I can't believe it's been almost four years since Blade Runner 2049 came out. I saw it in the movie theatre but it was on a day when, due to circumstances I can't remember, I didn't have any caffeine before I saw it. I do remember refusing to take the movie theatre's expensive, instant pod coffee. To quote Deckard (Harrison Ford) in the movie, I know what's real. But do I?
Jared Leto's character floats the idea that Deckard was designed to fall in love with Rachel. Which is a possibility of you consider the theory that Deckard's a Replicant. I always thought it worked better to think of Deckard as human but the ambiguity Leto's character, Wallace, teases is interesting for how it undermines Deckard's sense of reality. Do our lives mean less if we're puppets? If so, why, exactly? Why do we need to think we're in control, that our emotional and intellectual responses originate with us?
So, yeah, I finally had a chance to watch the movie again last night, now that it's on Netflix in certain countries. I mostly stand by my original review. I definitely still think the subplot with Ana de Armas is the strongest part of a film composed almost entirely of strong parts.
It may be the aspect of the movie most like the first film. As Deckard struggled with the validity of Rachel's apparent sentience, so K or Joe (Ryan Gosling) struggles with the validity of Joi's (de Armas). There are two things about it that don't work for me as strongly as when I watched the film without caffeine, though. I don't like the black eyes the Joi advertisement has at the end and I don't like how director Denis Villeneuve deliberately avoided showing Joi's nudity until it was in an advertisement. I understand the motive in both cases--the dark eyes are to make her face eerie and less suggestive of human warmth, and the refrain from showing nudity is a demonstration of how sexual attraction is heightened more by what we don't see than by what we do see.
The ad slogan makes it clear--you pay, you get "everything you want to see (and hear)". No tension, only satisfaction. I think this is an astute comment on what makes someone sexy but not on what makes someone human or sentient. The thing with the dark eyes is a bit of a cheat--it telegraphs to the audience that an advertisement is colder than the relationship Joe built over time with his Joi. But the people who made the advertisement wouldn't want it to look cold--they're trying to tell you you can have everything. And showing her with human eyes would underline the sense of uncertainty about Joe's relationship with his Joi. Did they have something real or was it just his impression? Is it always just impressions?
A relevant comment could also have been made about people who are caught in a cycle of compulsively viewing porn or who are otherwise compelled to satisfy all questions and urges as quickly as possible. It's not the audience's job to be aware of the value of tension, which makes it a shame audiences now have so much authority over how and when they digest stimuli. I suspect this is why so many young people have anxiety disorders.
We're not yet at a point where artificial lifeforms are capable of the nuanced, dynamic facial expressions that suggest to the viewer a real, internal, emotional existence. The Blade Runner movies will probably take on a new relevance when that does, inevitably, come to pass but as it is now the stories are relevant for how they extrapolate from a problem we already have. How real is love, how much of it is genetic programming? And why does it matter?
As I pointed out in my previous review, this question is essentially the same as posed by Hitchcock's Vertigo. I was also reminded of the French New Wave, itself so influenced by Vertigo. The scene in Blade Runner 2049 where Elvis Presley songs flicker abruptly in and out of holographic existence in the middle of an action sequence is reminiscent of Anna Karina's musical number in Une femme est une femme, and it has much the same point. The filmmaker is demonstrating to us how our emotions are manipulated by the presence or absence of melody. It's somewhat admirable, then, that Deckard, in the end, resolutely says, "I like this song."
No comments:
Post a Comment