Revisiting the Future: Reflections on the World of Blade Runner

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By Mark Stewart

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 “You’ve never seen a miracle.”

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“It’s okay to dream a little, isn’t it?”

 

Great movies are like art galleries; they make you want to go back and revisit their contents, time and again. Every year I revisit Blade Runner 2049, to remind myself about the type of future we are all heading towards (if any such reminders were necessary, and sadly they aren’t). And perhaps in the hope that the movie might have a different ending, one in which the most human character in the film doesn’t die. Maybe in the future movie endings will change of their own accord to keep audiences guessing (evolving like an image from the transfiguring fluid in a photographer’s negatives tray). But for now K is as doomed as his counterpart in the original movie, the rogue replicant Roy Batty, destined to die before his time, even as inferior men, less deserving of life, live on.  

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2049 is that rarity in a movie franchise, a sequel that’s as good as the original. Much of that is down to Ryan Gosling’s performance, and his interaction with the AI construct Joi (a highly emotive Ana de Armas), who waits in K’s  apartment for him to come home each day, as devoted to her beau as any newly married wife. These pivotal scenes come early on in the film, and the underlying message is the same as before, in Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece: the replicants – the artificial humans – are more human than their creators. And just like before, this role reversal (and all that goes with it) is the core of the movie: a stark warning about the dangers of exchanging one’s humanity for a technological substitute. For abandoning the real world in favour of the virtual one.      

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In a world in which human identity is constantly called into question, there’s ample scope for childhood avatars to appear, the storybook characters we use to teach our children about the perils of the grown-up world. Thus a Pinocchio theme runs through both movies: in the first, with the dwarf-like creations of the master toymaker J.F. Sebastian, played with great vulnerability by William Sanderson, living dolls that strut about his home like manifestations from The Singing Ringing Tree. In the sequel, Joi herself is the avatar, announcing that she’s just “like a real girl” after K buys her an emanator as an anniversary present, freeing her from the prison-like confines of the computer projector (“Now you can go anywhere you want”). This symbolic cutting of the mannequin’s stings has disastrous consequences, as K himself tries to warn Joi about later on (“If anything happened to it, that’s it... you’d be gone.”). Like any human child she waves these warnings aside in her rush to experience the freedoms and sensations of adult existence.  

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Although Harrison Ford doesn’t appear until almost two thirds of the way through the movie, it’s his film as much as Gosling’s, and the initial confrontation between the two is a struggle between father and son, a one sided fist fight which culminates in an uneasy truce (“We can keep at this, or we can get a drink”). The flickering uncertain backdrop to this contest, featuring holograms of Elvis Presley and Las Vegas show girls, suggests a multiplicity of worlds struggling to fix themselves in time and space, none as yet fully emergent.

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There are several references to 1960s music culture (particularly Sinatra), a warning that the future world of 2049, only three decades away is going to be a cheerless place, with little to celebrate, especially in song. (“Did you know this song was released in 1966 on Reprise Records? It was number 1 on the charts...”). We are headed towards a self-inflicted Armageddon created not by nuclear weapons or by a rogue asteroid but by global pollution and a complete loss of empathy with the natural world. In such a reality Fly Me to the Moon becomes an anthem for those who wish to escape life on Earth and all its attendant miseries. The citizens of 2049 inhabit a seedy ruinous world, one which J.G. Ballard, a leading architect of literary dystopias, might have called “a zone if ill omen.” 

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2049 should be a rallying call for all the diverse arms of the Green Movement depicting as it does an Earth almost as desolate as the Moon. In this there are echoes of Silent Running, of a future in which the Earth has been utterly stripped of its natural resources, and in which its protagonist, Freeman Lowell, rails against the desecration of nature: “You don't see the difference? The difference is that I grew it, that's what the difference is. That I picked it and I fixed it, and it has a taste and it has some colour and that it has a smell and that it calls back a time when there were flowers all over the Earth; and there were valleys and there were plains of tall green grass that you could lie down in, that you could go to sleep in; and there were blue skies, and there was fresh air and there were things growing all over the place..."   

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Mackenzie Davis is excellent in the Pris-like role of Mariette, her long limbed body and expressive, wide eyed face showing why’s it’s so hard to tell the real humans from the make-believe ones.  Half-way through the film, at its turning point, when an atmosphere of menace and betrayal is starting to build, she morphs with Joi so that K can finally sleep with the girl of his dreams. It seems that organic androids dream of more than just electric sheep, as Philip K. Dick surmised in his 1968 novel on which Blade Runner was loosely based. “Coffee?” he asks Joi the morning after, their romance crossing back and forth between the real world and the virtual. The smile this question brings to Joi’s face is like that of the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland; something memorable and touching that exists in its own right. And it’s heartbreakingly real. It’s where you hope the film will end before the horror really starts. But of course it doesn’t. The genetically engineered genie has escaped from his prison and he isn’t going back. Like Roy Batty, he wants more life and is prepared to engage in murderous retributive violence to get it.

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Every time he retires a replicant, K is debriefed by an unseen interrogator in scenes that are reminiscent of Kafka at his most paranoid (hence K’s name), in order to ensure that he is back on baseline, and in no danger of accidentally retiring a human. The questions that are thrown at him are, to our ears at least, meaningless but strangely hypnotic, working the way into the brain like a lingering fragment from a song: “Cells. Interlinked. Cells. Within cells interlinked.” This is a dehumanised and dehumanising process, similar to the Voight-Kampff interviews conducted by Deckard in the first movie. In one of these encounters he meets Rachel, the Tyrell Corporation’s more-human-than-human replicant (“Is this to test whether I’m a replicant, Mr Deckard, or a lesbian?”). And it’s that encounter which forms the narrative core of the sequel, its ramifications still being felt a generation later.   

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“Oh, you don’t like real girls,” Mariette tells K at one point on discovering that he’s a Blade Runner. But in a very real sense he does: Joi is more human than K’s bloodless boss (an acerbic Robin Wright) who believes that her replicant agents can survive very well without a soul. Or Wright’s counterpart at the Wallace Corporation, the cold-blooded and ironically named Luv (Sylvia Hoeks). Her black eyes are like those of a doll, identical in their glassy lifelessness to one of J.F Sebastian’s creations, her soul – if she has one at all – an empty simulacrum of the real thing, a paper construction like one of Gaff’s origami pieces that opens out to reveal nothing but an empty space at its core.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The only false note in the story line is Niander Wallace (a Prometheus, Peter Weyland-like character) who presides over the life and death of his creations with all the callous indifference of a concentration camp commandant (“Offworld I have everything I need to make you talk. You don’t know what pain is yet. You will learn…”). Luv is a memorable implacable villain: “You tiny thing. In the face of the fabulous new your only thought is to kill it. For fear of great change. You can’t hold the tide with a broom.” There’s no need for her to play second fiddle to her theatrical and overly-melodramatic boss.  

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2049 predicts the near future in a way that should give its audience sleepless nights. All the trees are dead (those few that remain are little more than tombstones), and every blade of grass is long gone; the severely restricted and rationed water supply is barely enough to take a ten second shower in. Derelict humans populate the dark neon streets and the litter strewn stairwells of tenement blocks like extras from a Mad Max movie. K’s home is no more than a cell in the midst of the urban desolation, besieged on all sides by a lawless society of criminals, outcasts and hustlers. He survives simply because he is more dangerous than those who would be happy to take his home from him, to skin the “skinner.” The word is scrawled across the door to his apartment like a racial slur.   

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K’s disillusionment with the human world, when it comes, is absolute and damning as he encounters a giant-sized hologram of a highly sexualised Joi, after she has been erased from existence by Luv. “I hope you’re satisfied with our product,” Luv asks K at one point in the movie and in 2049 that’s precisely what all humans, real or otherwise, have become: disposable, saleable products, purchased for pleasure and then discarded. It’s a disenchantment which Roy Batty experiences in the first movie when he realises the temporary nature of his existence (“The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And you have burned so very very brightly, Roy”).     

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2049 is haunted by the ghost of Rutger Hauer (the movie came out before his death in 2019). I so wanted Rutger, in spectral form at least, to make an appearance, perhaps in a special cameo role, possibly as a street vendor plying his wares on the electronic DreamStrip where everything is for sale. Or as a tired out Blade Runner at the end of his career about to clear out his desk down at the precinct, but not before retiring one last replicant. But it wasn’t to be. Even so, Rutger is still there in many of the scenes, his pale image loitering in the background like an uneasy ghost, ready to repeat the damning speech he delivered at the end of the original movie, the one which exposed humanity’s collective lack of imagination and ambition: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched sea beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

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K’s death at the end of the movie echoes Batty’s own demise and even shares the same soundtrack. It may be Ks time to die but his spirit isn’t so easily extinguished. And hopefully, despite the destruction of the emanator, nor is Joi’s.  Somewhere along the way K acquires the soul that his boss thinks he can do without, and which most humans lack. So perhaps part of him doesn’t die after all, as he lies down on those stone steps in the snow, Roy Batty’s white dove fluttering unseen from his empty hands. And if he restores some of Ford’s humanity – a man whose job it was like Ethan Edwards in The Searchers to kill those with a savage spirit, the renegades civilised society can’t bear to live alongside – then his death hasn’t been in vain.

 

“Why? What am I to you?” Deckard asks K towards the end of the movie, incredulous that K has sacrificed himself for the former replicant hunter, that he has been shown such considerations in a world bereft of human compassion. It’s a question that K can’t answer (how can he?) other than to tell Ford that his daughter is waiting for him. It seems that to love someone you don’t have to be a stranger after all.

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Ford is surprisingly good at playing the world weary recluse (“Maybe he finally got what he wanted….to be left alone”), reluctant to re-engage with a world he so clearly despises. The irony is almost wounding: a man who once made his living retiring replicants coming out of retirement so he can meet his half-replicant daughter. 

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Only a reunion with this equally reclusive young woman, now a designer of memory implants, brings him back, and the final scene depicting this – depending as it does on Ford’s facial expression – is genuinely moving. It is the perfect antithesis to the infantile nonsense of the George Lucas galaxy, in which every human relationship seems based on a predictable cliché. It is not the emotional heart of the movie (that has already been and gone in the K-Joi relationship) but it is pretty close.  Not a happy ending (there can’t be one on a world whose surface is as wasted as the interior of a nuclear reactor); but one which suggests at least a measure of the redemption that K had so set his heart upon.

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Real memories, rather than replicated ones, are indeed the best and the memory of watching Blade Runner 2049 is a great one to have.          

 

In memory of:

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Syd Mead (1933-2019)

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Rutger Hauer (1944-2019