Do A.I.s dream what it's like to be a bat?
Blade running to the bottom of whether art is an empathy box
In Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, the poet John Shade, whose daughter drowned herself, suffers a blackout during which he has a vision of a fountain. Later he reads a story in the news about a woman who during surgery complications also had a vision of a fountain. He’s elated: the shared vision proves to him the existence of life after death. He gets in touch with the journalist, who confesses it was a misprint—the story was meant to read ‘mountain’. Nevertheless, “[Shade], conscious that his very quest to explore the beyond makes him seem a mere toy of the gods, derives a sense of the playfulness hidden deep in things, and feels that he can perhaps understand and participate a little in this playfulness, if only obliquely, through the pleasure of shaping his own world in verse, through playing his own game of worlds.”1 That is, through artifice.
Blade Runner 2049 references Pale Fire many times: we see a copy of the book in the shot above, and Robin Wright’s character Joshi quotes from it. Her replicant replicant-hunter, played by Ryan Gosling and called K or Joe, tells her a memory, which he knows is implanted, of a toy horse he hid from bullies in a furnace. However, in that Philip K Dick way of reversed expectations and circles within circles, this sequel to a story about a human who might be a replicant turns out to be a story about a replicant who might be a human. Another blackout, this time of global information, sends K on a trail that leads to the furnace, where he finds the toy horse. The memory wasn’t implanted but real, so he is real, as the film defines it—born and not made. But later the replicant rebel Freysa (Hiam Abbass) tells him he misread a meaning into what was just a diversionary tactic of the fugitive replicants, Deckard (Harrison Ford) and Rachael (Sean Young). Though the toy horse memory is a real one, it’s not his: it belongs to the film’s ‘true-born’ replicant, Ana. K is downcast to learn he’s not special but he persists in saving Deckard all the same.
In Blade Runner: The Director’s Cut and Final Cut, Deckard has a reverie not of a real horse but a unicorn. His colleague Gaff (Edward James Olmos) makes an origami unicorn, which he leaves at the door to his apartment instead of coming inside and retiring Rachael, if not Deckard as well. The unicorn reverie could’ve been implanted or just a coincidence—Deckard half-smirks, half-nods then makes his escape. The point seems to be not so much who or what Deckard ‘really’ is, but how tenuous all identity is.2
In the source novel to the films, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, a new religion called Mercerism has grown out of the ruins of World War Terminus and the mass extinction of nearly every species on the planet. Its followers use an ‘empathy box’ to watch and then ‘become’ an old man, Wilbur Mercer, who’s forever climbing a mountain while being pelted with rocks, the sting of which the box-user feels: simulated empathy, leading to fellow-feeling with all other humans. But androids expose Mercerism as a con - Wilbur Mercer is a drunk shambles of a bit-part actor - yet this doesn’t change the human characters’ response to it.
The sentimental take on all this: it’s a testament to the spirit, whether human or otherwise, to persist even when your raison d’être has been proven false. A better take: the raison d’être must be capable of being proved false to be worthy of following.
Cells interlinked
Nabokov is a dangerous touchstone, and referencing him the artistic version of an Argument from Authority, the sort of habit he himself parodied via the title of his novel and fake poem that so conventionally leaned on Shakespeare: “Help me, Will! Pale Fire” (which is from Timon of Athens). At worst, referencing him warns you that a story has pretensions above its pay-grade (the only successful Nabokovian story in recent times being the Darin Morgan X-Files episode ‘Jose Chung’s From Outer Space’). Denis Villeneuve, the director of Blade Runner 2049, and his screenwriters Michael Green and Hampton Fancher set themselves a high standard, tempted fate, and the results were predictable.
2049 has a clear-cut bad guy for us to revile in the form of CEO-god Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), introduced giving a monologue then dispatching an underling in the style of a Bond villain; Wallace also threatens to torture fan-fave Deckard himself. This torture needs to happen off-world so the plot can give Deckard the chance to be rescued from Wallace’s replicant henchwoman, Luv (Sylvia Hoeks). A few scenes earlier, Luv destroyed the hero’s hologram girlfriend, but Joe avenges his Joi (Ana de Armas) in a drawn-out superhuman martial arts fight, as disappointing a climax as the same Michael Green rustled up for Alien: Covenant.
Disappointing because the Blade Runner story, in its various iterations, has always been so much more than heroes versus villains or Screenwriter 101 tricks to generate sympathy. The story is about—is empathy.
If only you could’ve seen what I’ve seen with your eyes
The original film complicates empathy enough that it asks us to feel for a cop who executes runaway slaves, then tilt in the final act towards feeling for a homicidal Aryan android. In the sequel, despite the presence of the merciless Luv, we’re meant to squarely side with the replicants, reduced now to a revolution-in-waiting over their merciless human masters.
Whereas in Do Androids Dream…, empathy is not black-and-white nor a touchy-feely panacea; it’s necessary for being human, yet not guaranteed either. Humans might’ve developed Mercerism (whose consonance with ‘mercy’ is not accidental) but, even so, the pity shown by Deckard, a follower of Mercer, for his wounded bounty hunter colleague Dave Holden, is immediately tainted with ambition. The character J.R. Isidore (the basis for the original film’s J.F. Sebastian), gets treated kindly by his boss Mr. Sloat, but the moment they suffer a professional snag Sloat turns cruel on him. And when Deckard feels sorry for J.R. Isidore witnessing animal torture, he still refers to him, despite his empathy, as a “chickenhead” (a derogatory term for “specials”—people who remained on Earth after World War Terminus and are thought to have mutated genes due to the radioactive fallout).
The novel is ambivalent, too, about how much empathy we should have towards its androids. The best dramatisation of this is when henpecked Deckard sleeps with Rachael, which, given it was written in 1968, might be one of the earliest ‘sex with a robot’ scenes in the canon. As presented, it’s either a failure to subjectify Rachael, or - to allow that form follows function - is your trashy ogling SF sex scene that objectifies by genre convention but also in line with the theme of the specific story:
She unbuttoned her coat, carried it to the closet, and hung it up. This gave him his first chance to have a good long look at her… the total impression was good, however. Although definitely that of a girl, not a woman. Except for the restless, shrewd eyes.
In that noirish way, the sex leaves Deckard angry at himself. His self-hating response to his depressed wife has been to use Rachael, all the while scoffing at her lack of true consciousness.
Though Dick explicitly compares androids like her to antebellum slaves, the master’s religion is not available to these slaves because of a defect he wrote into them: they cannot empathise. Question is: do those who can’t experience empathy still deserve it? Then again, who does? Then again, what does? When is empathy just projection or anthropomorphism? And what if our fear of being accused of anthropomorphism is just a way to avoid the possibility that personhood might be more than a binary?
Everybody needs good neighbours
Do Androids Dream… is smart enough to go beyond questions of what is artificial about the human and human about the artificial. The novel is more lateral than that: it depicts four distinct forms of life: human, mutant, android, and animal. Fittingly for an author whose middle name is ‘Kindred’, Dick’s categories are not all equivalent but neighbours (Isidore: “It’s good to have neighbours.”) Rather than projecting ourselves onto the inner lives of others, ‘recognising their humanity’, empathy for Dick is about having a more diverse sense of what counts as a person. At the same time he doesn’t expect our responses to all four categories to be the same. His characters’ responses are certainly not.
Take J.R. Isidore, the novel’s unwitting moral centre. He’s glad to have made friends with androids despite their lack of empathy. Without them, he would feel like an electronic appliance:
In the absence of the Batys and Pris he found himself fading out, becoming strangely like the inert television set which he had just unplugged. You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean, before they came here I could stand it, being alone in the building. But now it’s changed. You can’t go back, he thought. You can’t go from people to nonpeople. In panic he thought, I’m dependent on them. Thank god they stayed.
Isidore needs their company, is kind to them, he even falls in love with one of them, Pris Stratton. He doesn’t think in a binary but plural way; his empathy stretches across the continuum of what is and isn’t human, and is expressed without judgement; in Mercer’s terms, he’s a “highly moral person.” Dick though, being Dick, makes the character who’s capable of this complex morality inferior to everyone else. The empathetic Everyman is a recurrent figure in his work—a reminder that morality doesn’t depend on social status and intelligence.
Deckard, meanwhile, begins the novel with fairly un-nuanced feelings towards androids: he hates them—useful for a man whose job is to exterminate them. The persistent, reliable android failure at the Voight-Kampff Empathy Test (iterations of which are used in both films) and at embracing Mercerism fuel this hatred:
An android, no matter how gifted as to pure intellectual capacity, could make no sense out of the fusion which took place routinely among the followers of Mercerism - an experience which he, and virtually everyone else, including subnormal chickenheads - managed with no difficulty.
Deckard goes so far as to say that “evidently the humanoid robot constituted a solitary predator”—though the humanoid robots he says this about are escaping slavery, so it’s not as simple as that. In his 1975 essay ‘Man, Android and Machine’, Dick says of androids that: “their handshake is the grip of death… their smile has the coldness of the grave,” and they’re “a cruel and cheap mockery of humans for base ends”. Yet after Deckard kills Luba Luft (Zhora in the original film), and after he discovers he has unsettling feelings for Rachael, his stance complicates:
Rick said: “I’m capable of feeling empathy for at least specific, certain androids. Not for all of them but—one or two… So much for the distinction between authentic living humans and humanoid constructs.
This richer empathy spreads throughout the novel, albeit with bumps. At one point Pris confides “the androids are lonely, too,” but still Deckard, like Dick, resists—his new ability to care about androids only makes him feel he is “violating his own identity.” Even so, he’s in too deep. Soon, and famously, he asks himself “do androids dream?”, granting them a facility for that most mysterious of human behaviours. Rachael too says she has empathy towards Pris, while Deckard confesses to loving Rachael. By the end both Deckard and Dick’s resistance breaks.
The films inspired by Dick’s novel are not so morally visionary. 2049’s binary thinking, like that of TV show Westworld, is one explanation for why they portray their androids as easily far worthier of empathy than corrupt old humans. (For one, to truly challenge our capacity for empathy, the androids in these stories should not be played so humanlike.) Villeneuve’s film has goodie replicants and baddie ones: despite some initial sympathy for the rebel cause, Luv3 is as dedicated as the Terminator in pursuit of her maker’s commands, wanting to prove, like she shouts near the end, that “she is the best” (do androids dream of Electra complexes?) And gone are the complicating Aryan undertones of The Director’s Cut and Final Cut; the replicant rebels walking out of the underworld sump in 2049 are conspicuously diverse. As for Ryan Gosling’s K/Joe, he goes from state executor to self-sacrificer in the familiar redemptive Hollywood mode.
Why, then, did the filmmakers return to a binary rather than Dick’s more complicated schema? A grim proposition: the age-old human urge is to divide the world into only two camps: those worth caring about and those not.
What Joi
The sequel understands how replicants will end up using their own replicants, how they themselves will enter the game of how much empathy they ought to feel for mass-produced entities of ambiguous personhood. In the novel, Rachael empathises with the rest of her android model types of which she’s just another token (though her lover, Deckard, gets annoyed by her mawkishness in this regard). While in 2049, Joe has his own reproducible romantic partner, Joi.
Through Joi, we’re meant to empathise with Joe’s loneliness—it’s clear she’s his only source of intimacy. But she’s also the nth degree of pornography, forever modifiable yet interchangeable and, as though this design-philosophy has leaked into the general girlfriend experience, a fantasy of total support, concern, and self-sacrifice.
Is this another chauvinist fantasy of a Stepford Wife? Or an improvement on the previous misogynist fantasy of a sex toy/slave with a handy four-year lifespan? Is Jo and Joi’s relationship reciprocal at least? Joe does give back to Joi, first giving her a simulacrum of touch which he himself cannot receive from her. She returns the favour another way, simulating sex with him by transposing her virtual self over the real body of a sex worker, who later turns out to be artificial, too, an updated vision of the replicant Pris from The Director’s Cut (in the novel, Pris was a clone of Rachael—presumably changed in the film to avoid audience confusion). This transposition in turn replicates the sex-scene-by-proxy in Spike Jonze’s Her, but without the latter’s ironising awkwardness. Joe and Joi’s relationship is pitched as noble. He buys her as much independence as she can get, and she uses it to try plead for his life.
Given that Joi is a Wallace Corporation product, it’s sad that even Joe’s solace is a mirage manufactured by his antagonist. A replicant can use a manic pixie dream hologram to his lonely ends, but in doing so he treats a sex worker as a shell to be filled by a make-believe woman; he pins his dreams and desires to a piece of standard-issue merchandise: relief brought to you via surrogates and evil billionaires. (Villeneuve probably just meant for Joi to be a way we could empathise with Joe, but you should always be careful about what kind of consolations you give your lonely men…).
Not you; I mean me
Jared Leto’s Wallace complains he can only make so many replicants. But, inspired by this passage of Rachel’s dialogue in the novel, the replicants from the original film offer him an opportunity:
Androids can’t bear children—is that a loss?… I don’t really know; I have no way to tell. How does it feel to have a child? How does it feel to be born, for that matter? We’re not born; we don’t grow up; instead of dying from illness or old age we wear out like ants. Ants again. Not you; I mean me.
K finds evidence that Rachael did get to know what it was like to have a child: hidden inside a piano is a dusty piece of infant clothing (‘For sale, baby sock, never used?’). For the rest of the film he grapples with the question of “How does it feel to be born?” It feels better in any case than to have been made. Wallace, too, hunts down the evidence of this miracle birth, in order to create a self-reproducing workforce to conquer the stars. He wants hereditary slavery.
Still, you can always rely on Jared Leto to be terrible in playing this role. (According to reports he stayed in character between scenes. Maybe he’s still in character.) Then again he did have the hard job of outlining the sequel’s notion of personhood: speciation. Replicants make babies now.
Robin Wright’s character cites the ability to reproduce as the crucial distinction between humans and replicants.4 But Mother Rachael is dead at the beginning of the film, leaving Deckard as the quarry, possibly as some kind of prize stud—turns out the whole story was about the highest-paid actor after all. Poor Roy, Pris, Zhora and Leon, downgraded to a subplot in another miracle birth narrative. Screenwriters, stop and think if you have anything interesting to add to the Bible mythos! The very title of the novel should have given a hint as to what else they could’ve done with Dick’s story.
Dick wanted to know whether androids dream of electric sheep; The Director’s Cut asked whether humans (and possibly replicants) dream of unicorns; in 2049 we learn that replicants dream of toy horses.
But to dream can also mean to yearn. What if replicants had lacks they desired to be filled? What if they were anxious about wealth and status symbols like the Blade Runners and their wives? And what if they replicated our corporate-taught fantasies about love?
Yet, while foregrounding Joe and Joi’s relationship, 2049 undercuts the beauty of the Deckard and Rachael love story. Instead of Deckard and Rachael running away together even though she’s going to be dead in four years time, and maybe him too, the sequel reveals they were in fact, and fortunately, longer-lasting Nexus models. Turns out Eldon Tyrell was lying when he said he couldn’t give more life (fucker).
In memory of a real tree
Tyrell built the replicants, “but not to last.” The facts of life: everything dies. The landscapes of 2049 are the “tomb world” that we read about in Dick’s novel. But the its theme was more about the macro-climate than the personal or animal. Whereas the dead tree at the start of Blade Runner 2049 is symbolic; someone’s left a recently alive flower at its root because the tree is also a grave, one that contains evidence that life has found a way (again).
Animals are the soul of Dick’s novel. The mass extinction of nearly all animal and plant life has turned its Earth into a wasteland—a “void”, Isidore calls it. Owls died out first; in the original film, an owl is one of the first animals we see. Strangely, the film reverses what kind of owl it is (“Is it artificial?” / “Of course it is.” / “Must be expensive.” / “Very.”) Here the artificial owl has become a symbol of wealth; in the novel it was the vanishingly scarce real bird that would be the ultimate luxury item.
The words “cells interlinked within cells interlinked”, heard as part of the sequel’s new, automated and scarily hyperactive Voight-Kampff or “baseline test”, come from the poem in Pale Fire. Their meaning is no longer to be openly read as in that novel, but a literary reference to be spotted. The Voight-Kampff test in the first film included questions about animal cruelty among those about and sexual romantic boundaries; in the novel, animal cruelty is the main concern. Such an ‘enlightened’ attitude towards animals, however, only serves to highlight in the novel how graded human progress always is, how each generation, in its smugness about what they’ve now allowed into the scope of moral consideration disregards at the same time another class of living things—in the novel’s case, androids.
The reason animals are essential to the story is because they’re the closest analogue for androids—they, too, are less human than human. The characters yearn for animals with which, now most are extinct, they’ve formed a haunting spiritual bond. So even in this mild sense, which borders on sentimental nostalgia, humans have evolved. Yet these same humans still execute slaves. And these slaves, whom we might feel sorry for, torture animals.
In one of the novel’s final scenes, Isidore’s new neighbours, his friends, take a precious real spider he’s discovered and cut off its legs, one by one. My guess is Dick chose a spider for this scene because it’s not cute. Neither does the torture ennoble the spider; its suffering is gross and pathetic. As such the scene tests the reader. Sure, it remains horrific - Isidore’s helpless anguish, his pointless empathy - but if we’re shocked at what the androids do to the spider, shouldn’t we feel the same about what Deckard does to the androids?
The last animal to feature in the novel is the one Deckard finds when he falls into the hell-vision of the tomb world, where everything is meant to be dead. Even there, though, he finds life, in the form of a dusty old toad. Except, when he gets home to gift it to his wife, she discovers it’s artificial.
It won’t matter.
Not the same but almost
The tension between the real and the artificial was always the least interesting place a new Blade Runner film could have gone with the story. Especially when that binary is so evaluative, with the almost-real or the as-good-as-real made to feel like a tragic compromise: “It’s better than nice, it feels authentic, and if you have authentic memories you have real human responses. Wouldn’t you agree?”
This line, said by the sequel’s ‘real’ miracle replicant Ana, is another example of modern films inadvertently giving away their ethos through dialogue.5 In a vertiginous postmodern way, 2049 itself wants to be real, to be authentically Blade Runner: when composer Jóhann Jóhannsson left the film it was because his score didn’t mirror Vangelis’s as much desired. (Vangelis is still alive and working, you know…)6
In that aspiration, the sequel still fails. Some claim that Blade Runner, in whichever cut, is only a technical or visual achievement. A lot’s buried in that ‘only.’ How can the early work of Ridley Scott, with every frame dense with intelligent detail, be put in the same style-over-substance category of, say, the haute music videos of Tarsem or the cod-David Fincher style of modern prestige TV? Slick Villeneuve has no knack for Scott’s production design clutter, for what Dick called “kibble”; the city scenes are too clean and uncrowded at street-level. Villeneuve’s much more comfortable with the stark contours we get in Wallace’s castle and Ana’s dream laboratory. His style is more expressionistic, too, than Scott’s (at times the film has the 90’s aesthetic of Brazil or Delicatessen): the labyrinthine refinery and junkyard locations, the overhead shots of an endless, dark Los Angeles with its lava-glowing trenches of future favelas.
The best example of this desire to authentically replicate some essence of the original film - the word ‘best’ here used advisedly - is in the climax: a CGI Sean Young portraying Rachael as she looked in the first film. A few years ago, I wrote that we were still in the uncanny valley but climbing up a slope; in 2049, we conquered the peak. Either this special effect of Rachael marks the triumphant and on-theme collapsing of the binary between the artificial and the real, or it’s the final seal on modern cinema’s desperation for lifelikeness above all things.
For Dick, however, artifice-as-artifice was worth our time, and in a way that went beyond extending our empathy to the artificial, putting the artificial on a par with (if not equal to) the natural. Because maybe empathy depends on artifice.
In Do Androids Dream… empathy is ‘disproved.’ The androids reveal that Mercer is an actor, paid in whisky, that the empathy box experience is based on a lie. But, in one of the most beautiful and moving passages in any genre, Dick writes:
“Is the sky painted?” Isidore asked. “Are there really brushstrokes that show up under magnification?”
“Yes,” Mercer said.
“I can’t see them.”
“You’re too close,” Mercer said. “You have to be a long way off, the way the androids are. They have better perspective.”
(Can we even imagine a story where Truman hits the painted wall of reality and returns happy?)
“Is that why they claim you’re a fraud?”
“I am a fraud,” Mercer said. “They’re sincere; their research is genuine. From their standpoint I am an elderly retired bit player named Al Jerry. All of it, their disclosure, is true. They interviewed me at my home, as they claim; I told them whatever they wanted to know, which was everything.”
“Including about the whisky.”
Mercer smiled. “It was true. They did a good job and from their standpoint Buster Friendly’s disclosure was convincing. They will have trouble understanding why nothing has changed. Because you’re still here and I’m still here.” Mercer indicated with a sweep of his hand the barren, rising hillside, the familiar place. “I lifted you from the tomb world just now and I will continue to lift you until you lose interest and want to quit. But you will have to stop searching for me because I will never stop searching for you.”
Perhaps empathy depends on ‘authenticity’ not really meaning anything. In the tomb world - increasingly a “familiar place” to us - we experience a storied kind of identification: Deckard is Isidore is Mercer who is an actor. The point here goes further than how it doesn’t or shouldn’t matter that Mercer is artificial; for instance, Isidore still wants and needs the androids’ company even though he knows they’re exploiting him. Mercerism’s artificiality makes it collapse on itself yet it remains a transcendent experience—so perhaps it had to contain the possibility of artifice in order for that to occur. The worthiness of empathy like Mercerism lies in the fact you can never know the other. Theoretically we’re all replicants to one another: soulless, inner-lifeless. Empathy is risk, trust, ‘taking a chance on someone’, ‘giving them the benefit of the doubt’ and all those other hoary humanist virtues.
What else collapses, or ought to, the real and the artificial, and in order to make people feel for what’s not really real? Fiction is our empathy box: in novels, poems, plays, films, following then feeling like others and so identifying with the real plight of made-up characters. The spider, and the spider’s carer Isidore, whom the reader empathises with so keenly, were not ‘really’ there either. All fictional characters are simulated living things, are replicants.
Fiction works because of our natural tendency to read agency into the inanimate. Empathy, meanwhile, is itself a kind of fiction—you can never know what it’s like to be someone else, never walk in another’s shoes, never be Mercer climbing up that mountain, not really. Literal empathy is impossible, yet it happens all the time in fiction. Empathising with characters in a story is a sort of purposeful conceptual mistake. And, since there’s no gap between our perception of a fictional character’s subjectivity and their own subjectivity, this mistake is more ‘accurate’ an empathy than exists in real life.
Might empathy, then, have started as a mistaking of identity, like that between real and implanted memories, between fountains and mountains? Is that how it evolved? Did the imaginative capacity needed for language - “What do you mean?” - entail some brief minor confusing of yourself with the other, from which neurological side-effect came all moral and spiritual feelings of brother/sister/otherhood? Because surely the ancestor of “What do you mean?” must’ve been “What do you feel?” Our feelings are how we experience the physiological preparedness for actions we might be about to do. But to learn what another creature might do (what it might do to you), we first had to develop the capacity to feel what they felt. Using “I feel” interchangeably with “I think” and “I believe,” as we do in ordinary conversation, isn’t then a sign we’re dangerously mixing up emotion and reason but a wisdom.
Empathy regardless of artifice - and artifice in the full Dickian scope: artificial animals as well as humanoids as well as made-up characters - is what fiction gets us to practice. Our empathy for fictional characters is meaningful despite/because of fiction’s fictionality. (It’s mature, healthy to cry at a tragedy; for now it’s deluded to cry over a broken toaster; but considering our relationship to pets, it seems inevitable that one day we’ll mourn and weep at the death of machines.) All empathy is an act of faith, it all depends on make-believe as opposed to certainty about what the other is or isn’t. Yes, we can never know what it’s like be a bat, but a moral imagination is just that, imagination. Once when I was younger, I saw a bat that a boy had knocked out of the sky with a boomerang. Its wing was almost sliced off at the armpit, and the blood was purple. Its chest moved up and down fast as it lay in the boy’s hand; then he tied its wings in a knot to stop it from escaping. I didn’t know what it was like to be that bat, but I could imagine how it felt. My imagination wasn’t some mystical connection between beings, nor an apprehension of a true fact. It was just a belief, a story, but one that told me what I should’ve done: not left the bat to the boy’s mercy but killed it as soon as his back was turned. Had he told me I couldn’t truly know whether the bat was real, or what it felt, or whether it could feel anything at all, wouldn’t that have been as psychopathic as somebody who could say the same thing, with just as much grounds, about a human?
Does it matter whether my story is true?
Ensemble, def. ‘all the parts of a thing considered together’
If it doesn’t matter who’s ‘really real’ or not, whether Ana or Joe was the miracle replicant ‘twin’, then Joe, on finding out he wasn’t real, should’ve behaved even more like he was— failing a second brainwashing ‘baseline test’ more drastically than he had done the first time.
In A.I. Artificial Intelligence (a big influence on Blade Runner 2049, with dirty-bombed Las Vegas twinned with statuesque Rouge City) the ability to dream, this time absolutely meaning ‘to yearn’ as well as ‘imagine’, is what drove android David (Haley Joel Osment) to the end of his quest, and it’s what makes him, in his creator’s eyes, a real boy. But on learning he’s still not as real as the creator’s true-born son, his biological archetype, David throws himself off a building. Whereas when Freysa in 2049 breaks the news to special Joe that he’s just replicant K after all, he - barring a brief shock - keeps trudging along the same pre-programmed course of action he was always on. (Brian Boyd again: “It is not that deflating recognition, however, but the resolve that follows it, that forms the core and key to the poem.”) The core story of 2049: ‘I am the chosen one. I’m not, they are. Ah well, I can still be useful.’ Our hero politely dies after reuniting the real chosen ones: miraculous father Deckard and miraculous daughter Ana. Then again, perhaps for K to step back from any special status and willingly make himself useful to others is the kind of anti-narcissism that Dick would’ve admired.
The narcissist believes they’re the main character in life’s story and others are bit-players, supporting actors (only there to support, their own lives just an act). Whereas to empathise is to feel like everybody is the main character, that existence must be an ensemble story, that everybody is the chosen one because a choosing one—creatures with responsibility as well as agency. Because one thing we have to choose is whether we want to live by the following story: that all of us are responsible for anything we feel can feel.
In the film’s source material, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Deckard starts questioning his identity over merely a faked video call.
Whose name alas doesn’t provide the film any Blackadder “Captain Darling”-style jokes.
The film is weirdly pro-life in this sense, similar to how, in the novel, not only do humans make fur illegal but abortion—nothing is uncomplicated in the world of Philip K Dick.
See the comforting regression contained in Star Wars: The Force Awakens line, “Chewie–we’re home.”
Which itself is odd, considering how un-Vangelis-like the final score ended up being; no cheesy saxophone, no half-synthesised / half-honky-tonk piano, very little twinkle. Instead we hear sound-stretched versions of the original film’s melodies with what seems like Hans Zimmer yelling his signature blares into a vocoder.