Bordering the Future? the 'Male Gaze
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Borders in Globalization Review Volume 1, Issue 1 (Fall 2019): 22-28 https://doi.org/10.18357/bigr11201919244 Bordering the Future? The _ R ‘Male Gaze’ in the Blade Runner ARTICLE Films and Originating Novel * Kathleen Staudt ** Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), author of numerous science fiction narratives from the 1950s-1980s, some of which Hollywood made into films, grappled with the nature of reality, the meaning of humanness, and border crossing between humans and androids (called ‘replicants’ in the films). The socially constructed female and male protagonists in these narratives have yet to be analyzed with a gender gaze that draws on border studies. This paper analyzes two Blade Runner films, compares them to the Philip K. Dick (PKD) narrative, and applies gender, feminist, and border concepts, particularly border crossings from human to sentient beings and androids. In this paper, I argue that the men who wrote and directed the films established and crossed multiple metaphoric borders, but wore gender blinders that thereby reinforced gendered borders as visualized and viewed in the U.S. and global film markets yet never addressed the profoundly radical border crossing notions from PKD. Introduction Directors Ridley Scott and Denis Villeneuve directed In Philip K. Dick’s (PKD) science fiction novel, Do the Blade Runner films, herein labeled BR-I and Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, characters BR-II, each with strong, central male protagonists, performed as gendered beings, even in stereotyped aimed at largely male audiences with lots of high- ways, but they displayed androgynous behaviors;1 tech features, violence, and noise. In the films, female protagonists played markedly different and humans and androids live in a monopoly capitalist stronger roles, unlike in the films.2 PKD’s not-so- authoritarian world of extensive police security that cool-sounding central male ‘bounty hunter’ was seeks to control or to “border” the line between renamed ‘blade runner’ in the Hollywood films. And humans and androids—a line invisible to the eye, for PKD’s novel, empathy is the key characteristic given advances in technology that make androids separating human from android, whatever and look human on the outside. Female replicant protag- whomever designed or birthed these creatures in onists, sidelined as sexual objects, robotic and their hybridized worlds. In the novel, empathy with even hologram beauties (with the exception of the living and sentient beings, including animals,3 is the ruthless “Luv” in BR-II) occasionally exhibit senti- essence of humanness. Real animals are celebrated ments and behaviors that show their cross-over into and valued, in contrast to the less valued android humanity, such as the expression of feelings and, (electronic) animals. The common thread in the in the thematic obsession of BR-II, of reproductive novel and films involves answers to a foundational capability. It is sometimes unclear whether the chief question long asked in spiritual, anthropological, male protagonists are humans or replicants. and philosophic deliberations: What does it mean to * Revised Paper, Association for Borderlands Studies, San Antonio, Texas, USA, April 5-7, 2018. ** Kathleen Staudt, PhD, is Professor Emerita, University of Texas at El Paso, and Film Review Editor for BIG_Review. Contact: [email protected] https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/bigreview Creative Commons https://biglobalization.org/ CC-BY-NC 4.0 Borders in Globalization Review | Volume 1 | Issue 1 | Fall 2019 Staudt, “Bordering the Future? The ‘Male Gaze’ in Blade Runner” be human? To clarify even more, we also need to ask identity lines (bordering) range from hardening whether humanness is gendered. The use of literary or increasing, often with surveillance and controls, and graphic metaphors in alternative universes to softening or lessening (de-bordering) and re- permits us to engage in “thought experiments,” as bordering in response to threat and/or new iden- science fiction pacifist-anarchist-feminist Ursula tities. With the contact that comes with interde- LeGuin would call them (LeGuin 2017). This paper pendence and integration, co-mingling can occur in does not cover the enormous ground possible—the ways not immediately clear to viewers and readers. field of science fiction and film is huge—in analyses Readers, film directors, writers and viewers, just of science fiction, gender, and borders, but rather like many geographically minded border scholars, examines this fertile soil in two visually startling engage in mental mapping of these powerful visual high-profile films and a novel. images that may or may not coincide with territorial or physical maps.5 Feminist theorist and critic of binary dualisms, Donna Haraway wrote in “A Cyborg Manifesto” Gender is a social construct that manifests itself that we are all “chimeras, theorized and fabricated differently in historical time and place. Among as hybrids of machine and organism…. the relation the earliest to challenge the near-ubiquitous of which has been a border war” (1991: 292). She gendered borders was prolific science fiction draws from Taylorism to the integrated circuits of writer, the late Ursula Le Guin (1929-2018) (with women who work in global factories. Haraway asks whom PKD communicated) who wrote The Left whether we should view the cyborg world as plane- Hand of Darkness in the same era as PKD wrote Do tary control, in the name of defense, of “male appro- Androids… In Left Hand…, confusion sets in during a priation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of male galactic diplomat’s long-term visit to a planet war” (1991: 295) or as fearless human kinship with where ambi-sexual non-gendered people enter a machines, animals, multiple identities, and contra- fertile “kemmering” period in monthly cycles, in just dictions. Her position is the latter, but she gave the one-fifth of each month. The visitor always brought first Blade Runner film a ‘pass” in a lone sentence assumptions to encounters with his stereotyped perhaps not recognizing the power of film visual perceptions of men and women.6 Thus, both PKG imagery to reinforce the former, the “masculinist and Le Guin employed gender themes and Le orgy of war.” In Practices of Looking, now in its third Guin transcended gender, although she used male edition, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright offer pronouns and regretted that as she wrote later in an expansive text on the increasing importance her Redux to “Is Gender Necessary?” yet planted of the visual compared to the narrative, including some surprising phrases, such as “the king was popular culture such as films and television series. pregnant” (2017). BR-I and II not only imposed Indeed, feminist and film theorists and their readers firm, heavily controlled bordered gender constructs probably exercise minuscule impacts on sizeable on characters, but sexualized most of the women; global audiences compared to blockbuster films like and in BR II, deviated from the foundation to make iterations of Blade Runner. male impregnation and female reproduction the sine qua non of the defining feature of humanness. The paper is divided in three sections. The first These directors reinforced and exaggerated gender provides conceptual and theoretical perspectives. constructs. In the second, I recap the films, focusing on gender and exaggerated femininity and sexuality among The body of the paper culminates in my contrast somewhat minor female characters. After that, I of the films with PDK’s book, raising questions contrast PDK’s novel with the films, but more point- about those who direct and script-write films in the edly in the third section on the novel and films. The way they respect, fantasize, and/or even reinforce concluding section ties ideas and the argument hardened gendered borders as they cross borders together, with reference to theorists and founda- from novels to films. As British feminist film theorist tional science fiction. Laura Mulvey wrote in her 1975 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” later in her book (1989), those who direct, write, and fund representations I. Conceptual and theoretical perspectives of historic large-scale Hollywood film productions often brought a “male gaze” of voyeurism and Here, I make brief reference to concepts as I use narcissism to the process for an assumed predom- them in my recap the various borders that are inantly male audience, and I would add, heteronor- crossed or maintained in the films and novel: mative (Mulvey 1989). With their particular gaze, bordering, rebordering, debordering, co-mingling, and whether intentional or not, the effect of these mental maps, and hybridized societies along with powerful directors, script-writers, and produc- the beings who move back and forth from the cate- er-funders shaped the minds of millions of viewers, gorical borderlands including alienated, co-existent, not only in the United States but in exports to a interdependent, and integrated.4 Territorial and global film audience. While BR-I initially flopped in 23 _R Borders in Globalization Review | Volume 1 | Issue 1 | Fall 2019 Staudt, “Bordering the Future? The ‘Male Gaze’ in Blade Runner” _R 1982, it grew to gain a cult status reputation and Several Nexus 6 replicants, gendered in appearance was reissued in 2007 and subtitled The Final Cut. as male and female and designed to last four BR-II cost $150 million to make, and from www. years, rebelled and returned to earth. They looked the-numbers.com, we learn that domestic (US) like humans and worked to respond to bio-metric and international sales generated $258 million, tests of their quick response to cultural/linguistic the majority of it outside the U.S., thus reinforcing contextual questions. They were androids, yes, the global impact. While DVD and rental sales are but they were crossing, became hybridized, and unknown, those additional sales surely magnify the developed feelings about exploitation, love, and impact. Countless numbers of global Netflix viewers anger.