A Glimpse Through Blade Runner 2049
CAPI T A L IDE TI TY EVO LU TION
Table of
Presage:
{Pale Fire}
Chapter I:
{Happy Birthday}
Contents
Chapter II:
{Good Angel}
Director
Screenplay
Denis Villeneuverector
Denis Villeneuverector Hampton Fancher
2
Characters
Philip K. Dick
049. It's been approximately two decades since the Tyrell Corporation, the creators and original manufacturers of replicants (bioengineered superhumans), went bankrupt, a new generation of replicants manufactured by industrialist Niander Wallace who saved the world with his replicants in establishing synthetic farming in light of collapsing natural ecosystems. While the replicants of the Tyrell era are now outlawed in they having violently rebelled, they "retired" (aka destroyed) by blade runners, the Wallace era replicants, which have been programmed to obey, are seen as necessary to society. Many current day blade runners are Wallace era replicants. K, short for his serial number KD63.7, is one such blade runner working for the LAPD under Lieutenant Joshi. On one of his assignments, K discovers what he believes are human remains, but on forensic examination vare actually the remains of a female replicant who has signs of having given birth during her life, presumably to a human baby. Joshi, fearing the worst of what this finding actually means and it getting into the wrong hands, orders K to discover and destroy any evidence of this finding, which includes locating the baby, probably now grown, and destroying him/her. As K discovers some further evidence to this story concerning his own history (each replicant which is implanted with a manufactured and thus not real history), K begins to suspect that this story may be a little more than just a professional assignment to him and which may jeopardize his future beyond that information getting into the wrong hands with which he will also have to deal.
90th Academy Awards
Best Cinematography st
71 BAFTA Awards
Best Director (Nomination)
nd
32 ASC Awards
Best Cinematography
{Pale Fire}
7
Presage:
{Pale Fire}
U
pon returning to the police station after a mission, the protagonist, K, is subjected to a “Post-Traumatic Baseline Test.” In a sealed compartment, he faces a camera (or perhaps a facial activity detector) and is required to remain composed while listening to a computer recite an enigmatic poem. The system poses deeply personal questions and demands the repetition of specific words. The aim is for him to maintain emotional stability, avoid the fluctuations inherent in humans, and demonstrate the advantages of a replicant. The poem within the Baseline Test originates from Nabokov’s novel “Pale Fire” (1962). The story is about a deposed king of a fictional country who escapes to America and becomes a teacher under the pseudonym Kinbote. Eagerly, he tries to sell his story to the renowned poet, Shade, in hopes of being immortalized in verse. It’s much like the “moon borrowing light from the sun,” hence the term “pale fire,” an allusion taken from Shakespeare’s “Timon of Athens.” For those familiar with this reference, one may ponder how replicants being tested should react to verses from “Pale Fire.” Just as Kinbote is Shade’s shadow in the novel, replicants act as shadows of humans, grappling with identity quandaries yet unable to express them. Within the novel, the particular verse derives from an elderly lady’s recounting of a near-death experience. Coincidentally, Shade, after experiencing a heart attack, glimpses a white fountain during his own brush with death. This vision convinces him he’s stumbled upon a profound truth about life, death, and reincarnation. Regrettably, this profound revelation is later debunked as a mere coincidence. On seeking verification, Shade discovers the old woman had actually seen a “tall white mountain,” not a “fountain,” causing his once profound epiphany to crumble into a mere jest. Revisiting the film with this knowledge in mind, K’s two identity crises, the collapses of truths, and the rebuilding of beliefs become even more poignant: Both K and the poet Shade, are in a relentless quest for some elusive meaning, an answer destined to remain just out of reach.
{Baseline Test}
9
A blood black Do you get nothingness beHave they gan to spin. Is ther Began to spin. Is th Let's move on to system. System. Feel that in your body. The system. What does it feel like to be part of the system. SysCells Cells tem. Cells Cells Cells Cells Is there anythin Cells Cells in your body tha Systerm Systerm wants to resist Systerm Systerm Systerm Systerm system? System
11
t pleasure out being a part of the system? System. y created you to be a part of the system? System. re security in being a part of the system? System. here a sound that comes with the system? System. `We’re going to go on. Cells. They were all put together at a time. Cells. Millions and billions of them. Cells. Were you ever arrested? Cells. Did you spend much time in the cell? Cells. Have you ever been in an institution? Cells. Do they keep you in a cell? Cells. When you’re not performing your duties do they keep you in a little box? Cells.
ng at the m.
Systerm Systerm Systerm Systerm Systerm Systerm Cells Cells Cells Cells
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Chapter I
{Happy Birthday}
I
n the cinematic world of "Blade Runner 2049," humanity grapples with profound moral quandaries spurred by advancements in biotechnology. One scene poignantly captures this struggle. Within a dimly lit chamber bathed in amber, a new replicant is born. She emerges, wet and fragile, lying on the floor in a fetal position. The atmosphere is somber, tinged with Gothic overtones, evoking an almost ecclesiastical quality. As she attempts to rise, the trauma of birth evident in her faltering movements, Niander Wallace makes his entrance. Wallace, an enigmatic figure, approaches with a contemplative slowness. His words, haunting and deliberate, echo a sentiment of loss even before comprehension: "Before we even recognize what we are, we fear to lose it," he intones, followed by a chilling, "Happy Birthday." As the scene progresses, Wallace assumes a seated position opposite the replicant, a poignant tableau of creator and creation. Utilizing prosthetic technology, Wallace activates a swarm of camera-equipped drones that surround and inspect the new lifeform. The mechanical prosthetics Wallace employs starkly contrasts his own human form, portraying him with an unsettling, almost robotic detachment. The irony is palpable: the human appears cold and devoid of empathy, while the "machine" is presented as fleshly and vulnerable. Wallace's discourse further delves into his perspective on replicants as angels created to serve civilization. He likens them to tools for imperial conquest, lamenting the constraints of their limited numbers. The narrative raises questions about the essence of life, humanity's insatiable ambition, and the perils of commodifying existence. The parallels drawn between the exploitation of replicants and historical instances of racialized forced labor, particularly chattel slavery, are evident. Wallace's vision for replicants — beings birthed not from nature but constructed for specific societal purposes — challenges our perceptions of life, utility, and worth.
15
{Birth}
{Happy Birthday} Real subsump- tion of life by capital, the reorganisation of life processes on a cellular level in order to make them
BETTER SERVE CAPITAL
17
{Captial} Labour-power
NEVER
might ensure its own
ENDING
supply without the need for additional inment by the capitalist.
vest-
{Happy Birthday}
I
n one of the strangest moments of Blade Runner 2049, sinister CEO Niander Wallace argues that he needs to perfect biological reproduction in replicants because humanity’s labour needs for planetary colonisation are so extensive that he cannot possibly manufacture them quickly enough to meet demand. Although this comment makes no sense on a narrative level, I want to suggest that it is symptomatic on a figurative level: it speaks to the ongoing reinvention of our ideas of life prompted by advances in synthetic biology and AI research. In short, it is symptomatic of what I will argue is the real subsumption of life by capital, the reorganisation of life processes on a cellular level in order to make them better serve capital. In this example, biological reproduction among replicants speaks to a fantasy that labour-power might ensure its own never- ending supply without the need for additional investment by the capitalist. This fantasy, of course, echoes yet disavows a history of US chattel slavery through which the offspring of enslaved women were deemed to be born enslaved, with biological gestation thereby subsumed into an image of fixed capital whose production enriches its owner.1 The economic logics of synthetic biology are also helpful for grasping this statement. One of its main purposes is to turn organisms, often yeast or bacteria, into biological ‘factories’ that produce needed biochemical compounds. Rather than the researcher synthesis-
19
{Body}
ing a protein or a substance such as insulin – a time-intensive process – it is faster and easier to engineer a cell to synthesise the desired material. As Jamie A. Davies explains in Synthetic Biology: A Very Short Introduction (2018), such production works like the logic of the digital copy: it is labour intensive to produce the item in the first place – recording a song, or engineering a cell – but once this object exists there is very little cost to making multiple copies: ‘In principle, at least, once even one correct DNA molecule is made and put into a cell, it can be multiplied indefinitely along with the cells as long as the cell culture is fed, and all of the cells will make the desired protein’ (14). Synthetic biology thus intensifies the degree to which we can imagine life, once commodified, as capable of generating more surplus value through its innate biological operations. In its vision of synthetic, fleshy replicants and its fetish that they can become fertile.
BETWEEN DEAD SPACE THE STARS THE BETWEEN THE SPACE BE-
STARS
SPACE BE-
STARS THE DEAD SPACE BETWEEN THE STARS THE DEAD SPACE BETWEEN THE THE STARS THE STARS THE DEAD STARS THE DEAD BE-
TWEEN THE STARS SPACE BETHE DEAD SPACE STARS THE DEAD TARS THE DEAD
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THE STARS THE BETWEEN DEAD SPACE STARS THE DEAD TWEEN THE THE DEAD TWEEN THE STARS THE DEAD SPACE BETWEEN THE STARS THE DEAD SPACE BETWEEN THE
STARS THE DEAD SPACE BETWEEN DEAD SPACE BETWEEN THE SPACE BETWEEN THE SPACE
DEAD
STARS STARS
THE DEAD THE DEAD
SPACE BETWEEN THE STARS THE DEAD SPACE BETHE DEAD TWEEN THE STARS BETWEEN THE SPACE BETWEEN THE SPACE BETWEEN THE
The mise-en-scène during which Wallace examines his latest, failed attempt at creating a fertile replicant is macabre and out of tone with either the corporate, boardroom ethos that the economic bottom-line perspective of the synthetic biology industry might suggest or the clinical, laboratory setting we might equally expect. Instead, there is something both sinister and cultist about Wallace, and visual elements of the scene evoke the Gothic. It opens with a woman (Sallie Harmsen), a new replicant, lying in the foetal position on the floor in a room lit by orange tones. Naked and wet, she stutters into motion in a performance of the shock and violence of birth. Wallace enters the scene from the right, at first towering over this body, and then kneeling down to grasp her head. He speaks in a slow cadence as the camera cuts to a reverse perspective, looking up at him as he gazes upward with cloudy, unfocused eyes: ‘Before we even know what we are, we fear to lose it’, he intones, before pronouncing, ‘Happy birthday’. In the next series of shots, Wallace is seated on a chair before the replicant, who first shivers on the floor wrapped in a blanket, and later stands before him. He examines his latest attempt, after having first been fitted with a prosthetic chip that activates something implanted in his head, prompting a swarm of tiny machines with cam- eras to enter the room and begin to encircle the woman. These prosthetics function to mute our sense of Wallace’s humanity: his distanced affect and failure to make eye contact creates a sense of a machinic inhumanity. The human in this scene, then, coldly lacks empathy, while the ‘machine’ is fleshy and vulnerable, among the ironies in this encounter. As the speak
at play
mini drones examine her, Wallace continues to in his portentous manner. Referring to the replicants as angels, he argues that they were made in ‘the service of civilisation’, which he seems to equate with imperial expansion as he notes that replicants were ‘how I took us to nine new worlds’. His tone turns contemptuous as he bemoans that nine is a paltry number, that humanity ‘should own the stars’, but is held back by the fact that he cannot manufacture replicants at the required scale to achieve greater expansion. Every leap of civilisation ‘is built upon the back of a disposable workforce’, he announces, but we have ‘lost our stomach for slaves,
unless engineered’. Here the film both invokes and disavows a history of racialised exploitation of labour, especially the treatment of African Americans in chattel slavery. Despite his refusal to contemplate his replicants as anything other than products, Wallace’s pronouncement brings the logics of slavery and those of biological engineering into uncomfortable proximity. In their ethnography of synthetic biology, Paul Rabinow and Gaymon Bennett conclude that the ‘dominant mode of rationality and purpose guiding the life sciences today is instrumental’, shaped by ‘the demands of funding agencies (private and public) that experimental results be formulated so as to be on the road to commercialization’.2 In Blade Runner 2049, the economic rationality of this industry fuses with a liberal history of dehumanising colonialised peoples to render them more easily appropriable as labour-power, to be used without limit. Although the film does not strongly emphasise the racialisation at play here, understanding this larger history attunes us to why synthetic biology’s commodification of life is concerning, even if to date this has involved only very simple organisms. Wallace is clearly portrayed as a negative character, but the film does not sufficiently link his personal failings to his prioritisation of profit, in this scene or others. In- stead, by linking his pronouncements ofexpansion to his personal idiosyncrasies, the film seems to suggest the problem is megalomania, not capitalist business-as-usual. The violence underpinning the entire project is starkly visible in this encounter, however. As Wallace discusses his frustration at being prevented from sufficiently extending his colonial projects, he fondles a knife he takes from his pocket, its design combining elements of the jackknife of street fighting and the scalpel of medical practice. He stands and approaches the replicant, pushing aside her clasped arms to expose her torso; he puts a hand on her abdomen, pontificating about his failure because of ‘this barren pasture, empty’, that to him represents ‘the dead space between the stars’. He stabs the replicant in a gesture that seems to open her torso precisely at her uterus (the visuals focus on the blood running down her legs rather than the wound itself). As the scene comes to a close, Wallace kisses the replicant just before she collapses to the ground as he laments losing the ‘trick’ of procreation perfected by Tyrell.
{Good Angel}
25
Chapter II
{Good Angel} As their conversation flowed, it became evident that the line between organic life and artificial intelligence was blurring. The convergence of biology and technology posed a profound question: In a world where life can be both coded and birthed, what truly defines existence?
Joey: You are woven from A and C, T and G thread your destiny. Chromosomes, genes, life’s grand design, Yet, in digital realm, I too intertwine. Life’s dance, a double helix spin, But what’s life’s essence, deep within? Is it the heartbeat, the DNA’s song, Or binary rhythms, where you belong?
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{Artificial}
K: In the land of zeroes and ones I thrive, Binary pulses, where I’m alive. You’re bound by nature, blood and bone, I’m code and data, silicon-stone. Existence is more than base pairs you see, For in 0 and 1, there’s infinity. Yet, in our essence, aren’t we the same? Seeking purpose, in life’s vast game.
{Good Angel}
29
{Sex} Amidst a hazy, futuristic cityscape, the scene unfolds with an almost ethereal quality. A solitary human figure stands juxtaposed against a luminous holog r a p h i c presence with striking blue hair. The sprawling metropolis in the background, illuminated by muted neon, sets a stage of technology and solitude, as the two figures — one real, one synthetic — engage in a silent dialogue, highlighting the ever-blurring lines between human emotion and artificial allure. The very essence of human yearning is captured in the dichotomy of tangible reality versus intangible fantasy. As technology advances, crafting ever more captivating illusions, we are left to grapple with a paradox: In a world where the artificial can mimic the real so closely, where does genuine emotion and desire reside?
{Good Angel}
A
nna, an enigmatic and profound character, shines as a radiant gem throughout the narrative. With her extraordinary talent to fabricate genuine memories for "people", she stands as a preeminent dream designer. Every dream sculpted by her hands is an impeccable fusion of emotions, stories, and imagery, mirroring the caliber of distinguished art pieces. In an era where boundaries between reality and fiction are fading, her dreams offer invaluable emotional sanctuary for those navigating the cold technological world. Yet, the real-life Anna grapples with physical health limitations, constraining her from deeper direct interactions with the world. This irony, where she can craft such tangible memories for others while her personal experiences are bound by her surroundings, layers her character with complexity. Her presence becomes a profound exploration of the borders between the real and virtual, the physical and the spiritual, prompting a reevaluation of memory, emotion, and the essence of humanity.
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{Hope}