Blade Runner is sixty years old. It was about ennui (or, dysphoria), state violence, and modernity then, and it is no less relevant today. Social media has only further mediated (no surprise there) our sensing of the world after corporate domination and economic stagnation had in the years Blade Runner was written and produced. The movie so excels at placing us in the shoes of the emotionally-dead Rick Deckard, unable to recognise the cyberpunk gorgeousness of 2019 L.A., that many bounce off the movie on their first viewing. I did, though I knew it was beautiful.
In Blade Runner, the people and the “robots” have switched roles. Deckard is passionless, the police chief Bryant is suspicious and eager to kill. But the replicants are full of life, full of passion and hunger. Roy Batty sticks his hand into boiling water, gives himself stigmata in an attempt to feel more, and tells his creator he wants “more life.” He and his cadre search for a future where Deckard dwells on the past: his former career, his ex-wife, his anonymous black-and-white photographs of long-dead people, and a piano he doesn’t play.
Where Deckard has a state-sponsored “normal” life killing minorities and reifying corporate patriarchal control, the replicants are the opposite, are queer. Zhora and Pris are sex workers, Leon is a photographer, and Roy, with his bleach-blonde hair and affinity for leather, is at least throwing up some handkerchiefs. During his encounter with the designer of his eyes, Batty even misquotes the great liberationist poet William Blake. If you need more evidence, he kisses and kills the actual patriarch of the movie, Eldon Tyrell. Not much more queer and revolutionary than that.
If Blade Runner shows us the life of queer misfits proudly defying the status quo, its sequel, Blade Runner: 2049 shows the life of the assimilated queer who has suppressed their identity for survival’s sake. K, the movie’s replicant protagonist, is eking out an existence even more barren than Deckard’s. He owns almost nothing save for a beaten copy of Pale Fire by Nabokov. Well and his holographic girlfriend; we’ll get to her.
K does not have the wild dress of Blade Runner’s original replicants, and doesn’t search for more life, yet he still has slurs thrown at him, is implied to be sexually abused by his boss, and is threatened with execution after the first few signs of aberration. If replicants are queer, the clear message is that K’s assimilation is a failed one; he is not accepted by those who made him.
Joi, K’s girlfriend, is a hologram that he bought. She and K play out a 50s nuclear family fantasy at first, with Joi disguising nutrient paste as a steak dinner. The two are commerical products of the Wallace corporation aiming at a patriarchal, white fantasy. It’s these fantasies that are attractive to assimilationist queers, such as those in the “tradcath” movement and figures like Blair White and Buck Angel.
Like all replicants, K has a cushion of implanted memories that give him real human responses. K’s most prominent memory is of being in an orphanage, where he hides a wooden horse engraved with his birth date so it isn’t stolen. It’s the discovery of this date elsewhere in a case about a replicant woman giving birth that spurs the plot into motion. In the movie, as soon as the connection between the memory and the birth date is revealed K and Joi never return to the 50s play-act. Instead, they act at something far realer.
Joi hires a human (or at least non-holographic) sex worker to act as her body during an encounter with K. The sex worker, Mariette, is a replicant secretly associated with a revolutionary group similar to Batty’s, aligning her with anti-assimilation and overt queerness. The scene won the movie an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, and plays out as an intimate threesome with Mariette playing a part somewhere between a disability-aid and a gender-affirming care provider. Joi, like trans women, asserts her femaleness in soul and essence, and but requires or desires another (or at least, other materials) to provide her with female embodiment.
Joi says to K: “It’s okay. I want to be real for you,” to which K replies “You are real for me.” In other words, he denies Mariette’s involvement is necessary for real intimacy. Nevertheless, he assents to the encounter which is presented less like another play-act at heteronormative sex dynamics but as its own queer love— a kind of sex possible only because everyone involved is a replicant or hologram.
It’s not difficult to see K and Joi as trans; they are a constructed man and woman whose presence in society is only tolerated as much as they can be used. Their play at the 50s nuclear family seems all the more ridiculous because they’re not “real” people, not “really” a man and woman. Not to mention that it’s revealed later that K is actually a little girl in the memory that defines him. Gender is afoot.
What we see in the scenes is two people whose gender is even more constructed and farcical than that of non-replicants, and who explore empty fantasies and real intimacy, the latter of which can only be reached through acceptance of themselves.
After K returns from the field, he is subject to a “baseline test,” wherein he must repeat a series of phrases as a machine reads his vitals. We see him pass the first one and get a bonus as a result, but when he fails the test later in the movie his boss tells him he has twenty-four hours before he must pass the test again or be killed.
The phrases K must repeat form half a stanza from the book Pale Fire, with each word of the line expanded to a full sentence in which the fictional poet John Shade describes a near death experience:
And blood-black nothingness began to spin
A system of cells interlinked within
Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
Against the dark, a tall white fountain played1.
Ryan Gosling and Director Denis Villeneuve have said the strange structure of the baseline test comes from an acting exercise for memorising Shakespeare2. Given that K owns a copy of Pale Fire, the implication could be that K chose the lines himself. However, it’s equally possible that any resemblance to what K knows is just coincidence. K may have performed the baseline, then read Pale Fire only to discover the source of the lines, and wonder how they ended up in a police station’s interrogation room, shifted like a fossil in the great subducted ruin of human culture.
In the poem of the novel, Shade searches for others who have seen the “white fountain” in death, desperate for evidence of an afterlife in which he can rejoin his dead daughter. When he reads the testimony of a woman in a newspaper that sounds identical, he soon learns to his despair that it was only a misprint; she saw a tall white mountain, not fountain. This small terror resonates in the greater story of Pale Fire as crazed professor Charles Kinbote narcissistically invents hidden meanings in Shade’s poem, only to realise (though not fully accept) that there are none that relate to him.
We’d be reticent to call K a narcissist, but his journey in Blade Runner: 2049 is similar to Kinbote’s. His core memory, implanted by the corporation that made him, begins to seem like evidence that K is the child of a human and a replicant, something thought to be impossible. If true, the memory would make K a miracle. It would mean he was special, cared for, and filled with purpose.
In both texts the “coincidence” spurs their subjects to action and hope. K searches for the child in the memory and finds the memory-maker, Stelline, while Shade searches for the woman in the newspaper and Kinbote combs through Shade’s text for evidence that Shade loved and appreciated the eccentric professor. Not to put too fine a point on it, but K and Kinbote even share an initial.
Crucially it’s Joi who pushes the fantastic possibility that there is more to K’s life than assimilation. When Joi tries to cheer him up she offers to let him read Pale Fire to her, a book K says she hates. And why wouldn’t she? She thinks the memory makes K special, and Pale Fire’s fruitless searches suggest it doesn’t.
Joi herself is a copy, a product, and a sex worker. Her oppression is of a different character than K’s, but it’s hard to say who has it worse. She is at least more easily killed and is dependent on K for everything. It’s inspiring that under this precarity she still pushes him towards queer revolutionary consciousness, telling him his core memory makes him special and could even make him human. Joi says “how many times have you told me that story?” when K discovers the replicant child has the same birthday as appears in his memory. But it takes Joi’s prodding for K to entertain the human fantasy, saying he may have been “pushed into the world. Wanted. Loved.” She asks K “isn’t it okay to dream a little?” to which he replies “not if you’re us.”
K reveals with this line that he derives all his aspirations from a single work of art: the memory. Once that key work of art has veracity, it drives him to stop assimilating and act; the dream drives him to act. That is what Sapper, one of the replicants who hid the child, says in the opening scene; that the “new replicants” will do anything with no resistance because they’ve “never seen a miracle.”
But the miracle that drives K is a product of Stelline, who is both the maker of the memory and the miracle child of Deckard and Rachel. Both the work of art and the women who made it were produced by women. K gets nothing but repression from masculinity and everything that liberates him from femininity.
In maybe the most famous scene of the movie, Stelline tells K his memory was lived by a human and K screams. It’s a moment of anger, fear, and self-realisation that comes as quickly as it goes, but the whole movie hangs on it. In Stelline’s office, K can express that emotion. While he thinks her response means he’s human, all she says is “someone lived this.” She has to protect that she’s the miracle child and she illegally sold a real memory to the Wallace Corporation. She can’t show her true emotions to Officer K. Protected by Sapper, Deckard, and the replicant revolutionaries, the only act of rebellion she could take was to make art and send it out like a fuzzy signal, amplified by the megacorporation that would enslave, rape, dissect, and ultimately kill her3.
At the end of the movie, we’re not sure if K has successfully concealed Stelline’s identity and location. But her work of art has impassioned him to give his life to protect her and maintain the revolution. Something similar happens at the end of Pale Fire. Ultimately, John Shade’s poem has nothing to do with Kinbote. But it doesn’t matter. He still leaps in front of Shade when he’s attacked by a gunman whose arrival has been consistently described as inevitable and unstoppable. He fails to protect Shade from the bullets, but he tries. K tries.
In Blade Runner, Deckard learns that replicants matter. In 2049, K learns that he can matter. We first see him attempt assimilation and accept a second-class status; then we see his burgeoning hope that he can be human and be completely assimilated. Then he realises that even if he’s not seen as human, he can still connect by not staying in his little box, by holding the hand of someone he loves, by interlinking, by saving someone. By giving back to the artist that spurred his passion and hope. Though it costs him his life.
Endnotes
- Pale Fire, lines 703-707
- https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/blade-runner-2049-how-a-key-scene-differed-from-the-script/
- In 2049, while examining a newly-made replicant, Wallace caresses her abdomen, calling it a “barren pasture, empty and salted,” while lamenting that he can’t make replicants fast enough to keep up with demand. He calls replicant procreation “Tyrell’s final trick,” and demands Luv bring the child to him; his search for Stelline is predicated on the idea she could bear “replicant” children, like her mother. If delivered to him, she will be used for this purpose.