Blade Runner 2049 (2017) — II: That We Are Special
*SPOILERS*
Unlike the original film, this story’s protagonist is not in delusion as to his own humanity. He knows he’s a replicant. So I’d argue that this film’s exploration of the boundaries of humanity happens more through Joi than through K. Where K’s journey feels more like an affirmation of his humanity, following a more personal journey wherein he explores his specific identity. He begins the film as an obedient replicant apparently resigned to his sub-humanity.
Identity Noir
Then he encounters Sapper Morton, a replicant and former combat medic who went rogue and now lives quietly as a protein farmer. After retiring him he sees small yellow flowers laid at the base of a dead tree in front of his farm. He can leave; his boss has given him the go-ahead to return to HQ. But he gets out of his car and investigates instead, unable to help himself. Perhaps due to his programming. Or perhaps due to something deeper inside. Either way, this kicks off his noir arc.
Born of a Miracle
His helplessly voluntary investigation uncovers an ossuary — the remains of a female that died in childbirth. And she’s a replicant. In this universe that entails a seismic shift in thinking that runs a similar risk to allowing AI organisms to think their experiences of emotions are as valid as those of NI organisms. If you allow replicants to think their capacity for emotions is as rich as a human’s then the only thing left giving us any special claim to reject their status as biotically true copies of living, feeling things is our ability to procreate. Replicants aren’t humans despite all of their similarities precisely because they can’t create life. At some level betraying Ridley Scott’s career long expression of vagina envy. At some level simply an interesting point about what defines a living thing. The hallmarks of humanity (and all sexually reproducing life) are that you must be born, die, and procreate. Hearkening back to GITS. Some replicant analog for birth and death exists but not procreation. So finding the remains of a replicant who died in childbirth becomes highly threatening to NI supremacy given that the original film establishes that replicants can only recognize that they’re not human once you tell them (Deckard), affirming the validity of their conscious states.
When K’s boss, Lt. Joshi, finds out she tells him to immediately cease all investigation and to pretend nothing was ever found. Her rationale is to preserve the status quo. But what she does — to find evidence that would upset the status quo and represents the rumblings of a movement that would do the same (after all this couldn’t have happened in a vacuum) and then act to suppress it rather than escalate and act on it — this feels like something an ally of that same movement would do. But we don’t know shit yet. All K knows is that he wants to know more. So he continues his investigation despite Joshi’s orders. Helpless against a calling from deep within.
This has consequences. He finds a photo of a woman who is not the child’s mother holding the child. Evidence that there were plural others who knew of this replicant birth event when it happened. This “miracle.” Evidence of witnesses, of at least one who would share in the zeal of the retired Sapper Morton, the zeal of an evangelist, of one who would start a movement. And investigating in the Wallace Corp archives yields leads while more importantly triggering alarms in Wallace Corp HQ for the hand of Niander Wallace, a replicant named Luv. Someone whose attention you don’t want. Her knowledge of Rachael’s significance is assumed. So from here on out she will be using K to find the object of his (and her) investigation.
Part of this investigation involves a visit with a memory-maker, an endearing, gentle character in Dr. Stelline, who loves company, loves crafting memories of birthdays (foreshadowing) and understands that what makes a memory feel special is that the important parts are weighted more while the rest feels fuzzy, more easily idealized. What makes a memory authentic is its unreliability and the ease with which it can be imbued with emotional gravity. Likewise K learns that his weirdly dark memory of being chased in an orphanage, hiding a figurine of a wooden horse, and being beaten is not a memory she would make. Therefore it’s an authentic memory.
At this point K reaches a central character moment. The best thing about Gosling’s performance is the same thing I loved about Fassbender’s performance as David in the Alien prequels — the very subtle communication of a synthetic humanity with a rich cognitive and emotional milieu simmering in existential dissonance just below the surface of a forced neutrality. Where in the Alien prequels David’s sapient simmer hardens into matte, Stygian misanthropy, here we see another in the spectrum of responses to such dissonance in Ridley’s universe. K might have had more in common with David had he also met his creator and were he not made to believe that he was special — a miracle child with a claim to divine favor. One of Wallace’s more obedient replicants now thrust into the belief that his memories are proof of his divine instrumentation, or at the very least a unique claim to humanity no other replicant has. And on learning this he cathartically erupts in violent anguish. Not real violence. Existential violence. There’s vulnerability in this moment as Dr. Stelline weeps (he thinks) for him.
This investigation also puts him on the trail of an orphaned child who was taken from an orphanage with a genome perfectly matching a different child that died there, in the process validating that the wooden figurine of a horse from his memories was in fact real and is engraved with he same date engraved in the root of Sapper’s tree where the ossuary was found. It’s a birthdate.
Qualific Loop
Along the way, Joi’s humanity is becoming increasingly apparent as she sees that K holds authentic memories. She sees this as evidence that he was the child born from the union of two replicants. That he is the miracle. What’s poetic about this unfolding dynamic is the conviction and power that each gives the other. Where they began by building the simulacrum of a beautiful life with one another, they then began creating a feedback loop of authentic emotion, of cherish and support. Of mutual humanity. Easy to use character flaws to drive drama but another thing worth noting about Villeneuve is the intentionality with which he illustrates healthy character interactions, which requires more work of a human writer inherently flawed and also allows the story to sharpen its focus on character motivations and personality-level elements.
K and Joi began their arcs with the pre-existing undercurrents of sapient dissonance that the facade of their life together helped cope with (as opposed to Deckard’s alcoholic coping from the original film). These undercurrents found a catalyst in the Sapper Morton case. Where it was previously contained by the levy of facade, the loop of mutual love between these two synthetic loci of awareness caused their undercurrent’s flow to grow until it overflowed the banks of their humanity.
Lt. Joshi, who took an interest in K’s identity and granted him safe passage from Blade Runner HQ after he failed a Voight-Kampff Test with a viscerally human response to the horrific arthouse imagery it evokes, sacrificed herself at Luv’s hand for her transgressions.
You cannot stay the tide with a broom.
Except that I did.
Words of defiance. And facing imminent death, words of humanity. The only part of this that K is ignorant of is the price that Lt. Joshi paid to help him escape. This also furthers a character theme of a Blade Runner’s superior officers being sympathetic with their cause and helping them escape, a la Gaff from the original. Joi now mortal and in tow, emotional context is set for K to embark into the unknown, into the archetypal cave, into a Las Vegas irradiated and in detritus, in search of Deckard. Mirroring a theme of real things existing in a continuum of hyperreal constructs, with the socially constructed pretense of a professional investigation now removed, the real nature of his journey is exposed. A hero’s quest.
Finding Deckard, he questions him with the sincerity of a child questioning his estranged father. “To strangers,” he toasts when Deckard, impatient with his questioning, says that sometimes loving someone means becoming a stranger.
After this Wallace finds them, kills Joi, apprehends Deckard, and leaves K, an act that has the same energy as the Romans building bridges to explore new areas and then taking those bridges down afterward to let the locals know that they’ll come back when they feel like it, you’re being left alone because they don’t need anything from you right now.
K then wakes up in an abandoned Church of some sort. Mariette is looking at him, this time sadly and empathetically, probably having seen Joi’s emanator crushed. K had true love, he’d found his creator. Not Wallace but a father. And they were both taken from him. One abducted and the other permanently relegated to the realm of memory, whose depth he better than anyone understands. Mariette sees he’s broken, emoting in a way Blade Runners aren’t programmed to do. So she feels with him.
Humbled by Truth
This is how Freysa finds him, the woman in Sapper’s photo. The one who witnessed a miracle. The evangelist. A face with militaristic fortitude, she explains that this place houses more than a movement; it houses a resistance. She explains that she’d seen the miracle child born of a replicant. A girl crying into the heavens with a face “mad as thunder.” What an image, you can almost hear it. Her framing of the trauma of birth also tells us something about Freysa’s relationship with divinity. She might meet god and thank him; she might wring his neck; maybe both. Wait, a girl? K sits. Freysa’s face and voice soften; she holds his with her hands. Her image of zeal and power now showing a sort of affection. If theirs is a rebellion affirming their own humanity then the stoicism of its evangelist would readily give way to such moments of compassion.
Villeneuve staggers memories visual and audible of past moments in the film to emphasize this central moment in K’s arc. The key moment of his transformation when he realizes he is not the miracle child. An existentially saddening subversion of everything it had been setting up. K did not find his father. His creator is Niander Wallace. The hope is what gets you. Yet Freysa reminds him that he’s not alone. He still has this resistance. He still has his humanity.
A Chosen Creed
K leaves, walks the city, reeling in the trauma of this day. He encounters an advertisement of a Joi hologram, stating she will say all the things he wants and even calls him “a good Joe,” the name his Joi gave him. He’s looking at this and feels sickened. Feels angry. We realize his arc’s central transformation is not over. As in real life where a singular moment can rarely be isolated at which we changed at some deep level, he’s still processing the traumas of his loss and revelation of his existential unremarkableness.
Some familiar with Buddhism will have heard enlightenment described as the traversing of a gateless gate, an act of learning that the destination was always present and that the transformation into enlightenment was less a transformation and more of a realization. In a wonderful transformation that affirms the actualization of a prior state, K’s arc reaches the end of its extended meditative peak. He sees this advertisement that represents the commodification of humanity and resolves. He has been evangelized. His realization is not merely one of humility in the Church. His realization is that being human is enough. Something he already knew he was with Joi. Something he can choose to be. Joi proved that. He might not be a miracle, but he can still be human.
This is a film whose main character finds out he’s not special, in line with the noir style. But it feels right because the story earns this in the form of set-up and subversion. And K actually does change. His transformation is one of conviction. Purpose. Even when illustrating a singular minded noir protagonist Villeneuve doesn’t know how to do a bad job. And let’s not rob credit from the writer of the story, although I suspect that the other writer might be responsible for my favorite parts.
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Blade Runner 2049 Essay —
I: Dreaming in Refracted Light
II: That We Are Special
Blade Runner Essay —
