DENIS VILLENEUVE’S ‘BLADE RUNNER 2049’ “Who’d you bring?”

 © 2017 by James Clark

      You have to be careful about tricking out one’s film with factors from other artists. The recent Blade Runner 2049 (2017), offers us a cornucopia of blue-chip endeavors, all of which putting Villeneuve’s spectacular and shallow film to shame.

First of all, there is the first Blade Runner (1982), overseen by an expert, Ridley Scott, regarding the monstrous problematics of interpersonal integrity. Like the current film, Scott’s Blade Runner has been seen as a science fiction entertainment, which is to say, a saga saturated with a baseline of classical scientific possibility. As to this very specific binary business of widespread 21^st century navigating, one aspect especially should not be missed, namely, that the protagonist of the Scott film, namely, Deckard, first comes to view to us as quite happily retired from the LAPD where he was regarded as the foremost hunter of wayward slave robots. As we first see him enjoying the Oriental fare of a seriously decrepit Los Angeles sidewalk comfort bar, and being much food for thought as a rather vivacious player within a world of squalor and dazzle we’ve never encountered (this being 2019, not 1982), we know immediately that he’s having no trouble being stimulated by the world, and is steadfastly not being fixated upon “the good old days.” Only the threat of a trumped-up arrest from his former superior restores him to displaying the (now seen more than ever to be time-wasting) expertise in bloodily “retiring” bio-engineered maverick quasi-humans, known as “replicants,” designed for dangerous and super-human work. Thereby, we have a speculative back-story of a free-spirit coming to grips (however boozily) with matters transcending police work, including office politics and moonlighting. In marked (and careless) contrast to Deckard, the born skeptic, we have in the current film a docile, if lethal, replicant/ LAPD detective putting down (30 years after Deckard’s controversial going AWOL) remnants of a long-surpassed replicant issue with traces of that rebelliousness unwelcome to a rather dizzy police state. That the latter protagonist, namely, K [an abbreviation of his serial number], comes to a level of skepticism himself in the course of his employment would be a very different instrumentality from that overseen by Scott.

K also answers to the name Joe, and thereby gets somehow involved in the major stonewalling presented in novelist, Franz Kafka’s, The Trial (1914), the hapless protagonist of which being called, Josef K. K’s coming up against his Superior Officer, Joshi and the oligarch, replicant-manufacturer, Wallace, extends the new protagonist to extreme measures, none of which, however, touching the register of Josef K’s being under a gun of relentless isolation at a pitch no mere spikey scheming can approximate.

The number, 2049, is the year of the film’s narrative. But it also activates filmmaker’s Wong Kar Wai’s study of missing out on love (and the full range of its uncanniness) and not missing out on longing and loneliness, namely, 2046 (2004). K and his girlfriend, a personalized hologram, named Joi, go up to the roof of his flat where a product is pitched by way of Japanese kanji lettering in neon, recalling a similar sign on the roof-haven of the protagonist’s Shanghai hotel, “The Oriental,” in 2046. The interaction of the two life-like machines in 2049 is fleshy and sporadic; and a far cry from the sustained and fervid efforts of Wong’s ravishing tone poem. (A little adjunct of that surreal interdependency between K and Joi, which constitutes a pale rendition of the adult, surrealist romance of Deckard and the biological and cosmological paradox that is Rachel, is K’s being a student of the novel, Pale Fire [1962], by that same novelist, Vladimir Nabokov, who created a nymphet, Lolita, also being a paradox, but far easier to fathom than Rachel. Joi, on that night on the roof, apologizes for not being a fan of Pale Fire, with its gloomy arsenal of “faint hope in higher powers” and “playing a game of worlds.”)

From the get-go, we have K exterminating one of those pesky oldsters, until then disguised as a “protein farmer,” cultivating weevils for the sustenance of that populous not having been able to quit a dead planet Earth for the sake of, on “off-worlds,” obtaining much better dining and other creature comforts. After dispatching the farmer, he is drawn to a few very incongruous poseys at the foot of a dead tree, perhaps the handiwork of that grower who, with his dying breath, gave the functionary a two-stage piece of his mind: “How does it feel to kill one of your kind?” …; and, “You’ve never seen a miracle…” The tree is a dead ringer for the bare, jagged gallows where a lawman’s wife died, in Bud Boetticher’s Western film, Ride Lonesome (1959), and where doing justice within a ratty society reaches us with remarkable grace which could be described as “a miracle.”

Kafka’s protagonist caps his being exterminated with the declaration, “Like a dog!” [“it was as if the shame of it must outlive him”]. Villeneuve’s K dies with more pomp than Hamlet. Kafka has brought to bear the possibility of a shattering defeat having failed to rise to a miracle of equilibrium. Villeneuve (needing to make much more than the 155 million construction cost) has brought to bear an implicit impossibility of crossing the line where bathos ends, notwithstanding his virtual three-ring circus of notables. Where the little bouquet might quietly have maintained a solitude which Deckard, in his prime, could have seen the point of, the younger blade runner, returning to the tree, stirs up the remains of Rachel, which prove her having died in childbirth and thereby setting off a frenzy (not the least of which being his own, while coming to the hasty conclusion that he is her child).

The extreme and death-dealing concomitants of K’s life could exert quite a pull to innovation. His becoming obsessed with the miracle that flesh-and-blood engineering (his old-style colleagues unpleasantly refer to him as a “skin-job”) might have, in the instance of the now-defunct Tyrell Corporation presiding over Blade Runner One, shattered the ceiling confining replicants to mere machines forever lost to that sense of “soul” being suffused with cosmic creativity itself. K does indeed find himself thrilled and overwhelmed by the phenomenon of a hybrid of human sensibility. Not only, however, does our protagonist depend upon the story of Rachel to get into the big leagues (and thereby remain a blunderer as to self-examination); but, the priorities of his job—having a lieutenant seeing the hybrid, wherever she or he might be, to cause attitude amongst the replicant-slaves and needing to be snuffed out—have thereby become even more anathematic to reflection beyond scheming. And, to make matters even worse, Wallace, the blind tycoon who took over the assets of Tyrell after the latter’s murder by a vengeful and philosophical replicant (but not in possession of the miraculous extra step), soon gets wind of what that tree produced, and kicks up another notch of reflection-killing stress for K, insofar as the LAPD comes under fire in various ways, as being the best bet to crack the case, for the sake of Wallace’s needing the progeny to be sifted for the reproductive structure and consequently going into the production of trillions of emissaries (“angels”) to effect, by means of conveniences and amusements, like Joi, a dominance of the universe. (Wallace being a blind man in many ways.)

This narrative campaign does carry some wherewithal of contrarian bite. It posts, in its own rather self-destructive way, a citation concerning most of Earth’s inhabitants barking up the wrong tree, not simply the obviously deluded Wallace. But its focus is blindsided by K’s wooden-puppet, morose keening to have soul despite the handicap of being a product of a superficial—but maybe not entirely superficial—ambition. That he generally buys into the axioms, of figures like Lieutenant Joshi (who is wont to declare, “It’s my job to keep order;” and, “You’ve been getting on fine without one” [namely, a soul, an entrance to the primordial]) and Wallace, the would-be fixer of everything, by way of simplistic science and its technological products, and comes to be convinced that he was a real boy all along (with one parent not having been produced in a lab), bulldozes real avenues of discovery about flesh. The dismal upshot about the pursuit of the “miracle” comprises the same domestic humanitarian/ religious/ scientific enterprise having run the planet into the ground. The overtures that were the tree, 2046, Kafka, Nabokov and Deckard go nowhere because our helmsman is also a Canadian, a master, therefore, of seeming game while getting lost. (Arrival [2015] being an anomaly, in having the protagonist mystified, horrified [“like a dog”] and utterly alone, save for a fatuous daydream of a momentarily “excellent life,” soon dissipated.)

Blade Runner 2049 manages, until the final reel where all the wheels fall off, to forestall complete absurdity by way of two impressive assets: actor, Ryan Gosling, as K; and the visual and aural design. With so much of the narrative invested in macho appetites, suspicion, intimidation and mayhem—Joshi’s screen picks up his bloodied face after the retiring of the farmer and remarks, “You’re hurt. I’m not paying for that!”—Gosling’s K’s taciturn presence implicitly makes the case that he’s far from that, even when he’s breaking down. After he patches up some nasty wounds at his tiny flat’s bathroom, there is Joi in the mix, dressed like a 50’s house-wife, noting he’s home early and hearing him quietly explain, “I had an accident at work.” Joi, picking up more than you might expect but having the benefit of his understatements, tells him soon after (not for the first time and more a hope than a fact), “I always knew you were special…” (But the full evening has him more a company man than company. Feeling flush from the bonus concerning the bones of Rachel, he presents her with “an anniversary” gift, a supplement to her insubstantial pizzazz, by name of a “chemiactor” which endows the user a sense of natural sensuality. [They go up to the Wong Kar Wai memorial rooftop, where Joi experiences some kind of ecstasy on feeling the raindrops. There is an interlude of their holding hands, which prompts her to sing out, “I’m so happy when I’m with you!”/ “You didn’t have to say that,” he retorts, quickly reverting to cybernetics as a default region. Were Chow, in 2046, to hear a similar protestation from the volatile Bai Ling, up there on the “Oriental,” he’d not be thinking of apps. K adds, as if modern transportation would be more fun than love, “You can go anywhere you want,”) Apropos of K’s shorting chivalry, whereas he presents the farmer/ prey a handgun to kill himself with maximum dignity, he gets suckered by one of his pursuers, a hooker recalling Scott’s rather warm replicant, Pris (now a populist politician), into updating Joi’s new power-pack whereby he explores the more kinky corners of his mobile toy. Joi having been sold by Pris that the threesome is good for K, the latter leaves next morning with the advice, “He’s not as much as you think…” Summoned down from that lesser roof by Joshi now having the technical goods on Rachel, he’s aware the boss covets him and proceeds to take liberties for the sake of his own agenda of aggrandizement in being confirmed as Rachel’s child. Consulting Wallace’s memory-implant whiz, he undergoes a scan which, sort of like the chemiactor, creates the illusion of the real deal. In the rush of such good news he goes into a frenzy. “I know it’s real! I know it’s real!” he screams. Leaving the lab, he cherishes snowflakes the way Joi went for raindrops. This non-policing behavior results in his arrest, his being documented as failing to be consistent to “baseline” [low emotion] and a selling job on Joshi that he found the kid.  It is in the wake of this uncontrolled passion that he buys into Joi and Pris’ motives. (But not before he tells Joi, “You’re real to me…” [ a window of real opportunity slamming down the minute it opens].) With all this going on, no wonder his promising sensibility comes to us beset with bugs to lead to lesser accomplishments. (Don’t think for a moment that Villeneuve and his writing team weren’t very OK with that confinement.)

Blade Runner 2049 is often an annoying bore. But its images and sounds speak to a gigantism both arrestingly spacious and abysmally deadly. The central visual scheme provides a clash of toxic ruin and constructive purity. On the premise that the planet’s eco-system is beyond repair, we are transported to aerial and surface perspectives of necrosis befalling agricultural land (now ominously silver) and formerly- urban regions on-the-go reduced to repellant decay, the remaining residents picking their way through filth and atrophy which renders all circulation there resembling an evacuation perpetually forestalled. Adding measurably to this crisis is an atmosphere of perpetual night due to an endless chemical revolt discharging, alternately rain and snow (once the precinct of sunny Southern California). Although most of the Los Angeles captives (like K) are dead-ended in multi-unit studio flats where trailer trash convulsively litter the hallways, the tours we are taken through police and Wallace corporate dimensions are models of brilliant minimalist architecture and industrial design. A boardroom at the tech-palace shimmers with golden waves, which, were the scenario less constrained, might beckon to that disinterestedness having been hunted down, by the brain trust running this movie, as relentlessly as the ethnic cleansers they have put into motion. As to the sonic side, there are howls and drumbeats aplenty, often accompanying the aerial kinetics, but generally subsiding into “action adventure” clichés. From that befouled reservoir, the muzac from self-styled deities like Sinatra complements the general pollution, while creating little frissons of terribleness. (I can imagine an afterlife for this vehicle in movie nights at old folks homes.) One contribution from the preposterously stagey combat is the sound of cataclysmic impact, secreting shards of solid substance, akin the Joi’s update. That, however, notwithstanding the proviso of super strength manufacture, readily sinks into unbelievable boredom. (On seeing a number of trailers, while awaiting the feature—all noisy “action adventures.”—I came to the hypothesis that the bemusing appetite for such nonsense derives from occupants of baby safety seats experiencing motion terror and stoking up relief that a crash is nothing but a good bottle.)

Making what he imagines to be a productive detour at the orphanage which figures as an early memory bedevilled by the likelihood that it’s an engineering not a full-fledged experience, K does considerably more than scoop up a solid confirmation (a toy horse with a serial number coinciding with the one at Rachel’s grave) that he is vitally linked to the feisty couple in the first Blade Runner. He drags us into Charles Dickens’ orphanage novel, Oliver Twist (1837), a spearhead of solicitude for the downtrodden.  Squeezed to bathetic (advantage-driven) proportions by overkill exigencies, the film reckons that Dickensian resentment, sentimentality and “miraculous” derring-do should freight the climax, not to mention freighting the box office. Inferring, with help, that the little horse had experienced radiation on the level of a “dirty bomb,” K, with Joi at his side (showing enough hardware to suggest that her software could involve miraculousness of a problematic type), arrives at dirty Vegas, and some dirty ego surprises us in all the wrong ways. Finding Deckard sitting pretty in a casino/ hotel, with access to unlimited Scotch and hologram “immortals” like Elvis, Liberace, Marylin and, most of all, Sinatra (“…set ‘em up Joe…”) and behaving quite a lot like Walter Brennan, K gets nowhere with his own celebrity and, with Wallace’s hit-woman, LUV, barging in (putting a quick end to Joi the joy-rider, having actually felt the validity of death), the formerly cool one screeches, “Who’d you bring?” Now that’s a good question! As we’ve seen, our protagonist was a moving target; but of late ageing alarmingly. As such, after some Saturday morning TV manoeuvres you don’t want to know about, he finds himself rescued by a network led by the nurse who presided over Rachel’s C-section. Something of a rhetorician, she tells the stranger, “A revolution is coming! Dying for the right cause is the most human thing to be! She [Deckard’s daughter] will lead our army!” [as up to date as Joan of Arc]. Disabused of being an icon (and never well seeing he doesn’t have to be one), he brings Deckard safely to his daughter where they will soon perish, following in his fateful and rather precious death.

Purporting to be a plausible glimpse of futurity, our film, brimming with smarts, crashes upon the seemingly inconvenient priority of carnal creatures being carnal first, a condition making a mockery of melodramatic cleanups and utopian ease.

Among the many films having resisted the assumption that interestedness essentially dominates human action, there is Wong Kar Wai’s 2046, which makes the season truly bright. A writer of modern romance—one of his successes being, “Diary of the Bazooka Hero”—observes without fanfare the care for women in his life by taking each one of them to dinner on Christmas Eve, through the years, while each time a lovely tune by Nat King Cole puts in an appearance, as if a few minutes make a life.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rg1QB_h6mY