CHAPTER FOUR

The Virtue of Hope Within Blade Runner 2049

in which I describe the theological virtue of hope (opposed to wish) and argue why it is important for understanding the strong virtual

Having explored the potency of the virtual as the power of latent presence within narrative options embedded within the film, I now want to return to the discussion of what how the virtual relates to a model of hope, what Green described as the “aspirational” element of the script. My model for the virtual nature of hope builds from the material elements of the movie, but ultimately contributes to an expanded theological understanding of what hope might mean in a secular, technologically oriented world. Understanding “hope” as part of the virtual helps justify the theological perspective that I believe is a virtual (latent) element within the film—in the strong sense of a factor that makes the film more than just another sci-fi action movie.

Blade Runner 2049 features three different points of view shared among different characters, each of which hope to find the child that K. is eventually is assigned to procure. The first point of view is embodied in Freysa (Hiam Abbass), the leader of the Replicants who hopes that the child—who embodies an ability for Replicants to reproduce without human interferences—will free them from humans. Lt. Joshi shares this point of view, but from the opposite direction—desiring to quell a potential Replicant uprising, she wants to destroy the child and all evidence that it had existed. The second point of view is embodied in Wallace, and thus by Luv: it hopes to acquire the child and use it as a way to unlock Replicant reproduction in order to expand Wallace’s empire. The third point of view is embodied in Deckard, who has a paternal hope to see his child once again.  

Hope is a concept that has been developed within a Christian theological context. In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas argues that hope has three intersecting qualities: it is a point of view that regards something futural, arduous, and possible. This definition still informs how we speak of hope today—we don’t hope for what is present or past, there’s no need to hope for what will come easily, and we know not to hope for what is impossible or contrary to reality. Theologically, hope differs from wish—it means something a bit more although conventional usage may render them as synonyms. It is easy to substitute “wish” for “hope.” For example:  “I hope I get a different job” and “I wish I had a different job” are functional equivalents. The example of the child in 2049 speaks to a difference: the wish to find the child first and the hope that the child embodies are overlapping, but non-identical. Even though each party may wish to find the child first, and even though the wish is something futural, something possible, and something arduous (at least as it directs action), it exists in a different sense than the hope that such a child represents. I would like to argue that hope is the observable not-yet-reality that underlies the competing wishes and points of view.

In a way, the difference between hope and wish replicates the difference between the strong and weak sense of the virtual. The space where they’re virtually identical or synonymous fueled the criticisms of religion launched by Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Feuerbach. Each supposes that the appearance of God, or religion, is the projection of a wish that runs contrary to reality. Marx thus sees religion as the “opiate of the masses” which allows the oppressed to wish for an afterlife that includes less suffering, Nietzsche sees it as the wish of the weak to dominate over the strong, Freud finds it as a form of wish-fulfillment or magical thinking, and Feuerbach simply finds God as a way to project and thus externalize our values. The practice of religion often feeds such critiques, as humans worship gods made in their image with violent, tragic consequences. Religion, as wish, is thus equivalent to the weak virtual—it invites experiences that appear to be bigger than what they actually are.

These perspectives, which Ricoeur classified as detailing a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” provide a reductive account of religion. Hayles’ account provides a handy example of why these accounts end up equating religion to the weak virtual: they look at the question of “god” in terms of pattern/randomness, discarding the mythology as “random,” and exposing the underlying “pattern” as though it were the sole cause of religious sentiment. By extracting the pattern as the true “essence” of what religion “is,” the thinker thereby makes hope equivalent to wish—there’s no materiality that would resist this extraction. The hermeneutics of suspicion simplifies the virtual content that remains latent within the possibilities of religion, or the gods that religions may invest with hope. Although religion as wish is one virtual possibility within religion—one that many seize upon—there are other virtual possibilities within religion. Thus, while the isolated virtual sense they interpret is “true,” it is similar to claiming that Blade Runner 2049 is virtually the same as Pale Fire—which is accurate, but misleadingly incomplete.   

Nonetheless, their success at creating a powerful argument against religion attests to the power of the virtual. Isolating one virtual strand of the virtual truth that underlies religious impulses provides a coherent pattern of what arguably is true. Often, arguments that identify a sole possibility as the “true essence” of a complex phenomenon can succeed at dismissing it by relating it to the weak, rather than strong, virtual. In this case, equating religion to wish, rather than hope, makes religion appear less than real. The resulting certainty that “religion is false” often has as a corollary consequence the elimination of the stronger virtual field. In this case, limiting discussion to the weakest version of religion’s virtual capacity leads to a forgetfulness concerning the far more potent virtual strands of hope.     

Not all critical accounts of religion are reductive. Jordan Miller provides an expansive account of religion that explores its capacity to inhabit observable non-realities. In his masterful Resisting Theology, Furious Hope, Miller argues that hope is grounded in the subjunctive, the “might be” true, that assigns religion the task of identifying unripe potentials that have yet to become (rather than wishes that are merely contrary to reality, or that hover above it in a disconnected sense). He defines the subjunctive as the  “grammatical mood of a verb used to express uncertainty, hypothesis, contingency, possibility, desire, potentiality, necessity, hope, or action that has not yet occurred,” and argues that

 the subjunctive describes the world, not as it is, but as it might be. This “might be” is the root of religious world-construction through theology, myth, and ritual. Subjunctivity uproots the world the way it has been and plants new possibilities in its place. The world becomes meaningful through subjunctivity.[1]

This sense of hope as “might be” seems less certain, less urgent, and more open than the reductive explanations offered through the hermeneutics of suspicion. Rather than outlining a pattern as the dematerialized essence of an observable non-reality, Miller’s subjunctive engages in activities like uprooting and planting, symbolic language that speaks to a kind of  rematerialization of the world that counters the “might be” hoped for by informatics, at least as Hayles describes it. If informatics and the hermeneutics of suspicion are powerful because they abstract the essential pattern away from the material in order to predict and replicate precise outcomes, then the subjunctive is powerful by installing unknown potential into fertile material soil and allowing the unexpected to emerge.

Put back in terms of 2049, the embodied child presents hope at the foundation of three very different “might be” worlds. This child anchors the possibility of a world that is yet to come, one that remains potential. The embodied child thus differs from when Joi hires a Replicant sex worker to fuse with her as a way of making love with K. During this scene, Joi’s clear desire to have an embodied future is presented, but its presentation is that of a wish (contrary to reality) rather than a hope (a potential that the future could inhabit).

Both hope and wish have a yearning to allow a future to materialize, but hoping and wishing have access to different levels of the virtual—the strong level of more than (hoping) and the weak level of less than (wishing). Paul Tillich’s account of symbols provides a useful way to distinguish the different virtual realities that undergird each. Symbols re-present the structure of the virtual in a theological form: hope requires symbols and wishes, which can (like Joi) overlap the material world without finding an anchor, find no such purchase. As Freud knew, a wish finds its own fulfillment in haunting the present by observing (and living in) a non-reality.

Wishes incline toward disappointment even as it finds easy fulfillment. Hope lacks a wish’s instant and imaginary gratification. Its stakes are generally the reformation or recalibration of the material world aligned with its virtual potential. The apparent disconfirmation of hope is thus devastation. We remain trapped in a world we’d desired to leave behind and feel that what had felt like hope was only a wish after all. 2049 allows audiences to glimpse this devastation as K wrestles with the question of his possible material origin—and thus his options for the future.

Because hope connects a virtual now with an actual future, we sense it in the present in its incompleteness. Symbols work to create this bridge through some of the structural features that Tillich identifies. Symbols both point beyond themselves and participate in what they point toward. They open up new levels of reality, and unlock corresponding parts of the soul. Finally, they are produced out from the collective unconscious and thus have life cycles (growing old and dying) anchored in specific cultural understandings.[2] Symbols call out to the observable non-reality within us, a virtual potentiality within us whose becoming will unfold in tandem with the future world. 2049 shows this kind of recognition as characters become acquainted with a new sense of self aligned to the revelation of a possible child.

Tillich’s discussion of symbols, which emerged in his description of faith, seems applicable in a context of hope—that which is futural, arduous, and possible. A symbol points beyond itself into the future, and (unlike a wish) participates in what it points toward in a materially present sort of way. This futural unfolding alters contingent circumstances, which thus opens a new level of reality, a virtual reality that has remained latent, as well as a corresponding virtual part of the soul. The material circumstances that contextualize the production of this symbol emerges without intention (unlike a wish), but provide a focal point for a collective anchor.

A symbol of hope works because it virtually is what it might be in the future: it is virtual, material, subjunctive. Children, in general, symbolize hope in this way—they embody and anchor a virtual future in which they might participate, depending on contingent circumstances. Consider the child in 2049, at least at the time of its birth. At this time, it is not literally capable of reproduction, but its vital virtual capacity unlocks a potential future that resonates within Wallace, Deckard, and the Replicants. Each future is an observable not-yet-reality that depends on which—if any—of the interested parties succeed in finding the child first. Each of these parties also creates a different story around these possibilities that anchor a different world of meaning. These rival visions of the future are virtual potentials, any one of which would entail a logical outcome of the story.

These subjunctive “might be” worlds of 2049 present distinct virtual narratives embedded within the movie. The narratives borrowed from cultural products that inform the narrative externally (Kafka, Treasure Island, Pale Fire, Electric Sheep, Chinatown) present an analogue of the “collective unconscious” that Tillich references in relation to the uncreated symbol. These stories of hope anchored in the child are virtual narratives in a similar fashion, at a level anchored internal to the movie. At one level, the virtual futures that might emerge exist only for the characters within the movie’s world. At another level, to the extent that these virtual futures unlock a corresponding domain within the audience, these become a virtual future in which we can participate. Clearly, the virtual reality opened relates less to holographic companions or Replicant police than a way of understanding the strong virtual aspect within reality. In indicating the contrast between wish and hope, strong and weak, the movie gestures toward ways that the virtual realities that hope opens are seeds that continue to spread, unlike wishes that rarely move beyond the person or community that more superficially opposes reality.

The symbol of hope has a virtual relationship to this future world: it provides the virtue, or power, that will enable a “might be” world to come into being.[3] Such symbols are “inherently powerful or effective owing to particular natural qualities.” These symbols of hope are also not relegated to a far-off future—although it anchors a future possibility, the symbol of hope is always important in the present. In making a desired future world, no matter how arduous, possible, the virtue of the symbol of hope changes current, status quo understandings of reality—and thus the reality itself. It provides new information that remains integrated within material reality (possibility) even as it shifts the relation of pattern/randomness to present a new reality. This material planting that corresponds with an opening of the self makes the virtual, observable not-yet-reality of hope differ from the observable non-reality of a wish.

Finally, the virtue of a symbol of hope is able to offer material changes to reality in each next, rather than the far-off future of its ultimate fulfillment. Put otherwise, rather than seeing hope as “proven” or “disproven” given the future world in which the symbol does or does not function within a given “might be” world, hope’s virtue is effective in each next moment that the soul is unlocked to resonate with a given version of the might-be. This allows for the virtual to provide material resistance to the status quo, as it gives birth to an observable not-yet-reality. The symbol of hope is the essential seed that draws together past narratives into a new perspective on reality. The setting of 2049, anchored in a world where the Soviet Union remained an active political force, shows how smoothly the virtual supports and anchors contingent counterfactual realities. Its basic assumptions in its setting create a “might be” world of old hopes. What makes a hope true is how it activates the virtual within the human—how it inspires us to live with the virtue of hope—rather than concrete changes in the world.

Relative to its own timeline, Blade Runner 2049 has three different virtual futures in competition throughout the movie that congeal around one central symbol. Whichever actor is able to relate materially to the symbol will, in this way, have the power to affect which of the virtual futures becomes materially present. Relative to the movie’s latent (virtual) narratives, this means that the interested party ends up relating/interacting with the child determines the ends to which the child is put. K. becomes the focal point of the movie in part because these three virtual (future) possibilities summon him as an agent who has the power to activate one potential. In the plot of the movie, this occurs as K. is tasked (by Joshi) to find the child even as his drive toward this particular potential plot occurs through the activation of one of his own (virtual) memories. He is given to understand a (through interactions with Luv and Freysa) the stakes of who “gets” the child, as well as the understanding that his acting on the information will determine primary access to the child. His behavior matters, but the choice exceeds his programming or his memories because it ultimately is a choice that brings a new world into being—even as this new world is one of three that is virtually presented.

[1] Miller, Furious Hope, Resisting Theology

[2] Tillich, Dynamics of Faith

[3] The fact that this movie inspires hope, despite being a noir film set within a dystopic future world, is intentional. 2049’s director, Villeneuve, said “For me, one of my goals was to create a bleak world with strong sparks of beauty coming out of it. …The humanity of the characters creates beauty. It’s a movie that I feel has, in a strange way, an optimistic ending. I’m glad about that, because I need to have that kind of optimism in the world today.”  https://time.com/4964530/blade-runner-denis-villeneuve-interview/