Bladerunner, Ishiguro, and humanity

By a confluence of events which could only be described as serendipitous, I’ve recently finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, having been inspired by Ishiguro’s recent Nobel Prize win, and seen both Bladerunner 2049, and Ghost in the Shell.   All three have treatments of what might be termed quasi humans, or the treatment of those regarded as not quite human.  To begin with, Aristotle was pleased to think that that which was distinctly human was the capacity for rational thought.  At this point that no longer seems sufficient a condition, given that AI could in principle even more rational than a human.  Bladerunner wants to consider the distinctly human the domain of memory, which is highly policed, and only artificial memories are given to replicants.  (As an aside, one might wonder, why give them memories at all?)  Ghost in the Shell opines on the other hand that memory isn’t relevant at all, but it’s action which defines one.  Ghost doesn’t get very philosophical, and really, it’s up to the reader/viewer to tease out or elaborate on the premises of all these works.  If we leave it there with Ghost, we’re left with a kind of half-baked existentialism, which may not even be coherent, because by the end of the film Major spends a lot of time exploring her personal history, but  ends up working in the same capacity as at the beginning.  So perhaps the message is that personal history has a role to play, no matter how we choose to act or define our identity.  Or it could be just a muddle.

Bladerunner 2049 is impossible IMHO to fully appreciate without reference to the original, whichever original that may be.  At the end of that film, Roy saves the Bladerunner, just like K does in 2049, one might say, choosing to save humanity.  In the former case, Ford doesn’t completely understand why Roy made his choice, and in the latter, he doesn’t know about K’s fatal(?) wound. In either case, the replicants are constructed narratively to be far more sympathetic than humans, generally speaking.

That same approach is in play with Ishiguro, where the clones are the ones with passion and concern for each other, while humans are generally cool, unsympathetic, or distant.  The key difference in the narrative is that the clones pretty much accept their lot, whereas in Bladerunner they do not.  Presumably there were and have been a lot of replicants who accepted their lot, but we don’t hear much about the house that isn’t burning down.  Parenthetically, this book has a similar approach to his other works, where a character looks back on the past with more or less accurate memories, and either masks feelings or is prey to self deception.  In a role where the only future is grim and set, memories are questionable, and action apparently futile, it seems that it is actually the clone’s ability to fantasize and imagine which makes her most distinctively human.