NOT A PROPER REVIEW AT ALL OF ‘BLADE RUNNER 2049’

Just in case you missed it up top, this is not a proper review of ‘Blade Runner 2049’ in any shape or form. It’s more a rumination upon two questions, one exceedingly fannish (the great Deckard debate) and the other a bone of some contention in the political blogsphere. (Well, us SJWs have to get our virtue signalling in somehow.) Hopefully needless to say, but tackling both takes us into PLOT SPOILER territory…

Token review bit… Yes, it is a good film. In some ways it bears the same relationship to the original as ‘2046’ did to to ‘In the Mood For Love’, for all that those films are very different. It works as the difficult B-side, digging deeper into questions. Despite being long (over 160 minutes) it’s very well paced and does (kind of) work as a detective story.

And despite looking stunning, it doesn’t just look stunning. The imagery often is imagery, rather than an excuse for another CGI-fest. For example, some have claimed that the statues found in abandoned Vegas are a copy of ’Planet of the Apes’. But that misses the point that the shock of seeing the Statue of Liberty sticking up out of the sand is that one day it meant something, and part and parcel of that shock is it being an original. Whereas the Vegas statues were built to be copies, or – to use a very Dickian word – simulcara.

To start on the Deckard debate, we do need to look back at the original. Most people bothering to read this will know this next para already, but…

This sequel was designed so it might fit both originals. The original original, the one first released, turns out to be in essence a love story. Hero Rick Deckard is able to escape into the wild green yonder with his girlfriend Rachael. Who’s a Replicant (a synthetic imitation human), but then love conquers all. Even, it would seem, plot. 

But in the bleaker director’s cut escape is not an option, those luring adverts for the off-world colonies only taunt, and rather than Rachael getting to live as a human there’s the hint Deckard might be a Replicant himself. (There’s now multiple versions, but that’s essentially the division they come down to.)

Original director Ridley Scott has consistently insisted that original original was only ever a studio imposition, that the second version was always his intention. Then more recently he added that Deckard definitely was a Replicant. Now one of these things is more useful than the other. (In fact when he first said that I confess to shouting at the telly, an activity I normally reserve for Tory MPs and anyone associated with ‘Top Gear’.)

In fact, I suspect he’d been on the convention circuit too long and was merely repeating back to fans what they want to hear. Because fans, forever keen to believe they possess secret knowledge denied to norms, had long insisted this. And the problem with it is that it treats Deckard’s status as something of an Easter egg. Each scene, each line of dialogue should be scoured obsessively for clues, with little consideration of how the answer would affect the film overall. But let’s assume that in art, if the creators want you to know something they’re probably going to tell you. So by the same token, if they keep things ambiguous that was most likely a decision too.

‘Blade Runner’ starts with humans being humans and Replicants Replicants, only to progressively muddy the waters. Tyrell, director of the evil Corporation who makes the Replicants proudly insists "more human than human" is our motto. While Gaff’s parting shot to Deckard (in Scott’s version the last line), speaking of Rachael, is “It's too bad she won't live! But then again, who does?”

Because we don’t. Humans live in a society which dehumanises, which effectively forces them to treat each other as though they’re not human. Deckard wants no part in the Blade Runner business but is forced back in. While at the same time Tyrell is more right than he thinks. The Replicants, the supposed non-humans, are becoming human. Chiefly evidenced in their final battle where Batty, who has been painted throughout as the villain and been shown to kill remorselessly, chooses instead to save Deckard’s life. 

Scott has said of this: “It was an endorsement in a way, that the character is almost more human than human, in that he can demonstrate a very human quality at a time when the roles are reversed and Deckard may have been delighted to blow his head off. But Roy [Batty] takes the humane route.” 

The line turns out to be blurred, the street two-way. So the sequel wisely retains these ambiguities, in fact throws up ambiguities of it’s own. However, does it really match both originals? It’s world is clearly not that verdant green space which the original Deckard and Rachael run off into. It’s a barren wasteland, where only maggots grow and wood is valued like a precious metal. It’s also true that K, the new protagonist is effectively Deckard’s mirror image, a Replicant who starts to suspect he might be human.

Yet, at least as far as the Deckard = Replicant option goes, it firmly follows the original. In fact, those not clued up on these things might miss entirely any suggestion otherwise.

Some point out Deckard doesn’t have Replicant abilities, by which they mostly mean super strength. But there’s no reason why Replicants have to be built to be super-strong, any more than every processing device is built to have bags of RAM. Plus if the plan is to conceal his true nature from him, granting him super-strength might be something of a giveaway. 

It makes more sense to concentrate on his ageing. Short of having Harrison Ford frozen since 1982 on the off-chance of a sequel, they are of course stuck with an older Deckard. In the original we saw with Batty how a Replicant expires. And he doesn’t die like a human, of old age, only faster. He more shuts down. But then like Rachael Deckard would be a special, new kind of Replicant with handwaves allowed. So they could either skirt around that issue, or hint that because of reasons someone might have designed Replicants to mimic human ageing.

As it is, by reintroducing Rachael, they virtually do the opposite. Because this is a rebuilt Rachael, as she was, as only a machine can be rebuilt, the way it was, in contrast to the ageing Deckard. It’s true that Wallace (the wicked capitalist this time) suggests that he might have been set up to get it on with Rachael. But humans can be set up for dates too.

A recurring theme of the film is data, fitting both the techno-future setting and a detective story organised around the search for clues. But the theme pivots to emphasise the unreliability of data; pages ripped from record books, glitches in VR displays, memories which may not be yours.

And that unreliability is associated with the Replicant resistance (more of which anon), particularly with the Blackout – the great data wipe they engineer. But this is itself very much associated with their becoming human. Part of K’s journey of self-actualisation is his developing the ability to lie, when he tells his boss Rachael’s child’s been “taken care of”.

But mostly this ambiguity is associated with Deckard. He’s still alive when he shouldn’t be, living in the abandoned hotel with the glitchy VR. And we’re told quite specifically it was him who covered his child’s tracks.

Which makes his and Rachael’s child a hybrid child, in a plot line oddly mirroring ‘Battlestar Galactica’ a union between human and Replicant. The Replicant resistance don’t want to replace humans so much as insist on their parity, a para-military civil rights movement. So such a unifying child becomes the solution to the whole problem. It might “break the world,” or it could break down “the wall that separates kind”.

K’s accessing the memory of the hidden wooden horse is what leads him on the self-actualisation path, even accessing a name. Ana tells him “someone lived this”, withholding the rather vital information it was her. (The memory is also the microcosm of her life. She has to abandon the horse to preserve it, just as her father has to abandon her to save her.) Yet Mariette later recognises the horse and underground leader Freysa tells him "we all thought we were the child."

Which suggests that Ana slips this memory into all Replicant craniums, as a kind of equivalent to the wake-up code in ‘Humans’. (This works better symbolically. All Replicants can’t be expected to all take the journey to the orphanage, and if they did and hopefully hunted for the horse they’d now find it gone.) When K dies, she experiences from her cell the snow that falls on him, also suggesting some sort of psychic link.

So in brief the answer to the question “is Deckard a Replicant?” is the same as it would be to “does he have African ancestry?” We don’t care, and we’re fighting for a world where that won’t matter to anyone.

For a brief summary of the claim the film has a “women problem”, there’s 

Anna Smith’s piece in the Guardian. Let’s start with Joi, a hologram designed to stop live-alone loners like K getting the blues. (An extension of female-gendered operating systems already in existence, like Siri.) Except, much like K and his orders, Joi overcomes her programming and the two fall in love.

Or does she? Look at little harder, and it’s as deliberately ambiguous as the Deckard debate. There’s a theory that kept apes taught human language were really mimicking rather than absorbing what they were told, fulfilling their role as best they could so as to appease the fruit providers. Similarly K wants not just the off-the-shelf sex toy but for Joi to assume sentience and embark on a genuine relationship with him. She, built to oblige, does just that.

At Forbes, Paul Tassi develops the simulacrum argument. To which we might add Mariette’s line to Joi: “I've been inside you. There's not as much there as you think.”

But how does this relate to the women problem in wider popular culture? At most, by foregrounding it. Which can be a valuable thing to do, but only if you then go on to deal with it. Foregrounding alone achieves little. (Supposing in the original Rachael had a line of dialogue where she said “here I was thinking I was a sentient being who made my own decisions. Whereas as it turns out all I wanted was a he-man to come along, slam me against a wall and tell me how I feel. I am so much better now. Let’s run away together so you can dominate me some more.” That would improve things?)

K does become Joe after a fashion, achieving a form of self-actualisation, even if it doesn’t happen according to the script in his head. Joi, whichever way you read her, is there to encourage this process before nobly sacrificing herself for him in classic girlfriend sidekick mode. And beside K’s antagonist, Luv, Joi is the chief female character in the film. She’s the only female character on the version of the poster above.

Unfortunately, Anna Smith then goes on to generalise from her example, saying “Mariette shows initial promise as a strong character who can give as good as she gets, but she is also a sex worker who is literally used as a puppet.”

Uh, no. Not what happens at all. From her first scene it’s made clear she’s posing as a sex worker to gain info on K. She slips a tracker on him which she then uses to save his life and take him to the Replicant resistance. Who are led by a woman – Freysa. And this is the real point where the critique gets derailed. K’s investigations cause him to believe Rachael’s child is a boy, who he then assumes to be himself. Yet he’s completely wrong-ended when Freysa tells him it’s really a girl.

So when Smith writes “it is worth thinking about whether this is the future we want for women in film”, she’s talking about a future where a woman has a central role. This is the very opposite trajectory to the boy power fantasy of for example Neo in ‘The Matrix’, where the regular guy gets to discover he’s “the one”, a rank which comes complete with a sexy girlfriend sidekick. 

Freysa suggests to K he take out the captured Deckard before he can have intel extracted from him, though it’s clear he won’t be coming back from such a mission himself. K then encounters another Joi copy on a bridge, who is back to default sex-toy mode purring come-ons. Bridges, as a symbol in films, are often associated with suicide. This is the point where he bottoms out, gives up entirely on ever becoming Joe, and is liberated to embark on his suicide mission. He’s only a cog. But he can still choose which wheel to fit his cog into.

(I couldn’t quite tell whether K was there to kind of blindside us as we led into the real story, and the whole film was to set up a sequel around the actual antagonism of Ana and Wallace. But the film fared poorly domestically, which I guess strikes that option out and so we’ll never know.)

But from here things get more interesting. Wallace’s plot is to gain for himself the secret of Replicant reproduction. His ostensible reason for this, “I can only make so many”, is the very reverse of sense. Surely the very point of making machines to populate the planets was that human reproduction is so time-consuming and imprecise? So let’s look for symbolic sense. We see a Replicant created the way a foal is born. Though, displeased at his barren handiwork, he dispatches her. But what if he, the future capitalist who has conquered human society so completely he effectively lords it, is now turning his expansionist eye on the world of nature? (A regular SF trope in recent years. Weyland in ‘Prometheus’ wanted to conquer death.)

What Wallace wants to do is seize the ‘miracle’ of birth from women. That might even explain another strange plot flaw. Everyone’s so excited the child is born while not considering that her mother died in labour, which suggests the ‘miracle’ isn’t quite down pat yet. But what if Wallace’s plan is effectively to make women redundant, to do away with them? If so, what more natural figure to lead the resistance against him than a woman?

Which probably takes us into a pointed debate. Is this a dystopian future where male-dominated science and technology are in effect trying not just to colonise women’s bodies but usurp them, and women are fighting back? Or is it another form of gender essentialism, where women’s main role in society is held to be inherently due to their biology? Whether the film has a “women problem” may be down to the form of feminism you adhere to.

Coming soon! Back with the gig-going adventures...