Blade Runner 2049

A Philosophical Exploration

Timothy Shanahan, Paul Smart, Timothy Shanahan, Paul Smart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429862496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Widely acclaimed upon its release as a future classic, Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 is visually stunning, philosophically profound, and a provocative extension of the story in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. Containing specially commissioned chapters by a roster of international contributors, this fascinating collection explores philosophical questions that abound in Blade Runner 2049, including:

• What distinguishes the authentically "human" person?
• How might natality condition one's experience of being-in-the-world?
• How might shared memories feature in the constitution of personal identities?
• What happens when created beings transcend the limits intended in their design?

• What (if anything) is it like to be a hologram?
  
  

• Can artificial beings participate in genuinely romantic relationships?
  
  

• How might developing artificial economics impact our behaviour as prosumers?
• What are the implications of techno-human enhancement in an era of surveillance capitalism?

Including a foreword by Denis Villeneuve, Blade Runner 2049: A Philosophical Exploration is essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy, film studies, philosophy of mind, psychology, gender studies, and conceptual issues in cognitive science and artificial intelligence.

Chapter 1

Timothy Shanahan

We’re all just looking for something real

Did you miss me?

Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 succeeds as a highly entertaining and deeply thought-provoking film on its own terms. But as a sequel, our appreciation of the film is enhanced by noticing some of the ways in which it remains faithful to and subtly references philosophical themes that distinguished its famous predecessor, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.¹ Just as the ersatz “Rachael” in BR2049, who asks Deckard, “Did you miss me?” is both similar to, yet recognisably different from, her prototype in the original film, so too the new film clearly gains inspiration from the original film while just as clearly departs from it in important ways.

Consequently, the aim of this chapter is to construct a bridge between various elements of the Blade Runner universe to provide important background for the chapters that follow.² Philip K. Dick (1978/1995: 260) once explained, “The two basic topics that fascinate me are ‘What is reality?’ and ‘What constitutes the authentic human being?’” Not coincidentally, these are also the two most fundamental questions that animate both Blade Runner films. The question of reality comes up most noticeably in scenes dealing with animals, memories, and minds.³ The question of the authentically human pervades both films. Because some readers may not be familiar with this background, it will be helpful to begin by reviewing the basic narratives of both films as well as key elements of Dick’s novel before examining the aforementioned themes in more detail.

It was simpler then

The action in the original Blade Runner takes place in a decaying, polluted, densely populated Los Angeles in November 2019. Early in the film we learn that the Tyrell Corporation had advanced robot evolution into the NEXUS phase. The NEXUS 6 replicants (i.e., synthetic humans) were virtually identical to human beings, but superior in strength and agility, and at least as intelligent as the genetic engineers who created them.⁴ Replicants were used off-world as slave labour in the hazardous exploration and colonisation of other planets. After a bloody mutiny by a NEXUS 6 combat team in an off-world colony, replicants were declared illegal on earth—under penalty of death. Special police squads—blade runner units—had orders to shoot to kill, upon detection, any trespassing replicants. This was not called execution. It was called “retirement.”

Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is presented as an exceptionally proficient ex-blade runner who had quit because, as he narrates in the 1982 theatrical release of the film, he’d had “a bellyful of killing.” Nonetheless, thanks to a group of NEXUS 6 replicants who illegally return to earth, he is persuaded (by way of a thinly veiled threat) by his old boss, Capt. Harry Bryant (M. Emmet Walsh) of the LAPD, to resume his former occupation. Deckard succeeds, with considerable difficulty, in killing two of the females—Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) and Pris (Daryl Hannah). Rachael (Sean Young), a beautiful experimental model replicant (with whom, incidentally, he is falling in love), unexpectedly dispatches a third replicant, named Leon (Brion James), by whom Deckard was being brutally assaulted. That left just one rogue replicant, the leader of the band and the most dangerous one of all—a formidable combat model named Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer)—who wastes little time in turning the tables on Deckard, making the hunter the hunted. To Deckard’s bafflement, Batty decides to spare him just as Batty’s predetermined four-year lifespan is coming to an end. Having narrowly escaped death, Deckard flees with Rachael, making them fugitives. What would become of them was left uncertain for 35 years—until, that is, BR2049 appeared to provide a few tantalising details.

There’s still a page left

Set 30 years after the events of the original film, BR2049 opens with text that pays homage to the opening crawl in the first film and that serves to contextualise the current state of affairs:

REPLICANTS ARE BIOENGINEERED HUMANS, DESIGNED BY TYRELL CORPORATION

FOR USE OFF-WORLD. THEIR ENHANCED STRENGTH MADE THEM IDEAL SLAVE LABOR

AFTER A SERIES OF VIOLENT REBELLIONS, THEIR MANUFACTURE BECAME

PROHIBITED AND TYRELL CORP WENT BANKRUPT

THE COLLAPSE OF THE ECOSYSTEMS IN THE MID 2020s LED TO THE RISE OF INDUSTRIALIST

NIANDER WALLACE, WHOSE MASTERY OF SYNTHETIC FARMING AVERTED FAMINE

WALLACE ACQUIRED THE REMAINS OF TYRELL CORP AND CREATED A NEW

LINE OF REPLICANTS WHO OBEY

MANY OLDER MODEL REPLICANTS—NEXUS 8s WITH OPEN-ENDED LIFESPANS—SURVIVED.

THEY ARE HUNTED DOWN AND “RETIRED”

THOSE THAT HUNT THEM STILL GO BY THE NAME …

BLADE RUNNER

We are not told who designed the NEXUS 8 replicants. But in 2022: Black Out, one of three short films dramatising key events in the interim between the stories in the two feature films, we learn that, “While the Replicant NEXUS 6 expired in inventory, TYRELL CORP. pushed the series 8 into the local and off-world market. The NEXUS series 8 were purpose-built with a natural lifespan.” However, this enhancement apparently made the NEXUS 8 replicants seem a little too humanlike, and therefore threatening, because we also learn that, “Soon the human supremacy movements began. These angry masses used the Replicant Registration database to identify and kill Replicants.” Led by a NEXUS 8 named Cygnus, the replicants retaliated by triggering a powerful electromagnetic pulse, causing a massive blackout and thereby erasing the Replicant Registration database. We also learn that “The Blackout, which led to the prohibition of Replicant production, sealed the fate of the TYRELL CORPORATION. It took over a decade for THE WALLACE CORP. to win approval to manufacture a new breed of Replicant.”

In the second short film, 2036: NEXUS Dawn, we learn how Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), the brilliant, blind, megalomaniacal CEO of the eponymous Wallace Corporation, accomplished that feat. Thanks to goodwill engendered by his development of synthetic farming, Wallace is granted a hearing by government officials in which he shocks them by proposing to resume the manufacture of replicants. When they categorically reject the idea, reminding him of the dangers posed by synthetic humans, he reminds them that it is his patents that keep their hunger at bay, and then provides a dramatic demonstration intended to confirm his boast that, “My replicants will never rebel. They will never run. They will simply obey.” Indeed, the new NEXUS 9 replicants he went on to create seem to be deeply integrated into life in mid-twenty-first century Los Angeles, serving not only as blade runners but also as prostitutes and even, in one case, as a top-level executive in the Wallace Corporation itself (Luv, played by Sylvia Hoeks).

Meanwhile, some NEXUS 8 replicants continue to live clandestinely on earth, their escape from slavery abetted by the Blackout of 2022. In the third short film, 2048: Nowhere to Run, we learn that a NEXUS 8 named Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista) dropped identifying papers when he was drawn into a violent confrontation in Los Angeles after conducting some personal business.⁵ He beats a hasty exit, but it is clear from the ease by which he dispatches several assailants that he is a replicant. The film ends with a bystander tipping off the police with Sapper’s address.

This is where BR2049 picks up. The film’s protagonist is K (technically, Officer KD6-3.7, played by Ryan Gosling), a taciturn NEXUS 9 blade runner whose job is to hunt down and kill NEXUS 8 replicants.⁶ Just before K retires Sapper, the latter cryptically chides his executioner, “You newer models are happy scraping the shit … because you’ve never seen a miracle.” A surface-penetrating scan of the farm reveals a large box buried next to a dead tree containing the bones of a woman who died in childbirth. Subsequent analysis reveals them to be the bones of Rachael—Tyrell’s experimental model replicant introduced in the first film—a shocking discovery because replicants were not supposed to be able to reproduce.⁷ K’s superior, LAPD Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright), wants K to find and destroy the child and all evidence of its existence because, she warns, “The world is built on a wall. It separates kind. Tell either side there’s no wall, you bought a war. Or a slaughter. So, what you saw … didn’t happen.” As she reminds K, her job, and his as well, is to keep order. She worries that if it became widely known that a replicant gave birth, the repressive apartheid system that draws a sharp distinction between humans and replicants would collapse, with chaos and bloodshed ensuing. Upon returning to the farm in search of clues, K notices a date carved into the trunk of the dead tree—6 10 21. Presuming that the date carved into the tree was the missing child’s birthdate, he or she would now be about 28 years old. K is clearly shaken, although we don’t yet know why.

Meanwhile, leak of the discovery of a replicant who gave birth sets off a quest to find Rachael’s now-grown child—led by Wallace, who (if Deckard’s concern is correct) wants to dissect it and thereby learn how to make procreating replicants with which to populate countless more off-world colonies.⁸ As he laments, “Every leap of civilisation was built off the back of a disposable workforce. We lost our stomach for slaves … unless engineered. But I can only make so many.” A third party, Freysa (Hiam Abbass), the one-eyed leader of a new replicant resistance movement, wants to enlist Rachael’s offspring as a messiah of sorts for her fledgling rebellion, because (she supposes), “If a baby can come from one of us … we are much more than slaves, we are our own masters.”⁹

In a series of plot twists involving a memory of a toy horse with the date 6 10 21 carved on its base, K comes to believe that he is Rachael’s son, and thus wants to find Deckard (whom he believes to be his father) so that he can learn more about Rachael. His subsequent quest for self-discovery becomes the narrative engine of the film. K eventually finds Deckard, learns from Freysa that Rachael had a daughter, and realises that she must be Dr. Ana Stelline (Carla Juri), a subcontractor providing realistic memories for the Wallace Corporation’s replicants. The film ends with K uniting Deckard with the daughter he had never met, and with K (apparently) dying, at peace for having accomplished his mission, on the snow-covered steps of Dr. Stelline’s laboratory.

There are, of course, many more details worth reviewing, a selection of which will be discussed below. But with this broad background in mind we can turn our attention to some of the most important philosophical connections between BR2049 and the works from which it is descended.

Is he real?

First, consider the role of animals in the Blade Runner universe. Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is set in San Francisco in 1992. Following an unexplained worldwide calamity, “World War Terminus” (probably a cataclysmic nuclear catastrophe), humans healthy enough to do so are encouraged to emigrate to the off-world colonies to preserve the human gene pool. As an incentive, each émigré is given an andy (an android) as a personal servant. Those left behind are either radiation-induced genetic defectives (such as J. R. Isidore, the inspiration for J. F. Sebastian in the original film), or those (like Rick Deckard) too stubborn to leave. Most animals have perished from the effects of radioactive fallout. The owls were the first to disappear, but most other animals quickly followed. Real animals have become scarce, and are thus expensive to purchase, with the current market price of each listed in the Sidney’s catalogue. Possessing a real animal, especially a large one, confers significant social status. Many people have to settle for realistic artificial animals, all the while longing for the real thing.

In Dick’s Electric Sheep, Rick Deckard is a freelance bounty hunter hired by the San Francisco Police Department to retire rogue androids. When his real sheep dies of tetanus, he replaces it with an artificial one realistic enough to fool his neighbours. Yet he still longs for a real animal. After Deckard finally retires enough androids (at a rate of $1,000 per kill) to purchase a real Nubian goat, Rachel Rosen, an android with whom he had conducted a brief sexual affair, correctly perceiving that he cared more about his goat than about her, spitefully pushes the animal to its death off the roof of his apartment building.¹⁰ Having already decided to get out of the bounty-hunting business, Deckard is distraught until, wandering alone in a desert outside the city, he is delighted t...