The title human can have many different meanings, and can be used in different ways.
Today I’m going to be telling you about what it means to be human in the classic text Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and the epic film Blade Runner by Ridley Scott with reference to contexts. Humans are known to exploit the world and people around them for their own benefit, but at the same time humans can love fiercely and show compassion in the most unlikely of circumstances. These traits are part of what makes humans so difficult to box and understand. Humans are known for exploiting nature towards their own aspirations and wants.
They pass up the beauty of God’s creation for money, power, and enlightenment or knowledge. However, in the process the humans can destroy themselves. In Blade Runner, the humans, mainly Tyrell Corporation, forfeit nature for production, technology, and ultimately greed. This is shown in the opening sequence of the movie; The L.
A. skyline shot. It pans over the future city, utilising the crowded coloured lights that we associate with cities (showing how vast the city is) by having so many of them is a small space. The shooting fire plumes create a contrast between the night sky and the ever working factories.
This city objectifies the human greed, and shows that all selfish things humans do can wreck the environment around them, but at the same time endanger the exploiters themselves. Pollution could be thought of as the main point in this scene, and there are three types’ shown; light pollution, air pollution, and even space pollution in the form of the massive Tyrell corp. pyramids. All these aspects show the lack of nature, and also how it must have been exploited for this man-made future to exist. This idea of a bleak future comes from Ridley Scott’s life in the 1970’s and 80’s.Some in this time felt that nature and the natural world were being threatened by the rise of corporations, mass production and the new technological advancements like the artificial brain, and others were realising that nature isn’t indestructible and needs human protection.
Scott’s movie is an existential warning, telling the viewers that our world could end up nature-less and abused like his version of L. A. in 2019, how we as curious, greedy humans could end up destroying ourselves.In Frankenstein, Victor removes himself from the world as he “ardently desired the acquisition of knowledge.. and his obsession for this knowledge, but also his need to be famous pushes him and he falls terribly ill.
And although it is harder to tell in this scene, Frankenstein also hopes to use his theory of life to eventually make himself immortal, which like his creature, would be a gross misuse of nature, and very against Shelley’s romanticist views. Here, she uses much dramatic irony to brightly show Frankenstein’s error in the pursuit of knowledge, and throughout more of the novel, we see that when Frankenstein attempts to use nature for wrong, something goes terribly wrong.From this, Shelley puts forward that the human pursuit for knowledge is dangerous, and that nature needs to be valued and held in awe, not used for one’s own gain. This fear of science and the warnings of science over emotion, come from not only from the fact that she lived through the beginning of the Industrial revolution, but was part of a group of romanticist writers that hated the uprising of science and its “cruel misuse of nature”.
Shelley’s portrayal of Frankenstein in this case helps the reader to understand that humans have passion, but sometimes for the wrong reasons and that exploiting things towards our own gain is also a common human trait that can lead to the downfall of yourself or many. Human feeling is adaptable; we can feel compassion and love for other humans, animals, and even inanimate objects. A common theme in Blade Runner and Frankenstein is the love/compassion that the creations are able to feel, yet their creators are now devoid of it, and do not even love their own creations.In this case, both texts comment on the fact that being human doesn’t mean only biologically, and people can lose their humanity just as they lose their ability to love. In Blade Runner Roy and Pris share a love that is the most honest feeling in the movie, it has an innocence that comes from their young age, and we also see their near compassion when Roy saves Deckard.
In the scene where Roy first meets Sebastian in his home, Roy and Pris interact in a fierce yet natural way.When Pris states that they will die like the others, Roy simply says “No we won’t”, as a promise to his loved one. Roy wants a longer life, not only for himself, but for Pris also. The creature in Frankenstein however, is not given the chance to have a spouse, but he shows his capability for compassion through his first acts in the world, looking after the cottage family and saving the girl from drowning. Loving something without even interacting with it is a distinctly human trait.
Both creators, Tyrell and Frankenstein may have once felt love but not anymore, and especially not for the ones they created. Tyrell is too occupied with greed on the forsaken planet, and Frankenstein’s every other relation is dulled by his passion, then his horror at his creation. These two uncaring godlike or father figures and the human compassion coming from created or neo-humans is a link to the fact that both Shelley and Scott had similar values, even in different time periods.Shelley’s industrial revolution correlates with Scott’s technological revolution and the more advanced mass production, where both managed to spike fear in hearts because they lowered the value of the human. For Shelley, humans became disposable workers; even children were made to work in terrible conditions.
As for Scott, greed had begun to take over “greed is good”, and the corporate control turned people into figures for money making. The ideas that rose up to object like romanticism and dystopian futures are what make us, and these texts question what it means to be human.Both texts, although with different contexts and sometimes similar values, question and attempt to answer what it is that makes us human, and what defines us from other species. Greed and the exploitation of nature are human traits shown in both Frankenstein and Blade Runner through the actual humans in the text.
They show the cruel way that we, unlike other species, dominate the environments around us and feel the need to better them, or better ourselves using them.However, humans can be on the other side of the spectrum as well, with compassion and love for unlikely things at surprising times. Strangely this trait is shown in both movies mostly by the creations, the non-humans forced to be like humans. These copies or advancements of our race it seems can be more than human in many senses. Can it be that we boost our humanity in our creations? There are so many ways to be human, and less ways that we decide are not, therefore, is being human something that can ever actually be fully defined?
