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Who can forget the original Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott, and based on Philip K. Dick’s classic novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968).
Dick imagined a post-nuclear, environmental wasteland planet Earth, abandoned by human beings for a better life off-world, where their personal needs are served by replicants who resemble humans except for the fact that they are not. It is the task of the original “blade runner,” played by a youngish Harrison Ford, to eliminate the replicants who have returned to Earth to wreak revenge on their creator, a myopic technological mogul named Tyrell.
It is hard to imagine such a plot harboring a love story, but that is its beating heart. We develop sympathy for the dying breed of replicants and foster their revolt, while also rooting for the survival of the blade runner and his romantic interest Rachael—who appears at first to be human due to her poignant memories (replicants lack these) only to discover that she is a memory-enhanced product of the Tyrell Corporation.
Blade Runner challenges our notions of what distinguishes human from technological forms of intelligence, an increasing concern, if not obsession, of our age.
We depend on technology to an extent that no one in my childhood could have foreseen, much less imagined. We rely on, but also fear, the machines that connect us to the internet, search information data bases for us, manage our investment portfolios, keep our calendars, surveil our properties, and spy perhaps, in the middle of the night, on us.
Blade Runner 2049 assumes all of the above, while raising a new and unexpectedly old-fashioned question. If the capacity for personal memory does not distinguish us from artificial forms of intelligence, what does?
Memory, as we now know, is not an absolute, like an indelible recording or digital code in our brains that we can summon at will. Rather, it is a neurological construct, a product of neural network connections that alter their configuration with each specific instance of recall. Random cues from the present moment become entangled with the previous neural network and embedded within them. Our memories are continually being updated in this way. What we remember is not what happened in the long ago past, but rather our most recent revision of it.
Blade Runner 2049 has not only absorbed this piece of wisdom but also transformed it in ways that are specific to the film medium. It magnifies the importance of the protagonist K/Joe’s single childhood memory: bullied in an orphanage where he is hunted for his unique possession, a carved wooden horse, which he hides in the recesses of a dead furnace for safekeeping. He believes this “memory” to be an implant but comes to think otherwise, when he discovers that the mysterious code (6.10.20) etched into its base matches the one he discovers at the root of a tree, where the remains of a woman (perhaps his mother?) are buried.
As naïve viewers, we believe K’s fantasy. We want—as does his holographic girlfriend Joi—for him to be “special,” that is to say “born of woman,” and hence not a replicant, but a “real boy.”
Tyrell’s replacement in Blade Runner 2049 is a soulless tycoon named Niander Wallace, whose dream is to create replicants that are able to reproduce—in the old-fashioned human way, via biological means. Who knows why, as he is able to create an endless series of seemingly perfect adult creatures that correspond to his needs and desires.
Once the remains of the mysterious Rachael (a Tyrell replicant with the capacity to give birth) have been exhumed, the chase is on—for her partner in crime and for the child they created together. K/Joe will lead us to them.
The key to the film’s resolution, we believe, is the determination of K/Joe’s identity and the validation of his need to believe in his own humanity—as if this question depends on whether or not his single childhood memory is “true.”
At the center of this mystery is Dr. Ana Stelline, a young woman who is a magic memory maker. She lives in a bubble—due to a rare genetic disorder—where she spends her days imagining and creating (mostly) happy memories for replicants. To K/Joe’s question about his personal memory, she responds cryptically: “If you have authentic memories, you have real human responses.” She also tells him that “we recall with our feelings,” suggesting a more complicated means of authentication than a simple reality test.
She asks him to gaze into a two-sided screen, which allows her to view his memory through eye-mind contact. She receives it and weeps. K/Joe takes her response to mean that his memory is real and continues his quest.
If you have not begun to lose the thread of the narrative by now, you are a far more astute moviegoer than I am.
On my third viewing, I was finally able to thread the pieces of this visually dazzling and radically jump-cut film into some kind of manageable order.
Memory is a distraction; the real question is what distinguishes those of us who are “human” from those of us who are not. You might think that this is a classic AI issue, but it only appears to be.
Early in the film K says that he has one, but suspects that it is an implant. He dutifully narrates it, then offers that he has never “retired” someone who was born before. She calls him a “sentimental skin job.” He suggests that “to be born is to have a soul, I guess,” to which she responds, “You’ve been getting along fine without one.” “What’s that?” he asks. “A soul,” she replies.
The stakes of this film are higher than we might have expected.
The mere fact of having memories that feel authentic is not enough to establish one’s humanity. So what is?
This is why I love movies. The labyrinthine plot turns and amazing cinematography of this film seduce us into a complex meditation on the functions of empathy—a subject we might dismiss as un-hip, if not hopelessly romantic otherwise.
Skin jobs, according to Lieutenant Joshi, do not have souls, right? Yet the most soulless character in the film, Wallace, is biologically human. In contrast, K’s holographic girlfriend Joi has a powerful emotional presence and some of the most compelling lines in the film. She urges Joe to believe in his own specialness, while also choosing to die, like “a real girl.”
By the end of the film, the fact that Joe has been deceived about his quasi-human status does not matter. Instead of inheriting his claim to humanity by virtue of being “of woman born,” he chooses it.
In the critical scene where he learns that he is not the offspring of Deckard and Rachael, he hears the words of the leader of the replicant rebel movement: “The most human thing you can do is to die for a cause you believe in.”
Her words prompt him to rescue Deckard and unite him with his long-lost daughter—you guessed it—Dr. Stelline.
Mortally wounded, K/Joe dies on the steps to her residence, assisted by a shared “memory” with his twin female counterpart, hence blurring the distinction between them. In other words, humanity is not a function of biological reproduction as distinguished from artificial intelligence, nor is it a function of authentic memory construction, but rather a matter of empathy.
Does it matter that Philip K. Dick, the progenitor of the Blade Runner saga, lost a twin sister, who died within 41 days of their birth? What do you think?
Stay tuned for Part II.
