Blade Runner, cyberpunk, and the importance of cultural context
Hello again! Here's another essay of mine - a bit older, though, so probably not as good. Once again, don't judge me too hard, but feel free to discuss things with me if you'd like. This essay is what inspired my somewhat unsettlingly popular 'permanence in the digital age' post. This essay discusses Blade Runner, its sequel Blade Runner 2049, and the ways in which the emergence of cyberpunk is related to the sociocultural environment of the 1980s.
“All those moments will be lost in time”: the importance of social and cultural context in understanding and analysing Blade Runner 2049
When analysing any work, be it a Shakespearean tragedy, a historical news article, or a surrealist painting, it is fundamentally important to acknowledge and consider the social and cultural context of the period in which the work was produced. When analysing film, this is undeniable. For example, Hollywood has been described as an “unwitting recorder of national moods”, often reflecting escapist or nihilist tendencies within the American public (Rollins, 2015, p. 1). Aside from being useful in fully understanding plot details, costume choices, and set designs, understanding a film’s context is often essential to understanding its underlying messages and lessons, as well as its tone. Within this essay, this concept will be explored with specific reference to Blade Runner 2049 (2017, dir. Denis Villeneuve), the Blade Runner universe, and the cyberpunk genre as a whole. By comprehending the social and cultural context of a film (and its genre), a more complete understanding of the film’s meaning and message can be gained. Thus, knowledge of a film’s context is undoubtedly essential to film analysis.
Blade Runner 2049 is a long-awaited sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, a work fundamental to the integration of ‘cyberpunk’ into the science fiction tradition, and which has “exerted a powerful influence on virtually all subsequent film visions of the urban future” (Booker, 2006, p. 185). In order to understand the importance of the context of Blade Runner 2049, one must first examine the context of the original Blade Runner, and how the cultural and social circumstances of the 1980s are reflected by and related to the circumstances of the 2010s. This allows for a better critical examination of not only the in-universe chronology and plot, but the way in which the context of the original Blade Runner, when contrasted with the context of Blade Runner 2049, adds meaning to the film. The 1980s was a time of economic and political upheaval, rapid technological advancement, and environmental and social concerns; in terms of audience, the aftermath of the Vietnam war and the Watergate scandal left the American public feeling apathetic (Harrison, 2017). These issues, particularly those involving the growth of corporations and the development of new technologies, impacted the science fiction genre greatly. In his preface to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk anthology (1986), author Bruce Sterling gave an early indication of this influence.
“Technical culture has gotten out of hand. The advances of the sciences are so deeply radical, so disturbing, upsetting, and revolutionary, that they can no longer be contained. They are surging into culture at large; they are invasive; they are everywhere. The traditional power structure, the traditional institutions, have lost control of the pace of change.” (p. xii)
Within the film itself, Blade Runner reflects these fears and circumstances through its polluted, dark, electronically-lit shots, drawing on the lighting techniques of film noir to create an atmosphere of bleak futility and danger (Guynes, 2020). Huge electronic billboards of beautiful women form a hypersexualised and hypercapitalist backdrop, and the mise-en-scene is consistently crowded by large numbers of Asian characters, reflecting xenophobic immigration concerns and fears about overpopulation (Chan, 2020). Without knowledge of Blade Runner’s social and cultural context, the relevance and meaning of these lighting and set design choices would be lost.
Blade Runner 2049, in contrast to the Reagan-era original, was released in 2017. The 2010s were a decade defined by: further technological advancement and the rise of hugely powerful corporations like Google, Facebook, and Amazon; increased awareness of environmental catasrophe due to climate change; more individualised media and advertising consumption in the age of streaming and metadata; economic inequality and inflation… the list goes on (“The decade, explained”, 2019). Indeed, it seems in some senses that Blade Runner was a prophetic work. Many of the fears of the 1980s reflected within it have solidified and grown more real.
The replicants, androids whom the audience sympathise with and yet fear in the 1982 film, are more empathetically portrayed in Blade Runner 2049. The protagonist, K, faces discrimination at his workplace due to his replicant status; combined with a slur graffitied on his apartment door and the imagery of a huge wall built around Los Angeles, Villeneuve draws a more direct allegorical line between replicants and immigrants than his predecessor (Wegner, 2020). Additionally, while the majority of Blade Runner takes place in cramped city streets, dark buildings, or the opulent halls of the corporate overlord Eldon Tyrell, Blade Runner 2049 portrays aesthetically distinctive environments (Wegner, 2020). These include: Las Vegas, warmly-lit and orange-tinted, irretrievably damaged by nuclear fallout; the cool-toned agricultural outskirts of Los Angeles at the opening of the film, home to a singular yellow flower that seems to signify both hope and threat; and the grey industrial desolation of the San Diego wasteland, filled with trash and child slave labour. These distinctive environments allow Blade Runner 2049 to follow cyberpunk’s tendency towards “global integration”, using them as allegories for both worldwide exploitation and national inequalities, without losing sight of Scott’s original, more insular film (Sterling, 1988, p. xiv). The social and cultural concerns of 1982 and 2017 are somewhat different, but clearly related - or, perhaps, interlinked.
All of this is to say that Blade Runner 2049 reflects highly relevant real-world contextual issues. This is, arguably, obvious to anyone who has seen the film - but for the sake of evidence, specific elements must be examined. The film opens, after a brief exposition, with an extreme close-up of a human eye. This then cuts to what turns out to be a bird’s eye view of a concentric solar panel installation. The composition of the shots are similar, with the eye-like structure and blue-grey colour immediately linking the human body (and, given that the eyes are the window to the soul, the human spirit) to technology, industry, and exploitation. This reflects one of the central tenets of cyberpunk science fiction, internally-focused and “implosive”.
“The topoi of implosive SF are based on analogies of the invasion and transformation of the body by alien entities of our own making. Implosive science fiction finds the scene of SF problematics not in imperial adventures among the stars, but in the body-physical/body-social and a drastic ambivalence about the body's traditional - and terrifyingly uncertain - integrity.” (Csicsery-Ronay Jr., 1992, p. 188).
Throughout the rest of the film, this connection between technology and physical exploitation is reaffirmed. Plot details (such as the use of child slave labour in gathering scrap metal, and the link between artificial intelligence and sexual exploitation) expand on this, but so do the parallels between characters. Deckard, protagonist of Scott’s 1982 film, is reflected in K - both are Blade Runners, performing executions at the command of corporations (because, although both work for the LAPD, it seems that the chain of command ends with Tyrell or Wallace rather than any government authority). K is accompanied by Joi, an artificial intelligence that serves as his housekeeper, girlfriend, and confidante. She is undeniably exploited by the world of Blade Runner 2049, both sexually and emotionally, but the audience are always fully aware that she is not human. Despite this, the fact of her exploitation is echoed in K’s character, who is used as an instrument of violence.
Villeneuve strikes a key modern fear in this: technology that humanity has created, for the purposes of exploitation, is now indistinguishable from ourselves. This is ultimately cemented by the fact that K is not human, confirmed towards the end of the film, despite looking, acting, feeling, and dying just like us. The link between humanity, technology, and exploitation is a potent one, considering the modern trend of the ‘internet of things’, the use of customer metadata as a product for sale, and constant corporate surveillance in order to increase sales and datapoints. Without knowledge of this real-world fear, these character parallels and their implications lose emotional and cultural significance.
Another significant sociocultural concern reflected in Blade Runner 2049 is digital impermanence, and the recession of physicality. The character of Joi illustrates this best, but so do two particular objects - the wooden toy horse, and the origami unicorn from the 1982 Blade Runner. In a world where physical media objects (such as newspapers, CDs, DVDs, and even paintings) are increasingly phased out, Blade Runner 2049 explores the implications of life in a digital environment. The audience is first introduced to Joi when K arrives home at his apartment, through an odd sequence of interactions reminiscent of 50s housewives and their husbands. First seeming like she is calling from another room, it becomes evident that she is actually a disembodied voice, whose holographic form flickers into existence as she serves K “dinner” - a projection of steak and fries, which she places over his real food, a sad-looking bowl of grey noodles. Joi and K play out their nightly routine of programmed intimacy; however, it is clear as the scene progresses that both harbour a real affection for the other. K, after spending his bonus on a device that makes Joi more mobile, takes her to the roof of the building so she can experience the rain. A panicked Joi, later in the film, frets over an unconscious and injured K. They are portrayed as emotional and autonomous beings. Joi’s subsequent death is horrifying, then, on two levels: not only has a conscious, potentially unique being been murdered, but such a being was existing exclusively on the virtual plane, and was destroyed, leaving no trace of her existence in the physical world.
Blade Runner 2049 is by no means the first work of science fiction to address the ethical complexities of artificial intelligence. However, it portrays the fear of deletion sympathetically and horrifically, while many other fictional works do not. For example, the character of HAL-9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) attempts to kill humans out of self-preservation. Although this is often an acceptable motive for many positively-portrayed human characters (and, indeed, the real-world judicial system), HAL-9000 is considered by most to be a “quintessential cautionary tale” about the dangers of AI (Gittinger, 2019, p. 145). The portrayal of Joi, in contrast, parallels her with K; K is in turn a human allegory. As characters, they are tied together.
Blade Runner 2049 thus explores a real-world contextual anxiety by asking relevant and haunting questions of its audience. How much of our lives are now digital? How much of a trace will we leave behind when we die? How much of us can be deleted by a few keystrokes, existing nowhere but on a few Amazon-owned servers? These fears are contrasted by the physical objects used as motifs in both the 1982 and the 2017 Blade Runner films - Deckard’s origami unicorn, and K’s wooden horse. These are physical, sentimental objects intruding on the digitally-focused cyberpunk environment. A deleted scene from Blade Runner suggests that the unicorn is something out of Deckard’s memories - this implies that he could be a replicant, though this has remained intentionally ambiguous (Chapman, 1998).
Regardless, within both films, these objects signify memory, and are physically grounded in reality. By contrasting physical objects against a digital (corruptible, hackable) environment, Blade Runner explores a modern fear of the digital replacing the physical. This fear, highlighted by Joi’s murder-deletion, is one that has only grown since 1982; today’s context of NFTs (owning digital “tokens” of art rather than the actual art itself), music and video streaming with no artifacts left behind, and seamless virtual reality gaming, is darkly reflected in Blade Runner 2049.
From a broader look at contextual impacts on the Blade Runner universe, to a more focused examination of some of the sociocultural fears reflected in the story, it is clear that an understanding of the context of a film is necessary for a comprehensive reading of it. The explicit portrayal of current social and cultural concerns within Blade Runner 2049 are central to the film. Without knowledge of - or, indeed, fear of - xenophobia (specifically with regard to ‘wall-building’), environmental degradation, the exploitation and objectification of women and workers, and the rising power of corporations and omnipresent and omniscient technologies, Blade Runner 2049 becomes largely an aesthetic exercise. This is not to say that analysing or critiquing a film purely on an aesthetic basis is pointless, but that any work cannot be fully understood and represented without at least an acknowledgement of its context, and the sociocultural issues it may be responding to.
Perhaps director Denis Villeneuve said it best, in a 2017 interview with Vanity Fair:
“What is cinema? Cinema is a mirror on society. Blade Runner is not about tomorrow; it’s about today. [...] If you look at my movies, they are exploring today’s shadows. The first Blade Runner is the biggest dystopian statement of the last half century. I did the follow-up to that, so yes, it’s a dystopian vision of today. Which magnifies all the faults.” (Hoffman, 2017).
An understanding of a film’s social and cultural context is hugely important for a comprehensive examination of the film’s elements. Without this understanding, the significance of these elements may be lost or disregarded. Blade Runner 2049, and the Blade Runner universe as a whole, illustrates this extremely effectively.
REFERENCES
Booker, M. K. (2006). Alternate Americas: Science fiction film and American culture. Greenwood Publishing Group.
Chan, E. K. (2020). Race in the Blade Runner cycle and demographic dystopia. Science Fiction Film and Television, 13(1), 59-76. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/750563
Chapman, M. (1998). What is the significance of the unicorn? Blade Runner Insight. https://br-insight.com/library/significance-of-the-unicorn/
Csicsery-Ronay Jr., I. (1992). Cyberpunk and neuromanticism. In L. McCaffery (Ed.), Storming the reality studio: A casebook of cyberpunk & postmodern science fiction (pp. 182-193). Duke University Press. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/10.1215/9780822398226-033
Gittinger, J. L. (2019). Personhood in science fiction: Religious and philosophical considerations. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/10.1007/978-3-030-30062-3
Guynes, S. (2020). Dystopia fatigue doesn't cut it, or, Blade Runner 2049's utopian longings. Science Fiction Film and Television, 13(1), 143-148. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/750552
Harrison, T. (2017). Pop goes the decade: The eighties. Greenwood Press.
Hoffman, J. (2017, November 24). Denis Villeneuve Is the Sci-Fi Remake Master with Blade Runner 2049 and the Upcoming Dune. Vanity Fair. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/11/denis-villeneuve-blade-runner-2049-dune
Rollins, P. C. (2015). Hollywood as historian: American film in a cultural context. The University Press of Kentucky.
Sterling, B. (1986). Mirrorshades: The cyberpunk anthology. Arbor House Publishing Company.
The decade, explained. (2019, December 18). Vox. https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/12/11/20968465/2010s-moments-best-of-instagram-uber-occupy-decade
Villeneuve, D. (Director). (2017). Blade Runner 2049 [Film]. Warner Bros. Entertainment.
Wegner, P. E. (2020). We, the people of Blade Runner 2049. Science Fiction Film and Television, 13(1), 135-142. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/750568
That's all I have to say, I think.