Blade Runner 2049: The Equality of Suffering

One measure of a good sci-fi dystopian film is how it uses the setting to address key issues of current society. A subtle easter egg example of this is in a Clockwork Orange, when the protagonist Alex walks around a prominent 70s-era record shop without even changing the set, it was a clue that Kubrick was touching on behavioral programming in then current society (hat tip Rob Ager).

If the underlying political ideology behind dystopian novel Clockwork Orange was totalitarian communism, the political movements that Blade Runner 2049 counter balances against is neoliberal globalism and feminism, interlinked within one stem.

But first a note on the pace, which is glacial in the same vein as Kubrick or Tarkovsky, indicating that important themes and motifs are communicated visually. In the opening scene K sits quietly as the monster of a man Morton Sapper enters the tiny hovel. K inexplicably lays down his weapon and engages in a conversation with a former blade runner twice his size. Morton Sapper attacks first, driving K through the wall before K begins counterpunching. K, importantly never throws the first punch. In this brief analysis I will discuss two important and slow visual scenes, the beehive in las vegas and the death of the newborn replicant.

The Beehive as Interlinked Cells

Near the end of the second act K descends upon Las Vegas in search of Deckard and spends considerable time investigating the beehive outside Deckard’s residence. A normal movie may spend 6 seconds or less (the time of the average movie edit) displaying the beehive. K by contrast sticks his hand in the beehive, allows the bees to crawl all over his hand and sting him repeatedly. In strictly logical terms it fits his overall pattern as being a glutton for punishment or idiot masochist. K exhibits the behavior with Morton Sapper and later allows Deckard to punch him repeatedly.

The beehive has two important meanings. First it is a miracle event, a wondrous sight to behold in 2049. Bees are integral pollinators to many fruits and vegetables and the collapse of the bee population was likely the trigger of world wide crop failure plunging humanity into starvation. The only plant seen in the film is the dead tree at Rachel’s grave, and wood is a highly scarce commodity. Deckard also has a dog and several wood carvings indicating he is a curator and progenitor of the miraculous.

Secondly, and thematically more important, the beehive represents the pinnacle of the slave / royalty hierarchy underlying both Blade Runners. Importantly for 2049, the beehive is led by the Queen. The life cycle of the worker bee centers around maintenance of the cells of the beehive, capping honey supplies and feeding drones and the queen bee. Fully mature bees then begin to forage in known locations for nectar, and at about six weeks from birth the honeybee travels further and into unknown locations to forage. K emerges from his cell to retire replicants but his search for the lost child of Rachel is perilous and outside of standard protocol. K travels to distant, bombed out Las Vegas in search of Deckard is a final venture in search of high yield reward for the hive and Niander Wallace. Everything K has done up to the retrieval of Deckard had been part of Wallace’s grand plan. He was likely one of many Blade Runners implanted with false memories of being the only son of Rachel, the miracle child, the one in a million hero.

For further evidence of the bee heirarchy parallel, let’s consider the poem K recites from Pale Fire as part of his baseline exam.

K: “and blood black nothingness began to spin…cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked within one stem. And dreadfully distinct against the dark a tall white fountain played”

Interrogator: Cells.

K: Cells.

Interrogator: “Have you ever been in an institution? Cells.”

K: “Cells”.

Interrogator: “Do they keep you in an cell? Cells.”

K: “Cells”.

Interrogator: “When you are not performing your duties do they keep you in a little box? Cells.”

Three more questions related to human relationships and bonding are paired with the word “interlinked” and the interrogator asks K to again repeat the “Cells interlinked x 3 “ section before he picks up his bonus. The beehive scene in the beginning of the third act brings home the concept that K is a worker bee in a system of cells interlinked within a hive mind directed by mass and individualized programming. His living quarters is a crammed cell, a tiny box. He is interlinked to Wallace enterprises through Joi, when he wipes her hard drive the beacon sends a signal to central command where Luv , the (false) queen bee who has been shown to dispatch drones at will. His interaction with the beehive is a realization by K, or at least a clue for the audience that K has lived his life as a bugman lacking an intelligence autonomous from the hive mind. Monitored by the “Queen Bee” Luv, who is herself sterile, throughout his adventure to find out about the source of his memory, which he realizes after the fact has been implanted.

The revelation of K as lowly Knight in the slave hierarchy is certainly a refreshing antidote in the last generation of the big movie blockbuster. Every Harry Potter film and superhero film has an indestructable hero, “The One” that through heavy handed deus ex machina overcomes all obstacles easily, and retains all his friends and allies to endlessly promote sequels. Such media is a recipe for a generation of entitled, narcissistic school shooters. Compare this to classic movies such as the Magnificent Seven or the Dirty Dozen, grunts that work as a team and die in the defense of a small town or nation. In K, we have a hero that hearkens back to these more classical heros, the martyr to the cause of something greater than himself.

The Death of the Maternal and it’s consequences

The central question of the series is what it means to be human. K is implanted with memories, but has been deceived into believing these memories are true. His interactions with the prostitute that also turns out to be a replicant is stilted and awkward, likewise his conversation before his fight with Morton Sapper is cryptic. K’s banter with the Somali merchant and the Black orphanage headmaster are better examples of how humans behave, with greed, fear, anger and heightened emotions in general. Thus the only major human character early on is Lieutenant Joshi. Lt. Joshi is a hard as nails and career-oriented, played brilliantly by Robin Wright, (who notably also plays the Vice President on House of Cards). When K misses his baseline Joshi browbeats him, throwing a temper tantrum, saying “You were fucking MILES off your baseline K!” She then does the human thing of basically looking the other way and letting K investigate the history of the child of Rachel without her direct consent.

It is upon K’s return from San Diego, with the horse token, Joshi meets him at his apartment and intermittently dotes over K as a child and lecherously hits on him. Lt. Joshi is revealed to be an alchoholic that is desperate for human connection. She has sublimated her biological drives for sexual reproduction and maternal care into masculinized aggression and alternatively doting over subordinates. Through a long series of career moves she painted herself into a phylogenetic corner, and after aging out of biological reproduction can only chase some semblance of human connection.

Soon after the discovery that Rachel gave birth, there is a long scene where industry head Niander Wallace inspects a new replicant. She is stunningly beautiful with short blond hair and very fearful. On the surface, Mr. Wallace weighs the benefits of having replicants that can procreate, reveling in the god-like power within his grasp, as slices the infertile replicant in her womb. The scene is long and excruciating, even his no-nonsense bodyguard Luv sheds a tear for the newborn, nameless replicant. But one of the upgrades of the new replicants is that they are well programmed to obey, and so Luv offers no protest to Niander at this gruesome exercise.

When Luv meets Joshi, these suppressed emotions come to the surface. Ostensibly Luv wants to track the location of K to ultimately find Deckard, but she aggressively confronts Lt. Joshi and says:

Luv: You tiny thing. In the face of the fabulous new your only thought is to kill it? For fear of great change? You can’t hold the tide with a broom.

Lt. Joshi: Except that I did.

Lt. Joshi may have directed the Blade Runners, and Luv was angry of having so many of her cohort dispatched. However, later in the pyramid Luv has no qualms about destroying the new Rachel model in front of Deckard. The clue here is “new”. Luv’s programming prevents her from confronting Niander Wallace directly and as such channels her anger outwardly to others in her line of work. Luv also slices Lt. Joshi above the pelvis which would lead to a painful and slow death. Niander Wallace’s demonstration on the newborn served to prime Luv to act with direct violence, which she recreates a second time with K, sealed with a kiss. Like the newborn replicant, Lt. Joshi is infertile, not by design but by choice.

The tragedy of Lt. Joshi illustrates that the equality in the workplace that women have been fighting for will largely result in an equality of suffering throughout society. Actually, because it goes so far against the grain of biology, far greater suffering. Just outside the city K finds sprawling, pathetic orphanages of young boys, surrounded by homeless encampments of shiftless men. Lt. Joshi, at the pinnacle of her career as a policewoman, completely reversing gender roles, is a miserable and depressed high-functioning alcoholic. I can think of no more effective counter-signaling to the current crop of female authority figures promoted on the small and big screen. Interestingly, Niander Wallace reverses gender roles as well, performing the duty of the Queen Bee by producing endless slave replicants.

Luv, like Lt. Joshi, is another incarnation of the modern career woman. Infertile and masculine she is programmed to kill and defend to her death her father/boss. The equality of feminism must lead to the equality of suffering and inflicting violence. Luv is such an effective villain precisely because this final endpoint of gender equality in the workforce (I must repeat this) runs so counter to human biology. Once the novelty wears off, seeing prominent talking heads or female politicians shooting at the range is distasteful to men. Like Lt. Joshi she had nearly full autonomy within the workplace but no autonomy over her offspring, no capability to mold the future.

The death of Rachel represents the death of the Maternal throughout society. There are no more families in the world of 2049. There are prostitutes and career women, but no mothers. Reproduction goes on at high rates, if the orphanage is any indication. One unspoken, eerie mystery is that there are no young girls portrayed in the film. Dr. Stelline was passed off as a boy, why? Are young women sold into sex slavery, or sent Off world? The only joyful memories are the ones being implanted by Dr. Stelline, the daughter of Rachel, the final Mother. Real families seemingly no longer exist, but have to be recreated. Memories are thus commodified and monopolized by Wallace enterprises. This is the ultimate realization of feminism in a neoliberal globalist society, where we are all atomized units of consumption.

The triumph of K is that he is able to overcome his psychological programming and become a martyr, not in the service of Niander Wallace or the replicant rebellion, but in honor of Rachel and in aid of the Paternal figure Deckard. He plants his flag in the name of Family, not class struggles or to preserve the global neoliberal heirarchy. This is why Blade Runner 2049 is ultimately a hopeful and uplifting story, because it strives to awakens within us that slumbering biological impulse to create and develop our own families, for men to find and honor the Rachel in our lives and for women to cherish the maternal within themselves.