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

Technodemons of the Digital Self 233As Roy Batty arrives in the film to torture the Chinese biomechanicwho designed the replicants’ eyes, he utters some lines of poetry: “Fiery theAngels fell / Deep thunder rolled around their shores / Burning with thefires of Orc.” 136 The reference is to William Blake’s “America: A Prophecy”(1793), an apocalyptic poem allegorising the battle for American independence.Batty’s quotation, however, is significantly altered; the original Blakereads “the Angels rose” – not “fell.” 137 Batty is actually quoting Miltonthrough Blake. 138 There is no immediate plot rationale why Batty shouldnot have stayed with Blake (a rebel who regarded the authority of State andKing with the same dislike he later devoted to Church and God). Thechange of wording is important as it is yet another example of how demonicambivalence is produced in Blade Runner; Batty is not necessarily arighteous rebel, he has also destructive and demonic potential – and theambiguous combination of both makes his character the more interesting.Rosemary Jackson has written about the relativity of evil, how shifts incultural fears and values also modify the use of the demonic. 139 The latetwentieth century has witnessed renewed attention to animation narratives;as Lois Rostow Kuznets writes in her When Toys Come Alive (1994), numerousstories about living toys, automatons, and cyborgs are capable ofembodying “human anxiety about what it means to be ‘real’ – an independentsubject or self rather than an object or other submitting to the gaze ofmore powerfully real and potentially rejecting live beings.” 140 Demonic imageryis not immune to cultural change: omnipresent technology may beassuming the role which terrifying animals or demonic monsters used tooccupy. 141 The relatively permissive character of contemporary society may136 Blade Runner 0:26.137 “Fiery the Angels rose, & as they rose deep thunder roll’d / Around their shores,indignant burning with the fires of Orc; / And Boston’s Angel cried aloud as they flewthro’ the dark night” (Blake 1982, 116). – The impulse towards Blake came from directorRidley, but David Peoples chose the lines and rewrote them to suit Batty’s character(Sammon 1996, 134). See also Wood (1986, 185) for a political interpretation of this detail.138 Some relevant sections from the first book of Paradise Lost (1:34, 36-8): “Th’ infernalSerpent [...] his Pride / Had cast him out from Heav’n, with all his Host / Of RebelAngels” – and from the second book (2:266-67): “And with the majesty of darknessround / Covers his Throne; from whence deep thunders roar.” And (2:771-3): “downthey fell, / Driven headlong from the Pitch of Heaven, down / Into this Deep […]”. (Aninteresting analysis of the intertextual relationships is the article by David Desser, “TheNew Eve: The Influence of Paradise Lost and Frankenstein on Blade Runner” [Kerman1991, 53-65].)139 Jackson 1981, 52, 54.140 Kuznets 1994, 2.141Michael Jackson writes in his article “The Man Who Could Turn Into an Elephant:Shape-shifting among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone”: “Just as images of were-animals areconditioned by the ubiquitous dialectic of village and bush in preindustrial societies, soimages of bionic people, androids and robots reflect the human-machine dialectic thatshapes both mental and bodily consciousness in industrial societies.” He also refers tothe famous case of “Joey: a ‘Mechanical Boy’” (reported by Bruno Bettelheim in Scientific