All That Are Tears Melt Into Rain A Comparison Of Blade Runner And Blade Runner 2049 Through Concepts In Modernity And Postmodernity

I S T A N B U L B I L G I U N I V E R S I T Y
FACULTY OF COMMUNICATION
ALLTHATARE TEARS MELT INTO RAIN:
AComparison of Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049
through concepts in MODERNITY and POSTMODERNITY
UTKU KAFALIER
ISTANBUL JUNE 2018

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I S T A N B U L B I L G I U N I V E R S I T Y
FACULTY OF COMMUNICATION
ALLTHATARE TEARS MELT INTO RAIN:
AComparison of Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 through concepts in
MODERNITY and POSTMODERNITY
SUBMITTED BY
UTKU KAFALIER
IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF ARTS IN
FILM AND TELEVISION
JUNE 2018
APPROVED BY
PROF. FERIDE ÇIÇEKOĞLU DR. AYŞEGÜL KESIRLI
HEAD OF DEPARTMENT DISSERTATION SUPERVISOR

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ABSTRACT
This paper surveys the points of divergence between Blade Runner (Scott, 1982) and Blade
Runner 2049 (Villeneuve, 2017) in terms of how they portray their protagonist blade runners'
identity, personal lives and their jobs. The main disparities are analysed through concepts of
modernity and postmodernity, the latter being specifically applied to the former movie by
previous authors with similar approaches. In examining the differences between these two
movies, an attempt in cognitive mapping of the cultural differences between the times the movies
were made in has come into fruition. By comparing the political and societal differences between
1982 and 2017 with movie universe's differences between 2019 and 2049 and analysing the
projection of these variances on the main characters, a historically materialistic progression from
postmodernity into today’s social and political culture is discussed.

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CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................... 2
1. INTRODUCTION................................................................................................................. 4
2. ON THEORY, CONCEPTS AND METHADOLOGY ..................................................... 8
postmodernity and Blade Runner as a postmodern film.......................................................... 9
post-postmodernity of today.................................................................................................. 11
3. ON IDENTITY: Blade Runners’ Race and History ........................................................ 14
which / one............................................................................................................................. 17
seeking roots.......................................................................................................................... 21
4. ON PRIVATE SPACES: Blade Runners’ Life, Partners and Reality........................... 24
the purple pill......................................................................................................................... 27
with incels interlinked ........................................................................................................... 33
simulacra versus simulation................................................................................................... 36
5. ON TASK: Blade Runners’ Job, Quest and Relations with Power................................ 42
a real human being and a real hero........................................................................................ 44
sometimes historicise............................................................................................................. 47
the boss level ......................................................................................................................... 50
6. ALL THAT ARE TEARS MELT INTO SNOW: A CONCLUSION............................ 55
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................... 59
FILMOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................... 61

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1. INTRODUCTION
I wasn’t born yet when Blade Runner came out in 1982 in United States to the amusement of
a very few people who actually went and saw it on release. I wasn’t born either during its
sporadic showings on TV during the 80s which led to people talking and writing about it. I
wasn’t born when it received a new Director’s Cut version on DVD that cemented its status as a
cult sci-fi movie. And I was still not born when it came out in theatres of my own country in
May 1993.
Most stuff from 80s that an older generation of brothers and sisters loved got some form of
continuity during my childhood, which enabled me to feel a sort of connection to the past and
recent pop history that came before me. Back to the Future was still airing non-stop on TV and
Indiana Jones was selling fast on bleeding edge DVDs. Alien series kept being made and Star
Wars got prequels. Soon there was a new wave of popular entertainment of cinema that created
new forms of fandoms and a history for itself anyway. Yet as much as I had heard of Blade
Runner, or Bıçak Sırtı as it was translated to me, being hailed as the perfect sci-fi movie, I never
got around watching it until I was much older, resulting in a relatively lack of a personal
attachment for me. Granted it was more mature in content compared to some other blockbuster
movies but people were still talking about it and yet it didn’t receive a form of reboot or sequel
when it was perhaps most expected. Then there was an another director’s cut released in 2007,
which did fuel the rumour mill of a sequel coming for a good decade but it all fell into silence
soon after. That is until 2017 when Blade Runner 2049 directed by Denis Villeneuve was
released with what I thought was a great anticipation for the sequel of a cult classic.
I had been wrong in my life before, so that was okay.

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Turns out there was not so much of an anticipation as most people were not terribly interested
in the movie and it ended up underperforming in the box office just like its predecessor. A
number of articles were published, questioning this lacklustre financial outcome but it was quite
futile when discussions of the movie could be cantered around more intellectual points and
everyone involved in the production of the movie was eager to move on from it anyway.
As I have said before, I myself have never felt a nostalgic connection with the original Blade
Runner. I had seen it more times than I care to admit but after a while, a visually pleasing movie
like that becomes what I can call a “comfort food”. On particular sleepless nights, I started
watching it for its scenery, its music, its well crafted slow pace to clear my mind and fall asleep.
With that, Blade Runner had become my very own electronic sheep. In an age where we are
constantly kept alive and paralyzed by a constant flow of new information from various
networking objects, a constant source of audio-visual familiarity, while still satisfying my
addiction of sensory overload, was spectacularly good at comforting me to sleep.
Yet Blade Runner 2049 was different. Ever since I have first seen it, the moment I start
thinking about it, it acts as a stimulant. Never once have I fallen asleep watching it despite the
many times I did. Despite its inherently slow pace, its tension reflects on me at a level where I
am still ready to follow the narrative even if I know where it is going with, with great tension
even. I think there isn’t a better way of putting it into words other than saying the movie
resonated with my anxieties. It certainly feels more contemporary than the original movie which
is supposed to be set in 2019, a much closer date. But that was obvious. Sci-fi movies reflecting
the fears and hopes and anxieties of their contemporary audiences is a well known trait. So that
led me to think the original Blade Runner in a more critical light too. How do these movies differ
in a way that evoke such different sensory responses from me?

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Now, if one is to compare Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, it can be done in multitude
of ways. Even though the latter is a sequel, it’s by any margin more than a pastiche of the former
but one thing that had stroke me as too consciously similar is the characters in the movie and
what they do. Even though -except for a little cameo of Gaff and Rachel- all supporting
characters are different in the movies, yet there are many of them that feel like echoes of each
other. There is Gaff and Joshi, commanders at the Los Angeles Police Department; Pris and
Mariette, replicant sex workers; Abdul Ben Hassan and Doc Badger, replicant animal sellers;
Hannibal Chew and Dr. Ana Stelline, contractors for the main corporate firm; Rachel and Luv,
female assistants to a corporate head; Tyrell and Wallace, the corporate head and the creator of
replicants… The similarity of such characters’ positioning in the story is so strikingly similar that
it perhaps leads to a moment where it becomes easy to miss the real duality between the two
characters that perform the same task: Deckard and K. While it would be fruitful to discuss any
two mirror characters and their position in the movie, I find Deckard and K to be the most
compelling binary oppositions as they both perform the duty of the titular blade runner.
There are several main differences between Deckard and K, but the most obvious and
narratively important one seems to be their identity, while Deckard shares a much subtle and
debatable identity as a person, K is an unambiguously replicant character. This difference forms
the first part of my thesis where I try to see how the sequel movie places K against Deckard’s
identity to form what I will see as a grand paratextual narrative. Second part of my thesis will
focus on the private lives of the two characters as shown in the movies, in which I will discuss
how K’s lifestyle and relationships are completely different than those of Deckard’s, reflecting
cultural and social zeitgeist with neoliberal ideology becoming the norm. Third part of my thesis
will investigate the work these characters do and how it differs in movies’ universe from 2019 to

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2049 and if blade runners’ role in maintaining status quo changed. Overall, this thesis is a
culmination of points where I believe Deckard and K converge and diverge in Blade Runner and
Blade Runner 2049, giving the movies a distinct difference in both narrative and narration. As
Matthew Flisfeder states while talking on the critical significance of the movies,
Like the original, 2049 is a visually stunning depiction of our potential dystopian
future; one that if we read it in its historical context provides for us a detailed
cognitive mapping of the continued decline of unfettered multinational
capitalism. […] It also makes plain, thematically, deeper questions about
neoliberal and capitalist subjectivity, ideology, dynamics of race and gender,
and of course poses for us questions about our new age of automation, global
computation, ecological degradation, and provides a glimpse into the vastly
developing cleavages between central enclosures and peripheral slums.
(Flisfeder, 2017)
Likewise, with my analysis of these two characters, I aim to show a cultural mapping of
differences between Blade Runner for which postmodernist philosophy has been critically
important of, and Blade Runner 2049 which opens interpretation for several post-postmodernist
points still yet emerging today.
In doing so, one of my aims will be trying to withhold any antagonisation towards the
concepts from a moral perspective and approach it as the cultural zeitgeist of its time that they
are. Nevertheless some of the main points will be deduced at the divergent points of modernism,
postmodernism and wherever post-postmodernism stands, so it should be understandable that
there will be critiques of particularly postmodernism at the point I am standing in 2018. Despite
that, this paper is not a direct critique of postmodernism itself but a guide into understanding the
movies using its concepts while accepting the validity of the philosophy they come together
with, pretty much the same way Fredric Jameson offered a critique of it while still accepting its
legitimacy on cultural and historical grounds.

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2. ON THEORY, CONCEPTS AND METHADOLOGY
There are numerous definitions of postmodernism, many of which can be summarised as a
reaction against modernity and its metanarratives. Modernism itself epitomises ideas such as
enlightenment, positivism and so forth and postmodernism rejects such ideas claiming it sees
through “the narrative of humanity as the hero of liberty” (Berman, 1982, p. 10). This stance
comes from the notion that all metanarratives are oppressive and there cannot be a single version
of the truth. I am grossly over-simplifying the debate here but what is important for me is that a
postmodern look is often identified as the mode and cognitive norm of late capitalism starting
from 70s.
In the context of my discussion, a unique phenomenon for postmodernism that is
spatialisation of time is particularly important. In what is regarded as a monumental critique and
a guide into understanding the modes of postmodernity, Fredric Jameson brings in the question
of perception of time. In his argument, he makes a point that consumer society and multinational
capitalism come with inevitable erosion of a sense of history as he says:
[…] entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its
capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a
perpetual change. (Jameson, 1985, p. 11).
This perpetual present is us constantly barrowing things from the past (a la ‘pastiche’ as
defined by Jameson) and future (in the form of credit and debt) so that we can simply live in the
present, at the expense of both a sense of the past and a vision for the future. We can directly see
this postmodernist trend in today’s Hollywood that has brought forth the Blade Runner 2049 in
the first place. Today more and more older movies are getting sequels or being rebooted (taken
from the past) and gambled with huge budgets in the hopes for providing a franchise of future

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instalments (barrowed from the future) and Blade Runner 2049 is simply another one in this
perpetual present. Yet it’s not only Blade Runner 2049 that exemplifies a postmodernist trend,
the original Blade Runner is the perfect example of a perpetual change. As Flisfeder writes
The digital, as we have seen, manages to “spatialize” time –in the case of Blade
Runner, this means the constant redux of the film, so that we can never really
say that the most recent incarnation is the final version. Like our experiences of
the debt and finance economy, Blade Runner is perpetually present. (Flisfeder,
2017, p. 92)
postmodernity and Blade Runner as a postmodern film
Blade Runner has long been defined as the postmodernist movie, somehow encapsulating
ideas and aesthetics surrounding the much debated concept of postmodernism, from its narrative
to the costumes or even the set designs of the city, as Guillina Bruno says as an example:
The link between postmodernism and late capitalism is highlighted in the film’s
representation of postindustrial decay. The future does not realize an idealized,
aseptic technological order, but is seen simply as the development of the present
state of the city and of the social order of late capitalism. The city of Blade
Runner is not the ultramodern, but the postmodern city. (Bruno, 1987, p. 63)
This postmodernity of the movie can be seen in its various features, even in the outlook of the
cityscape as Bruno has said, but I am more interested in how Flisfeder defined the movie with its
perpetual change. To this day, seven different versions of the movie exist, scattered through a
timeline covering three decades. While it’s not unusual for a film, specifically for a Ridley Scott
film to have an extended version or director’s cut, it’s quite unconventional for it to have seven
different versions with differing meanings. While numerous differences between them can be
discussed from different perspectives, it is mostly with Deckard’s identity that I will investigate
the most momentous implications of these changes.

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In the US theatrical release version, Deckard narrates his story with voice-overs providing the
biggest difference as this voice-over is missing in all further versions. This choice is said to be
studio mandated, as it helped audiences to follow the narrative better but it is also a genetic
component of Film Noir aesthetic the movie borrows from so while many contemporary
audiences deem it as the inferior telling of the story, it still makes sense within the movie’s
aesthetic sum. In this version also, at the end Deckard drives into Los Angeles wilderness with
Rachel providing a very definitive happy ending. In the following versions however, this scene is
cut as the movie ends with them escaping in the elevator, leaving for a far more open-ended
closure.
The most widely available versions came out in 1982, 1992 and 2007 so the version of the
story that’s been experienced by the audience changed depending on the decade they were in.
This fact itself makes it clear why this movie is the perfect example of perpetual change as it
keeps changing right in front of us and with each subsequent change, it outdates its previous
versions making them ‘inferior’ versions and not worthy of a watch as many fans of the movie
end up repeating the adage that whatever is the latest version must be ‘the true vision of the
director’. This results in the diegetic nature of the movie-verse, or the reality of the movies vastly
differing depending on which version is available to one. This variance of reality is in fact a very
mode of postmodernity. As Mark Fisher says
The 'reality' here is akin to the multiplicity of options available on a digital
document, where no decision is final, revisions are always possible, and any
previous moment can be recalled at any time. (Fisher, 2009, p. 54)
When the movie was first released, neoliberal capitalism still had an alternative in the form of
Soviet Union. The first big step of its perpetual change comes at 1992, at the end of history as

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proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama after the collapse of the Union and capitalism being declared
as the absolute form of sociocultural condition. By the time the final version is released in 2007
just before the economic crisis felt mainly in the West, the ivies of neoliberal policy making has
already taken hold of everyday life, where it became “easier to imagine the end of the world than
to imagine the end of capitalism” (Jameson, Future City, 2003).
Which brings us to the present time in which Blade Runner 2049 was produced and released.
So what about today?
post-postmodernity of today
In a quest to find the successor of postmodernism, one must first define the point of transition.
In her literary analysis Postmodernism is dead. What comes next? Alison Gibbons writes that:
Critics – such as Christian Moraru, Josh Toth, Neil Brooks, Robin van den
Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen – repeatedly point to the fall of the Berlin Wall
in 1989, the new millennium, the 9/11 attacks, the so-called “War on Terror”
and the wars in the Middle East, the financial crisis and the ensuing global
revolutions. Taken together, these events signify the failure and unevenness of
global capitalism as an enterprise, leading to an ensuing disillusionment with
the project of neo-liberal postmodernity and the recent political splintering into
extreme Left and extreme Right. (Gibbons, 2017)
We can try to see its succession from different perspectives, which is one of the reasons why
it is so hard to define a succession in the first place. Alan Kirby offers the terms pseudo-
modernism to define an age where the instant flow of information has rendered masses zombified
where all exchanges of ideas have been reduced to a shallow bullet point discussions (Kirby,
2006). There is also meta-modernism where Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker
define the cultural movements as an oscillation between the ideals of modernism and
postmodernism (Vermeulen & Van Den Akker, 2010).

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What I would like to do is to look at it from the way we produce and consume, in other words
the way economic exchanges occur in our lives since postmodernism itself has been criticised as
a reflection of late capitalism to begin with. If the forms of capitalism have changed since the
time Blade Runner was made -and they are changed- then that would mean a different set of
understanding into how these economic factors affect our lives. This stance may be somewhat
Marxist in nature and therefore modernist as well but even trying to read into postmodernism as
a reflection of cultural mind-set is forming a metanarrative around a concept that opposes
metanarratives. What that means is that there may be no way to study postmodernism in a post-
postmodernist world without first taking a stance against its rejection of some of the ideals of
modernism. In fact it was not possible to study postmodernism in a postmodernist world either
without being a modernist as Marshall Berman was in All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, bringing
up points that will –quite evidently- be explored in this paper also. That’s perhaps why various
philosophers today are so determined to name their outlook as something-modernism because an
opposition against postmodernity always ends up forming a metanarrative about the progression
of history and stay closer to the ideals of modernity as a result.
That being said, not all proposed successors of postmodernity end up with a total rejection of
some of its ideas. There are various stances one could share with postmodernism without being
postmodernist and some emerging concepts feed from the philosophies proposed in the
postmodernist age. For instance, Mark Fisher, in his book Capitalist Realist: Is There No
Alternative? defines capitalist realism as the successor of postmodernism (Fisher, 2009). His
argument is that fall of Soviet Union and the declaration of end of history have come to mean
that no viable alternative to capitalism exists in the world today, creating a reality where
capitalism is the only conceivable form economic and cultural reality. While the definition is

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highly elaborate and offers a fair amount of details in how certain concepts of postmodernism
like hyperreality have evolved into their contemporary forms, it does leave some points
unattended, perhaps due to being already outdated in an ever changing political atmosphere. For
example postmodernism have been criticised for its position on the existence of relative truths
but today, few can argue that it is not somewhat true since we live in a post-truth Trumpian age
where literal facts end up not mattering in the arena of public and political discourse.
Nevertheless, to me the point where Fisher’s capitalist realism excels in understanding the
culture today is its motivation to directly link its present concerns with the critiques of
postmodernity, forming a progressive and cohesive historical narrative and I believe a
perspective like that is necessary for me to have in order to compare Blade Runner and Blade
Runner 2049 to form a thesis on what makes them similar and different.
Scope of this paper is too limited to simply dissect each and every cell of postmodernism,
isolate them and offer a critique on them with its relation to the differences between these
movies, even in just from the protagonists’ perspective. Nevertheless throughout the next
sections, some postmodernist philosophies such as historical relativism or Baudrillard’s concept
of hyperreality will be discussed and utilised. While I will also use capitalist realism in some
aspects regarding the capitalist culture of today, as a methodology, various connections and
divergences between the two time periods with observations on social, political and economic
atmospheres will be explored more in-depth. This I hope, at its conclusion will form a critique of
both Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, tracking the transitional age from postmodernism to
whatever it is we are living in today, with the difference evidently visible in the society as well.

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3. ON IDENTITY: Blade Runners’ Race and History
The modus operandi of the titular blade runners is stated as hunting down and ‘retiring’ rogue
replicants. This retirement, as quite unambiguously explained in the opening crawl of the first
movie, is killing them upon detection. The first movie opens with a blade runner, later revealed
as named Holden interviewing Leon who goes on to shoot him. After Leon’s subsequent escape,
the protagonist Rick Deckard is called from retirement to hunt down a group of replicants Leon
is a part of. This signifies a potentially loaded contradiction: the movie’s narrative is keen on
naming replicants’ executions as retirements and the one whose job is to perform this duty is
called back from a literal retirement. Even though it is hard to equate Deckard’s literal retirement
to death, the contradiction provides a more agency-driven subtext which I am going to examine.
In the very few scenes we see Deckard in his retirement, he is spending his time reading
newspapers in uncomfortable positions, struggling to order a noodle menu and generally being
among the crowd in the metropolitan area of the city. While it may not be easy to portray what a
conventional retirement looks like, this would hardly be it. Especially if we look retrospectively
and see how much it actually looks more like retirement when he escapes from the city at the end
of the movie with Rachel compared to his retirement at the beginning of the movie, it hardly
feels like he was retired in the first place. These sentiments are exacerbated when Officer Bryant
insists that he comes back from retirement, bursting out “If you are not cop, you’re little
people”. Yet despite the wording, Deckard does not even have a choice to be of little people, he
is called back duty and he knows he has no other choice but to accept it. This call-back to service
is eerily similar to how professional military personnel can be called back to active duty, giving a
sense of militarisation to the police force but more than that it strongly indicates a lack of agency
on Deckard’s part regarding his own life within the institution he is working for. His inability to

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refuse work essentially puts him in the role of a slave, which is also what replicants assume their
position to be. As David Harvey puts out, both replicants and blade runners “[…] exist in a
similar relation to the dominant social power in society. This relation defines a hidden bond of
sympathy and understanding between the hunted and the hunter.” (Harvey, 1990, p. 310) This
forms one of the primary ways of the movie equating the blade runner and the replicants to form
its central moral thesis that replicants are not so different than humans.
In the sequel Blade Runner 2049, one big glaring difference of the titular job is that it belongs
to an unambiguously replicant character. Whereas the first movie attempted to portray the
similarity of conditions of the blade runner and replicants by taking away blade runner’s agency
at work, the second movie directly gives them the same identity and the same lack of agency in
everything to do with life right from the beginning. Being a replicant himself, K’s job conditions
are portrayed harsher compared to Deckard. While Deckard was not able to freely choose his
tenure, K seems to accept the job as his reason d’etre, with no reason or motivation to leave it.
He is subjected to ‘racial’ slurs at the job environment with one police officer calling him a
‘skin-job’ as well as in his living spaces, with his neighbours abusing him with the same or
similar slurs. He is also subjected to a routine baseline test, checking out if his emotional
responses are comprised or not. When he is not close to his normal baseline, not only his
employment is compromised but also his life. As Joshi says after he fails once “I can help you
get out of the station alive but you have 48 hours to get back on track. Surrender your gun and
badge, and your next baseline test is out of my hands.”
As we see even when K completes his task, if he cannot complete the routine tests to a
satisfactory degree his existence is cut short which is more drastic than what Deckard had faced
when he tried to quit the job. None of these differences are portrayed as a change of conditions in

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the job but the way the identity of the job owner affect the conditions in which the job is
performed, which forms the main point of my argument in this section. K’s life is harsher
because he is being seen and accepted as a replicant and Deckard enjoys what little advantage he
has over his future colleague simply because he is portrayed as human.
More so, we see more of the private life of K than we did in Deckard. Even though he lives
virtually alone, K enjoys the company of an holographic AI girlfriend named Joi, also produced
by Wallace Industries that create the replicants in 2049. While conditions of this lifestyle with
Joi shall be examined further in the following segment, what is important here is that when K is
kissing Joi under the rain, her program was interrupted for a phone call from Joshi, ordering K to
come down to the office. So to make it explicit the prioritization of work compared to his private
life, K’s moments of intimacy are harshly limited by work while we do not see similar violations
of private space openly in Deckard’s story.
As it can be seen, the conditions and portrayals of blade runners in the movie are directly
affected by the identity of the blade runners, depending on whether they are a human or a
replicant. That is due to the concept of replicant being directly constructed as a critique of
identity to begin with, with Scott Bukatman saying “As synthetic humans, replicants inherently
challenge essentialist notions of identity. Identity stands revealed as a construction, the result of
conscious or unconscious social and physical engineering.” (Bukatman, 1997, p. 80) In the first
movie’s case, the single purpose of creating the job title seem to portray a hunter-hunted relation
as put by Harvey and second movie’s point of divergence is caused by the fact that the blade
runner is now a replicant. So it’s hard to refute the bonds between the job of a blade runner and
the identity of the blade runner. Yet as we discuss the identities and the differences between

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human and replicant blade runners, the elephant in the room is always going to be Deckard’s
status as a replicant.
which / one
Over the years the movie has been out, the one big debate about both the narrative and
narrational ambiguity of the movie is centred on whether Deckard is a human or a replicant.
From one perspective, this debate seems to hardly matter at all. The movie directly draws a
similarity between the blade runner and replicants by various elements in both narrative and
narration, so its point to liken them together does not depend on Deckard being a replicant.
Actually in my personal opinion the movie’s humanist themes benefit from the reading that
Deckard is a human as that somewhat erases the cognitive boundary between humans and
replicants in audience’s mind. Since in this reading Deckard stands in as the token human
character and his various conditions are similar to those of replicants, we may derive the notion
that humans and replicants are not dissimilar in their existence within society.
That being said there are also compelling arguments for Deckard being a replicant which gain
more traction depending on the version of the movie in discussion, ranging from “Eh, maybe” to
“Yeah, definitely”. There are certain extra-diegetic accounts of the director, writer and the actor
that actually appear to be contradicting with each other, so I will omit such accounts in order to
derive an objective meaning out of this, if such thing is ever possible. Rather my argument is
that, the ambiguity surrounding Deckard’s status is in itself provides what I will call an
“paratextual narrative”1
, a version of the story that goes beyond the boundaries of a single
version of the movie and provides a narrative that can only be understood from a meta
perspective with the entire collection of versions at inspection. This paratextual narrative
surrounds the identity of the blade runners that capsulate this movie universe from 1982 to 2017.

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I have talked about some of the changes between these versions in a previous section, such as
the lack of voice-over and alteration of the ending. Here the most striking change is however a
narrational change that leads us to question the identity of the blade runner. While lacking in the
first ones, 1992 and 2007 versions add a unicorn dream sequence for Deckard. Coupled with
Gaff’s paper origami of a similar unicorn, this dream sequence is interpreted as Deckard’s
unicorn dream being an implant and thus proving that Deckard is a replicant. This argument is
compelling as it leaves little room for any other explanation for this curious revised inclusion. So
these changes both alter the reality of the movie’s universe and the identity of its main character.
While in 1982 version Deckard is simply presented as human and him being a replicant is only a
suggestion at a theory level, in future versions he is shown to be a most likely replicant from a
narrational perspective. Thus the paratextual narrative surrounding these movies is that
Deckard’s journey is one where he becomes less human and more replicant with each decade in
extra-diegetic time.
Another point that is important to consider is how this paratextual narrative plays out
narrationally since it is not the alterations in the story between the versions that provide this.
Speaking on one of the grand themes of these movies, Slavoj Žižek says that:
When the question “are androids to be treated like humans?” is debated, the
focus is usually on awareness or consciousness: do they have an inner life?
Perhaps, however, we should change the focus from consciousness or awareness
to the unconscious: do they have an unconscious in the precise Freudian sense?
(Žižek, Blade Runner 2049: A View of Post-Human Capitalism, 2017).
It is then we see that Scott revised the movie in future versions to suggest that Deckard be
replicant through the unconscious, dream-like unicorn sequence. It is essentially a dream
sequence, existing outside temporal continuity of the diegesis that effect these movies’ narration.

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Thus, just as Žižek proclaims that the line between human-replicant differences lies in
unconscious, it is through unconscious that human Deckard becomes a replicant paratextually.
As Fisher also points out
If memory disorder provides a compelling analogy for the glitches in capitalist
realism, the model for its smooth functioning would be dreamwork. When we
are dreaming, we forget, but immediately forget that we have done so; since the
gaps and lacunae in our memories are Photoshopped out, they do not trouble or
torment us. What dreamwork does is to produce a confabulated consistency
which covers over anomalies and contradictions. (Fisher, 2009, p. 62)
So it makes perfect sense for Deckard to become more replicant than human through decades
where capitalism becomes more absolute over time. It is this final version that also cemented
blade runner’s status as replicant. A decade later, when the sequel was released, there was no
question this time about the identity of the blade runner: he was openly, unambiguously and
tragically replicant, bringing a closure to a paratextual narrative that spanned for more than three
decades. As Fisher continues to explore the repercussions of the perpetual change of reality, he
also claims that “In conditions where realities and identities are upgraded like software, it is not
surprising that memory disorders should have become the focus of cultural anxiety.” (Fisher,
2009, p. 58)
To reverse cognitive map this claim and to return to my main point of comparing the two
movies, it is the most fruitful to examine Blade Runner 2049 with this framework. K’s quest of
self-discovery starts when he finds a date engraved to the root of a tree where Rachel, after
giving birth as a replicant mother, was buried. This date is also engraved in a toy he remembers
as a memory, which leads him to believe that the memory is in fact authentic (as in not
manufactured as all replicants’ memories are) and he may not be a replicant but a real human

20
being. What is important in the narration is that we see K’s memories not as consistent pieces of
flashbacks but as glimpses of details scattered and contradictory, intercutting with what is going
on in the scene. We do not understand the details of this memory until he recalls it later to Joshi
and even then the flashback is constructed ambiguously, avoiding showing details such as the
face of the protagonist in the memory’s own diegesis.
The ambiguity is deliberate of course, as when later it is revealed to be belonging to someone
else entirely, it seems plausible by omission. Thus K’s memory flashes are not conscious efforts
of constructing a memory but unconscious eruptions fuelled by schizophrenic tendencies, devoid
of an identity for the subject that’s experiencing them. If Deckard’s paratextual narrative of
turning a replicant is through unconscious, K’s narrative of turning a human is through
unconscious also. Yet as we see later in the movie, many other replicants thought they were the
‘chosen’ one, giving a sense that K’s journey was propelled not only because he has these flashes
of memories implanted to him but also because he desires to be human.
This marks another difference between Deckard and K, where we explicitly see the
disorientation of memories for the latter. The relation between memory disorders as an affect of
societal afflictions is nothing new. Defining post-modernity Jameson borrowed from Lacan to
suggest that schizophrenic condition is a condition of postmodernity:
He or she does not have our experience of temporal continuity either, but is
condemned to live a perpetual present with which the various moments of his or
her Past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable future on
the horizon. In other words, schizophrenic experience is an experience of
isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up
into a coherent sequence. The schizophrenic thus does not know personal
identity in our sense, since our feeling of identity depends on our sense of the
persistence of the "I" and the "me" over time. (Jameson, 1985, p. 7)

21
seeking roots
Essentially, K’s whole journey hinges on the idea that he may have an identity. A journey so
based on fragmented memories that if come into fruition would change how he views his past,
present and future altogether. This is pointed rather plainly when Joi urges him call himself Joe
instead of a serial number, thus giving him name, the very identification of individuality. This
entire journey is a very pronounced subversion of what we had in the original movie where
Deckard eventually turned into a replicant in the eyes of its audience and here we watch K
discover that he is not a replicant but a human. It is almost as if the complete opposite of the
paratextual narrative surrounding Deckard has become the story of K. However as the movie
continues, we end up with the cold hard fact that K is indeed a replicant, and the human child he
is looking for is not himself. Despite that, however, we continue to watch K make choices for
himself, displaying free will, something denied to replicants not by design or nature but by status
quo and as we see, he creates a story for himself. His search for a personal or ancestral history
had not bore any fruit, but he still chose to save Deckard and have him meet his daughter, giving
a history for another character and essentially displaying heroism.
This is far from any length Deckard had gone into in the first movie, but also more than what
he had as a past in the first place. The personal history of these characters I believe, are neatly
tied with the concept of identity as per the movie’s own admittance a Tyrell explains to Deckard
in the first movie, “We began to recognize in them strange obsession. After all they are
emotional inexperienced with only a few years in which to store up the experiences which you
and I take for granted. If we gift them the past we create a cushion or pillow for their emotions.”
Deckard’s lack of history is different than replicants’, after all, it is only a representation of
history that is lacking for him yet this choice is still significant in postmodernist outlook as it

22
actually symbols the only historical source. Many postmodernists have a clear problem with the
history for this reason anyway2
so the lack of an existing history is a very postmodernist stance. I
will talk more about how photographs actually come in as a representation of this non-existence
on the next sections but for the context of this argument, I believe it is sufficient to say Deckard
has no ties with his past in a way that could define his identity. If he is human and his past is real,
it has absolutely no effect on how he acts and if he is a replicant then he does not have a past to
begin with.
Compared with Deckard’s postmodern perpetually-changing character, as I have said earlier,
K is very deeply rooted in his quest for a search of a past. A past not even personal, but ancestral
as if he believes that it will somehow help him make sense of his present. As Joi proclaims “I
always knew you were special”, K’s discovery of such a past would undoubtedly change how he
acts and we do not even need to see that fulfilled. Even as his search for one does so, as he omits
his mission and starts making choices for himself. My argument is that, contrary to how
postmodernist Deckard’s portrayal and identity is, this is a very modernist look of the past.
Digging up a history, especially an ancestral one, in search for a grand meaning or ideology is
the modernist stance on history as Berman says
The modernism of the past can give us back a sense of our own modern roots,
roots that go back two hundred years. They can help us connect our lives with
the lives of millions of people who are living through the trauma of
modernization thousands of miles away, in societies radically different from our
own –and with million of people who lived through it a century or more ago.
(Berman, 1982, p. 35)
What these points brings us is that the two characters, both perform the same job and both are
main characters of their own movie follow similar yet opposing paths. In the condition of the
first character, his narrative journey of having sympathy with the replicants that turns him from a

23
cold executioner of them to the saviour of one is accompanied by a paratextual narrative that
makes him a literal replicant himself. This is achieved with perpetual changes to the movie itself
by its creator, true to a post-modernist approach many deem the movie to be an example of.
More so, this identity change creates perhaps the only history for the character, as any other trace
of personal history for Deckard seems to be glossed over or omitted, which is altogether a
phenomenon that can be attributed to postmodernism as well. The sequel however makes its
character follow a quest for identity fuelled by false memories, what Mark Fisher calls as a
condition of capitalist realist symptom.
On another contrasting note with the original character, K’s quest is deeply rooted in his
personal history, fuelled by the question of authenticity of his memories and his experiences as a
child. This point of historical focus is not only personal but also ancestral as it concerns his
parents, or lack thereof. At the end, it is his search for a history that makes him break through
from the status quo imposed on replicants. Conclusively, while the first movie takes a relative
postmodernist stance towards the identity (by perpetually changing it) and personal history (by
completely omitting it), the sequel takes both a more modernist and a capitalist realist approach
towards the main character, by making him seek such a history to create a meaning in his life.
1
"Paratexts" as defined by Gerard Genette, are "liminal devices and conventions, both within and outside the book,
that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher, and reader: titles, forewords, epigraphs,
and publishers' jacket copy are part of a book's private and public history." (Genette, 1987) Even though Genette
uses the term as an application for literature analysis, I find it apt to adapt into film studies when a concern about the
existence of various versions of a movie comes into question.
2
With a fair skepticism towards historical sourcing methods and a sheer dislike against grand-narratives,
postmodernists claim that history is just a tool for the ruling ideology to impose a paradigm as postmodernist
historian Alan Munslow states that “The past is not discovered or found. It is created and represented by the
historian as a text.’ while Keith Jenkins proclaims ‘history is just ideology”. (Evans, 2002). Also as Foucault says
“To be brief, then, let us say that history, in its traditional form, undertook to `memorize' the monuments of the past,
transform them into documents, and lend speech to those traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal, or which
say in silence something other than what they actually say; in our time, history is that which transforms documents
into monuments.” Which is directly related to how photographs are rendered as the only visible pieces of history.
(Foucault, 1982, p. 7)

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4. ON PRIVATE SPACES: Blade Runners’ Life, Partners and Reality
In Blade Runner, we are not subjected to Deckard’s private life too much but there are traces
of events and objects we can talk about. His apartment is dark and cosy, not much different than
other places of interest in the movie. Even though most objects have visible light on them, in
most shots we do not see the light source as it seems to originate from the exterior city space. In
particular shots we see rays of light coming from the window and in others shadow of the shades
falls on characters’ faces, designating a light source of an exterior origin. Arguably this does
create a sense of lack of an autonomous private space since most of these lightings are dynamic.
They change colours from red to blue depending on whatever neon signs outside are emitting
and bursts of hard flashes come and go as if flying vehicles are moving on the same level of the
flat. Combined with clear lack of interior light sources, this does give the sense that Deckard’s
private space is actually a part of the public space without any clear boundary not allowing it to
be entirely private. The light noise in such shots is the visual equivalent for an auditory
experience of having a house near a busy highway with constant traffic noises, resulting in a
sense that one is actually living on the highway itself. In addition to the allegory, in some scenes
there are actual sounds from outside, whether it be mechanic or weather, further enabling this
feeling.
Design wise the interior is untidy with objects all around, yet sophisticated with intricate
interior architecture resembling Mayan styles and a full bookshelf. What we do see clearly are
the photographs on top of the piano. As we have seen from Rachel and Leon and as I’ve talked
about this in the previous section to some length, photographs of the past are used to designate an
identity in the movie. Replicants also lack a real history so they cling onto photographs, in
Rachel’s case a history non-existent since the photograph belongs to Tyrell’s nieces along with

25
the memory itself, making the representation a simulacrum, a copy without an original. For
Leon’s case, the photograph is of his history as a replicant with memories he himself has
produced. In any case they use a representation of the history, the photographs to proclaim a
past. Again, in a very postmodern fashion, representation becomes the real itself or as Flisfeder
puts into words “The photographs in the film are markers of real history. They signify the tie
between our subjective experiences with the objectivity of the world as “real” history.”
(Flisfeder, 2017, p. 138)
So even though we see no member of family, Deckard’s photographs stand in as the history of
him. Not to be contradicting with myself from my previous point, this history is only in the form
of representation and still does not affect his person. In a world where we know photographs
could belong to other people with the memories being other people’s also, one cannot truly claim
them to be true representations, but their presence still results in giving the flat a personal touch,
making it his flat rather than a hotel room. Such individuality of the room comes into question
when it is coupled with the lighting intrusion explored above. If Deckard’s private space is
indeed personal for Deckard, and if it is indeed shown as if it is a part of the public space, it
roughly makes what is personal for him a part of the public space as well.
These sentiments are exacerbated at the end of the movie when Deckard returns to his flat to
find the door open, suspecting an intrusion. After getting Rachel out, he discovers a unicorn
origami outside, realising Gaff had been there and he chose to spare Rachel as well. There are
several conclusions that can be made from this, one is that Gaff, acting as a blade runner and a
hand of the institution1
, did break into Deckard’s private space and witnessed what should be
personal for Deckard: Rachel’s placement in the flat and manifestly in his life.

26
On the other hand, the more sinister implication comes from the unicorn itself, as this would
be the point where audience is expected to remember the 1992 and 2007 version’s unicorn dream
sequence and interpret this as the fact that Gaff is sparing both Rachel and Deckard. Incidentally,
the point where Gaff gets inside Deckard’s private space also becomes the point where we learn
that he may have been inside his head all along. This does result in an uncomfortable equation of
correlating the unconscious of Deckard with his flat as they are both revealed to be subjected to
an intrusion by the same person at the same time. This equation was somewhat established with
the placement of the photographs before anyway, so rather than establishing a new meaning in
the last second, the movie ends with the enforcement of the idea that has been repeated all along
the movie: that the entire life of Deckard, from his involuntary call back from retirement to his
lack of an autonomous private space and regardless of his identity as a human or a replicant, is a
part of the institution’s decision making. This idea is also the same where Deckard comes to
agree with the fact that he is by no means any different than replicants.
In contrast to Deckard’s place, K’s living space in Blade Runner 2049 feels much colder. It is
a flat, similarly furnished like Deckard’s. We see no photographs in the flat as K knows his
memories are not real so a representation of them would come meaningless to him. It is only
when he finds the photograph of the tree at Sapper Morton’s house he starts clinging to a
photograph, consequently the point where he starts believing his memories to be authentic.
Other than the differences in the way the rooms are furnished, instead of the ominous exterior
lighting K’s flat is lit well with clearly visible fluorescent lights. So the narrational cues of the
lighting we get from Blade Runner is absent here. However if the point of discussion centres
around the key institutional apparatuses involving themselves in the private spaces of the
characters, there is one instance where this happens in the sequel, when Joshi as K’s superior

27
officer comes into his flat to discuss the ongoing investigation. As their conversation develops,
Joshi starts flirting with him quite blatantly, both verbally (indicating she sees him different than
other replicants) and with body language but her advances are subtly shut down by K’s wooden
responses. What makes this noteworthy is the blur between Joshi’s presence as an institutional
actor and/or a personal acquaintance. When she asks him to share a memory with her (a personal
question in nature explicitly told in a previous scene with Luv as a hint for desire) he does not
want to, but she humorously orders him to do so as a superior. In a different vein than what
Deckard was subjected to, this visit ends up as not only the institution violating personal space of
K but also Joshi using her superiority in the hierarchy of the institution to try to reduce K’s
position into a sex slave, something that applies to certain replicants. Coupled with the way
replicants are produced and treated in such aspects regarding sex trade, this advance feels not
only as if Joshi is just forcing an hierarchical power onto her inferior but also her forcing her
institutional power as a human being onto another race. Yet somehow K is able to push back
against this intrusion and keep his personal life intact. The real reason for this resistance and the
sheer motivation of protecting his personal for K, as we later find out, is of course Joi.
the purple pill
We do not get so much of a love plot in Blade Runner as it’s very hard to label Deckard’s and
Rachel’s relationship as a conventional love story. In fact the scene where they have sex does
nothing but raise questions about Rachel’s consent, or lack thereof. One can question this scene
in relation to replicants’ lack of consent in anything regarding their life, as they are literally
slaves so mentioned earlier. In such cases of discussions, Rachel’s lack of consent may actually
seem as if it’s a result of an identity shock regarding her memories and her conscious choices.

28
One could further argue that her lack of consent is involuntary in itself as she is not sure if she
has a free-will in the first place. However such sugar coatings of the event does not make it less
problematic from Deckard’s perspective which should be the main point of my discussion. What
may be a sound argument for Deckard is that he is shown to be very good at reading the
emotional responses of replicants, so he could know that Rachel too desired him. Yet even in that
case, desire does not necessarily indicate a consent of action and who does the action in the end
is ultimately him. In very simple terms, Deckard sees the girl; Deckard likes the girl; and finally
Deckard has the girl. In essence, it is only through Deckard’s will projected as physical strength
that they become a couple and such an instance is unmistakably machismo.
With that being said, despite the narrative’s short-comings from a more contemporary
perspective, what’s striking is that it is an all very modern depiction of romance in an otherwise
very postmodern movie. There may be arguments that Rachel’s desire or submission for Deckard
comes from his perceived power over her as he is the one who has discovered her identity at
Tyrell Corporation and Tyrell himself refuses to meet her. Nonetheless at the end of the movie
when she wakes up and he asks her if she trusts her, she verbally indicates that she does. It is
hard to tell how Rachel feels about Deckard at any point in their relationship but in any case,
even with her lack of consent it is a very human relationship based on individuals interacting in
real environments. Which is totally not the case in Blade Runner 2049.
Joi is what we can call a virtual individual. She is an AI projected onto the world as a
hologram. In a movie universe where the authenticity of humanity is subjected to questions with
the existence of replicants, a hologram AI feels like the next step further in this debate. First of
all, she is not physically solid. She does not occupy a space, as in another object or character
may very well be in the same position with her. That evidently makes her almost not real in a

29
sense that there is no physical manifestation of her existence, it’s only visual and auditory. She
can be seen and she can be heard but she cannot be interacted with through physical means.
Second point is that she is a program, a software. That too is different than the nature of a
replicant. Even when we question the agency and individuality of a replicant, we do so knowing
that they do poses a biological brain with neurons that appear to be in the same working
conditions with those of a human being. Yet Joi, as an AI does not and cannot work in the same
way. This difference is made explicit when K is investigating DNA samples and Joi explicitly
states her difference with 1s and 0s.
Of course, within the context of this question, again how this relates to K is of significance.
We first hear Joi as a conventional house-wife in K’s apartment. As he showers and prepares his
dinner, Joi asks him about the day and when he sits down to eat his intant-prepared meal, she
presents him with a virtual steak and pie, layered on top of his real food. This is only one of the
points where a strange layering of reality versus expectation is presented in a single shot. The
instant-food is what K is having, yet a marinated steak and French fries are what he wishes was
presented to him. The movie could have presented Joi as a simple virtual assistant-girlfriend, yet
by making her prepare a non-existent meal for K that he will not be able to enjoy, it makes the
whole ordeal with her look fake. It is just a substitute layered on top of the real because the real
is not as good.
Another important point in their relationship comes minutes after when K presents newly
bought emanator to Joi, allowing her to move beyond the ceiling projector’s limit. This gives
physical mobility to Joi who can now leave the house and follow K. As a first step, the couple go
the rooftop of the building and share a romantic moment where Joi experiences rain for the first
time, yet it is cut short when he receives a call from the same emanator, ordering him to get back

30
to work. There are a couple points that need addressing at this scene. First of all, as we are
studying K, we need to look at what emanator means for him from his perspective rather than
Joi’s, which I have over-simplified as her newly gained mobility. For K though, it is essentially a
way to carry his private life wherever he goes, erasing the line between private and public. When
he goes to work in the headquarters, Joi is now there. When he investigates in the field, Joi is
again there. Yet it goes both ways. When they are kissing in the rain and the emanator rings, Joi
is interrupted. This is a very literal reversal of the intent of K. What he thought was a tool to
bring in his private life into public space is being used for his institutional work to infiltrate his
private life. Joi is frozen in the rain, his private life is literally interrupted. This occurrence is
undoubtedly reminiscent of the first movie and Deckard’s private life being subjected to
intrusions. Nevertheless, K is shown fighting against it repeatedly unlike Deckard who seems
oblivious to the fact until the very last minute. K tries to hide Joi, he gets her off the network. He
is all too aware of the implications that such infiltrations could mean for him and he fights off
against them.
There is also a non-narrative degree in which we see the fusion of K’s private and public life
with Joi, that is the general landscape of the city filled with Joi holograms. Throughout the
movie, more than thrice we see different iterations of Joi holograms on the street with different
outfits. Sometimes she is dancing with mini-skirts and cyber-punk accessory in a manic way and
sometimes her three dimensional face is put on the big billboard as an advertisement. So even
though K’s girlfriend Joi is not on the streets herself, her image is and as I have established in
previous points, representations of the personhood sometimes is used as the real in these movies.
It is especially pivotal in the case of Joi since that representation itself is all that K has with her.
This conflict comes into a climax after her death, when K sees a giant naked Joi talking to him.

31
Image-wise the scene is extremely potent in both meaning and emotion. Her nudity is used to
a pornographic degree, almost as an abuse of K’s personal life. Her eyes are black, commonly
associated with hive-mind in various sci-fi movies due to its resemblance with bee-like insects
but also with demonic possession. So by association, this iteration of Joi is nothing like K’s
personal Joi. It is public, it is crude, it is open and it towers over him, crushing him in her image.
However it is her words that create the greatest juxtaposition as she still calls him Joe. She
uses it as a generalisation for the advertisement, nevertheless it resonates with K painfully as it
makes the audience question the authenticity of her Joi when she called him Joe previously. Was
that simply a part of her program to make him feel special? We can still question the nature of
free-will just like we could question Rachel’s free-will when she submitted to Deckard in the
original movie, but for K it means his private life, a part of his history and identity, is a public
construct and it now being on the street is nothing but an infraction coming to fruition. Despite
the fact that he tried his best to push back against intrusions, after the loss of his lover during a
‘work trip’ he finds the pornographic images of her on the street as a grand offense on his private
sphere. Not only that but his intimate memories shared with her, specifically the moment she
called him Joe -bestowing him an identity as his mother would- is violated retrospectively by the
reveal of the generic name dropping. Even his name is a piece of code. Maybe Deckard did not
fight as hard as K but he was also not subjected to the same level of intrusion when we look back
at his personal life.
Of course another very big difference is how K’s and Joi’s relationship is constructed against
each other. As explained earlier, Deckard and Rachel seem to develop a bond that seems to be
based on machismo of Deckard. This is quite different in the sequel as K’s relationship with Joi
is entirely based on capital. He purchases her and not as a service but as a product. Luv

32
repeatedly asks K if he is satisfied with their product and even does so provocatively later on. It
is clear K does not see his relationship with Joi to be material: material is the one and only thing
Joi cannot give to him, yet from a macro perspective, the entire existence of Joi is nothing but
material. She is “all that is solid melted into air” (Engels & Marx, 1969) except she has never
been solid. Unthinkable to the even most modernist critics of the consumer society of the
previous century, she is a commodity that is already air. What can she melt into further from
there on, if not to the rain where we first see the futility of her existence as a private, intimate
aspect of K’s life that can be halted so effortlessly?
I find it ultimately ironic that what brings her demise at the end is her becoming somewhat a
solid entity after K downloads her conscious from the cloud into the emanator. So even though
the sequel movie features a more complete love narrative than the original movie, it is actually
somewhat more rooted in materialistic bond between a consumer and product than a romantic
notion of bonding. This too is significant as it may signal a change in how we construct human
relationships in the first place.
Human relations being reduced to capital exchange is nothing new and absolutely nothing
postmodern. In fact it is something proposed by Marx, telling that the eventuality of capitalism is
the condition wherein all human relations are reduced to cash nexus when everything is
commoditised (Engels & Marx, 1969, p. 15). So it becomes striking to see the point in which
both the original and the sequel somehow choose to be not so postmodernist in their approach
when it comes to the relationship of the main characters with women. In the case of the original
movie it can even be pre-modern because it still feeds off of binary gender ideas regarding the
natures of man and woman. Such ideas are still prevalent today in various forms ranging from
naivety of men’s right activism to rampant misogyny of the Red Pill, tragically misnamed after

33
The Matrix scene in which Neo is exposed to the “grand truth”. Just like what it references, such
cases of manosphere adhere to what can be called as a grand narrative that men are superior over
women and couldn’t be further away from the postmodernist trend in gender critical discussions.
with incels interlinked
Nevertheless, as much as Blade Runner’s sexual depiction of a love quest does still seem
contemporary in the light of such ideologies, it cannot surpass the urgency of the problems
depicted in the sequel. As I have argued previously, it is clearly more modern than the original
because it acknowledges the reduction of human relations into a capital exchange but I also find
it compelling to argue that Blade Runner 2049 is undoubtedly more contemporary.
There may be arguments about Joi’s existence in K’s life being an allusion to emerging
philosophical subjects such as object oriented ontology but also both technologically and
sociologically, it is highly au courant. The new advances in technology point out to a future
where sex robots can start to become a feasible option which is all too familiar to the concept
explored in both movies, but it is also worthy to point out that there is a growing number of male
population who see their status of being incels, “involuntary celibate” as a result of being victims
of the sexual revolution.
The term involuntary celibate has been in use particularly in the recent years but the its first
known usage is by -sometimes Marxist Leninist / sometimes postmodernist- philosopher Henry
Flynt in 1975. Today the term incel is mostly used to refer to a population of a heterosexual male
individuals while the communities they communicate in have been involved with some matters
of mass murders recently. When incidents caused by incels are debated, we begin to see ideas as

34
reactionary as “enforced monogamy” become a talking point (Bowles, 2018), but on the other
side of the argument, it is also possible to direct the criticism in a more modernist route as
Rebecca Solnit writes very recently on the issue:
Under capitalism, sex might as well be with dead objects, not live collaborators.
It is not imagined as something two people do that might be affectionate and
playful and collaborative – which casual sex can also be, by the way – but that
one person gets. The other person is sometimes hardly recognized as a person.
It’s a lonely version of sex. (Solnit, 2018)
Blade Runner 2049 comes in to the discussion by its extreme reverence in such communities2
especially with how K’s relationship functions with Joi. I would argue that the movie features
none of the misogynistic tendencies of the groups, and that the criticisms towards how it handles
female characters is ultimately reductionist when such depictions are meant as a criticism of the
contemporary conditions to begin with, but it may be possible to argue that Blade Runner 2049
presents a “post-misogynistic” inceldom as stated by Dan DeCarlo:
It is truly the apotheosis of incel cinema. [...] Joi, is as a representation of the
male desire for a traditional femininity which has now been rendered archaic
by neoliberal market forces as well as having been deconstructed and revealed
to be oppressive under the lens of contemporary feminist theory. K, in strikingly
incel fashion, is thus revealed to be incapable of developing romantic emotions
unless he is confronted with a reality (or, in this case: an illusion) which
approximates traditional ideals of femininity—ideals which simply no longer
correspond with the real world. This has the result of rendering both K, and the
modern incel which he represents, unable to love women as he finds them in the
post-industrial societies produced by neoliberal economic conditions and
progressive ideologies. This is illustrated clearly in a remarkable and
disquieting scene in which Joi hires a prostitute for K who is then able to have
sex with her, but only once Joi’s own ideal image is overlaid onto the prostitute’s
body. (DeCarlo, 2018)

35
As it can be seen, the yearning of a female partner who displays more traditional feminine
features is the condition of late capitalism since women are no longer neither expected nor even
allowed to conform to such gender roles. Even though this fascination with the concept itself is
nostalgic in nature and it may tempting (or even profitable for the likes of Jordan Peterson) to go
backwards in history to find a solution for a problem that is ultimately futuristic, we may also
read what Henry Flint has thought on this as perhaps the first thinker to identify the issue:
Further, as the human species comes to have vast technological capabilities,
many special interest groups will want to tinker with human social biology, each
in a different way, for political reasons. I am no longer interested in petty
tinkering with human biology. As I make it clear in other writings, I am in favor
of building entities which are actially superior to humans, and which avoid the
whole fabric of human biosocial defects, not just one or two of them. (Flynt,
1975)
Flint here very casually suggest a trans-humanist approach to the problem of his own
inceldom, some 40 years before Blade Runner 2049, eerily resembling how the movie builds up
Joi in K’s life. Nevertheless, as I have stated before, Joi’s construction in the movie is through a
capital exchange and such a solution to a problem that’s already been caused by the capital nexus
is, at best, ironic but it is still important to look at how Joi is presented in that perspective.
Whatever the conditions of K’s love life may actually be, it is still very fresh as a debate in
public consciousness so it becomes impossible to judge it through neither a modernist or
postmodernist lens, unlike the way Blade Runner can be debated. What I can do at most is to
acknowledge the depiction of Joi and K’s relationship to be a relevant to the discussions being
held today in gender studies and more broadly in today’s socio-political climate and how it
strikes a note with the contemporary audiences’ feelings and notions, whether they are
progressive or reactionary: pre-modernist, modernist, postmodernist or post-postmodernist.

36
simulacra versus simulation
One certain thing we can also derive from the movie is K’s relation with the emanator as a
critique of today’s networking culture. As we have discussed the big moment of the interaction is
the advancement of mobility of Joi yet in mirroring terms, if we accept Joi as a matrix of
pleasure that is open for K’s consumption, by having the emanator K guarantees he is always
connected to this network of ecstasy. If the AI girlfriend is a product of Wallace that is designed
for pleasure, it becomes easy to argue that K’s relationship with her can function as a material
addiction. In that case emanator becomes nothing but a short-cut for that addiction and that
would be a relevant critique of a contemporary culture as Fisher says
What we are facing here is not just time-honored teenage torpor, but the
mismatch between a post-literate 'New Flesh' that is 'too wired to concentrate'
and the confining, concentrational logics of decaying disciplinary systems. To
be bored simply means to be removed from the communicative sensation-
stimulus matrix of texting, YouTube and fast food; to be denied, for a moment,
the constant flow of sugary gratification on demand. […] Cyberspatial capital
operates by addicting its users […] If, then, something like attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder is a pathology, it is a pathology of late capitalism - a
consequence of being wired into the entertainment-control circuits of
hypermediated consumer culture. (Fisher, 2009, pp. 23-25)
This hypermediated display of K and Joi’s relationship bears its own problems, but some of
them seem to be inherent from the original movie in the most unexpected ways. The trouble of
the relationship between Deckard and Rachel was that (as explicitly stated by the voice over)
replicants weren’t designed to show emotions, and the same applied to blade runners:
For Deckard to do his unpleasant job, and thus to remain a cop rather than one
of the “little people” (a potential victim of the power structure), he must be
emotionless. He has been the best of blade runners, but at the expense of, among
other things, his marriage he says that his ex-wife called him “sushi” which he
translates as “Cold fish”. (Byers, 1987, p. 330)

37
So a romance between Deckard and Rachel was unnatural as in both weren’t suppose to feel
anything but they did. That basically formed the tragedy of their love. Meanwhile the sequel,
while also touching on the love between Deckard and Rachel and retroactively turning it into a
“miracle”, creates a new dynamic where it is so hyperreal that it does not feel real at all. In
Simulacra and Simulation Jean Baudrillard talks of the hyperreal saying,
Everywhere today one must recycle waste, and the dreams, the phantasms, the
historical, fairylike, legendary imaginary of children and adults is a waste
product, the first great toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilization. On a mental
level, Disneyland is the prototype of this new function. But all the sexual,
psychic, somatic recycling institutes, which proliferate in California, belong to
the same order. People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for
that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. They no
longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or
lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food. One reinvents penury,
asceticism, vanished savage naturalness: natural food, health food, yoga.
(Baudrillard, 1981, p. 13)
Baurillard’s definition of simulacra within the same book has been applied to the replicants
before (Bruno, 1987) but I believe some of those more flowery examples of his texts may be
found literally adapted in the sequel. From K’s food being superimposed with another to the K
having sex with a sex worker while his girlfriend is super-imposed onto her, examples of
simulations are various. It is also worth examining K and Joi’s trip to Las Vegas in this instance.
Las Vegas as we see in the movie is a nuclear wasteland filled with orange hues but the
depiction of it still has an element that almost eerily recalls those of a theme-park like
Disneyland with giant statues towering over the vast landscape and entertainment buildings
surrounding them. It is clear that while Los Angeles is now the postmodern city where different
architectures, cultures and countries are merged into one, Las Vegas is a complete waste of a city

38
where the radiation levels are said to make it uninhabitable. Las Vegas is the simulation that has
become too hyperreal to be sustainable. Its casinos still displays holograms of Elvis, but they are
glitching and jarring and do nothing but create noise and disillusion of the false reality that they
once provided.
Meanwhile, speaking on the subject of holograms, which is what Joi essentially is, and
comparing it with the two dimensional copied images Baudrillard says that
Three-dimensionality of the simulacrum - why would the simulacrum with three
dimensions be closer to the real than the one with two dimensions? It claims to
be, but paradoxically, it has the opposite effect: to render us sensitive to the
fourth dimension as a hidden truth, a secret dimension of everything, which
suddenly takes on all the force of evidence. The closer one gets to the perfection
of the simulacrum (and this is true of objects, but also of figures of art or of
models of social or psychological relations), the more evident it becomes (or
rather to the evil spirit of incredulity that inhabits us, more evil still than the evil
spirit of simulation) how everything escapes representation, escapes its own
double and its resemblance. (Baudrillard, 1981, p. 73)
Perhaps this explains the reason why everything that is a copy and simulation in blade
runners’ lives suddenly seem too fake to be taken as real in the sequel. Because the simulacra in
the sequel movie is much closer to the perfection that it becomes impossible to deny their
inauthenticity. In Blade Runner, they were still living in the simulation in the way Baudrillard
describes it, but they didn’t know. That is because some sort of real still existed, perhaps outside
of the boundaries of Los Angeles. This is specifically true in the first version where there is an
untouched nature in the wilderness, and that became impossibly unlikely to be true in the
subsequent versions of the movie, forming a paratextual change of the city just like it did with
Deckard as Matthew Flisfeder also mentions it saying that “The escape to nature is also

39
indicative of the modern motif of utopia; whereas the depiction of the future in the Director’s Cut
is much closer to the cynical representation of dystopia.” (Flisfeder, 2017)
In the sequel however, outside the city is either a junkyard, a series corporate mecha-farm or
irradiated desolation. As Baudrillard describes it, in the original movie city life is a simulation
that forms “the reflection of a profound reality” that still exists outside. In the sequel, since the
outside is in decay, it "masks and denatures a profound reality” by actually turning the reality
into an inhabitable place and subsequently being what he describes as “an evil appearance, - it is
of the order of maleficence". Simulation in Blade Runner 2049 is way more malevolent because
we have seen the cost of it both in macro scale by the ruins of other cities and to a personal
degree in blade runner’s life. Perhaps this is why the giant Joi has demonic eyes, because as
another simulation, she reminds the loss of the real to K, both by pointing out the absence of Joi
in his life now and making his former Joi fictitious retroactively as well.
How the sequel handles outside Los Angeles is important also because it is there we see the
old Deckard residing. As we know, depending on the version of the movie, he is last seen leaving
Los Angeles to live with Rachel and as a result this is where he ends up. So not only the sequel
movie places a hyperreal virtual relationship against the one in the original movie, it also takes
the original movie’s romance and fills in its continuity with that of a lonely man in a waste-yard
of a city. Obviously, sequel’s re-imagining of Deckard’s private life does not end there. Just as K
was presented with images of Joi outside his private sphere which resulted in his realisation of
his private life being nothing more than a fabrication, Deckard gets to live a similar experience
that also retrospectively casts doubt on his past private life as Wallace tells him
All these years you looked back on that day drunk on the memory of its
perfection. How shiny her lips. How instant your connection. Did it never occur

40
to you that's why you were summoned in the first place? Designed to do nothing
short of fall for her right then and there. All to make that single perfect specimen.
That is, if you were designed. Love or mathematical precision.
To which Deckard only replies “I know what’s real.” Then Wallace presents Deckard with a
fresh replicant in the image of Rachel. After a moment of hesitation, he refuses the advance,
saying “Her eyes were green”, using the imperfection of the material as an excuse. It is
impossible to know the degree this version of Rachel was authentic to the original Rachel, if she
had the same memories etc. But unlike K, Deckard refuses to conform to the evil of a simulation
that defiles what he perceived as real previously. It is especially telling that he cites her eyes used
to being green as opposed to a darker colour, almost as a contrast with giant Joi’s demonic eyes.
These scenes actually follow one another, making the irony even more pronounced narrationally.
All in all, it is evident that the simulation of a life presented to both Deckard and K is the
hegemony they are subjected to in their lives. This ties in with the previous points I have
established as well since Deckard can go around doing his job without his identity becoming a
problem while that is not the case for K, who has to live and work with the fact that he is a
replicant. As I have pointed out, Deckard -as the older generation- was content with his
simulation because he was not aware of the fabrication the hegemony provided. The world of
2019 was imperfect but that imperfection stemmed from how people could envision 2019 to be
from the conditions of 1982 in real world and that created a postmodern padding for people to
fall back on, because even if the dystopia was unbearable, the movie was still a simulacra of the
real life it mocked and the reality was still more profound.
2049 however seems hardly like a dystopia in 2017. This is not because the conditions of
Blade Runner 2049 is more plausible in 2017 any more than Blade Runner was in 1982 but

41
perhaps because the real world hegemonies have become harder to ignore. The movies reflect
back on such hegemonies by providing a falsehood in fiction but now that the deceit has become
so widespread and the power of the capital has become so forceful that it is not only impossible
to not be aware of it, it is also unlikely to not acknowledge the evil of simulation.
In the first movie, even though there are intrusions, machismos and simulations present,
neither Deckard nor the audience was subjected to their destructive powers, essentially taking a
nihilistic, postmodern stance towards them. The sequel movie however acknowledges more
clearly the dangers that lie with the fusion of private and public spaces, the toxic reduction of
relationship to cash nexus and the simulation that emerges from these factors, and does so in the
most modernist way, as such parts of private life does end up defining the individuality of a
person. When K realises that his Joi was just a simulation, it is not because of a romantic
heartbreak akin to feeling cheated on that he is broken down but because of his realisation that
all parts of his life that meant something for him; that propelled his search for a history, that gave
him an identity and that constructed his individuality was just as ephemeral as the falling rain. As
Berman puts out
Marx believes that the shocks and upheavals and catastrophes of life in
bourgeois society enable moderns, by going through them to discover who they
“really are”. But if bourgeois society is as volatile as Marx thinks it is, how can
its people ever settle on any real selves? […] There will no longer be any illusion
of a real self underneath the masks. Thus, along with community and society,
individuality itself may be melting into the modern air. (Berman, 1982, p. 110)
1
I choose to refer to the whole Los Angeles Polis Department and its subsequent presence as ‘the institution’ as to
avoid loading any further meaning into their role. From a more liberal perspective one may even call it ‘the state’
wherein institutional actors become state actors but I feel like this may be a note too limited for the overall themes I
wanted to explore. That being said, even though both are institutional as well, my use of institution does not apply to
Tyrell Corporation or Wallace Corporation unless specified.
2
While it is systematically hard to cite this claim, one could take a look at 4chan’s /tv/ board on any day and see
Blade Runner 2049 being discussed, specifically in regards to K’s relationship with Joi being looked with envy.
4chan is an image-based website mainly used by young white males and recently been investigated in its part with
the 2018 Toronto van attack perpetuated by a man feeling victimized for being an incel. (Wendling, 2018)

42
5. ON TASK: Blade Runners’ Job, Quest and Relations with Power
To understand the capacities of the job that blade runners do, I believe it is important to first
understand the replicants’ position in society more thoroughly. They are undoubtedly used as
slaves as in the original movie Deckard specifically says that “Skin jobs, that's what Bryant
called replicants. In history books he is the kind of cop used to call black men niggers.” as if the
comparison needs any less subtlety. Throughout the movie we see their struggle to live longer
than their lifespan and they come to earth to seek this, essentially making themselves rogue and
open to execution. The boundaries between the earth and off-world is important to discuss at this
point.
As I have sparingly discussed previously, the version of Los Angeles we see in the original
movie is less than enticing. It feels crowded yet apartments are empty and public services seem
to be inoperative with trashes everywhere and decay visualised. By any perspective, city looks
poor and that makes sense because we also know that rich people live off-world now. So
whoever is left on earth seems to be of little people as Bryant chooses to call them. Beside the
existence of replicants, there is already a class difference here maintained by a planetary
separation. Therefore we can adopt a perspective that makes replicants as the regressed part of
the society where oppressed group of people need not be feeling so oppressed as they can reflect
their oppression back at them. Speaking on this, Christiane Gerblinger says that “[…] the crux of
the films’ version of capitalism, that is, by giving humans a new class to oppress, they are easily
controlled because they regulate their own repression.” (Gerblinger, 2002, p. 22)
In both of these movies, the repression of replicants are quite necessary as it is easily used by
the ruling class to maintain the status quo. One very explicit use of such neoconservative politics
is seen in the short movie that is a prelude to the sequel, Blade Runner 2022: Black Out where

43
we are subjected to the images of people blaming and literally fighting replicants because they
are losing their jobs to them. Such cases ring especially familiar with the same type of anger
shown towards immigrants in the Western world now but I believe the movies’ use of the
similarity is not to make a far too obvious allegory but to simply explain the political landscape
of the universe. We get glimpses of such oppression-repression duality so that we can deduce
how the status quo is maintained in the first place. As Kevin McNamara states
Much as in the contemporary United States, where the demonization of nonwhite
peoples refocuses anger that ought to be directed against the dismantling of civil
liberties, the de-unionization of the labor force, de-industrialization, the transfer
of production to low-wage economic dependencies abroad, the upward
redistribution of wealth, and the undoing of the welfare state, the demonization
of androids deflects mass attention from the real threat to freedom posed by an
economy that thrives on the manufacture of products that threaten society in
ways that justify the creation of a repressive apparatus. (McNamara, 1997, p.
433)
Regardless of how many layers of oppression there are, from ruling class to common people
or from common people to replicants, we can look at this difference as a form of caste system. In
that aspects, blade runner’s job seems to be protecting such class system. As Tihana Bertek also
argues, their job is to remove any replicant whose “presence undermines the neatly set spatial-
class boundaries” (Bertek, 2014, p. 4) meanwhile Žižek identifies the movie as Marxist in
narrative as he says:
The fusion of Capital and Knowledge brings about a new type of proletarian, as
it were the absolute proletarian bereft of the last pockets of private resistance;
everything, up to the most intimate memories, is planted, so that what remains
is now literally the void of pure substanceless subjectivity (substanzlose
Subjektivitaet -- Marx's definition of the proletarian). Ironically, one might say
that Blade Runner is a film about the emergence of class consciousness. (Žižek,
1993, p. 5)

44
In the original movie’s case, we can interpret Deckard’s journey to be at an end point where
he realises replicants are by no means different than humans and his job as a class partitioner, or
the guarantor of the class distinction, should not continue as he decides to run away from the city
with Rachel, essentially becoming class conscious. He can make that decision with ease, leaving
the job itself as he is from the oppressing group. In the sequel however, this is harder for K to do
even after he becomes class conscious as I have explained previously.
a real human being and a real hero
In 2049, the world is changed to some degree but not that much. After a successful replicant
rebellion in 2022, all digital records accounting for replicants are lost, resulting in all of the
replicants on earth (by that time Nexus 8 models are also served locally, meaning they are not
exclusive to off-world now) virtually becoming rogue as they become indistinguishable from
other humans except for a barcode under their right eye. Some of them solve this problem by
removing the eye and some of them continue to live under the radar.
As stated in the scene at Wallace archives, it is these rogue replicants that blade runners have
problem with as they make people “lose sleep”. The first job that’s given to K in the movie is to
find such rogue replicant that went missing in 2022, that is Sapper Morton. Aside from carrying
the same figurative title of guarantor of the class separation, the blade runner is now tasked with
hunting down an older generation of his race, who is regarded as more rebellious. As displayed
in another prelude short movie Blade Runner 2036: Nexus Dawn, the new generation is branded
by Wallace to be completely loyal to the point of taking their own life when instructed. This,
compared with the old vanguard with the likes of Roy who killed in order to stay alive puts a
clear distinction between the new and the old generation of replicants. So when in 2049, the

45
blade runner is hunting down older Nexus models like Morton, he is also basically participating
in a generation war.
It is then through Morton that he becomes a part of the conspiracy surrounding the fate of a
lost replicant born child. When Joshi discovers what a replicant child would mean, she starts
talking about the social conditions of the world by saying “The world is built on a wall that
separates kind. Tell either side there's no wall, you bought a war or a slaughter.” This clearly a
metanarrative of the world that she adheres to, something that cannot be found in the original
movie from an institutional character. After her remark, she immediately orders K to find the
child and kill him. We see K’s hesitation there as he says that he has never retired a born creature
before, believing they have souls and replicants do not. Right from that moment on, K’s job as a
conventional blade runner ceases. He is now not given a job to retire a replicant but murder a
human. This is completely different than Deckard’s position since he was never given an order to
kill one of his kind, yet that’s all K has been doing his whole life, and his first moment of
hesitation comes when he is ordered to kill a human but it would be a more thorough reading to
interpret this hesitation non-personal as K is involved in a conspiracy unlike Deckard. For the
twist of fate, towards the climax of the movie K finds himself between three fractions, the state
who wants to see the child gone, Wallace who wants the child to research on so that he could
give the replicants the ability to reproduce, and the replicant resistance band who wishes to
preserve the child believing her to be a messiah.
However as we are discussing his job, he is only responsible for answering to the first of these
factions and that makes it his proper quest. Undoubtedly this becomes extra difficult when he
starts believing himself to be the child he is supposed to kill. Whereas the first movie had what
Harvey had called hunter-hunted dynamic with making the blade runner and replicants position

46
closely, the sequel makes K both the hunter and the hunted in the same subjecthood and that
results with the great anomaly of not being able to perform the task of the execution. Only by
then he lets go off all sense of duty and start investigating for his own, to find answer on his own
and gets off from LAPD by lying to Joshi about killing the child.
In a way, Deckard’s character has always been a bit more distanced to the core of the story.
He happened to be a detective/assassin who was tasked to take out a group of individuals deemed
to be hazardous for society but the real journey has always been that of those individuals. Within
the movie itself there are several sub-plots involving Rachel coming to terms with her identity
and Roy and replicants’ quest to meet Tyrell. Combined with that, Deckard sometimes does not
even feel like the hero of the story, he becomes just a character that witnessed the journey of a
greater character, almost like how Nick Carraway functions in relation to Jay Gatsby in The
Great Gatsby. The events of the original movie are set off when Roy starts his quests and ends
with his death. Compared to what he went through, Deckard’s only character development is a
bit of an added perspective and a love interest. Even in terms of acting, Deckard is almost
positioned as the straight man and when he confronts Roy who is way more dramatic and
eccentric, the chase results in Roy following Deckard as he tries to escape from him. Throughout
this chase, Roy taunts him with his words and when Deckard almost falls from the building, it is
Roy who decides to save him. Even when he shares his final moments with him, Deckard is
silent and only watches. Throughout the climax, it is Roy who performs the actions that propel
the narrative and he is justifiably regarded as the hero.
K’s journey however is much more personal within the story. Even though Ryan Gosling too
has established his screen persona with similar acting roles of a straight man, especially in Drive,
he is unmistakably the hero as it is his actions that propel the narrative and effect not only

47
himself but those around him. In that aspect his task is also very personal in nature and this
creates a great deal of difference between the two movies. Whereas one is more concerned with
telling a multi-section story with an unreliable perspective of a character who may not even be
seen as the hero, the other is a proper retelling of a hero’s journey with the extra subversion of
the hero being special trope and this difference stems from how their subjecthood is placed
within the task they are given. Deckard’s task is outward and involves going against other agents
whereas K’s inward as he takes a journey to discover his identity. If Blade Runner refuses to
conform to the convention of a hero by making Deckard an anti-hero, the sequel has no problems
with going back to the more traditional way of telling its story with a clear hero as the centre of
its story where his tasks shape the narrative.
sometimes historicise
That being said, how these tasks are performed is just as important as what they are. In a
conventional Noir fashion, both movies feature key detective works yet how they are presented
to the audience bears interesting differences. Take Deckard’s photograph investigation for
example. Speaking on it, Flisfeder writes that
Instead of the three-dimensional space of the room itself, and the “scene of the
crime,” so to speak, the two-dimensional surface of the image provides Deckard
with the very information that he seeks. […] Deckard is able to explore the
photograph in this way because it becomes a space of virtual reality. (Flisfeder,
2017, p. 119)
In the same vein of such investigation, we see a similar scene in the sequel when K, Joshi and
several other officers are investigating Rachel’s bones through an x-ray imaging device. Even
though x-ray images, just like photographs, are known to be two dimensional, K does not only
enhance the image on the screen but almost travels through it. In this world, if a print photograph

48
can be enhanced to a degree that allows for weird a parallax to be formed and previously unseen
details to be discovered, the x-ray microscope is by no means different. Yet whereas in the
original movie Deckard travels through an existing place, that is the room replicants were hiding
through a photograph, in the sequel K does so in between molecules creating a hyperreality
within the hyperreality.
Just as Flisfeder argued that Esper machine’s enchantment resulted in a virtual reality or
hyperspace being formed, microscope too does the same thing, but this virtual reality compared
to the one in the original movie is too impossible to be conceived as real since it is implausible to
normally witness the amount of details K has discovered. This is again similar to how I have
talked about the entirety of the simulation in the sequel being too detailed -in this case literally
since it is a detail in the molecules- to reflect the reality.
Another strange part of K’s investigation takes place in Dr. Ana Stelline’s laboratory where
she designs memories. This scene as well is a creation of hyperspace of sorts. The most
resemblances Blade Runner has to this scene is perhaps when Hannibal Chew designs the eyes
for the replicants but it is still not that close as eyes are just apparatus for perceiving reality when
in Blade Runner 2049 we explicitly see the creation of a reality that is unquestionably a
construct. K’s reason for coming to her is to understand if his own memories are authentic but
after she tells K that his memory is real, he wrongly assumes that it means they belong to him.
While she is telling the truth that the memory is real, what she omits to tell is that it is actually
her memories, not his. This is similar to what Rachel was subjected to as she too knew that her
memories must be real since she had photographic evidence, what she couldn’t have known is
that her memories, along with the photographs, belonged to someone else. In a sense, Blade
Runner again takes a postmodernist stance towards the history by proving that even if they are

All That Are Tears Melt Into Rain A Comparison Of Blade Runner And Blade Runner 2049 Through Concepts In Modernity And Postmodernity

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