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When I first wrote about “Blade Runner 2049” (2017), I was concerned with the issue of what distinguishes humans from robots. I recast this question in terms of what makes us (anyone) human. No, it isn’t the status of our memories—real vs. implanted—but rather our capacity to imagine the mind of someone other than ourselves, to care about what happens to them, and to make choices on that basis. I called this capacity empathy. By empathy, I include the ability to engage in self-reflection (a form of self-empathy). I treat both as aspects of a viable inner life.
Now, however, I want to turn to the matter of memory—a more congested and contested subject for our time.
Cognitive neuroscience teaches us that personal memory is mutable, malleable, and hence unreliable. This is not a matter of individual brain function (as in Alzheimer’s) but a condition that applies to us all. The formation of memory involves neural network activity in our brains. To remember is to reactivate that network, which then attaches to new neural formations, related to the present moment.
As a result, we cannot recall an original memory intact, but only increasingly altered ones, over time. This theory violates our preconceived notions of memory integrity and recall, but once you get used to it, it makes sense.
Intuitively, we know that our memories are not fixed, like photographs, in our brains. Instead, they change and evolve over time. We each harbor significant memories from our childhood, which seem to “explain” who we are to ourselves and to our intimate others.
Yet, each time we recall or describe them, they take a slightly different form, depending on our subsequent experiences, understandings, and stages of life. Some details (especially ones of a traumatic nature) seem indelibly inscribed in our brains, but even these have a tendency to soften or mutate with the passage of time.
So who are we, and what is real? “Blade Runner 2049” raises this question in a visual, dramatic, and philosophic way.
K has one memory from his childhood, which he believes to be “implanted,” an enhancement of robot construction that is explained in the previous “Blade Runner.” He dutifully relates it to his LAPD superior Sergeant Joshi early in the film.
In our first viewing, we take this memory (represented in visual narrative form) as both real and unreal. For K, it feels like his own, at the same time that he considers it a fabrication, designed to provide him with the illusion of being human. As if to drive this point home, Sergeant Joshi reminds K of his lesser status in the chain of being. When K muses that he has never before killed anyone who was born, observing: “To be born is to have a soul,” Joshi fires back: “You’ve been getting along fine without one.”
At this point, it seems that implanted memories relegate one to something close to animal life, lacking consciousness, much less conscience, or that phantom entity, a soul.
As the plot advances, K comes to believe that he might actually be the vanished son of Deckard and Rachael, who died in childbirth. As this fantasy begins to take hold, we cheer for him. Step by step, K finds his one childhood memory as proof of his having been raised in an orphanage to protect his birthright as the son of a replicant—a mystery no less sacred in this film than that of the miracle of Virgin birth.
A goal of Niander Wallace, the executive who heads the company that succeeds the Tyrell Corporation from the previous “Blade Runner” film, is to devise a female model who can reproduce. His continuing failure in this regard causes him to seek and hunt down the child born of the union between Deckard and Rachael. K, ordered to kill this progeny—who blurs the line between robot and human—comes to believe that he has been ordered to eliminate himself. He shifts from his role of hunter to hunted.
As if this plot were not complicated enough, K discovers that he is NOT the son of Deckard and Rachael, but a decoy designed to divert attention from the real child—a girl sequestered in a bubble designed to protect her compromised immune system. K’s search for his counterpart—she being real, he being something less—leads him into a magical field of memory illusion and creation.
At first he takes his discovery of its creator Dr. Ana Stelline as validation of his childhood memory. She views his memory through a screen separating him from her shining bubble, and she weeps. In retrospect, we read this scene differently from the way that K interprets it—but this revelation is yet to come.
My point here is not who is more human than whom, but rather what is memory and how does it function in creating our personal sense of being individually alive and real?
K’s counterpart, Dr. Stelline, spends her time creating beautiful memories—her sole aim, it appears, in her lonely and restricted environment. For her, an invented field filled with foliage and insects is as real as a birthday cake surrounded by wide-eyed, happy children. Dr. Stelline, a new species of replicant, is a memory artist—a kind of neuro-filmmaker, who fabricates the stuff of internal reality that we consider essential to our sense of who we are. Having been born of woman, she rivals Wallace, who cannot create new life. Even more importantly, she (unlike Wallace) creates “souls.”
K’s encounter with his hybrid “twin,” sends him on a deeper journey, not only to verify his birthright but also to find an identity of his own. His discovery disappoints him but also leads him to a different kind of realization.
If not the messianic child of Deckard and Rachael, he has a mission that provides him with a sense of purpose in his brief existence. Saving Deckard’s life and delivering him to his daughter gives K the feeling of being human that he has sought. It no longer matters whether his memory was made up or real; it has guided his quest to its resolution.
K and his narrative of discovery are at the center of this film. As its trajectory unfolds, we become ever more invested in his fate. He is as “real” to us as any other character in the film and more appealing than most.
All of this, of course is an illusion—the film medium with its amazing array of narrative, visual, and sound effects, all of which serve to seduce us into a joint fantasy creation. In order for a film like this to succeed, it needs our willing suspension of disbelief—as any sci-fi narrative requires. But “Blade Runner 2049” raises an even more challenging set of questions for us as viewers.
What is memory? How does it look, sound, taste, smell, feel? Is it story-like, with a sequential narrative, or more like a dream, composed of flash images and verbal fragments? If memory is a brain-effect (composed of neural network activity that is constantly mutating), what can we know about ourselves, assuming that we count on it to stabilize us in the midst of the cacophony of our daily lives?
There is a surreal moment, late in the film, where K/Joe finally locates the missing progenitor Deckard. In this lengthy sequence, father and putative son first try to kill each other, while nostalgic holographic images of Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and Marilyn Monroe appear and disappear before our eyes. The cultural past of Las Vegas, like some strange visitation from Stephen King’s “The Shining” suddenly materializes. How much more real are K’s or even Deckard’s memories?
What if personal memory is as profound, mysterious, and elusive as these fleeting holographs? What if memory itself is a holograph—a necessary illusion of being in order to make us feel real? If so, it is not memory per se that validates our humanity but rather the ethics we create for ourselves and our relations with others, which we then enact in the choices we make over the course of our lives.
