Running With Scissors? No, that's not right...
I'd just like to try to jot down some of the questions that struck me after the first watching of the Blade Runner sequel (Blade Runner 2049). I'm hoping that some of them will lead to interesting philosophical questions.
I should mention that there will be spoilers, so if you want to go into the movie fresh, stop reading now.
* There are ways we define ourselves as human in terms of what it is that we want. We want, for example, to be treated fairly, to have our rights recognized, and to be loved by other humans. Joi was expressing something like this when she demanded to remain only in her emitter so that K couldn't be traced if people examined the memories of the copy in his apartment. She said she wanted to die "like a real girl".
This is flipped on its head when K sees the billboard hologram of Joi -- a creation that, its marketers assure us, allows us to "see what [we] want" and "hear what [we] want". (That may even be why Joi calls K "Joe" -- but more on that in a minute.) In this way, Joi is both the object of desire (the desire of its creators and the desire of its customers) and something that seems to be developing some of its own desires. (This kind of parallels Rachael's comment in the first movie -- "I'm not in the business; I am the business" -- when she realized that she was manufactured as a consumer product, but in a way that Joi herself never seems fully aware of.)
When can we call desires "fully human"? Even animals want things; when does desire become human? A first-blush answer might have something to do with intent, or with understanding consequences. Certainly, choosing the circumstances surrounding one's own death seems to be a fully human choice. But we also differentiate between the wants of children and the wants of adults. Does what we desire play into how society should treat us, and to what extent?
Also, was Joi insisting that K was really "Joe" part of Joi's programming -- telling K what he wanted to hear, namely, that he was something more than a replicant? Beyond that, it's interesting that the hologram used the name. What is in Joi's programming that might pick up on this need of K's, and do so quickly? (Are various Joi units -- if you'll pardon the pun -- networked? Could K have interacted with Joi anywhere that had a wall unit before he bought the emitter?)
What does it mean about being human that apparently Joi's creators were able to find a market for companionship, if not physical presence? (Does this have interesting implications for our own social media?)
Something else: Why was her activation signal the first notes of Peter's leitmotif from "Peter and the Wolf"? One thought I had is that there's an interesting argument between the bird and the duck in that piece. The bird asks the duck, "What kind of bird are you if you cannot fly?", and the duck replies, "What kind of bird are you if you cannot swim?" -- and their argument rages on, resulting in the wolf eating the duck. I suspect that the duck represents Joi, and the bird represents humans. Consider that K says that he doesn't like "real girls". When we last see the wolf, the duck is still quacking inside him, because he had been hasty and swallowed the duck whole; there are probably parallels to Joi's destruction that I haven't yet stumbled upon. In addition, there is the open question at the end of "Peter and the Wolf", voiced by Peter's grandfather: "But what if Peter had not caught the wolf?"
* Niander -- as in Niander Wallace -- means "new man", but also evokes "Neanderthal", a species that is long dead but still has remnants in our human DNA. This seems to me to point to this villain's advanced capability at creating a new species while still retaining the thuggish aspects of humanity, wanting nothing more than raw power and crude domination. In that way, he doesn't seem that far removed from some prominent parts of our society today, IMHO.
Niander also has something of a god complex (he refers to his assistants as "angels", for example, and speaks of owning worlds). I've often thought that Batty's dialogue with Tyrell in the first movie had interesting theological implications -- how would we argue with God for more life? -- and the fact that it concluded with Batty apparently thinking that Tyrell deserved to die for creating creatures painfully aware of their own brief lifespans struck a chord.
Niander has no consequences in the movie for his actions, however. While this serves as excellent social commentary -- the powerful are often never held responsible for their crimes against humanity -- there seems to be something deeper going on here.
* Rachael was evidently more advanced than the usual Tyrell product -- it takes Deckard over 100 questions to determine that she's a replicant, as opposed to twenty or thirty for more run-of-the-mill products. How was this achieved? Is it possible, for example, that she had more than Tyrell's niece's memories -- she had some of Tyrell's niece's DNA, too? Is that why she was unexpectedly able to get pregnant? Does this mean that her lifespan was longer than four years, and that if she had not died in childbirth, she and Deckard might have grown old together?
Based on the scene where Deckard sumbits Rachael to a Voight-Kampff test, I think we can state that Rachael's eyes were green on close examination, but appear dark brown at a distance. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some sort of meaning there, given the franchise's emphasis on eyes as symbols for all sorts of things.
* Why was Ana Stelline (Deckard and Rachel's daughter) in a bubble? The dialogue's stated reason was because she had an immune system disorder, and I could see that as being true and something that happens as a result of tinkering with Deckard's biology and/or having Rachael's biology in the mix. But she could just as easily have been put there to keep her from wandering out, leaving some evidence somewhere, and accidentally getting discovered for who she was.
* Speaking of Deckard, what if he (and perhaps all Blade Runners) was an experimental model, "softened" for more domestic use, without a Nexus-6 expiration date? Was he a human tinkered with, or a more human variety of replicant? What's the actual difference between a tinkered human and a more human replicant, if replicants are the product of advanced genetic engineering? (Were replicants designed from scratch, or do they dispense with a lot of junk DNA and replace other sections, or is there something different in the engineering of replicants that makes them "less human" than they appear?)
* I was under the impression that Gaff kind of held Deckard in contempt, and would have loved to have had Deckard's job, which is why he let Deckard run off with Rachael. But Gaff's brief appearance in the sequel -- where he seems to try to keep Deckard's secret by maintaining that Deckard is dead -- seems to indicate some kind of respect for Deckard. People can change in thirty years, true, but this is making me wonder about other angles to think about Gaff's role in the original, even as minimal as it was.
I should mention that there will be spoilers, so if you want to go into the movie fresh, stop reading now.
* There are ways we define ourselves as human in terms of what it is that we want. We want, for example, to be treated fairly, to have our rights recognized, and to be loved by other humans. Joi was expressing something like this when she demanded to remain only in her emitter so that K couldn't be traced if people examined the memories of the copy in his apartment. She said she wanted to die "like a real girl".
This is flipped on its head when K sees the billboard hologram of Joi -- a creation that, its marketers assure us, allows us to "see what [we] want" and "hear what [we] want". (That may even be why Joi calls K "Joe" -- but more on that in a minute.) In this way, Joi is both the object of desire (the desire of its creators and the desire of its customers) and something that seems to be developing some of its own desires. (This kind of parallels Rachael's comment in the first movie -- "I'm not in the business; I am the business" -- when she realized that she was manufactured as a consumer product, but in a way that Joi herself never seems fully aware of.)
When can we call desires "fully human"? Even animals want things; when does desire become human? A first-blush answer might have something to do with intent, or with understanding consequences. Certainly, choosing the circumstances surrounding one's own death seems to be a fully human choice. But we also differentiate between the wants of children and the wants of adults. Does what we desire play into how society should treat us, and to what extent?
Also, was Joi insisting that K was really "Joe" part of Joi's programming -- telling K what he wanted to hear, namely, that he was something more than a replicant? Beyond that, it's interesting that the hologram used the name. What is in Joi's programming that might pick up on this need of K's, and do so quickly? (Are various Joi units -- if you'll pardon the pun -- networked? Could K have interacted with Joi anywhere that had a wall unit before he bought the emitter?)
What does it mean about being human that apparently Joi's creators were able to find a market for companionship, if not physical presence? (Does this have interesting implications for our own social media?)
Something else: Why was her activation signal the first notes of Peter's leitmotif from "Peter and the Wolf"? One thought I had is that there's an interesting argument between the bird and the duck in that piece. The bird asks the duck, "What kind of bird are you if you cannot fly?", and the duck replies, "What kind of bird are you if you cannot swim?" -- and their argument rages on, resulting in the wolf eating the duck. I suspect that the duck represents Joi, and the bird represents humans. Consider that K says that he doesn't like "real girls". When we last see the wolf, the duck is still quacking inside him, because he had been hasty and swallowed the duck whole; there are probably parallels to Joi's destruction that I haven't yet stumbled upon. In addition, there is the open question at the end of "Peter and the Wolf", voiced by Peter's grandfather: "But what if Peter had not caught the wolf?"
* Niander -- as in Niander Wallace -- means "new man", but also evokes "Neanderthal", a species that is long dead but still has remnants in our human DNA. This seems to me to point to this villain's advanced capability at creating a new species while still retaining the thuggish aspects of humanity, wanting nothing more than raw power and crude domination. In that way, he doesn't seem that far removed from some prominent parts of our society today, IMHO.
Niander also has something of a god complex (he refers to his assistants as "angels", for example, and speaks of owning worlds). I've often thought that Batty's dialogue with Tyrell in the first movie had interesting theological implications -- how would we argue with God for more life? -- and the fact that it concluded with Batty apparently thinking that Tyrell deserved to die for creating creatures painfully aware of their own brief lifespans struck a chord.
Niander has no consequences in the movie for his actions, however. While this serves as excellent social commentary -- the powerful are often never held responsible for their crimes against humanity -- there seems to be something deeper going on here.
* Rachael was evidently more advanced than the usual Tyrell product -- it takes Deckard over 100 questions to determine that she's a replicant, as opposed to twenty or thirty for more run-of-the-mill products. How was this achieved? Is it possible, for example, that she had more than Tyrell's niece's memories -- she had some of Tyrell's niece's DNA, too? Is that why she was unexpectedly able to get pregnant? Does this mean that her lifespan was longer than four years, and that if she had not died in childbirth, she and Deckard might have grown old together?
Based on the scene where Deckard sumbits Rachael to a Voight-Kampff test, I think we can state that Rachael's eyes were green on close examination, but appear dark brown at a distance. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some sort of meaning there, given the franchise's emphasis on eyes as symbols for all sorts of things.
* Why was Ana Stelline (Deckard and Rachel's daughter) in a bubble? The dialogue's stated reason was because she had an immune system disorder, and I could see that as being true and something that happens as a result of tinkering with Deckard's biology and/or having Rachael's biology in the mix. But she could just as easily have been put there to keep her from wandering out, leaving some evidence somewhere, and accidentally getting discovered for who she was.
* Speaking of Deckard, what if he (and perhaps all Blade Runners) was an experimental model, "softened" for more domestic use, without a Nexus-6 expiration date? Was he a human tinkered with, or a more human variety of replicant? What's the actual difference between a tinkered human and a more human replicant, if replicants are the product of advanced genetic engineering? (Were replicants designed from scratch, or do they dispense with a lot of junk DNA and replace other sections, or is there something different in the engineering of replicants that makes them "less human" than they appear?)
* I was under the impression that Gaff kind of held Deckard in contempt, and would have loved to have had Deckard's job, which is why he let Deckard run off with Rachael. But Gaff's brief appearance in the sequel -- where he seems to try to keep Deckard's secret by maintaining that Deckard is dead -- seems to indicate some kind of respect for Deckard. People can change in thirty years, true, but this is making me wonder about other angles to think about Gaff's role in the original, even as minimal as it was.
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