CHAPTER THREE

The Virtual Texts within Blade Runner 2049

In which I demonstrate what I mean by strong virtual by showing the story lines that make the movie more than what appears

Before inquiring into the specific potency of hope (the virtue underlying aspiration), I first wish to rehabilitate the power of the virtual itself by showing how this term, as a narrative function, works within Blade Runner 2049. This will provide a clearer sense of the strong definition of the virtual—how it is also excessive, generous, more than what appears at first glance.

First, in terms of its provenance, Blade Runner 2049 continues the tradition of Blade Runner in virtually realizing a set of pre-existing elements that lay latent within it. The original Blade Runner retains characters from Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, set in 1992. Hampton Fancher is co-credited with the screenplay for each movie, providing much of the continuity.[1] The movie Blade Runner takes the names of some of the characters (Rick Deckard, Rachael, Pris, Roy Baty, J.S.), a test to determine whether beings are humans or androids (Voight-Kampff), and a plot that features Deckard trying to hunt down robots who pose as humans—it leaves most of the rest of the novel behind. The movie adds the term “blade runner” (inspired by a 1979 William S. Burroughs book), the notion of “replicant,” and an enduring vision of a future Los Angeles that never happened. Dick’s novel is thus an observable non-reality that builds on a peculiarly efficacious good. The novel is latent within the movie as part of its inheritance—at the same time, one can see how the movie itself is virtually present within the book. The movie uncovers a virtue of the book that contingent circumstances (Dick wrote stories instead of movies, technological innovations necessary to Blade Runner weren’t present when he wrote Electric Sheep) could not allow.

Blade Runner 2049 expands on this peculiar virtue of Blade Runner. It re-presents the terms from Blade Runner (replicant, Nexus, Blade Runner) and novel (Rick Deckard) into a timeframe set 30 years after the original movie. Like the novel and movie, 2049 is a work of art portraying a dystopic vision of the future, featuring overpopulation and ecological collapse. In the movies, advertisements and poverty are omnipresent—forces twinned around virtual meanings of want. 2049 goes beyond the initial movie by pointing to three other text sources, taken into the movie as virtual components in a way similar to Electric Sheep. These source texts are observable non-realities that allow audiences to understand the greater scope of the film.[2] The first text is referenced by title and image—Pale Fire (Nabokov)—and also is virtually produced as K’s baseline test. Its inclusion invites audiences to see the movie in terms of the novel’s inheritance of metatextual references, inviting the relationship to the virtual that I am exploring here.  

The second text(s) virtually appear in the protagonist’s name—first K, then “Joe” K. The joke is that the tension between K. and Joseph K. recurs in two of Kafka’s novels, The Castle (which features “K”) and The Trial (which features “Josef K”). Thematically, both novels deal with the tension of the virtual and the real. In The Trial, Josef K is notified of a virtual guilt (a property of his that had been latent due to contingent circumstances) that he spends the novel attempting to name before he is executed by being stabbed by a knife in the side (“Like a dog!”)—happenstantially, this is similar to K’s wound in 2049. In The Castle, K. is given a task and mission, but finds it impossible to locate the source of authority that grounds his efforts. Power in The Castle functions as Josef K’s guilt did in The Trial: although wholly virtual, it is also present and effective at initiating change.

The third text, Treasure Island (Stevenson), emerges as a bizarre interruption. It comes into play in the third act of the movie and stabilizes Deckard’s relationship to 2049 as a metatextual reference to a character (Ben Gunn, in the book) whose relation to the plot (given the continent circumstances of the narrator) remained unknown until late. Deckard, like Gunn, has remained isolated in a place distanced from the action of the text until his information is required for the plot to develop. The book appears not only as a metatextual reference to the plot, but also references its virtual appearance in 1982’s Blade Runner—the novel was a favorite of Holden, a blade runner—in what ended up being a deleted scene (a deleted scene is, of course, a scene that is only virtually part of a movie).

Blade Runner 2049 also carries other virtual texts within its code—noir, which influenced Blade Runner (and thus also Blade Runner 2049), as well as Chinatown. Certain shots—a sole green eye staring to start the movie, Deckard pulling out a gun, K. with a bandaged nose—recreate visual elements within 2049 that clearly situate the movie within other cinematic structures. These structures can be understood as different kinds of “patterns” against what—relative to patterns understood by other texts—would be established as “randomness.” The result is complicated scenes: when Deckard first challenges K. by asking about cheese, it activates two virtual texts that comprise Blade Runner 2049: Blade Runner and Treasure Island. Understanding 2049’s virtual relation to Blade Runner makes the question of cheese randomness according to its pattern, and understanding 2049’s virtual relationship to Treasure Island frames the visual image as random relative to its connective spoken content. Knowing about the deleted scene in Blade Runner that references Treasure Island provides a point of view that appreciates the deeper virtual pattern that integrates the rival elements of seeming randomness.

The virtual text that the movie most closely invokes is clearly Blade Runner. Part of the pleasure of 2049 comes in exploring how Villeneuve provides a deeper sense of the logic of the original through what he extrapolates into a second movie. Although 2049 can stand alone as a film, having seen Blade Runner (either the original or director’s cut) provides a strong sense of the pattern of this movie. From one perspective, the movies are virtually identical—thirty years apart. The original features a human who wonders if he is a Replicant, 2049 features a Replicant who questions whether he might be human. 2049 uses totems that are virtually identical to those in Blade Runner—wooden carvings rather than origami. There’s a love story that succeeds despite being doomed to fail, and powerful women who attempt to kill the protagonist. Precipitation dominates, but as snow instead of rain.[3]

Each of these texts is virtually “present” within Blade Runner 2049 as an observerable non-presence. They come to the surface depending on contingent circumstance—an audience member’s familiarity with the cited text. In other words, appreciating this virtual dimension of the movie requires knowledge of narrative patterns that inform the movie’s decisions, allowing the audience to discern different patterns through seeming randomness. Knowledge of the virtual requires interacting with its actual wholeness, the event of the movie as a visual, sonic, narrative product. None of these virtual elements are whole, or necessary: each expands the pleasure of the movie by deepening it, and each contributes toward a shifting experience of a non-total whole that remains arguably present, more or less, throughout.

[1] In an interview, Ridley Scott suggests that he is also responsible for much of the story and writing that occurred in the screenplay for Blade Runner 2049.  https://ew.com/movies/2017/12/27/blade-runner-2049-ridley-scott-reaction/

[2] Ignatiy Visnevetsky’s “Forget it, Kinbote, it’s Chinatown: A Blade Runner 2049 reference guide” provides a helpful, more in depth guide to the texts that I argue remain virtually present. https://www.avclub.com/forget-it-kinbote-it-s-chinatown-a-blade-runner-2049-1819179477

[3] As Thrillist puts it, “That constant twinning of plot points, creating nostalgic reverberations and deja-vu-like familiarity in nearly every scene, will either be your favorite or least favorite part of the sequel.”