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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

I'd rather have the obsession everyone has for the few remaining animals on earth, and the race to own at least a replica. Electric sheep are just a background detail in the movie, while they're as central as hunting the replicants in the book...

I'd also like the scene where Deckard runs into another blade runner agency, further complicating the question if he's a replicant or not :)

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Yeah, the film could have had more content about the real/artificial animals though it did feature a bit with the snake scales and the owl.

Also agree about meeting the other agency though I can imagine that would have complicated the plot a bit (disclaimer - I haven't read Androids for many years and can't remember the details of that scene).

I just think that Mercerism was a superb concept - a participatory religion. I suppose it wouldn't have really driven the story forwards in the film whereas almost every scene in the film was doing that.

Incidentally, here's PKD's short story about Mercerism: https://sickmyduck.narod.ru/pkd092-0.html

> can't remember the details of that scene

Deckard gets arrested by a different police agency - they think they're the only ones, just like Deckard's agency. He gets accused of being an android with implanted memories.

They administer Voigt-Kampf tests to each other and while everyone ends up as human, the scene serves to make who's human and who isn't even more of a question.

What really ticks me off about all movies made from Dick's writings is that they cut off most of the ambiguity.

I shudder to think what they'd make of Ubik or A Maze of Death...

I'd love them to get around to attempting Ubik - it's a shame that Gondry abandoned his attempt.

In terms of ambiguity, surely Blade Runner is a prime example of ambiguity and the dichotomies between real/fake, light/dark, salvation/damnation, hunter/hunter etc. There's also the very significant portrayal of Roy Batty as both the villain and a Christ-like figure (e.g. nail in his hand, confronting his maker and both kissing and killing him).

Yeah, I wonder if whoever wrote the script confused Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? with Divine Invasion and added Christian motives from there :)

It really really ticks me off too, because it makes multiple watchings much more interesting, and the writing has much more depth.

I don't think the human relationship stuff including the animal obsession really fits in the noir movie that Blade Runner ended up being (and hard to say that the decision to turn it into a noir thriller was a bad one considering how influential it's been). I do agree that keeping the other agency and their paranoid testing of each other would have been entirely in keeping with how the film worked out though. But Deckard testing as human would have disagreed with Ridley Scott's idea that he wasn't...

> But Deckard testing as human would have disagreed with Ridley Scott's idea that he wasn't...

If i recall correctly the way the chapter was written left me doubting everything that went on in it.

That may have been too hard to translate in movie form.

Or maybe I should reread the book... it's been a while.

Those aspects of the book are awesome but I think they run against the themes Ridley Scott was going for. Ridley Scott wanted Deckard to be an android. It's hard to interpret the unicorn scenes otherwise. The androids are shown as cruel due to their lives as slaves, but with human-like longings for life and meaning (like in Roy Baty's final speech about tears in rain). The overall point is to blur the boundary and say the androids can be meaningfully human.

Whereas Mercerism and the animal stuff in the book are all about emphasizing the ways humans are different from the androids. The androids mock Mercerism and they don't care about animals: they are incapable of empathy. They torture people and animals without compunction. The alternate police station scene, where Deckard is tested using a bone marrow test instead of Voigt-Kampff and comes out human, is evidence that he's not an android.

The book is, in my view, one of the few pieces of sci fi media that seriously raises the question "could these apparently human-like machines really be human just like us?" and answers a resounding "no". The androids are psychopaths who are unable to partake of the human experience. Ultimately PKD is concluding that they are meaningfully not human---and, furthermore, some biological homo sapiens who act like them might actually be androids, a theme you can find elsewhere in his essays [1]. To the extent that Deckard's humanity is called into question it's not whether he is physically an android, but if he is psychologically a psychopath because of his job killing androids.

[1] https://sporastudios.org/mark/courses/articles/Dick_the_andr...

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