This lack of humanity is also represented in a later scene in which John the ‘Savage’, who has not been ‘conditioned’ like the rest of the citizens in the New World State, is seen weeping over the dead body of his mother Linda. Though he considers it perfectly natural to do so, the nurses consider it to be a ‘scandalous exhibition’ and find the mere suggestion of a mother or family to be obscene and unnatural. Here, Huxley uses satire to show what he believes humanity is heading towards- a society where the word ‘mother’ is a profanity. John acts as a voice for the reader, as his reaction and attitude towards the New World State are a slightly more dramatic version of what many of the people who read the novel would have been thinking-the irony is, however, that Huxley believed that the people of his society had more in common with the conditioned people of the New World State.
Huxley’s concept of ‘conditioning’ could be seen as a response the totalitarian and fascist regimes, and a reflection of his society’s desire for order and control. The people of the New World State have hypnopaedic phrases repeated to them while they sleep when they are children. These messages resemble advertising slogans or propaganda as they are short, succinct and many rhyme, making them easy to remember-“A gramme is better than a damn” and “more stitches, less riches” are examples of this. These phrases are also reminiscent of popular proverbs- “more stiches, less riches” is a more consumerist parody of “a stitch in time saves nine.”
The main attitude towards nature that Huxley satirizes in Brave New World is the idea that nature is inferior to anything created by humans, as seen in the quote “What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder”- a play on the Bible quote Mark 10:9.
This whole idea of humans wishing to dominate and exploit nature (and then replicate it) appears to be a constant trait in human nature, as Ridley Scott explores this concept very similarly in Blade Runner, despite it having been composed fifty years later.
The consequences of humans’ domination and exploitation of natural resources would have been an important issue to Scott in 1982 as it was a time when people were beginning to show concern about the effects of human pollution on the natural environment, and technology on humanity, as technology was continuing to advance rapidly. In addition to this, the 1980s was considered to be the decade of materialism, excess, and corporate geed.
Scott, like Huxley, wanted to warn people about the consequences of all of these things, which can be seen in the eye motif used throughout the film. There is an extreme close-up of an eye during the opening sequence, then a machine that measures pupil dilation to determine whether people are replicants or not, and a man who makes eyes, as well as the constant close-ups of character’s eyes. This could be seen as calling into question the reality and our ability to perceive it.
Another thing that Scott and Huxley both do is place a lot of emphasis on artificiality. While Huxley does this through language- that is, scientific jargon and occasionally attaching the word ‘surrogate’ to ordinary words such as ‘pregnancy’ or ‘leather’, Scott uses film techniques like non-diagetic music, another recurring motif of fake animals and religious imagery to emphasise artificiality.
There is a saxophone playing in the background in the scene where Deckard shoots Zhora, which would be reminiscent of film noir if it wasn’t for the fact that it sounds distinctly electronic and synthetic. Tyrell owns an artificial owl, and Zhora owns an artificial snake, and the majority of questions in the Voight-Kampff test relate to animals (e.g. the turtle in the desert) which are once again suggestive of humans replicating what they have destroyed. Tyrell is also referred to as Roy’s ‘Maker’, a word with distinctly religious connotations. In the scene where Roy asks Tyrell for more life, the lighting is significant as the candles around Tyrell’s bed create a religious atmosphere, and this is emphasized by the pseudo-religious statement made by Tyrell- “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long”, which sounds more like something one would hear from a religious leader than the head of a mega-corporation. Tyrell appears to be ‘playing God’ in this scene, a term often applied to humans and science. This reflects the values that were inherent in Scott’s context at that time, as mega-corporations and the media were rapidly growing in power to the point where they began to dictate what people thought. Tyrell can be seen as a sort of substitute for the religion and belief in a higher power that is such an important part of human nature for so many people.
The power of advertising and the idea of being told what to think is also an issue in Blade Runner, as there are frequent close-ups of billboards advertising everything from Coca-Cola to off-world colonies, and these billboards are particularly intrusive because many of them fly in the air and block out the sky.
Though the two texts were written fifty years apart, the composers share the same concerns about technology’s impact on human nature and the natural world being dismissed as unimportant, despite the fact that they each use completely different techniques and mediums. The similarities between the two texts suggest that they really do transcend time and reflect what is constant in human nature.
