Man Machines

Cloning scenarios combine the fear of being usurped by a double with anxieties about modern technology. Movie plots involving androids and aliens also involve doppelgängers in high-tech contexts. Androids are artificial men or women, who are often used in stories as a gauge of our humanity. Massive increases in processing power are making real-life robots with some sort of artificial intelligence increasingly likely. The robotic android will therefore persist in the movies. However, aspects of robotic technology in films like AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001) and I Robot (2004) can feel a little anachronistic, possibly resulting from source texts written in 1969 and 1941, respectively. In the movies, cloning and genetic engineering have replaced or supplemented much of what was once exclusively metal robot technology. Androids in the future are likely to be both artificially intelligent and genetically modified.

In Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), organic androids called replicants are drones in the service of mankind. The source novel (Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1968) equates androids with human slaves. In the film, lines of clones are genetically engineered to perform specific tasks. Replicants were originally designed with low empathy and intelligence, but an advanced line (Nexus-6) fitted with false memories ("memory implants") develop into intelligent individuals. They are difficult to distinguish from humans, even using an advanced empathy test that monitors physiological responses, including pupil dilation. Eyes are said to be the windows to the soul and the replicants' eyes indicate the emergence of a soul. Blade Runner revolves around eye imagery, from the first shot of a city reflected in an artificial eye, to the moment when the mad scientist has his eyes gouged out by his supreme creation.

In Blade Runner, a group of fugitive Nexus-6 seeks more life from the Tyrell Corporation. A bounty hunter, Deckard (Harrison Ford), proceeds with extreme prejudice to terminate them. The last two surviving replicants, Roy (Rutger Hauer) and Pris (Darryl Hannah), locate genetic designer J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson) in an old apartment building. Sebastian has a genetic defect (Methuselah Syndrome) that has prematurely aged him. It is suggested that Sebastian's genes have been used to engineer the replicants with their limited life-spans. Roy uses Sebastian to locate Tyrell (Joe Turkell), but Tyrell cannot help the replicants once "the genetic die is cast". In his final act before expiring, Roy saves Deckard's life.

The replicants in Blade Runner have more humanity than most of the people they encounter ("more human than human"), in a society that has become soulless. The replicants are an example of the doppelgänger as outsider. They hold up a mirror to society, which can be judged by how it treats its underclass (e.g. slaves, asylum-seekers,