Kit Dobson
It’s too bad she won’t live, but then again, who does?
—Blade Runner
More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity.
I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber.
I need it for my dreams.
—Racter, The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed
Why open with Blade Runner and computer-generated poetry in a post-NAFTA paper on dystopias and the topic (in)security? My first epigraph is a statement made by the character Gaff in one of the final scenes of Ridley Scott’s iconic 1982 film Blade Runner about the character Rachael, a Nexus-6 replicant, an artificially intelligent robot who is virtually indistinguishable from the humans around her. My second is from the first book of poetry composed by a computer, published in 1984. Two books recently published in Canada—Larissa Lai’s Automaton Biographies and Douglas Coupland’s Player One: What Is to Become of Us—restage aspects of Blade Runner and, in particular, the character Rachael, in order to query the present world in the context of computerization. Lai quotes Gaff’s words directly in her book (40). My chapter will investigate these two restagings in order to argue for a view of Canada that is, today, becoming its own dystopia as the country aligns itself increasingly with transnational neoliberal politics. This chapter will approach the importance of understanding dystopic spaces through a comparison with Canadian apocalyptic visions before approaching the character Rachael through, first, Blade Runner (and the novel that spurred the film) and then Lai’s and Coupland’s visions in order to understand the limits of what it means to be human, ultimately ending with a consideration of the significance of security regimes in Canada today. This final reading will be grounded in the recently developed Nexus card, a regulatory process designed to facilitate security clearance for the privileged, one that marks ways in which today’s neoliberal world marks some humans as being more fully human than others.
First, then, why dystopia as a site for such investigations? The contributors to this book all offer their particular takes on the idea (some in more depth than I can go into here); for me, the term begins in a straightforward sense, but then takes on additional significance in a post-1994 environment under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In the first instance, I am interested in the textbook definition: M.H. Abrams gives us the notion that a dystopia is “a very unpleasant imaginary world in which ominous tendencies of our present social, political, and technological order are projected in some disastrous future culmination” (218). This definition of an “ill-place” or a “bad-place,” to give the term a more etymological definition, differentiates it from the idea of the utopia in more ways than one. The notion of utopia comes, of course, most famously from Thomas More’s 1516 book of the same name, and, it is frequently noted, is defined in particular through its etymology as a “no-place”; it is a place so idyllic that it cannot exist. The dystopia is therefore not only the reverse of the utopia, a place that has taken on a nightmarish form. The dystopia is also potentially possible in ways that the utopia may not be. It could exist, whereas a utopia, by etymological definition, cannot. In Canada, the discourse of dystopia in literature is dominated by references to Margaret Atwood, and her visions of the dystopic have very much been nightmare imaginings of the not-too-distant future. Her novels The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013) predominate any given search that one might do on the topic, while her recent book In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011) is a consistent point of reference for many critics. My desire in this chapter is, in part, to broaden considerations of the dystopic beyond the Atwoodian because the term is more flexible than a focus on Atwood allows. In my reading, Lai’s and Coupland’s works offer generative understandings for the dystopic in Canada that might extend the dominant conversation thus far.
Flexibility is needed in part because the dystopia needs to be considered in contrast to the idea of the Apocalypse. According, for instance, to Slavoj Žižek, in his 2010 book Living in the End Times, “the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point” (x). Žižek sees the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse embodied in “ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself … and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions” (x), and he reads the contemporary world according to the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance). What is particularly striking in Žižek’s book—aside from its range—is this focus on the Apocalypse, a notion that is useful for understanding Canadian literature as well. Marlene Goldman, tracing the idea of the Apocalypse in Canadian writing, has argued that “the apocalyptic paradigm pervaded Canadian literature from its beginnings” and that, specifically, this paradigm focuses on a vision of “the ‘old world’ being replaced by the new” (3). Apocalypse, Goldman notes, requires both “a transformative catastrophe and a subsequent revelation of ultimate truth” (4). Its Canadian incarnation, she argues, “refuses to celebrate the destruction of evil and the creation of a new, heavenly world.” Instead, she finds, Canadian “works highlight the devastation wrought by apocalyptic thinking on those accorded the role of the non-elect” (5). It is important to note, too, the temporal dimension: “the idea of apocalypse,” Goldman states, “falls under the general category of eschatology, the teaching of ‘the last things’” (14). Time is a key aspect of the apocalyptic: the end may be now in this vision, but the second focus, upon the afterlife or the world to come, pushes this vision toward the future, leaving it deferred. In either an Atwoodian dystopic or Canadian apocalyptic vision, the diagnosis of the present comes through a vision of the future. To propose to look for a dystopia that is ever closer to the present, as I am doing here, then, is to suggest a simultaneous reading of the future and the now. This temporal move is increasingly relevant in an ever more dystopic era, in which NAFTA and subsequent agreements facilitate the negotiation of increasingly synchronous cross-border arrangements, security regimes, and data sharing used to police the boundaries of citizenship and the human.
Given these cross-border arrangements, it is important to think about these temporal issues across national divides, bringing international influences to Canadian conversations. Such temporal questions are also important when examining Blade Runner. Like George Orwell’s 1984, a novel whose date has now long since passed, Blade Runner is catching up with itself. Ridley Scott’s film version opens by announcing the setting of the film: it takes place in Los Angeles in 2019. The date would have been more remote in 1968, of course, when Philip K. Dick published the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was transformed into Blade Runner in 1982. In Dick’s novel, the Earth has been largely evacuated following World War Terminus, except for those declared unfit for colonizing other planets. On Earth, androids known as replicants are illegal; especially feared is the new Nexus-6 variety, which cannot be reliably detected through the complicated eye scans used on previous models. Rick Deckard, played by a young Harrison Ford in the film, and other bounty hunters chase down and “retire”—kill—them. The film takes on much of the tone and structure of Dick’s novel while it abandons many of the contextual elements of the book: it is a bleak, pared down world in Scott’s version. The film is a vexed one, with at least four distinct versions in circulation, and it divides viewers as to whether the protagonist of the film, Deckard, is himself a replicant.
Perhaps the most enduring character from Dick’s novel and from Blade Runner, however, is Rachael, played by Sean Young in the film. Rachael at first appears to be an employee of the Tyrell Corporation, the company responsible for the manufacture of the Nexus-6 and other replicants. She learns in the course of the film that she is a replicant, and is therefore doomed to suffer the four-year lifespan of her kind. While Deckard battles with and retires four Nexus-6 replicants who have come back to earth in order literally to “meet their maker,” Dr. Eldon Tyrell, so that they might increase their lifespans, he also engages in an affair with Rachael. Rachael’s early lack of knowledge of her own inhumanity points to that, in turn, of the characters in the film. While those who appear to be human in the film are concerned with the purity of their species, they are perhaps the least “human” of the beings displayed: solitary, depressive, and socially anaesthetized, their environment is one that it is hard to imagine fighting for. The replicants, on the other hand, are deeply emotional and form lasting bonds with one another—or they are childlike and immature, according to Eldon Tyrell. By the film’s end, the replicants are shown to the viewers to be in the light (literally and metaphorically)—the replicant leader Roy Batty is shown backlit by a clear halo of light behind his head as he dies—while the humans are enshrouded in the dank, penumbral world that they have created. Rachael, as she is violently seduced by Deckard, is humanized, recognizes the danger to her, and flees with him at the film’s end.
One clear framework for investigating the role of Rachael in the film falls within the discourse of the notion of the cyborg, written about so persuasively by Donna Haraway in “The Cyborg Manifesto” and in all of the scholarship that has followed from that piece. Indeed, Haraway mentions Rachael directly in her manifesto, several years before either the 1992 “Director’s Cut” or the 2007 “Final Cut” of the film was released: as she puts it, “the replicant Rachael in the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner stands as the image of cyborg culture’s fear, love, and confusion” (178). The cyborg remains a useful frame of reference here because, in Haraway’s terms, it “can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” (181). That is, the nature/culture dichotomy is here undone: while the dichotomy typically is used to oppose humans-as-culture to everything-else-as-nature, the role of the human is reversed in Blade Runner; humans become the natural order against which the cyborg-as-culture seems to align itself. Yet here, too, the cyborg is cast as being outside of the domain of the human; it does not fit this dualistic paradigm and is therefore to be eliminated. That Rachael, however, gains our sympathies through her affective pull demonstrates the falsity of the divide and pushes the human to—and possibly beyond—its limits.
This disruption of the human moves from a distinct moment in the near future to a more ambiguous temporality—yet a clear locus within the geographies of Canada—in the works of Larissa Lai and Douglas Coupland; in many respects, the divide between the present and the future is suspended in both authors’ accounts. Lai’s 2009 book of poetry Automaton Biographies is an intelligent voicing of the limits of the human and the self. Broken into four parts, each investigates what it means to exist in the then, the now, and the future: the opening part, “rachel,” is written in the voice of Sean Young’s character, and therefore set in the future; the second part, “nascent fashion,” dismantles our contemporary state of war; part three, “ham,” is written in the voice of the chimpanzee of the same name, the first chimpanzee sent into space, in 1961, and is therefore set in the past; while part four, “auto matter,” is presented as semi-autobiographical research on the present, largely set in the Vancouver that Lai inhabits. It is a book of disruptive, enjambed poetics that questions the human and beyond. It is this particular query that drives my interest in Lai’s work.
Lai’s engagement with Blade Runner in Automaton Biographies extends her previous work. Her first novel, When Fox Is a Thousand, contains explicit reference to the film. This novel moves between the story of the T’ang dynasty poet Yu Hsuan-Chan and the contemporary haunting of Artemis Wong by the figure of the fox in Vancouver, challenging the constructions of gender and race in the contemporary world. In an interview, Lai stated that she hopes that her “narratives open questions—about race, about class, about gender for sure, but also about being human, about ethics, about action” (qtd. in Morris “sites” 23). Her use of Blade Runner enables these themes to be explored. In an early scene in When Fox Is a Thousand, the characters Eden and Artemis watch the film. The scene, which focuses on Artemis’ reactions to the violence of the film, and especially the use of eyes, prompts critic Robyn Morris to read the novel through the film. Indeed, Morris notes, Lai’s use of Blade Runner in her first novel “is integral to her interrogation of a white hegemonic gaze that seeks to simultaneously possess, and dispossess, a specifically Chinese Canadian self” (“Re-visioning” 70). Lai also makes explicit use of Blade Runner in her short story “Rachel,” a text that, critic Michelle Reid notes, allows Lai to open “up many disjunctions between … the novel and film source-texts” that she uses—that is, between the work of Philip K. Dick and Ridley Scott (354). Lai’s engagement with the film, then, is sustained and deep.
Lai’s second novel, Salt Fish Girl, Morris notes, continues “the dialectic between Fox and Blade Runner” (“Re-visioning” 81). Set in the near future in the Pacific Northwest, Salt Fish Girl follows the story of Miranda Ching, juxtaposing her story with that of the Chinese creator figure Nu Wa. The Pacific Northwest in this novel is bleak, broken into fortified corporate compounds and the “Unregulated Zone,” largely made up of the ruins of Vancouver. As the novel unfolds, Miranda becomes involved with a woman named Evie. Evie is, it turns out, a clone, one who is also made up, in part, of fish DNA—“point zero three percent Cyprinus carpio—freshwater carp” (158). Evie’s narrative provides a sustained parallel with Blade Runner, as Evie finds herself in search of a better understanding of her father, Dr. Rudy Flowers, the scientist who created her and her fellow clones, who are used in sweatshop labour. This search runs parallel to the replicants’ search for their creator in Ridley Scott’s film. More pressing still, however, is the parallel interest in the cyborg. Critics Diana Brydon and Jessica Schagerl term Evie “a literalization of Donna Haraway’s cyborg” (37), and, indeed, the clones—named Sonias—who work in the sweatshops literally interrogate the boundaries of the human. As rebellion begins to foment among them, they begin writing subversive messages on the soles of sneakers, which leave legible prints behind. The first of these begins with the question “What does it mean to be human?” (237). These prints, left in the ground on which the shoes tread, provides a geo-specific site for the cyborg within a dystopic vision of Canada.
Lai’s interest in Salt Fish Girl rests, more broadly, in the dystopic near future. As Rita Wong puts it, “Lai projects a futuristic scenario that traces the logic of contemporary capitalist relations” in that book (111). That is, the logic in this novel is contemporary, while the setting is futuristic. Lai is well aware of this dynamic movement between the present and the future in her writing: describing her novel, she notes that although a variety of “futuristic” events—she lists genetic modification, the criminalization of migrant labourers, simulacra of reality like the town of Celebration, U.S.A., and so on—may be “happening now,” “for some reason, it seemed that a futuristic idiom could handle it better” (“Future Asians” 171–72). Why might this be the case? What does Lai’s futuristic setting enable? As in Blade Runner, for one, it enables aspects of the present order to be interrogated and challenged. Joanna Mansbridge argues that Lai takes “the global as a site of conflict wherein individual and national origins are constructed through the abjection of feminized and racialized bodies” (123). Witnessing and unpacking this construction enables it to be queried and disrupted. Women’s bodies become a site of contestation, of control, one where the state asserts itself and demonstrates its power at the level of the biopolitical. Tara Lee’s analysis of Salt Fish Girl, for instance, exemplifies this disruption. Lee writes that the cyborg body is thoroughly enmeshed in capital, leading to questions as to “whether agency is possible for a body so entrapped in a system of commodification and consumption” (94). She finds, however, that Lai’s narrative provides a means of witnessing how “the body can break out of its passivity” as Evie and Miranda uncover the machinations of Dr. Flowers (94). Paul Lai similarly contends that “[Larissa] Lai’s embrace of messy origins and futures inevitably disrupts generic categories, offering a hybrid future that questions assumptions of scientific progress and Western modernity” (184). Similarly, Pilar Cuder-Domínguez argues that Lai’s work questions “the representation of Asian women’s subjectivity, challenging standards of both gender and genre” (127). Or, in the words of Eleanor Ty, Lai’s novel uses a structure that is useful “to express lesbian desire, as well as to critique technological advances such as cloning, the genetic modification of food, and the exploitation of Third World women’s labor by large corporations” (90). For readers of Lai’s previous work, then, the possibilities expressed through Blade Runner, the cyborg, and the dystopic enable her to expose and disrupt the category of the human itself, especially in its sexual and racial encodings.
Lai’s work in Automaton Biographies pushes this process of disrupting the human further. In a review of the book in Quill & Quire, Mark Callanan suggests one of the virtues of Lai’s investigation: “Lai’s meditations on a post-human world,” he writes, “proceed with an unsettling machine-like efficiency stripped of human vitality” (n.p.). Reviews of her book have been, in general, quick to observe the move toward the posthuman or non-human, but how, exactly, this effect is achieved with Rachel bears study (note that Lai, like Coupland, drops the second “a” in Rachael, which Philip K. Dick uses in his writing). There is a great deal of linguistic depth to Lai’s writing: direct quotations from the film, when they occur, tend to be offset in italics (like the motto of the Tyrell Corporation, “more human than human” (13), which is also, of course, the chorus of the well-known, Blade Runner–referencing White Zombie song of the same name from 1995). Rachel, as the speaker of her portion of the book, focuses on Deckard, the “policeman” to whom she repeatedly refers. This focus is one of the moves that humanizes her, alongside the fact that she dreams. In dreaming, she seems at once to achieve both consciousness and the unconscious: “i dream insect hatching,” she notes in Lai’s version (17). The reference is to both the film and to Dick’s novel, which returns to the question “Do androids dream?” (161). It appears that they may well, and at this moment the human/inhuman dichotomy, privileging the human, fails anew. That she dreams insects hatching rather than dreaming of them suggests that she brings them into being, more immediately than humans might. Rachel’s dream world intersects, moreover, with the waking world, her syntax blurring distinctions between states of consciousness and the unconscious:
i half my memory
what’s past is polaroid
i collect water in ditches
my body ticks out
its even rhythm too flawless
for birth
i athena my own sprouting
this knowledge colds me
in my ice-fringed room
my asian fits this frost
slow stare i thought was mine
father given
my heart exudes a kind of love
a kind of mourning. (16)
Significant in these lines is Rachel’s practice of verbing her nouns; nouns and adjectives like “half,” “athena,” “cold,” and “owl” become verbs here, with the jarring effect of creating an artificial syntax that mimics the overly formal, well-coiffed expression worn by her character in the film, but that also expands the range of language, into and with the natural world from which humans separate themselves. Viewers can tell that she is a replicant simply through her framing in the film; that she does not know this fact from the outset is surprising, and suggests the instability of self-knowledge. In this passage, it is the unconscious dimension of Athena’s story, her sprouting from the head of Zeus, who does not know that she resides within, that Lai foregrounds. The film invites this link between Rachel and Athena: in Los Angeles in 2019, animals have largely died off from an unknown cause; the Tyrell Corporation houses an artificial owl that Deckard encounters in his first meeting with Rachael. The owl, of course, is Athena’s symbolic animal, bringing to mind her birth, as well as the “blink” of its eyes and hers, the blink that she thinks is her own until she learns that her “father,” Eldon Tyrell, gave it to her in her manufacture. The manufacture of her eyes, which the film depicts as being made by a stereotyped Asian man in an ice-cold room, is particularly important. Eyes reappear throughout the film, not only in the artificial owl’s blink, or simply in the repeated images of eyes, but also in the Voigt-Kampff test that Deckard and others like him administer to suspected replicants in order to test their humanity.
That Rachel is not a human does not, however, lead her to feel inferior in Lai’s rendition; quite the reverse. The world that she inhabits is distinctly dystopic to her:
the future we sight still
in shot wounds
foreign coil
wrings dystopia
from others we mark contagious
from sound by eye. (24)
Rachel’s present is the future, self-consciously so, and it is an acknowledged failure. The failure, however, is not hers, but that of the humans around her:
i rank my anger
rail against this solitude
was a princess with perfect clothes
beloved daughter of a new elysium
our flawless manufacture
had shed earth’s dirt
imperfection’s disease toil filth. (30)
Lai’s Rachel, then, sees herself as representing the future, a better future than that which the humans around her are able to offer. The world is bleak, and it drags her down into its depths. The possibility that Rachel might, in fact, be an improvement upon the very flawed human species is something that the text offers. Nevertheless, her Rachel “mourn[s her] purity / in guilt in fear” (31), recognizing the way in which her “perfect construction” is an instrument that can be used by the humans around her.
The humans who surround the character Rachel in Douglas Coupland’s Player One: What Is to Become of Us are a similar source of consternation. The works of Lai and Coupland may be far apart in terms of aesthetics and politics: Lai writes complex, multi-layered texts that resist dominant narrative structures in order to interrogate the formation of identity, while Coupland frequently presents readers with highly accessible, witty stories about the ironies of life under late capitalism. The existing scholarship on Coupland notes an ongoing search for utopic spaces in, for instance, the western end of North America in Girlfriend in a Coma (McGill 49), or a lament for the failure of history—and the possibilities therein—in his breakout novel Generation X (Lainsbury). Coupland’s frequent intergenerational complaint about the abandonment of youth by those who were supposed to be in charge can be seen to parallel, in some ways, the challenge of father figures in both Blade Runner and Lai’s novels, yet the tone is sharply different. The most extensive study of Coupland to date, written by Andrew Tate, suggests that Coupland’s writing occupies “a perplexing hinterland between … optimism” and “everyday, apocalyptic paranoia” (162). He is a documenter, in many ways, of aspects of the contemporary Zeitgeist, and publicly embraces his role as such.
Coupland’s Player One, his “novel in five hours,” is remarkable, though, within his output for its variation from his established patterns of discussing contemporary ennui: it is formally unusual, given its five-part segmentation, and it was written as the 2010 CBC Massey Lectures, a lecture series that attempts to engage Canadians on key contemporary issues. That said, the novel nevertheless includes many familiar Couplandisms, and, in some cases, direct references to his previous works. One notable Couplandism is the “Future Legend” at the end of the book, a series of definitions of future-oriented words. Among these is not merely the posthuman, defined by Coupland as “whatever it is we become next” (236)—but also the “trans-human”—“whatever technology made by humans that ends up becoming smarter than humans” (244). Coupland’s version of the trans-human, in turn, raises a further question, which he labels the “trans-humane conundrum”: “if technology is only a manifestation of our intrinsic humanity, how can we possibly make something smarter than ourselves?” (244). The novel does not answer this question, but it is only mildly sympathetic toward the humans who are bypassed by the post- or trans-human future. Set in a sort of perpetual present that relies on many contemporary pop culture references, but also in the near future, the book revolves around five characters stuck in a seedy cocktail lounge near Pearson International Airport in Toronto during a sudden, massive, and unexplained spike in global oil prices, leading to rapid social collapse. The five characters—Karen, a desperate single mother; Rick, a downtrodden bartender; Luke, an embezzling pastor; Rachel, who is here transformed into a blonde but is in other respects very similar, in terms of character, to Rachael in Blade Runner; and a semi-present speaker simply called Player One—struggle to survive, trapped within the lounge.
The movement between the post- and the trans-human in Coupland’s novel is witnessed in particular through Rachel, as well as through the disembodied voice of Player One. Player One is presented as the online avatar of Rachel, but also appears to be separate from her, a possibly trans-human electronic self protruding into our world. Rachel, on the other hand, is arguably to be aligned with the posthuman. Globe and Mail reviewer Catherine Bush finds Rachel to be paradoxically the “most compelling” of the book’s characters as a result of her failing attempt to be human. Rachel describes herself in predominantly medical terms, stating that she has “multiple structural anomalies in [her] limbic system that affect [her] personality,” as well as “prosopagnosia, which is an inability to tell faces apart,” and a lack of “subjective qualities like humour and irony” (40–41). Additionally, she describes her brain as having lesions that create “tone-blindness” and that strip her “speech of inflection and tone,” as well as “autism-related facial recognition blindness syndrome,” “autistic spectrum disorder … problems with inhibition and disinhibition, as well as mild OCD” (96–97). She describes her conditions differently to various characters in the lounge, and many of her abilities appear to be connected. She notes that her “sequencing abilities are in the top half percentile” and she knows pi to over a thousand digits (97). She is simultaneously frightening and compelling to those around her. Luke finds that
this cool Hitchcock blonde is a living, breathing, luscious, and terrifying terminal punctuation mark on [his] existence, a punctuation mark along the lines of This is the New Normal, Luke, and guess what—it’s left you out in the weeds, and you pastor, reverend, good sir, have outlived your cultural purpose and … are a chunk of cultural scrap metal, not even recyclable at that. (27; italics in original)
Luke cannot decide whether she is “genuinely alien” or “the desired end product of an entire century’s eugenic efforts at physical perfection,” leaving the human species behind (30). Rachel’s father sees her as “a robot … working in the garage eighteen hours a day,” the space where she breeds mice for scientific testing (33). In response, Rachel has come to the lounge in order to “bear children and thus prove to the world her value as a human being” (33). She has spent her youth trying “to make herself human” by researching “what makes humans different from all other creatures” (34) and by undergoing what the book refers to as “normalcy training” (41). Rachel provides a clear demonstration of the limits of what can be accommodated within the category of the human, as she only marginally fits the rubric that the world provides for her.
In contrast, the human world of the novel is far from compelling. Rachel thinks that “neurotypical people are an endless source of puzzles” (74). Karen, thinking about her recent flight to Toronto, notes that “your body isn’t even a body—it’s an ecosystem” (3), one that she finds unappealing. Ultimately, the human is very meagre within this system: “only her DNA is actually her,” she realizes, and it would amount to “a fine powder maybe the size of an orange” if the rest of her ecosystem were to be removed (4). An additional character, named Bertis—madman sniper and son of the phony self-improvement guru Leslie Freemont, who visits the lounge just as the crisis begins—accuses the characters of being “a depressing grab bag of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of the most banal form of capitalism” (136), a sentiment with which Rachel agrees.
Why, then, does Rachel wish to be human? At the end of the day, and beyond Rachel’s desire to prove her father wrong (which would upend humanity’s patriarchal structure from a posthuman perspective), Coupland’s writing falls back on metaphysics and the unconscious in order to ground its characters: Player One states that “humans have souls and machines have ghosts” (42); they remain different, and the soul—especially Rachel’s—is highly valued by the novel. Rachel notes that she has never had a dream that she can remember, because “dreams are for normal people” (160). But, like the status of dreams in Blade Runner as a seeming guarantee of existence—a guarantee that is, however, undercut in that film—Rachel’s humanity is seemingly proven in the “vision” that she has of crawling through empty suburbs, and in which she comes as a prophet of the “Third Testament” (170). In this vision, she declares that “fiction and reality have married” and that “what we have made now exceeds what we are” (171). The dream, in confirming her humanity, signals at the same time a move toward a future that is, in the terms of the Tyrell Corporation, more human than human: we have made things that exceed ourselves. Karen, similarly, suggests that “we can change into something else, even if it’s something we don’t understand” (196). Rick is unsure: Rachel, he thinks, is “genetically advanced or genetically flawed, depending on how you [look] at her” (202). In the final movement of the book, Rachel is shot by Bertis and dies, her voice merging with her avatar Player One. Her final reckoning is possibly Nietzschean, as she provides a sidelong glance at the über-Menschen whom we may become: “in a thousand years,” she thinks, “electively mutated post-humans will look back at us with awe and wonder” (211). Simultaneously, however, she will miss the earth; the novel’s ending is therefore highly ambivalent. This ambivalence suggests that while humankind is deeply flawed, it is also affectively compelling in itself, that it remains a locus for desire that cannot quite be abandoned yet.
Throughout this paper, I have been investigating the limits of the human through the character of Rach(a)el in her multiple incarnations. Ultimately, the human condition appears to be baffling to Coupland’s Rachel; it is angering to Lai’s Rachel, who recognizes the flaws of the human and her own implication in its workings; and it is destructive to Ridley Scott’s Rachael, as her failure to fit the nature/culture dichotomy will lead to her demise. In all of these visions, it is humankind that is deeply flawed: Rachael’s flaw is her lack of flaws. To return to the idea of peace and (in)security with which I began, I want to note the ongoing relevance of Rachael’s character, particularly as adapted by Lai and Coupland. When we contemplate these texts, written in contemporary Canada, we should note that these dystopic visions reflect directly upon the myriad ironies and failures of our world, both in Canada and beyond. The present and future collapse not only textually; increasingly, the future is now. That the futurism of the present affects the world of “security” in which we live is only reinforced by one of the recent border synchronization plans created by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Canada Border Services Agency: the Nexus card. Whether or not this recently introduced security measure self-consciously refers to Blade Runner’s Nexus model replicants is uncertain; however, the parallels are worth noting. The iris-scanning technology that this card uses in order to expedite border crossings highlights the markers that we, as human animals, rely upon to differentiate ourselves not only from the explicitly non-human animal world, but also, and increasingly, from those people who, as in Judith Butler’s Precarious Life, are not recognized or recognizable within the terms that our society is today creating. With the Nexus card—just one example among many—our borders organize us into certifiably “good” citizens who qualify for expedited service, or as the undistinguished masses shuffling through the regimes of post-9/11 security to which we are, by now, more or less accustomed, or have been brutalized into accepting as the new normal. This ranking and differentiating brings me back to Rachael, to the humanized figure who is excluded for one reason or another, who is designated for “retirement,” and whose humanity is constantly challenged in, for instance, Deckard’s administration of the eye-scanning Voigt-Kampff test on her. Our notions of security, illuminated by the character of Rachael, revolve around such classificatory systems, and thereby maintain the increasingly dystopic state of affairs under which we live today.
Many thanks to Erin Wunker, who provided invaluable feedback on a draft of this paper. Thanks also to the British Association for Canadian Studies Annual Conference at the University of Birmingham in 2011, where an early version of this paper was delivered.
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