The long overdue _Blade Runner_ thread

like there has to be this deep, deep desire to unsee or look past the deficiencies of the representation, deficiencies which are immediately apparent to anyone not involved in the production

i can't work through the details rn but in light of the remembered-for-being-of-its-moment thing ryan mentioned (which seems right - lotta synthesis of the present day's cultural imaginary going on), when i heard the memory-maker say that real memories are a mess, my intuition was that this was a key for the way this movie is being positioned against the last one and somehow its official stance on its reality for its viewers. in other words its very very designed and deliberate plotting and conceptualizing (so much so that the rebel leader can say to K, that's just a piece of the puzzle, and it seems entirely accurate in multiple senses) are meant to reinforce the visual style's exploration of, i would say, a lack of uncanny-valley issues (which naturally there wouldn't be, after the technology reaches the point it's premised to have reached), so that the whole film is in a way not 'a mess', implication being that the mess is offscreen, in the theater, where memory and history are alive.

i haven't read that cellphone thing above, but i wouldn't be surprised if it said something about the prevailing lack of panopticon-style information-control in the whole film world. (i guess the bit about losing all the data in the crash is supposed to provide a pretext for that?) the authorities or the wallace corp seem to have it in certain respects, yet it's not the kind of constant-surveillance nightmare that is de rigueur in a lot of current near-future fictional imagination. there's... monitoring, but not surveillance. not control at a distance. because what's noticeable about K is his apparent privacy. a replicant, serving as a blade runner, why would they even bother? or why would they risk it, given the regular check-ins (which suggest a heightened scrutiny, a regularity of need to re-baseline for whatever reason)? and in fact the plot/characterization makes something of that, because K's relationship with joi is motivated to be slightly idiosyncratic (it costs him, it's what he's spend his pay/allowance on), and we see the 'real girl' replicant (though she may know differently, since she's a plant) play off his apparent disinterest in sexing a replicant, which suggests that his attachment to joi is in fact beyond the sad sex-chatbot pretense that is the initial suggestion for that. which would be significant, because his other earlier scenes make it clear that he's kind of a walking test case for nihilism, not because 'he's a robot' or whatever but because he has (almost) fully accepted his own unreality, his lack of original purpose, since he's walking around with roughly the same feelings and desires that everyone else is but also with the constant belief that they cannot really be his in the genuine sense of 'his'. so he has a perspective on himself that is not too different from the perspective a consumer ('we hope you enjoy our product') is to have, presumably, about any sufficiently artificial fruits of the advance of technology (where always in the background, there is the idea that there is reality in 'life' or what's 'alive'). i'm not too familiar with gosling but i thought his performance seemed good - in the first part, before he validates his memory as real, he has a constant wry smirk that seems to reflect back on everything he sees. in essence, because he more or less knows he's not real, he sees how (to what extent) everything else around him is unreal, too.

the plot beat with the memory, as it gets incorporated into his relationship with joi, and their interpretation of what the memory's supposed reality means (she stresses its secrecy, his harboring this feeling about himself), seems to say that what K is doing with joi is up to a point an effort to stake out a kind of inner life of his own, one he doesn't just accept as unreal. (later, after he fails the baseline check-in, his boss's accusation is something like, you're not the same as you were inside.) i suppose the plot causes this to be undercut as fundamentally narcissistic, for all that he seems to be a genuine romantic about her as opposed to his attitude toward the outside world (which, though, would make sense of his being a batty-like figure: wasn't roy hella narcissistic too?), except insofar as K does seem crushed by the loss of joi and afterward does eventually seem to make choices which are not directly narcissistic, so i guess it would depend on how we are to understand his motives after joi is destroyed.

i thought it was nice that the memory-maker essentially sounded like a mechanical turker as far as her working conditions.

the san diego scene does seem like the worst one, presumably the real need they felt for it was as an opportunity to show the underclass scrounging a living out of child enslavement, as some kind of counterpoint to the faith of the revolting replicants in their more-than-human dignity, which it takes belief in their (potential) natality, realized in a born-free replicant child, to maintain. if K's arc is to be read as always-already failed in some way but redeemed by what he does in the final act, then it would seem to be for the seemingly ultra-standard-sounding reasons involving deckard's genuine possibility of seeing himself (but not-himself) in another, escaping a narcissistic fantasy for a reality that only comes in time, through the extension of biological life into (family) history, etc.

in deckard's scene with wallace, are we supposed to take him as being sincere when he says rachel's eyes were green? (so that wallace just botched the reconstruction from, presumably, rachel's dna?) in other words, that he refuses to accept anything less than the reality of his memories (his desires etc)?

one thing i was not clear on, and seemed to be deliberately not made clear, is by what means humanity effected the obedience of the latest replicants. the whole premise leads one to be willing to accept some technobabble magical voila, but my impression of the fringes of the details that accrue in the plot is that it's just the same old combination of power, social coercion, and control over belief that has always been used to enslave human beings. (not even a matter e.g. of some substance dependency, as is common in this kind of story.)

that would perhaps explain the notes in luv's performance, the enthusiastic pursuit of wallace's mission combined with abject terror at wallace himself combined with seething rage for others. those aren't the feelings of someone whose obedience is a solved technical problem.

maybe you can read K's motivations when he opts to help deckard rather than kill him, like the revolters want, even though he seems to have accepted that the memory didn't belong to him and he only wished he was deckard's child, this way in terms of the sex scene with joi and the real girl, which seems important:

prior to that, we're given the impression, i think, that K's relationship with joi has been unusually chaste or gentlemanly, although we have no way to know that up until the scene in question, and the whole idea (j.o.i.) of their relationship is that it's essentially masturbatory. if chaste etc., it would seem to be because of the connection between joi and his cultivation of a private, inner life, not mere sexual fantasy, or a pathetic wish for happiness, but something he wants to protect or honor.

by the time of the sex scene he's thinking of himself as a real boy, at joi's urging. this is because of validating the memory; and i think - i can't remember the order - also because he's become convinced by then that he is deckard's child, thus fully real by all the important criteria in the movie?

the scene plays as a kind of capitulation. because the real girl is there, the pretext is that he in some way still disdains her, or is reluctant to profane his relationship with joi, yet accedes because her recent upgrade has somehow allowed a handy technical solution to the problem of realizing his desires with joi (surpassing her j.o.i. name). really, though, this is a line K had not crossed because for all his affable ease interacting with joi, all his openness with/to her, he had never really dropped the attitude that this, too, was not real, even if it was a pretense he took more enjoyment in extending. what has changed is that he now thinks of himself as real, not just real but superior, special, which does two things at once. one, he is willing to conspire with his own fantasy and drop his guard re the artificiality of it all, since he thinks of the fantasy as coming from himself and thinks of himself as securely real, deep down. two, the technical setup with the real girl effectively substantializing joi means that in actuality, nothing is being realized, the act of love is still a narcissistic fantasy, in which the sex is literally split off (to a subcontractor) onto, in true freudian virgin/whore fashion, the real girl, whom K is newly secure in viewing as beneath him. (of course, at the same time as he is exploiting her, she is exploiting him, getting in the conapt to drop the bug. her window is that he has made himself vulnerable, ultimately by conspiring with his own fantasy life.)

the read on the last bit would then be that rather than be exploited by the revolting replicants, and kill deckard for the sake of the saviour chld, in the process probably 'dying for a cause', what he does is again to side with his wish, or fantasy, of deckard being his father, even though he recognizes that he is not. it's because of a memory that's not his and a father that's not his, but he somehow acts as if that doesn't matter, as far as the realization of his desires is concerned.

still gotta work that out.

brb googling sean young blade runner hair

http://www.vintag.es/2016/06/astonishing-polaroids-from-private.html

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-b-zY_fYZ0nY/V18Jk-tyA1I/AAAAAAACPfI/1mmOLxBqiQ4OHuWViyFUw6XIprbDARfpgCLcB/s1600/sean-youngs-blade-runner-polaroids-2.jpg

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WbR5D4OMoUE/V18JkOsNhDI/AAAAAAACPfA/5qr7gOPo3LI9bTrhL4lF7tKxCMY_RMm-gCLcB/s1600/sean-youngs-blade-runner-polaroids-17.jpg

the read on the last bit would then be that rather than be exploited by the revolting replicants, and kill deckard for the sake of the saviour chld, in the process probably 'dying for a cause', what he does is again to side with his wish, or fantasy, of deckard being his father, even though he recognizes that he is not. it's because of a memory that's not his and a father that's not his, but he somehow acts as if that doesn't matter, as far as the realization of his desires is concerned.

yeah i liked this

liking your posts too j.

possibly this is where my "pickle jesus death scene" reading was pointing to (except without all the reading and thinking joining A to er Q or whatever)

Sports presenter on World Service this morning trying to do an introduction this morning: "we've heard a lot about Blade Runner 2014"

This was very good, but I agree with the problems mentioned here. Too long, too slow. Villeneuve seemed to want to match that aspect of the original, but I didn't like that much about the original either. The visuals and score were excellent - so many gorgeous sets and musical moments. The plot seemed secondary, as in written to showcase the sets, but was still interesting enough. The nonstop advertising of real-life companies was weird. I'm having a hard time putting into words why, but usually you see that kind of thing in more satirical, less serious scifi

sorry of this is dimm or literal but how come deckard's alive if he's a replicant? did tyrell make him "special" too? in the trailer i thought for sure that was primary among the "questions" K wanted to ask ol' ironsides

"too bad she won't live! but then again who does? present company excepted naturally"

(little-noted variant in one of the many cuts of the original)

the original film's nexus six models had built-in obsolescence. which is why poor roy survives a brutal fight only to flicker out like a candle at the end of its wick

I think there's a surprising amount of wiggle room in 2049 on the Deckard replicant question. Wallace postulates that his entire existence was a set-up for the destiny he had, and the base assumption is that if a replicant has a child it has to be with another replicant, but there's pleasingly no "AND THAT'S WHEN I FOUND OUT THAT I WAS A REPLICANT, TOO" dialogue

that would explain why they made a point of bringing olmos back, to help underscore the possibility that deckard could still be alive as a human, too

I kind of want to watch this again but don't want to leave the house, hrrrm

The olmos scene seemed more to raise the idea that Gant is also a replicant. It's replicants all the way down!

His retirement home looked pretty comfy for a run-down dystopia.

the police unions still make sure they have a pension plan, even if the rest of unionized labor broke down

yeah as a cop he's not one of the "little people"

the police station building reminded me a little of judge dredd comics

to the extent that either of these blade runner movies is "about" anything they seem less to do with their ostensible subjects (what separates humans from robots etc) and more about memories, and the function they serve, and about photography as a proxy for memory. photos are sort of like fake memories. reproducible, mechanical versions of memories. but in some ways these fake memories are even better than the original: they can be studied in detail, they don't fade (or at least not much) (and in the OG blade runner they can even be expanded, angles discovered that weren't there). in the new movie they extend this: the memory-maker, creating memories from whole cloth (usually) uses a device that looks essentially like a very high-end camera. the memories she creates are, like photographs, transferable, reproducible, exchangeable, they can enter into an economy. in the OG blade runner this is said to give the creators of replicants control over them. (how much is debatable?) but it seems like ana's thrown a monkey wrench into this system of control. she's inserted a real memory (illegally!) that destabilizes K, makes him question himself..

the read on the last bit would then be that rather than be exploited by the revolting replicants, and kill deckard for the sake of the saviour chld, in the process probably 'dying for a cause', what he does is again to side with his wish, or fantasy, of deckard being his father, even though he recognizes that he is not. it's because of a memory that's not his and a father that's not his, but he somehow acts as if that doesn't matter, as far as the realization of his desires is concerned.

still gotta work that out.

― j., Saturday, October 21, 2017

but but but he does die for a cause. and you've named it. he knows deckard's not his father and whatserface isn't his sister, but giving his life for them makes it so. et voila, he becomes a real boy.

tbf that's more a faith than a cause

(unless he actually IS robot jesus)

don't feel a strong need to split hairs but "in the service of life" strikes me as qualifying, causewise. it's not for nothing that the score pulls out that particular cue when he lies down on the steps.

i was laying emphasis on 'cause' being political, and his purpose, as he puts it to deckard, is, 'go meet your daughter', i.e. personal, private.

ok, looped in two friends and saw it again

i am the best replicant

rewatched blade runner 1 today -- the ending is good & iconic but overall the sequel is better imo

i just remembered the scene back at the farm when K spots the wonky piano key. v "clue from silent hill iii". i expected a triangle to appear hovering in mid-air with "ACTION" written above it (this is no bad thing)

something grim and nihilistic has happened to the subsequent generations of replicants. the new ones, like K, are still given memories, presumably to provide the same "psychic cushion" that Nexus 6s were. but they seem, unlike Rachel, to know quite well that those memories are false! can you imagine the cold depression that would envelop you??

i just remembered that deckard has a very nice grand piano in his hideout, and -- presumably hoping instantly to find a further clue -- K plays a single note on it

i like the idea that replicants can play the piano and apparently often do

knowing how wd be quite a useful fake memory tbh

like joe 90

an impression i had from the first third or so was that K's humanity made him a better detective. the depiction of his perceptual capacities clouds this somewhat, but even apart from that it just seemed as if he was much more of a noticing type (dolly in 'bleak house': 'I had always rather a noticing way—not a quick way, oh, no!—a silent way of noticing what passed before me and thinking I should like to understand it better.'), because of the interest he was taking in things.

re photography and memory, it seems as if the structure of their hunts for replicants assumes a kind of primacy of seeing it with your own eyes: the telling detail is the sight of the serial number. so i wonder what it means to have that be a detail that is visible only with instrumentation, typically only after death?, and at that typically only noticeable by replicants with heightened senses.

i am the best replicant

― mh, Saturday, October 21, 2017

she's a replican!

lol i almost made this joke earlier

clearly this should be the motto of freysa's resistance. it is snappier and frankly better in every way than the somewhat plodding "there is nothing more human than to die for a cause you believe in" which, you know, let's face it, could also be the ISIS slogan

"there is nothing more robot than to crush tiny humans"

about to finally see this, maybe 25 or 30 people here for small theater Sunday afternoon matinee, not bad.

i've crushed heads you people wouldn't believe...
https://i.imgur.com/UmfJY4F.png

Huh, flagging app ate everything I wrote.

Anyway, I loved this, utterly engrossing and hypnotic/dreamlike, which reminded me of some atmospheric horror films more than sci-fi. (Thinking specifically of movies like Near Dark, for some reason.) A million times better than I ever would have expected. I can totally see how someone might reasonably say this is better than the original, with the obvious caveat that without the original there would be no sequel.

There were times I felt it was a little too in love with its own ideas, but there were a lot of ideas, mostly really good, and the few bad ideas were generally fleeting (like anything with Leto and the rest of the very Matrix-y uprising stuff, none of which gets much screen time). At the very least, the hologram love scene was one of the most beautiful things I've seen in movies in a long time.

Avoided almost all spoilers, too, which was satisfying. Now to catch up on reviews!

(Overheard a couple leaving the theatre, with the woman telling her partner "Wow, that was pretty futuristic!")

nice

i believe you that the sync sex scene was beautiful but i was too busy getting absolutely SQUICKED OUT to appreciate it. truly unsettling

Well, that, too.

There is so much to unpack in that sex scene. An AI hologram who is human in almost every regard but physical who hires a physical replicant to more or less shut down and become the AI so that the AI can interact with a replicant who is beginning to think he may at least be part human (thanks to, in a nice twist, memories he thought were implanted that turn out to be more or less real).

Come on, it was the worst sex scene in a movie since the cave rave fuck in the Matrix sequel.

Well, at the very least they cut before they had sex. And also there was no rave. Or cave. And it was not in the Matrix sequel. And it was initiated by robots designed to do exactly what they were doing. So ...

(BTW, I am assuming there is such a scene in a Matrix sequel, because I can't remember shit about the other two except ... albino twins?)

...this was a slog, folks. A total fucking slog.

it was great. best looking + definitely best sounding movie i've seen in a long time. unbelievable sound

is this the third movie you've seen this year?

second

...see more movies.