BLADE RUNNER 2049
The movie is, first and foremost, a visual experience.
Emblematic urban landscape and pouring rain. A significant conjuring up of the first movie screen experience.
The visuals are pervaded by our current tastes for alternative reality/realities
Ubiquitous holograms and virtual images superimposed on to the real world
A taste for “good scenes”
Interesting and intriguing backdrops: a palace, Deckard’s home or simply the street.
Even the landscape of disasters is endowed with a magic quality…
The soundtrack is haunting:
The dissonance of the world at hand can be HEARD …
The snow and rain are the only surviving natural elements that are palpable.
The noise of the brew on the stove: eerie in its normalcy, its ordinariness
Everything else looks so alien and strange
Uncanny, yet, in a weird way.
Some central question (s)
The real and the virtual
The virtual is presented as a part of the characters’ real world (K’s girlfriend)
Enter The question of a real birth
Again, the question of memories: memories lived by someone or made up
“Yes, these memories have been lived by someone”
The wooden horse as sign of a lost world—a lost time (childhood, with the putative natural birth) and a lost space (nature).
The tree, of course, stands for a genealogical line, calling forth the question of filiations—legitimate or not. Incongruous questions, perhaps, in such a world.
Can the Replicant inscribe himself/herself in a human family/history?
“You are not made, you are born” says the girlfriend who insists on giving (him) a name.
His hesitation : did he really live this or does he believe he did?
Enter Memory and identity
The threshold ushering a self-delusion
(Maybe, maybe not)
He has constructed a narrative—a point of origin anchored in a “real’ family (Replicant or partially human…no closure on this point in the wake of the first movie)
A Platonic subtext? we perceive only shadows of the real.
Little nods to the early viewer, a different sense of recognition:
The origami
Rachel (without the green eyes): she is (has become) just a shadow, an illusion.
Little concessions to the passing of time and practicing of other SF spaces.
Feeling of displacement /unbalance created by the constant intrusion of holograms and their staged dramas (Elvis, Marilyn and company)
Giving shape and contours to our inner theatre, yet they remain as immaterial and fleeting and evanescent.
The linearity of time is disturbed along with linearity of space.
We hop from one setting to another without any sense of traveling and transitioning into…
Music and images from another time recur and create another form of haunting.
(Derrida’s specters)
A series of tableaux morphing a dreamscape. With an occasional nightmare.
We have to establish the connections.
Video game aesthetics and cinematic experience
The female body on screen
Desire—with new forms of “streetcars” and naming.
How cinema and reality intersect
Their constant crosspollination
A blend of high tech science and gimmicks (little flying objects)
And ubiquitous desires
The ability to scan and record reality, to probe into it with the eye without moving close to the object.
Proximity and distance
Drone like weapons.
The dog: the faithful companion. In reality as in the virtual world. At least, let’s hope so.
A leave-taking?
Temporary or final?
Depending on whether the next 25 years are—(perhaps) (also)—transitory or final.
Marie Lienard-Yeterian