Do Sheep Dream Of Electric Blade Runners?: Gnostic Spirituality In Blade Runner (with 50 mins.of Rare Behind-The-Scenes VHS Movie Content & Interviews)
Do Sheep Dream Of Electric Blade Runners?: Gnostic Spirituality In Blade Runner (with 50 mins.of Rare Behind-The-Scenes VHS Movie Content & Interviews)
FRESH LOOK: BLADE RUNNER REVIEW | FEBRUARY FEATURE IV
“There exists, for everyone, a sentence - a series of words - that has the power to destroy you. Another sentence exists, another series of words, that could heal you. If you're lucky you will get the second, but you can be certain of getting the first.”
― Philip K. Dick, VALIS
Insert dinner knife into broken Betamax machine, depress spring lever, wait for top loading mechanism to activate and pop. Slide tape in, push down, fast forward through FBI piracy warning message. You’re time travelling with me, seeing through my eyes.
It’s the mid-80s and we’re fourteen years old. The triumphant electronic horns of Vangelis start up, heralding from the darkness a tape-blurred dystopian Los Angeles skyline. It’s peppered with the exploding flames of burning oil rig towers and flying cars. The entire city is captured, reflected in a human eye.
Cut to Harrison Ford in a trench coat in the rain. He sits beneath flashing neon advertising signs, trying to read an analog newspaper; a man of the past burying his head in the sand, in denial of the noisy prison of future signs and symbols that surrounds him.
The image is a little squashed; cinema widescreen cut and forced into a 4:3 aspect ratio to ensure my small cathode ray tube home television unit is completely filled. We don’t care. Western detective noir blended with Asian futurist dystopia. A trench coat-wearing detective, an android femme fatale, Rutger Hauer as antagonist in a long, black leather coat. We’re hooked.
There we are, gradually edging closer and closer to the TV, drawn in so that we can pick up as much information as possible from the stretched, over-watched rental tape. Before we’re forced to return it, we’ll watch it another five times.
Thank you for journeying with me to relive first contact with the visionary gnostic mind of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. A door has been opened, the world will never be the same again.
PHILIP K. DICK (PKD)
At the time of his death in 1982, PKD’s work was generally known only to science fiction readers. Many of his novels and short stories were out of print. To date, a total of fourty-four novels have been published and translations have appeared in twenty-five languages. The Library of America has issued three collections of Dick's novels. At least nine films have been adapted from his work, the first being Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner which was released the same year that he died. PKD’s writing has had a meaningful impact on Western culture, American culture in particular, but to date none of his words have eclipsed the impact of the Blade Runner movie.
BLADE RUNNER GNOSIS
Ridley Scott scanned the novel, gave it to someone else to read for him, and focused on getting his screenwriters to produce something that would work for him. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, one of Philip K Dick’s Byzantine titles, wasn’t going to work, so he bought the rights to a treatment for a different film written by Beat generation author William Burroughs. The "blade runners” in that movie were medical supply smugglers in a dystopian future where the health care system is in crisis.
Scott knew what he liked, it didn’t matter that the new movie title had nothing to do with the novel. Taking the same approach to the script, he cut away elements of the story that had to do with cyborg animals bought by the city population as status symbols, and Mercerism, the popular religion of the age with a Christ-like Messiah who endlessly climbs a hill in virtual reality while being continuously battered with rocks. The focus for Scott would be Deckard hunting four rogue cyborgs who had hidden themselves among the populace of the city and the love story between Deckard and the android Rachael who was owned by Deckard’s corporate masters.
But Scott’s instincts were good. Visuals inspired by the French Metal-Hurlant comic anthologies, especially the visionary artist Möebius, blended with smoky film-noir rooms, rain and shadow. A futuristic city in decay.
"I got a call from one of the ladies at the [Blade Runner] production department saying that Philip K. Dick was coming down at three in the afternoon for a screening," [David] Dryer recalls, [one of Blade Runner's special effects chief]. "She told me to assemble an effects reel showing the best of the best. So I did. I planned on showing it to Dick in EEG's screening room, which was pretty remarkable. Doug Trumbull had one of the best screening rooms I've ever seen. The image on that screen was spectacular—it was in 70mm—and a great sound system had been installed that made the floor rumble.
"Now, Vangelis hadn't supplied any music yet, but Matthew Yuricich had been painting some of his mattes to old Vangelis albums—Matt likes to paint to music. Since we were already familiar with that, we decided to also play Vangelis music while we showed our reel to Dick.
"Then the production rented out a chauffeured limousine to pick up Philip Dick in Santa Ana," continues Dryer. "They were really giving him the deluxe treatment. That limo drove him all the way up to Maxella, and when he arrived at EEG, I noticed Dick had brought a woman along with him [Wilson]. I could also tell right away that Dick was unhappy; he acted like somebody with a burr up their ass. First he started kind of grilling me in this grouchy tone about all kinds of things—he wanted to know what was going on, told me that he'd been very unhappy with the script, and so on and so forth.
"So first we gave him a quick tour of the EEG shop, which I thought might settle him down. But Dick didn't seem impressed, even when we showed him all the preproduction art and the actual models we'd used for certain effects shots. (Then, after Dick and Ridley had a meeting), we went into the screening room."
"Dick was a bit guarded at first," recalls Ridley Scott. "Until we doused the lights, turned up the music, and ran the reel for him," adds Dryer.
However, according to Blade Runner's co-effects supervisor, "Dick didn't say a word at first. He sat there for twenty minutes like a statue. Then the lights came up, and Philip K. Dick turned around to me. He said in this gruff voice, 'Can you run that again?' So the projectionist rethreaded and ran it again.
"Now the lights come up a second time. Dick looks me straight in the eye and says, 'How is this possible? How can this be? Those are not the exact images, but the texture and tone of the images I saw in my head when I was writing the original book! The environment is exactly as how I'd imagined it! How'd you guys do that? How did you know what I was feeling and thinking?!'
"Let me tell you, that was one of the most successful moments of my career," Dryer concludes. "Dick went away dazed."
-Excerpt from Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner by Paul Sammon
The world PKD saw in his mind when he closed his eyes had somehow been reborn visually. The author wouldn't survive to see the finished result. He wouldn't know that Scott had also captured many of the themes in his broader works perfectly: paranoia, identity crisis, human vs machine, entropy, the nature of God, social control, power politics, human evolution. These themes had come together in Dick’s polymath mind over a period of decades, as the colors of his inner and outer worlds began to blur and run together. He used his fiction writing as a means of building a model to make sense of his insights and mystical experiences. When he discovered the ideas of the early Christian gnostics he found many parallels with his own experience.
Beautifully Broken is a newsletter dealing with enlightenment and repairing a broken world and these are both themes are contained in Gnosticism. Let’s look at the movie with these ideas in mind and see where they overlap with Philip Dick’s personal spiritual experience. First, let’s look at a basic definition of gnosticism.
WHAT IS GNOSTICISM?
Gnosticism (from Ancient Greek: γνωστικός, romanized: gnōstikós, Koine Greek: [ɣnostiˈkos], 'having knowledge') is a collection of religious ideas and systems that coalesced in the late 1st century AD among Jewish and early Christian sects. These various groups emphasized personal spiritual knowledge (gnosis) above the proto-orthodox teachings, traditions, and authority of religious institutions.
Gnostic cosmogony generally presents a distinction between a supreme, hidden God and a malevolent lesser divinity (the Demiurge) who is responsible for creating the material universe.
Consequently, Gnostics considered material existence to be flawed or evil, and held the principal element of salvation to be direct knowledge of the hidden divinity, attained via mystical or esoteric insight.
Christ was considered to be an emissary of the remote supreme divine being who came with teachings that enabled the redemption of the human spirit.
Many Gnostic texts deal not in concepts of sin and repentance, but with illusion and enlightenment.
And what about PKD's gnostic experiences? Let's jump right in!
ZEBRA-GOD & PINK RAY-BEAM ENLIGHTENMENT
Dick started the journal after his visionary experiences in February and March 1974, which he called "2-3-74." These visions began shortly after Dick had two impacted wisdom teeth removed. When a delivery person from the pharmacy brought his pain medication, he noticed the ichthys necklace she wore and asked her what it meant. She responded that it was a symbol used by the early Christians, and in that moment Dick's religious experiences began:
In that instant, as I stared at the gleaming fish sign and heard her words, I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, "loss of forgetfulness." I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.
For a short time, as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black, prison-like contours of hateful Rome. But, of much more importance, I remembered Jesus, who had just recently been with us, and had gone temporarily away, and would very soon return. My emotion was one of joy. We were secretly preparing to welcome Him back. It would not be long. And the Romans did not know. They thought He was dead, forever dead. That was our great secret, our joyous knowledge. Despite all appearances, Christ was going to return, and our delight and anticipation were boundless.
In the following weeks, Dick experienced further visions, including a hallucinatory slideshow of abstract patterns and an information-rich beam of pink light. In the Exegesis, he theorized as to the origins and meaning of these experiences, frequently concluding that they were religious in nature. The being that originated the experiences is referred to by several names, including Zebra, God, and the Vast Active Living Intelligence System. From 1974 until his death in 1982, Dick wrote the Exegesis by hand in late-night writing sessions, sometimes composing as many as 150 pages in a sitting. In total, it consists of approximately 8,000 pages of notes, only a small portion of which have been published.
“After he had encountered God, Fat (another name for PKD) developed a love for him which was not normal. It is not what is usually meant in saying that someone "loves God." With Fat it was an actual hunger. And stranger still, he explained to us that God had injured him and still he yearned for him, like a drunk yearns for booze. God, he told us, had fired a beam of pink light directly at him, at his head, his eyes; Fat had been temporarily blinded and his head had ached for days. It was easy, he said, to describe the beam of pink light; it's exactly what you get as a phosphene after-image when a flashbulb has gone off in your face. Fat was spiritually haunted by that color. Sometimes it showed up on a TV screen. He lived for that light, that one particular color.
-Valis, Philip K. Dick
Another event was an episode of glossolalia. Dick's wife transcribed the sounds she heard him speak, and discovered that he was speaking Koiné Greek, an ancient dialect which he had never studied. As Dick was to later discover, Koiné Greek was originally used to write the New Testament and the Septuagint. However, this was not the first time Dick had experienced glossolalia. A decade earlier, Dick claimed he was able to think, speak, and read fluent Latin under the influence of Sandoz LSD-25.
Out of interest, let's compare these experiences with those of Saint Theresa of Ávila (1815-1882)
Teresa of Ávila, OCD, also called Saint Teresa of Jesus, was a Carmelite nun and prominent Spanish mystic and religious reformer. Active during the Counter-Reformation, Teresa became the central figure of a movement of spiritual and monastic renewal, reforming the Carmelite Orders of both women and men
"In another vision, the famous transverberation, a seraph drove the fiery point of a golden lance repeatedly through her heart, causing her an ineffable spiritual and bodily pain."
I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it ...
The account of this vision was the inspiration for one of Bernini's most famous works, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa at Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome.
The memory of this episode served as an inspiration throughout the rest of her life, and motivated her lifelong imitation of the life and suffering of Jesus, epitomized in the adage often associated with her: "Lord, either let me suffer or let me die."
Saint Teresa of Ávila's experience is of a divine entity piercing her heart with a lance of fiery gold, leaving her on fire with a love of God. PKD’s experience is of a pink laser beam being fired into his brain leaving him with a hunger for god and a brain overloaded with information he had to write desperately to capture as it decompressed inside of him. They're not dissimilar, and where we see a difference it can be put down to the imaginative consciousness of the individuals using the available cultural symbols at hand to decorate and make sense of a spiritual experience.
For Teresa it's angels and flaming lances, for PKD in the Atomic Age, it’s flying saucers, laser beams and rocket ships.
For additional information, read CG Jung's short book Flying Saucers to see how science fiction imagery took hold of the popular imagination in post-war America.
THE BLACK IRON PRISON
"The Black Iron Prison" is a concept of an all-pervasive system of social control postulated in the Tractates Cryptica Scriptura, a summary of an unpublished Gnostic exegesis included in his novel VALIS.
Dick wrote: Once, in a cheap science fiction novel, Fat (another name for PKD) had come across a perfect description of the Black Iron Prison, but set in the far future. So if you superimposed the past (ancient Rome) over the present (California in the twentieth century) and superimposed the far future world of The Android Cried Me a River over that, you got the Empire, as the supra- or trans-temporal constant. Everyone who had ever lived was literally surrounded by the iron walls of the prison; they were all inside it and none of them knew it.
The Black Iron Prison is a manifestation of the gnostic demiurge—the creator being responsible for imprisoning all life in matter.
In Blade Runner, the Tyrell Corporation represents The Black Iron Prison. Their corporate headquarters is like a temple. They run what’s left of planet earth and also the colony worlds that everyone has abandoned the earth for. They control everything, including the police and android production. Androids are the new slaves and Tyrell Corporation are the slave masters. When androids go rogue, Deckard’s job is to hunt them down and eliminate them. When he tries to refuse the latest case, sick of killing on behalf of the corporation, it is made clear that there are two types of people and he doesn’t want to find himself included on the side of “little people”.
Choice is an illusion in the Black Iron Prison, everything we do is controlled, all actions involve suffering. Deckard insists that this is his last job and starts hunting the missing androids. What Deckard’s not expecting is to fall in love with Rachael, the latest model of android that doesn’t know it’s an android. What can break the bars of the Black Iron Prison? The ultimate system of material control? The need to control is a form of self-hatred, outwardly directed, and the spiritual alchemic substance that dissolves all hatred is love.
DECKARD AND RACHAEL, SHEEP PRIESTS WHO BRING ABOUT A LAMB MESSIAH
Here’s where we need to talk a little bit about the novel to help make sense of a gnostic theme that’s only partly shown in the film but is relevant to a gnostic understanding of the film.
In the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Deckard’s social status, how he feels about himself and to a certain extent the health of his marriage is dictated by his ability to purchase and maintain an android sheep. His future culture, which has destroyed nature and wiped out all living animals fetishes the animal world and purchasing an expensive life-like replica means you are an upwardly mobile citizen, a man with prospects. The sheep has a powerful symbolic meaning in early Christianity. The sacrificial lamb that was previously slaughtered and offered up to God for the forgiveness of the sins of the people, was now embodied in the person of Jesus Christ who dies in order to wash away the sins of the whole world.
Deckard’s identity is, in part, bound up with caring for a fake sheep, a symbol of false hope, false salvation, and he ends up falling in love with an artificial woman, whose name in Hebrew means “ewe”, a female sheep. In this sense Deckard becomes the proto-Adam of a broken Eden trying to find a way to reconnect, a thing to love. He can’t love nature, it’s been destroyed, his marriage is lost to medicated substance abuse and a virtual reality religion, and the woman he does fall in love with is an android, who he is scheduled to add to his kill list.
Here’s an example of Christian mystical sheep symbolism seen in The Ghent Altarpiece, also called the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb.
Completed by 1432, and attributed to the brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck, the altarpiece is considered a masterpiece of European art and one of the world's treasures, it was "the first major oil painting", and it marked the transition from Middle Age to Renaissance art.
The lamb stands on an altar, and is surrounded by 14 angels with multi-colored wings, arranged in a circle, some holding symbols of Christ's Passion and two swinging censers. The lamb has a wound on its breast from which blood gushes into a golden chalice, yet it shows no outward expression of pain, a reference to Christ's sacrifice.
It has a human-like face which appears to be looking directly out of the panel, similar to the subjects of Jan van Eyck's single head portraits. The antependium on the upper portion of the front of the altar is inscribed with words taken from John 1:29; ECCE AGNUS DEI QUI TOLLIT PECCATA MUNDI ("Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world").
A dove, representing the Holy Spirit, hovers low in the sky directly above the lamb, surrounded by concentric semicircles of white and yellow hues of varying luminosity, the outermost of which appear like nimbus clouds. Thin golden beams emanating from the dove resemble those surrounding the head of the lamb, as well as those of the three figures in the Deësis in the upper register. The rays seem to have been painted by van Eyck over the finished landscape, and serve to illuminate the scene in a celestial, supernatural light.
WHAT CAN GNOSTIC BLADE RUNNER OFFER US IN TERMS OF PRACTICAL ENLIGHTENMENT AND REPAIRING OUR BROKEN WORLD?
The answer to this lies in the question: Did PKD ever escape the Black Iron Prison?
My own best guess is based on my own gnostic experience that occurred more than twenty years ago in upstate New York. I’ll save the details for another post where I can do the whole story justice, but in short, I found myself with enough time on my hands to do nothing but meditate, practice mind body exercises like tai chi, and write stream of consciousness fiction every day. No pink laser beam to the brain, but a definite shattering of the ego, my sense of myself, and as I fell apart, a great being reached out to catch me and connect me to a greater reality. I was pulled out of my physical body and filled with an intense love. My body became a giant cloud body and I viewed my life as if from on high, a bird’s eye perspective where I could perceive the whole patten of my existence, like a single landscape. It took three weeks for my ego to reassemble itself and my body to feel like its former self. Two decades on I’m still processing and integrating this experience.
The bars of the black iron prison are melted by the realization of a universal love that binds all of creation together. If there is a gnosis, or secret knowledge in how to achieve it, then it is nothing more than the knowledge that divine love sustains the universe, and you are directly, personally included in this ongoing process. The very next experiential realization is that there is no black iron prison, no material trap or conspiracy other than that which we make in our own minds.
As The Buddha says—
(1) Life is suffering, (2) attachment to fear and desire causes suffering, (3) suffering ends when one liberates oneself from fear and desire.
Liberation, freedom, enlightenment.
With this in mind, I believe that PKD had broken free into an enlightenment consciousness, but weakened by drug abuse, his body and mind struggled and ultimately failed to survive the experience.
Drug use (including religious, recreational, and abuse) was also a theme in many of Dick's works, such as A Scanner Darkly and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Dick himself was a drug user for much of his life. According to a 1975 interview in Rolling Stone, Dick wrote all of his books published before 1970 while on amphetamines. "A Scanner Darkly (1977) was the first complete novel I had written without speed", said Dick in the interview. He also experimented briefly with psychedelics, but wrote The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), which Rolling Stone dubs "the classic LSD novel of all time", before he had ever tried them.
PKD died after suffering two back-to-back strokes. If he had lived, he would have had more time to synthesize his experiences, to take the pressure off of his psyche and reassemble his consciousness.
GNOSIS & LIBERATION:
What about the theme of liberation and enlightenment in the Blade Runner movie? It only exists in the original 1982 theatrical cut of the film. Deckard and Rachael escape Los Angeles and drive into sunlight, clear skies and the last remaining vestige of the natural world, a new Eden where they have the space to try and understand what their relationship will become.
This liberation ending was forced on Scott, an Englishman, by the studio, which wanted an upbeat, “American ending”. Scott’s reinserted his unhappy ending in his director’s cut (Deckard is revealed to be a maybe-replicant and he and Rachael will be hunted, their only happiness is that they will be hunted together).
The PKD novel also ends on a note of hopelessness, with Deckard abandoned by Rachael, returning from the wastelands to his wife with what he thinks is a real toad, only to find out that it too is an android. No frog that magically transforms into a prince or princess, but a toad and a fake one at that. One more shattered hope. Deckard ends the novel by going to sleep while his wife cares for the android toad. The sleeper, or sleepwalker is a metaphor for the unenlightened, the person who goes through life asleep, unaware of their higher self and connection to reality.
I understand perfectly why Scott would want to resist such an ending. It seems like a sudden, easy escape, a cheat that is at odds with the theme of control and struggle that pervades the movie prior to that moment, but in terms of a gnosis, of the experience of “thunderbolt zen” that’s exactly how it happens. A suddeny prison break when a moment ago, incarceration for all eternity seemed guaranteed.
The idea of Deckard and Rachael as a kind of broken-world Adam and Eve was revitalized in the new movie Blade Runner 2049, where they are revealed to have had a baby, a kind of half human-half android messiah who can unite the world and free it from the grasp of the new leaders of the Black Iron Prison. This take is perfectly in keeping with PKD’s writing and ideas and we see a similar idea take place in his book Valis, which was actually drawn from non-fiction musings he made in his voluminous exegesis:
In seeking the film's makers, Kevin, Phil, Fat, and David—now calling themselves the Rhipidon Society—head to an estate owned by popular musician Eric Lampton and his wife Linda. They decide the goal that they have been led toward is Sophia Lampton, who is two years old and the Messiah or incarnation of Holy Wisdom (Pistis Sophia) anticipated by some variants of Gnostic Christianity. In addition to healing Phil's schizophrenic personality split, she tells them that their conclusions about valis (which Fat had previously termed Zebra) and reality are correct, and more importantly, that we should worship, not gods, but humanity. She dies two days later due to a laser accident caused by Brent Mini.
Undeterred, Fat (who has now resurged) goes on a global search for the next incarnation of Sophia.
Philip K. Dick made himself into a sacrificial lamb, in order to try and understand the nature of reality, to solve the puzzle of existence, and we must applaud and be inspired by any human making the plunge into such dark, unexplored wilderness.
We can only imagine what Philip K Dick might have made of today's world had he lived long enough to see it. He is often lauded in the media for his ability to have correctly predicted future technologies and our relationships with them, so I imagine he would have recognized our world immediately and with a sense of disapproval. Instead of heeding PKD's prophetic warnings of the dangers of technology, we have rushed headlong into them, barely skipping a beat to consider self-preservation and the importance of our shared humanity. He would have seen that The Black Iron Prison was still going strong, but would also would have reminded us, I would like to think, of the imminent nature of divine-love-enlightenment. The pink information-rich laser beam is right there if we turn towards it, waiting to light up our mind.
Extensive Bonus Content:
Rare VHS Behind-The-Scenes Blade Runner material with media interviews
Mention of PKD in the current TV series The Bear
I join in the sentiment of Ritchie, from the TV show The Bear. When asked to give thanks for something at the lunch table he offers, “I’m grateful for Philip K. Dick!”
The Religious Experience of Philip K Dick Comic by Robert Crumb
Mainstream Christianity's View Of Gnosticism
The bishop being interviewed is clearly a highly educated and intelligent man. The heresy of Gnosticism from the mainstream perspective seems to hang on two key points: the idea that God is separate from the world and that the only way to get to him and become enlightened or awoken is by possessing secret knowledge. The mainstream idea is that Jesus’ death assures redemption for all, that God is present in creation and that Jesus’ sacrifice means that any who turn to him are saved, regardless of techniques or secret methods. Having said that, the Christian church do venerate saints who are somehow "closer to God” or have received some mystical experience, so I suppose a non-heretical gnosis must hang on the idea that anyone can have a mystical experience of God based on faith alone, without special teachings or instruction, and that the creative power of the universe is personal and ever-present in one's life, always communicating, waiting for those who are willing to tune in and listen.
Zaha Hadid's Blade Runner Inspired Architecture
Genius architect Zaha Hadid used to run the Blade Runner movie in her architecture office once a week to inspire her architects to push the boundaries on their designs.
ps: If you're curious as to what Philip K Dick novels would read like if he had been reincarnated in Japan, then try Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase.
