Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory

Alan Trachtenberg Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory “ I D O N ’T K NO W W H Y a REPLICANT W O ULD COLLECT PHOTOS— MAYBE they were like Rachel—they needed m em ories.” In the role of the bounty hunter Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult classic, Blade Runner, Harrison Ford utters these words w ith a bitter edge. Assigned to “term inate” the beautiful Rachel, an “android” especially menacing because she’s almost (almost!) indistinguishable from a “real” person, Deckard lusts after her and wants to be sure she’s hum an, not machinemade , before bedding her. Based on Phillip K. Dick’s brilliant science fiction novel of 1968, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the film adds the bit of sentim ent about collecting photographs to the otherw ise unm itigated darkness of Phillip Dick’s vision of a near future. The year is 2021, and by means of mechanical replication—the electric sheep of Dick’s title—warm-blooded animal life has been all but totally replaced by replicants, copies or duplications of alm ost forgotten originals. Memories of real sheep and toads and living hum an flesh are strug­ gling against the irresistible tide of a program med second-order reality unburdened by personal or cultural memoiy. In the film version m em ory survives paradoxically only as a faint rem inder of itself, a rem em bered need to a m em oiy and thereby an individual identity. Here’s w here the collected photographs come in. They answer to the need for at least an illusion of memory. Deckard vents his angst just after Rachel leaves his apartm ent in tears, her self­ social research Vol 75 : No 1 : Spring 2008 111 delusion shattered by the hardboiled bounty-hunter’s refusal to accept the presumptive snapshot of a m other and child fished from her purse as proof of hum an rather than laboratory birth. “Look,” she had said, “here’s me w ith my m other.” But Deckard knows better; he has his own tests for androids or “hum anoid robots.” True, she’s a special model, long-lasting and seductively beautiful but still a replicant. “Not your m em ories,” Deckard had said to her, “but some else’s,” a “synthetic memory system” as fraudulent as the faked photo. Crushed, Rachel leaves him m using at his piano, flipping through another set of faked “old” snapshots he had com m andeered from another android. He has also spread his own family snapshots on the piano top, some faded, browned, curling w ith age and use. These photos are presum ably the real thing, true mem ories of a past that actually happened. Replicants collect photos because they need m emories in order to believe they are hum an, a need itself program med into their system. The photos in the film are som ething like the electric sheep in the novel, fake pets in the absence o f real ones. In such a world, w here the photograph has lost its ground of reference in the past, where the surrogate assumes the look and force of the real, Deckard’s faded personal photos represent pure nostalgia; they are symbols of a life already lived, a dream o f the hum an persisting in the nightm are world of replicants dream ing of electric sheep. W ith its cult status as book and film, the story has an aura of foreknow ing com ing events in real-world genetic engineering and robotics. The pathos of the photograph as faked m em ory strikes an especially prescient note. As far as we can tell, the photos collected by the androids were made by actual cameras, w ith lenses and film. The chief point is that their fakery lies in their use, their implied captions or texts and narratives, the fictions that falsely identify them as m em o­ ries of a past that never was. Yet m any of the pictures Deckard holds in his hand seem to have been made by the replicants themselves, of their rooms, of one another—all the m ore ironic and...