – differ from other aesthetic experiences which might also be the scene of the production of sensual memory, like reading (see Miller, 1988)? Concern about the power of the visual sensorium – specifically, an awareness of the cinema’s ability to produce memories in its spectators – has a lengthy history of its own. In 1928, William H. Short, the Executive Director of the Motion Picture Research Council, asked a group of researchers – mostly university psychologists and sociologists – to discuss the possibility of assessing the effects of motion pictures on children. These investigations he initiated – the Payne Studies – are significant not so much in their immediate findings, but rather in what they imply about the popular anxiety about the ways in which motion pictures actually affect – in an experiential way – individual bodies. In a set of studies conducted by Herbert Blumer, college-aged individuals were asked ‘to relate or write as carefully as possible their experiences with motion pictures’ (1933: xi). What Blumer finds is that ‘imaginative identification’ is quite common, and that ‘while witnessing a picture one not infrequently projects oneself into the role of hero or heroine’ (1933: 67). Superficially, this account sounds much like arguments made in contemporary film theory about spectatorship and about the power of the filmic apparatus and narrative to position the subject (see, for example, Baudry, 1974–5; Comolli, 1986). However, Blumer’s claims – and their ramifications – are somewhat different. Blumer refers to identification as ‘emotional possession’ positing that ‘the individual identifies himself so thoroughly with the plot or loses himself so much in the picture that he is carried away from the usual trend of conduct’ (1933: 74). There is, in fact, no telling just how long this possession will last, for ‘in certain individuals it may become fixed and last for a long time’ (1933: 84). In fact,
In a state of emotional possession im-pulses, motives and thoughts are likely to lose their fixed form and become malleable instead. There may emerge from this ‘molten state’ a new stable organisation directed towards a different line of conduct. The individual, as a result of witnessing a particularly emotional picture, may come to a decision to have certain kinds of experience and to live a kind of life different from his prior career (Blumer 1933: 116).
A woman explains that when she saw The Sheik for the first time she recalls ‘coming home that night and dreaming the entire picture over again; myself as the heroine, being carried over the burning sands by an equally burning lover. I could feel myself being kissed in the way the Sheik had kissed the girl’ (Blumer 1933: 70). What individuals see might affect them so significantly that the images actually become part of their own personal archive of experience.
Because the movie experience decentres lived experience, it, too, might alter or construct identity. Emotional possession has implications for both the future and the past of the individual under its sway. It has the potential to alter one’s actions in the future in that under its hold an individual ‘is transported out of his normal conduct and is completely subjugated by his impulses’ (Blumer 1933: 94). A nineteen-year-old woman writes,
After having seen a movie of pioneer days I am very unreconciled to the fact that I live today instead of the romantic days of fifty years ago. But to offset this poignant and useless longing I have dreamed of going to war. I stated previously that through the movies I have become aware of the awfulness, the futility of it, etc. But as this side has been impressed upon me, there has been awakened in me at the same time the desire to go to the ‘front’ during the next war. The excitement – shall I say glamour? – of the war has always appealed to me from the screen. Often I have pictured myself as a truck driver, nurse, HEROINE (Blumer, 1933: 63).
What this suggests is that the experience within the movie theatre and the memories that the cinema affords – despite the fact that the spectator did not live through them – might be as significant in constructing, or deconstructing, the spectator’s identity as any experience that s/he actually lived through.
Many of the Payne Studies tests were designed to measure quantitatively the extent to which film affects the physical bodies of its spectators. The investigators used a galvanometer which, like a lie detector, ‘measure galvanic responses’, electrical impulses, in skin, and a pneumo-cardiograph ‘to measure changes in the circulatory system’ (Charters 1933: 25), like respiratory pulse and blood pressure. This sensitive technology might pick up physiological disturbances and changes that would go unseen by the naked eye. These studies thus presumed that the body might give evidence of physiological symptoms caused by a kind of technological intervention into subjectivity – an intervention which is part and parcel of the cinematic experience. The call for a technology of detection registers a fear that we might no longer be able to distinguish prosthetic or ‘unnatural’ memories from ‘real’ ones.
At the same historical moment, European cultural critics of the 1920s – specifically Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer – began to theorise the experiential nature of the cinema. They attempted to theorise the way in which movies might actually extend the sensual memory of the human body. By 1940 Kracauer believed that film actually addresses its viewer as a ‘‘corporeal-material being’; it seizes the ‘human being with skin and hair’: ‘The material elements that present themselves in film directly stimulate the material layers of the human being: his nerves, his senses, his entire physiological substance’’ (1993: 458). The cinematic experience has an individual, bodily component at the same time that it is circumscribed by its collectivity; the domain of the cinema is public and collective. Benjamin’s notion of ‘innervation’ is an attempt to imagine an engaged experiential relationship with technology and the cinema.2 It is precisely the interplay of individual bodily experience with the publicity of the cinema which might make possible new forms of collectivity – political and otherwise.
More recently, Steven Shaviro (1993) has emphasised the visceral, bodily component of film spectatorship. He argues that psychoanalytic film theory studiously ignores the experiential component of spectatorship. In his account, psychoanalytic film theory has attempted ‘to destroy the power of images’ (1993: 16),3 and that what those theorists fear is not the lack, ‘not the emptiness of the image, but its weird fullness; not its impotence so much as its power’ (1993: 17). We might say that the portability of cinematic images – the way we are invited to wear them prosthetically, the way we might experience them in a bodily fashion – is both the crisis and the allure. As if to emphasise this experiential, bodily aspect of spectatorship, Shaviro sets forth as his guiding principle that ‘cinematic images are not representations, but events’ (1993: 24).
I would like to turn to a scene in Total Recall which dramatically illustrates the way in which mass mediated images intervene in the production of subjectivity. The notion of authenticity – and our desire to privilege it – is constantly undermined by Total Recall’s obsessive rendering of mediated images. In many instances we see, simultaneously, a person and their mediated representation on a video screen. When Quade first goes to Rekal to meet with Mr McClane, the sales representative, we see McClane simultaneously through a window over his secretary’s shoulder, and as an image on her video phone as she calls him to let him know that Quade has arrived. In Total Recall the proliferation of mediated images – and of video screens – forces us to question the very notion of an authentic or an originary presence. Video monitors appear on subway cars with advertisements (like the one for Rekal), and all telephones are video phones; even the walls of Quade’s house are enormous television screens. Quade’s identity, too, as we will see, is mediated by video images. When he learns from his wife that she’s not his wife, that she ‘never saw him before six weeks ago’, that their ‘marriage is just a memory implant’, that the Agency ‘erased his identity and implanted a new one’ – basically that ‘his whole life is just a dream’ – any sense he has of a unified self, of a stable subjectivity, is shattered. When memories might be separable from lived ex-perience, issues of identity – and upon what identity is constructed – take on radical importance.
The question of his identity – and how his identity is predicated upon a particular set of memories which may or may not be properly his own – surfaces most dramatically when he confronts his own face in a video monitor. That he sees his face on a portable video screen – one that he has been carrying around in a suitcase which was handed to him by a ‘buddy from the Agency’ – literalises the film’s account of the portability of memory and identity. Quade confronts his own face in a video screen, but finds there a different person. The face on the screen says, ‘Howdy stranger, this is Hauser … Get ready for the big surprise. … You are not you. You are me.’ We might be tempted to read this scene as an instance of Freud’s (1959) notion of the ‘uncanny’. The sensation of the ‘uncanny’, as Freud articulates it, is produced by an encounter with something which is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar; the sensation of the uncanny comes from the ‘return of the repressed’. The experience of seeing one’s double is therefore the height of uncanny.4 But Quade’s experience is not that way at all. The face he confronts is explicitly not his face; it does not correspond to his identity.
Since the film rejects the idea that there is an authentic, or more authentic, self underneath the layers of identity, there is no place for the uncanny. For Quade, the memories of Hauser seem never to have existed. In fact, he encounters Hauser with a kind of disinterest, not as someone he once knew or was, but rather as a total stranger.
In this way, the encounter seems to disrupt the Lacanian notion of the ‘mirror stage’. According to Jacques Lacan, the mirror stage is initiated when a child first sees himself reflected as an autonomous individual, as a unified and bounded subject. As Lacan describes, the ‘jubilant assumption of his specular image’ (1977: 2) gives the child an illusion of wholeness, which is vastly different from the child’s own sense of himself as a fragmentary bundle of undifferentiated drives. For Quade, the experience is exactly the opposite. In fact, we might say that the encounter with the face in the monitor, which looks like his face but is not the one he owns, disrupts any sense of a unified, stable and bounded subjectivity. Instead of consolidating his identity, the video screen further fragments it. This encounter undermines as well the assumption that a particular memory has a rightful owner, a proper body to adhere to.
This encounter with Hauser – who professes to be the real possessor of the body – becomes a microcosm for the film’s larger critique of the preeminence of the ‘real’. That we meet Quade first – and identify with him – makes us question whether Hauser is the true or more worthy identity for the body. If we are to believe that Hauser’s identity is in some ways more ‘real’ than Quade’s – because his memories are based on lived experience rather than memory implants – the question then becomes is realer necessarily better? At the climax of the film, Quade claims his own identity instead of going back to being Hauser. In his final exchange with Cohagen, Cohagen says, ‘I wanted Hauser back. You had to be Quade.’ ‘I am Quade’, he responds. Although Quade is an identity based on implanted memories, it is no less viable than Hauser – and arguably more so. Quade remains the primary object of our spectatorial investment and engagement throughout the film. His simulated identity is more responsible, compassionate and productive than the ‘real’ one. That Quade experiences himself as ‘real’ gives the lie to the Baudrillardian and Jamesonian assumption that the real and the authentic are synonymous.
Part of what claiming this identity means is saving the Mutants on Mars from oxygen deprivation. The Mutants are the socio-economic group on Mars who are most oppressed by the tyrannical Cohagen; Cohagen regulates their access to oxygen. Quade refuses to go back to being Hauser because he feels that he has a mission to carry out. His sense of moral responsibility outweighs any claims on his actions exerted by the pull of an ‘authentic’ identity. By choosing to start the reactor at the pyramid mines – and thereby produce enough oxygen to make the atmosphere on Mars habitable – Quade is able to liberate the Mutants from Cohagen’s grip.
Surprisingly enough, memories are less about authenticating the past, than about generating possible courses of action in the present. The Mutant resistance leader, Quato, tells Quade that ‘A man is defined by his actions, not his memories.’ We might revise his statement to say that a man is defined by his actions, but whether those actions are made possible by prosthetic memories or memories based on lived experience makes little difference. Any kind of distinction between ‘real’ memories and prosthetic memories – memories which might be technologically disseminated by the mass media and worn by its consumers – might ultimately be unintelligible. Total Recall underscores the way in which memories are always already public, the way in which memories always circulate and interpellate individuals, but can never get back to an authentic owner, to a proper body – or as we will see in the case of Blade Runner, to a proper photograph.
Although Blade Runner is based on the 1968 Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, its points of departure from the novel are instructive. In Dick’s novel, the presence of empathy is what allows the bounty hunters to distinguish the androids from the humans. In fact, empathy is imagined to be the uniquely human trait. Deckard wonders ‘precisely why an android bounced so helplessly about when confronted by an empathy measuring test. Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community…’ (Dick 1968: 26).
What exposes the replicants in the film, however, is not the lack of empathy as much as the lack of a past – the lack of memories. Ridley Scott’s film foregrounds this point in the opening sequence. The film begins with a Voight-Kampf test. This test is designed to identify a replicant by measuring physical, bodily responses to a series of questions which are designed to provoke an emotional response. Technological instruments are used to measure pupil dilation and the blush reflex to determine the effect the questions have on the subject. In this opening scene, Mr Holden, a ‘blade runner’, questions Leon, his subject. As Mr Holden explains, the questions are ‘designed to provoke an emotional response’ and that ‘reaction time is important’. Leon, however, slows down the test by interrupting with questions. When Mr Holden says, ‘You’re in a desert walking along the sand. You see a tortoise’, Leon asks, ‘What’s a tortoise?’ Seeing that his line of enquiry is going nowhere, Mr Holden says, ‘Describe in single words the good things about your mother’. Leon stands up, pulls out a gun, says, ‘Let me tell you about my mother’ and then shoots Holden. In this primal scene, what ‘catches’ the replicant is not the absence of empathy, but rather the absence of a past, the absence of memories. Leon cannot describe his mother, cannot produce a genealogy, because he has no past, no memories.
This scene, then, attempts to establish memory as the locus of humanity. Critics of the film have tended to focus on the fact that replicants lack a past in order to underscore the lack of ‘real history’ in postmodernity. David Harvey, for example, argues that ‘history for everyone has become reduced to the evidence of a photograph’ (1989: 313). In Harvey’s account, that replicants lack a past illustrates the lack of depth – and the emphasis on surface – which characterises postmodernity. Giuliana Bruno claims that the photograph ‘represents the trace of an origin and thus a personal identity, the proof of having existed and therefore having the right to exist’ (1987: 71). Certainly the relationship between photography and memory is central to this film. However, both Bruno and Harvey presume that photography has the ability to anchor a referent; they presume that the photograph maintains an indexical link to ‘reality’. The film, I would argue, claims just the opposite. After Deckard has determined that Rachel is a replicant she shows up at his appartment with photographs – in particular a photograph depicting her and her mother. ‘You think I’m a replicant, don’t you?’, she asks. ‘Look, it’s me with my mother.’ The photograph, she hopes, will both validate her memory and authenticate her past. Instead of reasserting the referent, however, the photograph further confounds it. Instead of accepting Rachael’s photograph as truth, Deckard begins to recall for her one of her memories: ‘You remember the spider that lived in the bush outside your window … watched her work, building a web all summer. Then one day there was a big egg in it.’ Rachael continues, ‘The egg hatched and 100 baby spiders came out and they ate her…’ Deckard looks at her. ‘Implants’, he says. ‘Those aren’t your memories, they’re someone else’s. They’re Tyrell’s niece’s.’ The photograph in Blade Runner, like the photograph of the grandmother in Kracauer’s 1927 essay ‘Photography’, is ‘reduced to the sum of its details’ (1993: 430). With the passage of time the image ‘necessarily disintegrates into its particulars’ (Kracauer, 1993: 429). The photograph can no more be a fixed locus of memory than the body can in Total Recall. The photograph, it seems has proved nothing.
We must not, however, lose sight of the fact that Rachael’s photograph does correspond to the memories she has. And those memories are what allow her to go on, exist as she does, and eventually fall in love with Deckard. We might say that while the photograph has no relationship to ‘reality’, it helps her to produce her own narrative. While it fails to authenticate her past, it does authenticate her present. The power of photography, in Kracauer’s account, is its ability to ‘disclose this previously unexamined foundation of nature’ (1993: 435–6) and derives not from its ability to fix, but rather from its ability to reconfigure. Photography, for Kracauer, precisely because it loses its indexical link to the world, has ‘The capacity to stir up the elements of nature’ (1993: 436). For Rachael, the photograph does not correspond to a lived experience and yet it provides her with a springboard for her own memories. In a particularly powerful scene Rachael sits down at the piano in Deckard’s apartment, takes her hair down, and begins to play. Deckard joins her at the piano. ‘I remember lessons’, she says. ‘I don’t know if it’s me or Tyrell’s niece.’ Instead of focusing on that ambiguity, Deckard says, ‘You play beautifully’. At this point Deckard, in effect, rejects the distinction between ‘real’ and prosthetic memories. Her memory of lessons allows her to play beautifully, so it matters little whether she lived through the lessons or not.
Because the director’s cut raises the possibility that Deckard himself is a replicant, it takes a giant step toward erasing the intelligibility of the distinction between the real and the simulated, the human and the replicant. Early on in the film Deckard sits down at his piano and glances at the old photographs that he has displayed upon it. Then there is cut to a unicorn racing through a field, which we are to take as a daydream – or a memory. Obviously it cannot be a ‘real’ memory, a memory of a lived experience. Later, at the very end of the film, when Deckard is about to flee with Rachael, he sees an origami unicorn lying on the floor outside of his door. When Deckard picks up the unicorn, which we recognise as the work of a plainclothes officer who has been making origami figures throughout the film, we hear an echo of his earlier statement to Deckard about Rachael – ‘It’s too bad she won’t live, but then again who does?’ The ending suggests that the cop knows about Deckard’s memory of a unicorn, in the same way that Deckard knows about Rachel’s memory of the spider. It suggests that his memories, too, are implants – that they are prosthetic. At this moment we do not know whether Deckard is a replicant or not. Unlike the earlier version of the film, the director’s cut refuses to make a clear distinction for us between replicant and human, between real and prosthetic memory. There is no safe position, like the one Baudrillard implicitly supposes, from which we might recognise such a distinction. The ending of Blade Runner, then, registers the pleasure and the threat of portability – that we might not be able to distinguish between our own memories and prosthetic ones. Deckard is an empathic person who is even able to have compassion for a replicant. More importantly, he is a character ‘real enough’ to gain our spectatorial identification. Ultimately the film makes us call into question our own relationship to memory, and to recognise the way in which we always assume that our memories are real. Memories are central to our identity – to our sense of who we are and what we might become – but as this film suggests, whether those memories come from lived experience or whether they are prosthetic seems to make very little difference. Either way, we use them to construct narratives for ourselves, visions for our future.
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) begins with an uncanny allusion to The Thieving Hand. The film opens on a movie set, where an electrical version of the Freddie Kruger hand – a hand with razor blades in the place of fingers – comes to life, as it were, remembering its prior activity of killing. While this hand is not the hand from the old movie, but rather an electrical prosthesis, it nevertheless possesses the Kruger hand’s memories. After this prosthetic hand slices open several people on the movie set, we realise that this scene is ‘just’ a dream based on the main character’s memories of working on the Nightmare on Elm Street films. Gradually, however, the film begins to undermine or question that notion of ‘just’. What might it mean to say that those memories are ‘just’ from a movie? Does it mean, for example, that they are not real? Does it mean that those memories are less real? No, would be Wes Craven’s answer. In fact, memories of the earlier Nightmare on Elm Street movies – and from the movies – become her memories. And as the film radically demonstrates, this is a life and death matter. In the course of the movie, memories from the earlier movies begin to break through. Those memories are not from events she lived, but rather from events she lived cinematically. The film actually thematises the way in which film memories become prosthetic memories. Her memories, prosthetic or not, she experiences as real, for they affect her in a life and death way, profoundly informing the decisions she has to make.
All three of these films gradually undermine the value of the distinction between real and simulation, between authentic and prosthetic memory – and in Blade Runner, the value of the distinction between human and replicant. In Blade Runner, even empathy ultimately fails as a litmus test for humanity. In fact, the replicants – Rachael and Roy (Rutger Hauer), not to mention Deckard – become increasingly empathic in the course of the film. The word empathy, unlike sympathy which has been in use since the sixteenth century, makes its first appearance at the beginning of this century. While sympathy presupposes an initial likeness between subjects (‘Sympathy’, OED, 1989),5 empathy presupposes an initial difference between subjects. Empathy, then, is ‘The power of projecting one’s personality into … the object of contemplation’ (OED, 1989). We might say that empathy depends less on ‘natural’ affinity than sympathy, less on some kind of essential underlying connection between the two subjects. While sympathy, therefore, relies upon an essentialism of identification, empathy recognises the alterity of identification. Empathy, then, is about the lack of identity between subjects, about negotiating distances. It might be the case that it is precisely this distance which is constitutive of the desire and passion to remember. That the distinction between ‘real’ and prosthetic memory is virtually undecidable makes the call for an ethics of personhood both frightening and necessary – an ethics based not on a pluralistic form of humanism or essentialism of identification, but rather on a recognition of difference.6 An ethics of personhood might be constructed upon a practice of empathy and would take seriously its goal of respecting the fragmentary, the hybrid, the different.
Both Blade Runner and Total Recall – and even Wes Craven’s New Nightmare – are about characters who understand themselves through a variety of alienated experiences and narratives which they take to be their own, and which they subsequently make their own through use. My narrative is thus a counterargument to the ‘consciousness industry’, or ‘culture industry’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1991) one. What I hope to have demonstrated is that it is not appropriate to dismiss as merely prosthetic these experiences that define personhood and identity. At the same time, however, memories cannot be counted on to provide narratives of self-continuity – as Total Recall clearly points out. I would like to end by leaving open the possibility of what I would like to call ‘breakthrough memories’. When Quade is at Rekal Incorporated planning his memory package, he has an urge to go as a secret agent. In other words, memories from an earlier identity – not in any way his true or essential identity, but one of the many layers that have constructed him – seem to break through. It thus might be the case that identity is palimpsestic, that the layers of identity that came before are never successfully erased. It would be all too easy to dismiss such an identity as merely a relation of surfaces, as many theorists of the postmodern have done, but to do so would be to ignore what emerges in both texts as an insistent drive to remember. What both films seem to suggest is not that we should never forget, but rather that we should never stop generating memory. The particular desire to place oneself in history through a narrative of memories is a desire to be a social, historical being. We might say that it is precisely such a ‘surface’ experience of history which gives people personhood, which brings them into the public. What the drive to remember expresses, then, is a pressing desire to reexperience history – not to unquestioningly validate the past, but to put into play the vital, indigestible material of history, reminding us of the uninevitability of the present tense.
Notes
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