Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

Technodemons of the Digital Self 229“human” in our technologic culture and reality, he is not able to cast it offas outrightly Satanic. Rather, the androids are demons for Dick – this figureof a reified, cold and alienated man-machine both obsesses and inspireshim. In his writings during the 1970s, he revises his earlier vision of machineas the modern face of the devil. 122 Now he thought that he shouldhave been talking about masks, rather than faces; the situation is morecomplex, and a troubling ambivalence is more accurate than direct adversity.The relationship is reversible: the machine can be a mask for the humanas well as the human can mask something mechanical. Age-old mythologycan also be applied to these contemporary forms of hybrid selves;Dick calls for recycling, where a Pietà motif, for example, could be appliedto machines. 123CINEMATIC TECHNODEMONS: BLADE RUNNERHere’s to the crazy ones.The misfits.The rebels.The troublemakers.The round pegs in the square holes.[…]We make tools for these kinds of people.While some see them as the crazy ones,we see a genius. […]Think different.– Apple Computer, Inc., advertisement 1997Recycling the mythical motifs is, in a way, exactly what the director RidleyScott and his team did as they adapted Dick’s novel into a science fictionfilm. Blade Runner is loaded with traces from various mythological – oftenalso demonological – intertexts. The emotional coldness of the androids isback-pedalled, leaving more room for the existential anguish (and love interests)of these “replicants.” 124 Some of these changes are motivated bycommercial Hollywood interests, some are outcomes of several people puttingin months of labour to produce a working script from Dick’s novel –which had left quite a few open questions in its plot structure. The rationaleof the androids escaping and getting back to earth, for example, was not122 See Dick, “Man, Android, and Machine” (1976; Dick 1995, 213).123 Dick, “The Android and the Human” (1972; Dick 1995, 206-7).124 Ridley Scott: “The term android is a dangerous one, undermined by certain genericassumptions. […] I didn’t want Blade Runner to be premonitory of android at all. Becausethen people would think that his film was about robots, when in fact it isn’t.”Screenwriter David Peoples got the term “replicant” from microbiology and the practiceof cell cloning. (Sammon 1996, 61.) Replicant also carries the various connotations of theverb “to replace,” the threatening possibility of a supplement usurping the place of theoriginal.