Do Androids Dream of Electric Greeks?
Blade Runner 2049, a cinematic sequel that has appeared thirty-five years after the original Blade Runner, returns viewers to a dark and powerfully imagistic world where artificial humans (“replicants”) aspire only to stay alive before they are killed (“retired”) by the police. In its initial 1982 release, Blade Runner was an amazing film, which created a stunning, impressive vision of a future Los Angeles set within a globalized corporate culture. Viewers were told of off-world colonies, but shown only an overpopulated city beleaguered by climate change, with a fiIm noir voiceover from the detective Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). The original film is beautiful and cerebral and open-ended enough to prompt existentialist discussions about the self and the limits of humanity. The sequel recreates the ambiance and the imagery, and (crucially) it maintains the open-endedness, but it also falters in certain key respects.
This isn’t a review of 2049. I want instead to discuss the three most prominent classical images of the film — the wooden horse, Oedipus, and Pygmalion’s statue, Galatea. None of the classical sources is programmatic, but they are immanent enough that they suggest some kind of deeper engagement. These classical frames point respectively to an unexplored mystery in the film, to an undeveloped aspect of the protagonist, and to a significant problem in the representation of women. These issues each use classical sources as a point of departure, not because they were all intended (I’d suggest they’re presented in a decreasing order of intentionality, wherever that intention might be located), but because the classical offers a crowbar for unpacking the core of a film that carries with it so many expectations and associations that have accreted with the franchise over the past thirty-five years. This is an indirect but still important kind of classical reception. Both science fiction and myth provide a reflection for the society that produces them. When these two frames overlap, there is an opportunity to cut to some of the deeper narrative implications of what’s on the screen.
There have been many attempts before 2049 to expand the Blade Runner world in different media (comics, video games, novels, radio dramas, and a never-ending series of recuts of the original film, each of which reshapes the weight to be given to pieces of evidence on some of its central questions). I’m not interested in that for now, nor in the original novel by Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Doubleday, 1968), except to observe that Dick’s novel does flirt with the classical.
The new world religion presented in the book, Mercerism, focuses on a Christ-like martyr of perpetual, ongoing suffering, Wilbur Mercer, who is always climbing a hill while being pelted by stones. Readers are meant to think of Sisyphus, rolling his stone as described by Homer, Odyssey 11.593–600, filtered through Camus’ 1942 essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, and its assessment of the fundamental absurdity of human existence. The novel concludes with Deckard climbing a remote hill and mysteriously getting hit by a stone. There is no explanation, only an impetus on the reader to assess the novel’s Deckard in the light of Sisyphus. The classical theme doesn’t provide answers, but does shape the questions that can be asked. The same is true, with different themes, in 2049.
Loads of spoilers follow.
I. The Wooden Horse.
K (Ryan Gosling) is a Blade Runner, a police detective specializing in killing renegade replicants. He is also a replicant himself, with no name at the start of the film other than his police designation KD9–3.7 (though the shortened “K” overtly alludes to the initial in Philip K. Dick’s name). As a manufactured human, he has memories of his childhood, but they are artificial creations, created by designers.
Memories can’t be trusted, and K’s are knowingly false, implanted in order to provide a depth of experience the replicant has not undergone. They provide templates for the emotional (or apparently emotional) responses that help make replicants indistinguishable from humans. As a result, the viewer can accept that memories are painted in broad strokes. K “remembers” a childhood toy he had, how he was chased by other kids, and hid it rather than give it up to the bullies who then beat him. K blushes to describe the story, since he knows it is only part of his programming.
Memories are part of the “ghost in the machine,” philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s description of the Cartesian mind. The phrase is rich for thinking about androids, since it is that elusive spark, the ghost, that observers of apparent consciousness can only assume from outward behavior. This is a standard trope in android/robot science fiction, emerging most obviously in Ghost in the Shell (a 1989 manga by Masamune Shirow, which became a 1995 anime).
Blade Runner 2049 is laden with evocations of this idea. Allusions are littered across the screen — literally, in some cases: empty shells of oversized bodies are scattered on the ground as K approaches the Las Vegas hotel in which the original Deckard is living. At the same time, this image is a visual realization of human vanity, to think that we could create something as marvelous as a human being. For a film concerned with the lasting legacy of humanity, this evocation of Shelley’s “Ozymandias” seems almost heavy-handed:
… on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things …
Earlier, K has insisted that he is “real,” a plaintive affirmation that equates him with the false life of Pinocchio, the carved wooden marionette who dreams of becoming a real boy. (Readers are invited to evaluate Eldon Tyrell (Joe Turkell) in the 1982 film as a Geppetto figure in their own time.) Other allusions similarly evoke childhood adventure stories that may have been implanted in K: Stevenson’s Treasure Island is called out explicitly, with K as Jim Hawkins to Deckard’s Benn Gunn, marooned in the desert.
K’s toy is a wooden horse, carved from a small piece of wood and labeled with a date. Since it is real wood, it is absurdly valuable in this dystopia, yet it is treasured for no reason other than it is K’s only (remembered) possession. Can we be shown a wooden horse and not think of the hollow ribs that encased the hidden Greek soldiers who snuck their way into Troy? It’s such a laden image that suggests another story of adventure, perhaps (Odyssey 8.492–520; Virgil, Aeneid 2.1–401; etc.), but it’s also another echo of life nested within an empty and deceptive shell.
The film encourages viewers to dwell on these choices that have been made: K establishes his “baseline” as a replicant by reciting a passage from Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), a copy of which he has in his apartment. Pale Fire is a metafictional novel in the form of poem-and-commentary that explicitly alludes to many previous works and encourages re-reading in that light. When Joi (Anna de Armas) encourages K (whom she calls Joe, a more human name, and yet one that’s so generic it could be a default in Joi’s program, the name used by prostitutes of American soldiers in Korea and Vietnam) to read it, the request is an invitation to viewers as well.
Most obviously, the wooden horse evokes the origami unicorn in the original film, which Gaff (Edward James Olmos) folds and leaves for Deckard to find — nature and fiction bent and shaped by the hand of man. Though we don’t know it yet, the memory of the wooden horse is the key to the film’s central mystery. In his quest, K finds himself in an orphanage that is strangely familiar, and discovers that the horse is in fact real: buried in the ashes (of time, of memory, of an abandoned incinerator) he retrieves the only object from his past that he has been programmed to care about.
Whose memories these are, and how they relate to his quest, are revelations that threaten to unravel the essence of society as surely as the Greeks razed Troy. When K meets the resistance (replicants seeking an overthrow of the established order), he is told “we all wanted it to be us.”. Each of them has the horse memory. The Trojan Horse is inverted, hidden inside the soldiers instead of them inside it. The memory is a kind of virus that has been implanted in the memories of replicants and will lead to consciousness and rebellion.
II. Oedipus
As 2049 opens, K retires the replicant Sapper Morton (David Bautista), a farmer living a quiet existence. Investigation finds a female body buried by a tree outside Sapper’s hovel, and K learns that it was a woman who apparently died in childbirth. Subsequent investigation reveals that the woman is Rachael (Sean Young), the replicant Deckard ran away with at the end of the first film.
The revelation that there is a replicant baby somewhere (something that shouldn’t exist; the “miracle” mentioned by Sapper) begins the trail that K pursues. Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright), K’s human superior in the police, wants the child retired and all evidence of its existence destroyed — “This breaks the world,” she explains. K’s sense of duty is consequently challenged by his own past: the date carved on the tree where she’s buried is the same as the date on the wooden horse in his memory. This and other clues induce the viewer to conclude, as K concludes, that he is the lost child.
A detective seeks an unknown individual, and learns only too late that it is himself he seeks. This is a well-worn trail that inevitably evokes Oedipus’s determined quest to discover the killer of Laius in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. K doesn’t know his own parents (he has memories of an orphanage), and he learns that the memories he possesses are not fictional, but “they are real,” in the words of Ana Stelline (Carla Juri), the memory artist K meets. The search seems to anticipate an almost unavoidable conclusion, that K is Rachael and Deckard’s child.
The association with Oedipus is not perfect, of course, which saves it from being programmatic. Deckard himself becomes the Oedipus figure in a scene with Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), in which the blind visionary who has replaced Tyrell tries to cow the former Blade Runner into accepting the future he describes. The violence in Wallace’s words and actions, his contempt for K, his physical blindness, and his prophetic aspirations all mark him as a Tiresias figure.
The presence of “Tiresias” invites other associations. Sapper becomes a version of Sophocles’ Corinthian shepherd, rescuing the child years before. Rachael, wife and mother, as an absent but loving Jocasta authorizes the slippage between K and Deckard: K doesn’t want to sleep with Rachael, and so the Oedipal associations are incomplete, but the detective on a trail to discover himself (and apparently in the unique position of being able to follow the trail; it is a riddle no one else can solve) imposes the Sophoclean model.
There’s a sense in which all of this is forced: there’s an improbably small cast of players in the story of 2049, and every one seems relevant to unravelling who K is. So deep are the mythical ruts the story follows that one may question the many coincidences the plot imposes: that K appears to be the only one for whom the date on the tree will have significance; that the one artist he speaks to happens to be able to confirm the authenticity of his memory, etc. We’re almost tempted to think of it as lazy storytelling: that the narrative paths are familiar enough that the film can bank on viewers accepting it all, as did Sophocles’ audience. K is the chosen one, who alone is able to solve and resolve the identities of mother, father, lost child, and himself. We need to believe this if the twist is going to be effective.
For K isn’t the child in question, but is, apparently, a decoy. He’s been given the memories of Rachel and Deckard’s offspring, but (as he initially believed), they were implanted. When he had asked Stelline if the memories were real, her answer was true, but not in the sense that K understood. The memory was crafted by her, but also experienced by her: she is the lost child. The film establishes clues that there was a decoy. While K thought he had circumvented the misdirection, he was in fact following the trail that had been left (and which perhaps only he could follow). It’s not even clear Stelline is being duplicitous: one more question from the detective might have been enough. But the narrative trail being pursued was familiar enough that he doesn’t follow up.
Blade Runner 2049 depends on narrative expectations imported from Oedipus, even if it’s not specifically using the play as a source. When Wallace tells Decker that he and Rachael were brought together, it is a model of fate and prophecy that is familiar from Greek tragedy (regardless of whether or not Wallace is telling the truth). Indeed, the false connection made may even recall Fred Ahl’s iconoclastic interpretation of the play in Sophocles’ Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction (Cornell UP, 1981), in which he argued that Oedipus in fact was not guilty of killing his father, and that the evidence that he was Laius’ son was circumstantial. The film makes the same narrative move: inducing us to believe that K is something that he is not, based on our willingness to accept narrative implausibilities as we suspend our disbelief.
III. Galatea
Stelline is the child of a replicant (or, maybe, of two), and this threatens somehow to undo the corporate hegemony held by Wallace and to threaten the social stability generally as replicants realize the possibility of reproduction, freed from corporate controls.
To trace associations with Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation would be straightforward, but looks forward, to a time following the narrative of the film. Any story that involves men creating women risks an indirect association with classical myth. Pandora, as the first woman, responsible for releasing evils into the world, might be a natural association in this context. I think instead in this case it’s helpful to think of Galatea, the name given in the eighteenth-century to the statue carved by Pygmalion whom Venus brought to life (Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.243–97). It’s a problematic story, sexualizing a crafted female body, but it is one that resonates particularly with replicants: “more human than human is our motto,” says Tyrell in Blade Runner, declaring his belief that his creations surpass human limits; ars adeo latet arte sua (“in this, his art is concealed by his art”), agrees Ovid two thousand years earlier (Met. 10.252). Two women in 2049 need to be considered, since both of them are victims of male violence that stems from Wallace.
The first is Joi, a virtual girlfriend that K owns. Joi lives in K’s apartment, talks to him, is his confidante and companion, but she is also a holographic projection, purchased off the shelf. A more affordable product of the Wallace Corporation than a replicant, Joi creates and maintains the ideal of a married life, flicking through outfits until she finds one that he likes. The viewer sees Joi as another type of artificial person.
Fuelled by associations with the film Her, in which a man falls in love with his computer operating system, the viewer nevertheless perceives the disembodied Joi as an individual worthy of love. At the same time it is hard to shake the sense that she is a program, and that her subservient and sexy demeanor is too ideal, designed by men to fulfill male fantasies. Does that matter? Should it? Blade Runner 2049 works hard to establish Joi as someone worthy of our empathy, but it does so at the character’s expense.
One way it does this is with a choice it makes: Joi hires a (replicant) prostitute to make love to K, while her holographic image is superimposed on the woman’s body. His fingers feel Mariette (Mackenzie Davis), whose body is a surrogate that overlaps with Joi. Joi isn’t puppeting Mariette, though, but following her actions: who is in control, and who the marionette? It’s almost the ambiguity Pygmalion experiences in his early furtive gropings of the statue he has made:
Often he moves his hands over the object, testing whether this
is flesh or ivory, which it did not seem to be ivory before now.
He gives it kisses, believes it kisses back. He speaks to it, holds it,
and believes his fingers’ touch grazes her limbs,
and he fears a bruise may come where he presses.
Three artificial beings share the closeness of sex. Looking at Mariette’s body offers another echo of Blade Runner, since Mariette is styled in a way to evoke Pris (Darryl Hannah), the “pleasure model” replicant from the 1982 film who hides among the robot puppets. The experience of intimacy in Joi’s initiative is hard to disentangle, though, and the sense remains that Joi helps create the tenderness but is kept apart from it.
Later, Joi asks for her program to be transferred entirely into a mobile projector, which allows K to continue to enjoy her companionship away from his apartment, but leaves her vulnerable. Inevitably, her projector is destroyed, by Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), a replicant enforcer working for Wallace. (Yes, Luv kills Joi, with a high-heeled sledgehammer of symbolism.) Luv has also stolen Rachael’s remains from the police station and casually killed Lt. Joshi.
In Luv’s final battle with K, his strangling of her is not sexualized, but it is yet another presentation of a woman’s body being attacked. In 2049, women’s bodies are made to be broken, and they can be replaced. To drive that point home, K sees a giant holographic advertisement for the same model of holographic girlfriend on the street. Wallace is growing adult female replicants and killing them — stabbing them — at birth, when they do not meet his needs.
This is all troubling for K (and presumably for the viewer), but what happens to Rachael is worse. When Deckard meets Wallace, Deckard is shown the physical remains of Rachael: his true love’s body exhumed to torture him. This is not Hamlet finding Yorick’s skull, and feeling the absence of a love once enjoyed in the face of one’s own mortality. It is an unforgiveable cruelty to Deckard’s memory of Rachael (and, to a lesser extent, of our memory of the 1982 film). Then he is offered a temptation: a new Rachael walks through heavy shadows, and viewers of Blade Runner know who it is instantly from her distinctive and elegant gait.
Weirdly, the special effects technology that allows actor Sean Young’s face to appear as it did 35 years ago reprises the sex scene with Joi: Young’s virtual young face is artificially superimposed on the physical body of a substitute (Loren Peta, according to IMDB) in order to create an uncanny physical form that otherwise couldn’t exist. When Deckard does not immediately accept this duplicate as Rachael, she is shot point blank in the head by Luv, disposed of cruelly and without regard to anyone’s feelings. She meets the same fate as Wallace’s other experiments to reproduce the replicant that can reproduce, and the violent and casual disregard for life, always in the form of an adult female body, is viscerally repulsive.
Put simply, too many of the bodies subjected to casual violence in 2049 are female. Luv brutalizes Joshi, Rachael, and Joi, a trifecta of human, replicant, and hologram. Rachael, for Deckard, and Joi, for K, are both present in a relationship, and, in different ways, absent — kept incomplete and not fully realized. Women’s bodies become disposable things to be used by men, ghosts in a machine that seems indifferent to their fate.
K comes to understand that he himself is a duplicate, the decoy created to keep Wallace and others like him away from Stelline. That awareness of his own irrelevance only emerges through the ways that each of the three classical models has failed to run its course. In Blade Runner 2049, the wooden horse creates the replicant resistance; Oedipus offers a model of a detective seeking to find himself, only to be overwhelmed by the implications of that discovery; and the story of Pygmalion and Galatea reveals deep and unresolved problems about the treatment of female bodies in the film.
C.W. Marshall is Professor of Greek at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His latest book is Aeschylus: Libation Bearers (Bloomsbury, 2017). He’s seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
