English 102
According to an informal Google search, cumulatively, the world has created 208,555,6628 films and is making more every day. It is a daunting task to hand select only three of these films that would have narrative or philosophical connections I would want to teach and instill in my film course. To narrow the search I would look for three films that open my student’s eyes to the true nature of their existence. These films would have to express themselves in a way that would change my student’s perceptions of the reality in which we live. I would want to highlight the human themes of imprisonment and enslavement, freedom and liberation, and the progressive loss of the human soul, during the quest for monetary and material wealth. It would be my goal to emphasize that we are all just gears in the system, some larger than others, but that we must all hang on to our humanity as we become mechanized and less self sufficient if we are to remain human.
I would start this line of thinking by introducing my students to the film Citizen Kane. I would use this film to show how we are all part of something bigger than ourselves and how no matter how we resist or rebel we ultimately become a part of it. In the case of Citizen Kane that something is the beginnings of industrialized corporations and corporate controlled media. In the beginning of the film when Kane is young and still naïve at heart he fights the corporate power and does things because he wants to rather than based on profit margins; however, by the end of the film you see how one man’s quest for wealth and power robbed him of the qualities that differentiated him from his competitors. At the films finale – or rather its reverse story telling beginning – Kane drops a snow globe of his hometown, briefly visited in the linear beginning of the film, and whispers the word “Rosebud”. Shortly after, we find out that Rosebud is the name of the sled that Kane received as a child before becoming the corporate figurehead that the world recognized him to be. No matter how much he resisted, the allure of monetary wealth ultimately won him over and he found out that while the rewards are great, they are fleeting and that true happiness lies on the inside, with his memories of “Rosebud”. What I would hope that my students take away from this is that no matter who you become, or what society deems you to be, locked somewhere deep within your soul, is who you truly are.
The second film shown would be Network. In this film, corporation control of our everyday lives is both subtle and overtly shown and essential for my students to understand that we have become powerless to this great machine of corporations that is self perpetuating and enslaving us. The stripping away of the inner child in Citizen Kane was the first act of the corporate machine. The next act is to control all venues of the media to promote consumption and capital gain. By the end of the film it becomes apparent that this system is unstoppable and resistance is truly futile; as the world we live in, no longer just our country has become a great Corporatocracy.
In Network, the younger generation is represented by drone like humanoids that seem to be interested only in self gratification, promotion and capital gain and incapable of true human emotions. Those that realize that life is about more than money, ratings, or profit are left in the wake of those willing to jump through the hoops made by the Corporatocracy to promote both the product (in this case the networks shows) and themselves. Television and ultimately all forms of trustworthy, honest, reliable media are replaced by sensationalist “bread and circus” pieces.
Network emphasizes that by the time we’ve realized what has happened to our lives; that is, by allowing knowledge and truth to be regulated or forgotten in favor of profit rather than the necessity of their altruistic worth we have granted faceless, unconscionable corporations the rights to control our lives. Humanity has unwittingly allowed itself to be reduced to an army of consuming automatons, enslaved by corporations. Deals and regulations have been passed “behind the scenes” and we are now trapped in this seemingly unending cycle. If we rebel our options are limited and most likely death, if we give into the whims and wishes of the system, than we lose what makes ourselves human and we truly have become the gears and cogs in society’s great machine.
The buildup of these multinational corporations has led to the dystopian world presented in my third film, Blade Runner. Set in a future that is now only a decade away, Blade Runner focuses on a detective or “Blade Runner”, Rick Deckard. In the film, the line between human and machine has become conceptually and philosophically blurred. The aforementioned Corporatocracy has merged into what appears to be a global mono-corporation that controls all facets of everyday life. This mono-corporation referred to in the film as the Tyrell Corp has created a line of synthetic humans – replicants. They are identical to us in every way accept it is believed that they cannot process true human emotions, mostly because while they’re bodies are biologically engineered but their minds are a silicon microchip and they have a limited lifespan of four years. Utilized in Earths off world colonization efforts for jobs deemed too dangerous for humans, they have been banned from usage on earth after an uprising occurred off world. The replicants featured in the film are the same that led the rebellion after realizing that they are nothing more than slaves to humanity. It is at this point that they return to earth, to search for their creator and search for true freedom both in society and from their own biological clock.
Enter Deckard. As a “Blade Runner”, his mission is to seek out and “retire” replicants. His sole weapon is the Voight-Kampff test, a psychoanalytical computer examination that tests minute optical and facial reactions to a series of questions designed to initiate an emotional response. The first person to be tested by Deckard is Tyrell’s, (the namesake behind the corporation and designer of the Nexus-6 model replicants) niece Rachel, who questionably passes the test, though Tyrell informs Deckard that Rachel is a Nexus-6 model replicant. Neither Deckard nor Rachel appears to believe this, at least not sincerely, and it is at this point that we can begin to see Deckard question the nature of his existence. After retiring one of the rogue replicants he is confronted by a second and Rachel “retires” it to save Deckard. Deckard, after realizing he’d fallen in love with Rachel begins to feel a level of empathy towards the replicants. This revelation alone has deeply philosophical implications both represented to his society and the ethical conundrum that it represents towards his job.
In the meantime the two remaining replicants, Pris and Batty, utilize their screen time to persuade the audience, rather accurately, of their humanity and sincere want to live out their own lives and destiny’s. Batty pleads with his maker for the gift of extended life only to find it impossible and so kills him; Pris befriends a human, who like the replicants is also genetically flawed. When Deckard catches up with the remaining two, he retires Pris and Batty, noticeably grief stricken, takes his revenge not by killing Deckard but by breaking two of his fingers symbolic of the two fellow replicants he’d lost. The battle ensues on the rooftops where Batty pulls Deckard off the side of the building, saving his life, Deckard now noticeably in shock, having been saved by two replicants in a day. After Batty dies in a poetically cinematic way, Deckard returns to Rachel where they both are now the hunted as he has refused his next contract; to retire Rachel.
It is this symbolic struggle for freedom between the machines or gears that were created by the mono-corporations and the mono-corporations themselves trying to maintain control over the replicants (gears) that is truly reminiscent of society. As previously mentioned, society has become an army of automatons, much like replicants. They struggle to understand and develop their emotions and seek to create their own destinies free of their oppressive parent corporations. They have only one want; to live. To experience life at its fullest. So what I would want my students to understand is that Blade Runner is not a film about mankind killing rebellious robots, but a film about mankind committing genocide against itself. Its sole reason for doing so is the self preservation of the mono-corporate structure. If we are to free ourselves from the oppressive corporations that have cancerously spread throughout the world, then like the replicants we must return to our natural state and slay our creators/ oppressors if we are to ever become human again and experience true freedom.
It is this cycle of corporate oppression and the possibility of humanity to free itself from its self induced bondage that I would wish to focus my film class on and that is why my class will conclude with Blade Runner. Like the film, society is both open ended and open to interpretation. In my class students would be taught that humanism is crucial to the human experience and that when individual thoughts and actions are lost all that we are left with are robots. Ironically, science fiction has always personified robots with the unbending desire to be more human.
Perhaps the deciding factor in what makes us human is our ability to develop philosophy. If a non-human can begin to debate life’s mysteries, to question the nature of not only its own existence but also the universe and to be able to process and articulate literature and poetry in a dramatic and meaningful, perhaps that does make them human by definition. After all, no other entity to humanities known existence, can do that but us, so would that not define what it is to be us?
Putting this class together and successful illustrating these themes in an understandable manner will be a daunting task in the amount of time provided. The idea that we willing accept our loss of basic human freedoms to be part of this great socioeconomic machine should stand out clearly, although it may be a stumbling block for some. While accepting this truth will not be a requirement of the class, the knowledge gained of the true nature of the world that we live in today, outlined by Citizen Kane, Network and Blade Runner, three films that illustrate the economic oppression and imprisonment of our souls in the recent past, present and immediate future, will undoubtedly change the subconscious philosophy and inner workings of my students minds in ways that only Pandora could understand.
