REVIEW OF BLADE RUNNER 2049: on the ontology of replication

Red Wedge Magazine, 2017

Review essay on Blade Runner 2049.

Heersmink, R. & McCarroll, C.J. (2019.) The best memories: Identity, narrative and objects. In T. Shanahan and P. Smart (Eds.), Blade Runner 2049: A Philosophical Exploration (pp. 87-107). London: Routledge., 2019

Memory is everywhere in Blade Runner 2049. From the dead tree that serves as a memorial and a site of remembrance (“Who keeps a dead tree?”), to the ‘flashbulb’ memories individuals hold about the moment of the ‘blackout’, when all the electronic stores of data were irretrievably erased (“everyone remembers where they were at the blackout”). Indeed, the data wiped out in the blackout itself involves a loss of memory (“all our memory bearings from the time, they were all damaged in the blackout”). Memory, and lack of it, permeates place, where from the post-blackout Las Vegas Deckard remembers it as somewhere you could “forget your troubles.” Memory is a commodity, called upon and consumed by the Wallace Corporation, purchased from the memory-maker, Dr Ana Stelline, who constructs and implants “the best memories” in replicants so as to instil in them real human responses. Memory is ubiquitous in Blade Runner 2049, involving humans, replicants, objects, and machines. Even “God,” we are told, “remembered Rachael.” Nowhere, though, is the depiction of memory more important than in the attempt to solve a question of identity. Officer K has a memory of his past. Even though he knows it is an implant, it is a memory he is emotionally attached to, frequently narrating it to Joi, his digital girlfriend. But it is a memory that starts to puzzle and trouble him. When K discovers the remains of a dead replicant, a female NEXUS-7, he uncovers a secret—this replicant was pregnant and died during childbirth, a discovery that could “break the world.” K is charged with hunting down the child and making the problem disappear. Yet as K starts seeking answers to the question of the child’s identity he gets inextricably caught up in the mystery. Is he merely Officer K, or is he Joe, the miracle child of Rachael and Deckard? The answer to this question hinges on K’s memory. But is the memory genuine? Is the memory his? Blade Runner 2049 encourages us to think deeply about the nature of memory, identity, and the relation between them. Indeed, the film does not just serve as a starting point for thinking about philosophical issues related to memory and identity. Rather, as we show in this chapter, the film seems to offer a view on these philosophical issues. Blade Runner 2049 offers us a view of memory as spread out over people, objects, and the environment, and it shows us that memory’s role in questions of identity goes beyond merely accurately recalling one’s past. Identity depends not on memory per se, but partly on what we use memory for.

A look at how representations of the city, technology and gender create dystopia in the film Blade Runner.

In his 1993 book, Tarrying with the Negative, Slovenian psychoanalyst and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek states that "[w]e can … read Blade Runner as a film about the process of subjectivization of the replicants" (41). 1 In a similar sense, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep-the novel that Blade Runner is based on-can be read as a novel that explores not the process of, but the immediacy of the dehumanization and androidization of humanity.

While "Artificial Intelligence" describes cognition occurring on the part of machines, over the last several decades representations in television, film, and literature complicate what might comprise "the natural" relative to intelligence. This article explores what is at stake, besides masterful control, in narratives of intelligence as mediated and technical.

What would the future of heritage conservation look like? Would the concept of heritage remain the same or would new expressions of heritage come into play? What would the complexities of preserving this heritage be – or would preservation no longer be the first priority concerning heritage? If this is the case, are we heritage practitioners prepared for this future? And how distant or near is this future? The paper is an attempt to envision the future of heritage conservation – unavoidably linked to the future of our world –, reflecting on the book ‘The Archaeology of Time Travel’ and the movie ‘Blade Runner 2049’.

This essay argues that the science fiction classic disguises its use of race, signifying blackness indirectly through metaphor rather than directly through bodies that conform to traditional notions of biological race.

Comunicazioni sociali, 2014

The film Blade Runner raises issues of great anthropological value. This article explores the idea “cusp of life” as an ethical crossroads for the characters and the story by studying three key strands of the film’s narrative: the creation of human life as a moral dilemma for scientific progress, the search for identity among androids and the absence of parenthood (parenting) in manufactured human beings. Two strictly cinematic aspects are examined as a basis for its analysis. The first is genre-specific – studying the progressive anthropological predeliction of science fiction (their films project our contemporary fears and opinions of humanity into the future) and the development of the subgenre ‘cyberpunk’ (movies outlining two themes: the cybernetic organism and a chaotic society or one controlled by large corporations). The second centers on the story of Blade Runner – demonstrating its influence on later science fiction films, analyising its plot development (adaptation from book to film) and assessing the meaning of its six film versions.

Abstract A Study of the Impenetration of the Human and the Technological in Science Fiction Film: --Revisiting Blade Runner. Michael A. Unger Sogang University Graduate School of Media Ridley Scott’s prescient science fiction film Blade Runner (1982), thirty-three years after its initial release still marks a significant shift in the cyberpunk aesthetic and thematic changes of the notion of “alien” as “Other” within the science fiction film genre. This close analysis of the film re-examines how it offers a representation of the impenetration of the human and technology within the diegesis of the film through the notion of the “replicant”-- a technologically designed entity that exemplifies this fusion of the human and technology, creating a new subjectivity that collapses the boundaries between the human and machine. This re-reading also examines how the film reflects our relationship with technology in our contemporary, global information age. Key Words: cyborg, Blade Runner, impenetration, cyberpunk, technological l determinism, partial subjectivity,

This dissertation is a research into an element of what makes us human by looking closely at the postmodern film Blade Runner. Blade Runner has been well documented over the last 25 years since its original release for its integrity, visual aesthetics and complex ideologies. I understand that every angle of the film has been criticised, analysed and cogitated by varying degrees, by all number of acclaimed critics, writers and even philosophers. An influential film, it is one of the most used texts in academic study and stands alone as one of the greatest and most obvious examples of Science Fiction cinema. My direction has been to focus through the genre of science fiction film, to the influences of the author and director and wider society, which has enabled me to isolate memory as an element of being human. By looking at memory as an ‘inner space’ and an ‘outer space’ within the film I have ascertained that it is our memory that makes us individuals in wider society.