The Tyranny of Masculine Creation and the Potency of a Replicant Adam and Eve Mythology: Postsecular Critique of Materialism in the Blade Runner Films

  • Author(s): David S. Hogsette, Ph.D.
  • When: 2019-06
  • Where: davidhogsette.com
  • Fantasies of masculine creation—the (often) perverse desire to create life in the absence of woman—abound in science fiction literature and film. Mary Shelley in her foundational Gothic-SF novel Frankenstein (1818) set the literary, theatrical, and cinematic stages for exploring this tragic theme of unchecked materialistic creation. Her “hideous progeny” gave rise to the play titled Presumption: Or the Fate of Frankenstein (1823), Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), the film Frankenstein (1910), the film Der Golem (1915), Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), just to list a few. Each of these texts explores the horrific consequences of usurping natural procreative processes through the (mis)application of materialistic science. However, these SF horror narratives do not provide any cultural corrective (except, maybe, Metropolis). Is there a solution to the personal decimation and societal disintegration wrought by these applications of materialistic science?

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