Analyzing Discrepancies Between 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' and 'Blade Runner'

Blade Runner film is based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Written by a sci-fi legend Philip K. Dick. It follows a hunter known as Rick Deckard, who has been contracted to hunt down a group of androids that have escaped. During his hunting these androids, he meets a beautiful android known as Rachael and goes against two villains, Roy Baty and Pris, and utilizes the test referred to as the Voight-Kampff to determine who is human and who is not. The similarities between the book and the film end there. The following differences are observed between the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Blade Runner's film.

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Deckard resides in San Francisco and is married and not a sullen bachelor living in Los Angeles. As the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep starts, it is brought to the reader that Deckard is not a Loner who has a strangely futuristic apartment, as portrayed in the film Blade Runner. He lives with his wife, who has issues as she is experiencing self-induced depression. Both Deckard and the wife are seemingly obsessed and rules by a synthesizer that controls humans' emotions (Dick, 2014). They utilize this machine every day to make alterations on their behavior and moods to turn into hyper-efficient work drones as opposed to the rebellious Deckard from the film Blade Runner.

In the novel, rather than Deckard being a good bounty hunter in the game, he starts to feature as a loser at the work he does. Therefore, considering career, it can be said he is lame in the novel. In the film, he is portrayed as a badass capable of retiring young and being called back into the office and coursed to work again since he is extremely good at what he does (IMDb, 2020). In the film, he has been portrayed as an expert at his work whose skills and abilities cannot be compared or matched to others. However, in the novel, he is described as an upcoming bounty hunter whereby agent Holden who gets shots at the beginning of the book, is the force's best man. In the novel, Deckard is talked down a lot, and people talk behind his back, which is the exact opposite of the Deckard in the movie.

Deckard, in the novel, is fanatical about purchasing a live animal to replace the electric sheep that he used to keep on his roof. Apart from the mood synthesizer, he and his wife are continually engrossed with ideas of getting a live animal that they can take care of. This goes on to become a subplot of the novel. This obsession gets him to be manipulated by the company that manufactures replicants when they give him a real-life owl to falsify the results of the Voight-Kampff test that had been done on Rachel. The ideas of taking care of living animals and having a better life via the mood synthesizer are moral viewpoints of the neo-religion Mercerism, which is commonly practiced in the dystopian world that is represented in the novel. Possessing a live animal symbolizes and points to moral pride for the inhabitants of this world. Those individuals who cannot afford expensive rare live animals have android animals available for them, such as the electric sheep, which Deckard needs to replace since it died.

I loved the perspective of the movie. I hated the novel's viewpoint because Deckard, in the book, is a bit of a joke, a mediocre bounty hunter, and he has no much respect from his boss, wife, and even himself. This makes the main character to be boring and not involving hence its perspective becomes less interesting. However, in the movie, Deckard is mysterious, rebellious, and self-assured. These characteristics that he possess are able to make the movie interesting and thrilling which captures the attention and liking of the audience.

References

Dick, P. K. (2014). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. Simon and Schuster. https://www.larevuedesressources.org/IMG/pdf/dadoes.pdf

IMDb, (2020). Blade Runner. [Video]. IMDb. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/