Blade Runner 2049 and The Virtue Potential of Virtual Realities By Daniel Boscaljon
Blade Runner 2049 and the Virtue Potential of Virtual Realities
By Daniel Boscaljon
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Introduction:
This essay examines some of the virtual theological and humanist implications of the movie Blade Runner 2049. I replicate the movie’s movement, attempting to be slow and deliberate in its construction. The essay is divided into 1: Introduction—an overview of Blade Runner 2049 and virtual reality, 2: The etymology of “virtual” (in strong and weak forms), 3: The virtual texts that appear in 2049, 4: The virtual dimension of hope, 5: Virtual potentiality (paranoid and reparative approaches), 6: Virtual theological approaches (natality and necrophilia), 7: Conclusion—depiction of individual moral virtue. Each of these sections provides a different lens that adds to the meaning of the term virtual, moving from its most common cultural connotation that connects it to digital technologies to a sense of how the virtual empowers us. By the end of the essay, I hope to have been persuasive concerning the importance of how stories (whether textual or visual, books or movies) can empower us to live subjunctively, toward an observable non-reality that our decisions can bring into a shared existence.
CHAPTER ONE
in which I offer an initial sense of virtual reality and offer a synopsis of Blade Runner 2049 as well as Blade Runner
It is likely that humans have lived in virtual realities since the advent of language. Our finite field of perception invites frequent occasion for mistake, and how I understand events, even when virtually identical to how you do, diverges from you in small but important ways. Technological innovations, from cave painting onward, facilitate (rather than create) the realities that we inhabit: these create objective conditions that provide entry points into non-realities that we can virtually inhabit. For example: Plato’s Republic. As a written text, the dialogue itself creates a virtual reality where we participate and overhear conversations with dead Athenian men. The content, dedicated to an exploration of justice and power, also shows a deep interest in the problem of virtual reality and our hunger for the real. We see this most famously in the Allegory of the Cave, but these virtual realities occur in each of Plato’s thought experiments—from the ring of Gyges to the myth of Er.
That said, the human capacity to inhabit virtual realities has magnified through technologies that—like writing—open varying possibilities for what presence and absence mean. Technological power often takes the form of action at a distance, whether temporal (reading The Republic, written thousands of years ago and in a different language) or physical (reading The Republic on a smart phone, in an airplane). Contemporary digital technologies have entered into a sphere of the named virtual, making virtual realities into an expected part of daily existence. Clearly, VR headsets like Oculus Rift attest to this trend.
The blend of digital technologies and our penchant for virtual realities mean that our sense of non-virtual realities has become more difficult to grasp than the time of Plato’s shadows on a cave wall. The proliferation of smart phones (with cameras, filters, and interactive elements) make transforming the surrounding world easy. Beyond these visual technologies, Trump’s occupation of the White House and the surrounding state of rival information streams—including both accusations of “fake news” and journalists able to comment on prevarications as they emerge from political leaders—has exposed how easily the information age explodes into a host of different virtual realities that people can occupy even when sitting in the same room. Social media reinforces the nature of these divergent virtual realities. The more technology is able to dislocate us from remaining presence in a way that is shared with those around, the more we begin to have a merely virtual relationship to ourselves.
This essay provides an in-depth theological account of virtual reality through a reckoning with the movie Blade Runner 2049, which serves as an anchor text for a more general teasing out of the meaning of the virtual throughout. The hope of this reading is to show two divergent, extant senses of the term “virtual,” locating them within both historical and contemporary attitudes toward reality and theological supports for those attitudes. The essay begins by discussing the meaning of the term “virtual” as observable non-presence, which diverges into two main understandings—the virtual as either more or less than what appears to be present. This sense is then expanded through Katherine Hayles’ work on the posthuman to discuss how technology causes a virtual epistemic shift from one dominated by presence/absence to one that foregrounds pattern/randomness. In the second section, I explore the empowering sense of the virtual (as implying more than what appears) by exploring some of the narratives that form the patterns that inform Blade Runner 2049.
The third part of this essay explores the structural similarity connecting “virtual” and “hope,” which argues that hope is a form of a virtual reality that—unlike a wish—can be anchored in an imminent material expectation. I then discuss the movie in terms of the divergent kinds of hope that anchor around a central symbol. The fourth section of the essay builds on Eve Kofosky Sedwick’s work and contrasts a paranoid point of view from a restorative perspective on texts. These indicate two potential positions we can hold when exploring virtual patterns that help to shape our understandings of reality. The final section uses Grace Jantzen’s depiction of natality as an alternative, expansive, communal theological model: this shows the virtual realities that are called into being by the positions we choose to occupy. The conclusion returns to the theme of the virtue of the virtual—how a reparative position of hope can empower us to pursue morally desirable goods in the future through our everyday actions.
My choice of Blade Runner 2049 is made, in part, because of its timeliness and in part due to how it promotes distinct senses of the virtual. 1982’s Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott) is a past vision of our current present: the fact that the movie situates itself in Los Angeles, November, 2019, suggests that it is time to revisit the movie. Blade Runner begins with the following sentence scrolling up: “Early in the 21st Century, THE TYRELL CORPORATION advanced Robot evolution into the NEXUS phase—a being virtually identical to a human—known as a Replicant.” The next sentence explains what is meant by its slippery use of “virtually”: “The NEXUS 6 Replicants were superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them.” Replicants were used “off-world” to do hazardous tasks, and after a crew revolts, they were “declared illegal on earth—under penalty of death.” The film then defines the title: “Special police squads—BLADE RUNNER UNITS—had orders to shoot to kill, upon detection, any trespassing Replicant. This was not called execution. It was called retirement.” The violent Replicants returning to earth, led by Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), wish to confront their maker about the unfair limitations placed on their lifespan—they only are given four years.
The Replicant is not an android, a category of entity that Scott places in his Alien movies (Ash, Bishop, David); instead, Replicants are artificial, organic beings whose virtual identity to the human not only make them difficult to detect, but also whose virtual differences (greater strength and intelligence) make them difficult to retire. The virtue, or power, of this difficult relationship has made the movie a landmark in science fiction. The Blade Runner protagonist Rick Deckard, (Harrison Ford) finds it difficult to discern whether he is human or replicant. The situation is exacerbated when he learns that Rachael (Sean Young), who works at the Tyrell Corporation, is a replicant who has been implanted with the memories of Tyrell’s niece and does not know she is not human. Replicants are shown throughout the movie to have an anxiety producing attachment to their past—largely because, entities created as adults, they lack one. Deckard falls in love with Rachael, and the movie closes as he hears prophetic laughter from Gaff (Edward James Olmos): “It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again who does?”
The title Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villenueve) announces that is virtually identical to the original film—only it is set thirty years later. Blade Runner 2049 follows the pattern introduced by Blade Runner, opening with text that explains that Tyrell Corporation went bankrupt and that the remains of the company were acquired by Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), “whose mastery of synthetic farming averted famine.” 2049 follows K D6-3.7, or “K” (Ryan Gosling), a Blade Runner who knows he is a (Nexus-9) replicant. K. serves under Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright) as he tracks down rogue Nexus 8 model replicants (with no lifespan or obedience constraints). The plot of the movie concerns a possible replicant child, of interest to both the police (who want to cover it up and suppress a replicant rebellion) and to Wallace (who wishes to reverse engineer breeding potentials to expand his empire). Wallace dispatches Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) to procure the child. Like Deckard, K. also has a romance: his lover is Joi (Ana de Armas), a holographic program with an artificial intelligence. Like K, Joi is created by the Wallace corporation.