Blade Runner 2049: A Cold Case Warms Up

Philip K. Dick’s Organic Androids

 

In the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) Philip K. Dick describes an Earth that has undergone a human-made cataclysm,“World War Terminus,” and no one remembers why it began or if any side had won. The specific enemy is left unnamed but the author mentions the Pentagon and Rand Corporation, meaning that the USA was at least one of the involved parties. Moreover, the strange dust covering everything, blocking out the sun, and killing most animals had not been a by-product that neither the military nor business interests had included in their “cost” of war.

 

The author goes on to tell us that this is when the “organic android” had been modified from the “Synthetic Freedom Fighter” and developed as a type of re-location incentive:

 

“Under the U.N. law each emigrant automatically received possession of an android subtype of his choice, and, by 2019, the variety of subtypes passed all understanding, in the manner of American automobiles of the 1960s.”

 

So these androids, like automobiles, became a possession a human would like to show off, especially if “it” was shiny and sexy like the cars rolling off Detroit production belts in the decade of free-love and flower power and also of political assassinations, civil-rights struggles, and the Vietnam War.

But beyond their glistening paint jobs, cars have a specific function: They are machines engineered to transport humans from point A to point B.

So, what is the specific function of a Replicant?

 

Rachael and The Function of Replicants

 

Once a young human woman after watching Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/ in my class, Angels, Vampires, and Monsters, or De-Cloaking the Human “Other” at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, asked me what was Rachael’s function. Her question was valid, but at the time I couldn’t answer it.

 

In Blade Runner, the other Replicants have specific functions. As police officer Bryant goes over files with Rick Decker we learn that Pris is a “basic pleasure model” (her “incept date” is February 14, Valentine’s Day), Zhora is designed as an assassin (Bryant calls her “beauty and the beast”), Leon is a designed for combat, while Roy Batty is strong, fast and smart, probably a “military overseer” of other Replicant-Off-World-Slaves.

 

These four Replicants make sense as “machines” with a purpose, that is, specifically bio-engineered to help human beings in the labors of establishing colonies on planets beyond our own Earth. In fact in the novel, Philip writes that the new androids are the “mobile donkey engine of the colonization program.” And, as we know, colonization on Earth has been a brutal matter requiring strong bodies capable of endless, hard labor.

 

But here was Rachael, no donkey, but an elegant, well-dressed, and educated being, or as my student called her, the “Lady Replicant.”

The “Lady Replicant” Finally Returns

 

Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1856101/ is a visual spectacle, especially if you watch it in IMAX 3D which I was lucky enough to do so under unusual circumstances which I will explain later.

 

I think Philip K. Dick would have enjoyed Blade Runner 2049 as it is a brooding exploration, sometimes masochistically slow, of post-human life, a way of life where who or what is human is not clear. For example, there is a character in the film, Niander Wallace played by Jared Leto, that has highly enhanced vision but his eyes have been substituted by cold, metallic orbs. And if our eyes are the mirror of our souls, apparently there’s not much soul or humanity left inside Wallace.

 

In part the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was inspired to write his novel after reading an S.S. Nazi officer’s diary in which he wrote: “The screams of children keep me awake at night.” The officer wrote this in response to the innocents being summarily exterminated around him at a concentration camp. Philip, who studied Nazi propaganda and writings for several years at Berkeley concluded that “these people were not human, that the Nazis were a synthetic organism.”

 

But if throughout the 20th C. and now in the 21st C. humans continue becoming more like “synthetic organisms” then perhaps “synthetics” might be becoming more “human.” And at this crux is where the “Lady Replicant” enters. Rachael’s story gives meaning to Blade Runner 2049, which is set up as a cold case but quickly warms up when the new blade runner, LAPD Officer K played by Ryan Gosling, retires a now-outlawed model Replicant on an isolated protein farm, that is, a worm farm because this is the only thing left to eat on a moribund Earth.

 

In a similar fashion as the first adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I believe Blade Runner 2049 will also become a cult movie with a devoted following. But, if you can, don’t miss it now on IMAX 3D, which I had the opportunity to experience as I recently evacuated from Puerto Rico because Hurricane Maria has left the island with many areas resembling post-apocalyptic scenarios, and life there has become an exhausting matter of figuring out how to survive one day at a time.

 

I dedicate this blog to my students at the University of Puerto Rico who I have not heard from these last 3 and a half weeks because most technology, including communications, has collapsed on the island.

 

Hope you are all well. My heart is with you! Abrazos!