Re:Inspiration!: cross genre themes
Just seen ‘Ghost in the Shell’. Brilliant – I forgot just how brilliant!
I liked Kusinagi’s statement that we are continually changing beings, that while we think of ourselves as solid and fixed we are not. This is a kind of Zen perception of being – the harder we look for ourselves the more fleeting self becomes – a receding desert mirage always one step ahead!.
Yet something persits – we perceive ourselves as a continuum – perhaps this is a sense of soul?
Phil Dick’s attitude towards the replicants in Do Androids dream..is different to the portrayal of them in Blade Runner. In Do Androids Dream.. Dick conjures the replicants as cold ‘machines’ the replicants in BR are far from this. we intervene in the story just as they cross an ontological threshold.
We must be careful: for although the replicants are not human in the accepted sense, certainly with Rachael, mabe a little less with Roy Batty, one gets the feeling that it becomes meaningless to define what is human when such a definition is based in part upon origins. Particularly when it becomes harder and harder to test for the real thing …Deckard “…and if the machine doesn’t work?”…