Friday, September 11, 2020

Son of the Resurrection: A Review of 'Blade Runner 2049'

Spoilers will follow:

The new Blade Runner film is a deeply political exposition of  Humanity: what is it and how is it oriented? The story starts with an update from the last story. Replicants, cloned pseudo-humans, have become legal on Earth, but only because a new CEO, Niander Wallace, has perfected Tyrell's original design. The name of this new CEO is an interesting combination, drawing from both Neander, which is a transliteration of the Greek New-Man, and Alfred Wallace, an evolutionary theorist, occult spiritualist, and contemporary of Charles Darwin. Wallace completes Tyrell's original intent to make a docile replicant through the implantation of false memories. In the first film, Tyrell speculated that possessing memories would make replicants more pliable, more comfortable with their state of slavery. As an engineer of memories states baldly, memories are comforting for the hard lives of the replicants. They are, and will always be, slaves, but at least they can reflect on a past that was not always so.The tension, really war, between past and future becomes a central driving point in the movie.

The main character, a top-of-the-line replicant blade runner named K, hunts down the remnant of a failed replicant model. It seems Tyrell failed to create the docile workforce he strove for, and these replicants struggled for revolution. K uncovers the deep secret of Tyrell's design that directs the story: the possibility of replicants giving birth. The revolutionaries desire to be freed from slavery and Human overlordship, in a desire to become Human. Wallace also seeks the secret of birth, but for a cryptic purpose of Human perfection. He intends to make the perfect slave race that will become the means of Human ascendancy. In a series of enigmatic monologues, he blends gnostic Kabbalah with evolutionary scientism. He is the father of millions, and he only makes good angels. With an army of slaves, Wallace hopes to "storm Eden," to fulfill Humanity's destiny of colonizing the universe. The key to all is the knowledge of beginnings, of birth.

The fixation on protology also drives our protagonist. As K investigates, searching for the child of Rachael and Deckard, he begins to suspect that he is said child. His memory of a toy horse turns out to be real. K is prodded on wards by his pseudo-wife, an AI named Joi, who lavishes him with compassion, understanding, and affection. K loves, and is loved by, Joi, his only companion in an impoverished world that despises him for being a replicant. She even names him, calling him Joe, seeking to Humanize him. Birth becomes the marker of Human identity. When his chief gives him the assignment to "retire" the child for fear of Human-replicant civil war, K hesitates. He remarks that he had never retired someone who was born before, equating birth, rather than being manufactured, with Humanity. As K begins to believe he is the lost son of a replicant mother, his predictive programming begins to falter, he embraces his human name more and more, and burns with a sense of destiny.

Of course, it's not to be. After K discovered Deckard, who is subsequently kidnapped by Wallace's replicants who tracked him, K is picked up by the revolutionaries, who also tracked him. Meeting the leader, Freysa, K discovers that he is not the child. His memory was real, but it was an implant, given to him from the true daughter, who had been hiding in plain sight as a memory engineer. The leader then tasks K to kill Deckard before he reveals the location of the revolutionaries and the miracle child, the hope for a free replicant world. Freysa is one eyed; her name draws a link to the Norse goddess Freya, who had a potent and terrifying look, as well as the Greek one-eyed Fates, who could see the future, though not determine it. She tells K that one is most Human in dying for a noble cause.

The final breaking point for K is when he meets a giant advertisement version of Joi. In the kidnap of Deckard, Joi had perished, dying with love on her lips. However, as the giant VR advertisement pitches herself to K, he realizes that all his affection for Joi was a fraud. The advertisement calls him Joe; he realizes that all the things he felt, not only with his memory, but his love, was fraudulent. Here the film draws the final line.

K goes to rescue Deckard, and he battles Wallace's right-hand replicant, a woman named Luv, in the waves of the sea's edge. Earlier in the film, K met with Gaff, Deckard's "partner", who folded K an origami. The shape was a sheep. K humanizes in becoming the sheep Gaff had seen; he kills Luv and rescues Deckard, suffering a mortal wound to bring him to his daughter. K becomes the sacrificial lamb. The waters are heavily symbolic. In them, Luv, who seeks to win affection from her master for being the best, drowns. K strangles her underneath the waves, in a baptism of judgement, or a kind of reverse birth, being cast back into the birthing waters, rather than being drawn from them. Deckard, on the other hand, passes through the judgement; he is allowed to die, and thus go free to see his daughter. As Deckard goes inside the facility, K stares up at the heavens, amidst white snow, and dies in peace.

As I said earlier, the major rupture in the film, over the question of Humanity, is a question of the past or the future. Wallace's main quest is to gain reentry to paradise. There is certainly parallels to the sons of God mixing with the daughters of men. Highly modified himself, Wallace seeks to perfect Humanity through a blending of qualities with replicants, making a perfect slave population that can scour the galaxy and pave the way for Human's to reach the Heavenlies. His watery pyramid/ziggauraut corporate headquarters draws a parallel to Babel. Wallace exerts control through knowledge of beginnings, controlling replicants through their manufacture, and ultimately gaining ultimate control through birth. Per the ancient gnostics, protology, a knowledge of the beginning, is the secret to salvation.

However, the revolutionaries proffer an alternative, which K embraces, namely that the future is what humanizes. Throughout the film, K becomes more obsessive about his origins, which follows from his programming. A search for the past directs K's activities, pressed on by his Wallace Corp made AI mate. Joi acts like a Homeric Athena, or a gnostic Sophia, a feminine principle that guides the journey inward. K believes the secret to his own redemption is in his very special origin. But when K embraces his lack of uniqueness, his very much replicant origin, he opens up the possibility of the future. K becomes Human in pursuing an end, giving himself to the cause of replicant freedom and the love between Deckard and his daughter. In fact, the daughter's name, Stelline, may be a link to a messianic identity, referring to Bethlehem's little star. Stelline may also be a reference to the woman of Revelation, who holds the stars, a symbol of the new Eve, Mary, who is a type of the Church. The messianic revolt of the replicants is their desire to be Human. The future, the end, is the key to redemption.

The film presents a stark contrast between a cosmic hierarchy of the past and the revolutionary potential of the future. The politics of the revolution certainly reflects Benjamin's theory of history, where the messianic age is locked into the bizarre gaze of the angel of the future, moving forward but looking back on the wreckage, suspended in the moment. The figure of Wallace represents a global corporatism, which is ironically fixated with the past as it is focused on progress. Like contemporary scientism, while it talks of the future, of technology, and Progress, it is ultimately about protology, about biological beginnings. The goal is to fix the Human race, not to learn to live in light of it. Like Benjamin, Blade Runner presents a stark contrast, where the past needs an apocalyptic caesura, a break in the madness. Thus, the replicant revolution is a radically leftist vision, seeking to undermine corporate cosmic hierarchism for an equitable society of freed slaves. The messianic Stelline is the leader because her existence places a question mark on all determinations.

K's vivification and death for the cause of freedom does reveal the eschatological hope that destabilizes all narratives of origins. For this reason, Blade Runner 2049 paints a portrait of a son of resurrection. K, in a way, gained a new birth, not through flesh and blood and not through the will of man.

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