Entrapped by BLADE RUNNER 2049

Amalia Rizos

15 December 2023

Word Count: 3,623

Posthuman Entrapment

The theory of the posthuman challenges boundaries. It disrupts the status quo’s conception of identity, society, and agency by enabling individuals to exist in a state beyond the human. Since posthumanism recomposes the frontiers of man’s makeup––allowing man to be machine, inorganic, or a “replicant”––then finitudes, liminality, and confines become the fundamental confrontation of his existence. In the vast scope of Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), the propulsion of main character Officer K (Ryan Gosling) believing himself to be human is an exploration of his personal entrapment. All of his “life” he has been designated as a replicant––or a “bioengineered humanoid,” the very race of synthetic people born out of the retro sci-fi collision between human and technology, first designed by the Tyrell Corporation in the first Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). The concept of the replicant was first deployed in Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?, the inspiration for both films. At the heart of the original tale––and most of Dick’s writing––reside the themes of artificiality and questioning what it means to be a human. On this ontological quest for ascribing meaning to forged humans, the city of Los Angeles is rusted over, hectically globalized, and vaguely apocalyptic. Here, cars can fly and blade runners are the police officers who “retire” replicants (capitalistic lingo shrouding massacre––a conceived misnomer for the execution of replicants), and the first Blade Runner was salient in its handling of the replicant as a commodified object, a system of labor, an enslaved whir of metal and mind. The sequel 2049 elevates these themes and embalms them in the labyrinthine personal, ontological, and societal entrapment of Officer K, an entrapment exacted by greater society; the film’s dystopian society and totalitarian authorities schematize an apocalyptic, hyperreal cityspace which K maneuvers as a posthuman flâneur. 

This paper seeks to examine the bindings of K, and thematically link them to both Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, 1987), specifically Damiel’s yearning to escape his nonhuman existence in addition to comparisons with Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play, and the sense of “unsurpassable finitude” which holds Vladimir and Estragon hostage (Brandt 121). It will be shown how the spatial and societal entrapment of Blade Runner 2049 mirrors the restricted mental and emotional landscape of the replicants the world lays claim to: The replicants’ interiority is constricted by menacing authority figures, and the physical spaces which confine these replicants are isolating; consequently they are denied agency and autonomy in their oppressed existence. This parallels the futile waiting and existential angst portrayed in Waiting for Godot, in which a barren setting and limited reality deepen this posthuman discussion of what transpires when individuals are trapped in heedless matrices of imposition, and Wings of Desire offers further insight into the nonhuman condition by elucidating an angel’s desire to be human. These works collectively scrutinize the challenges faced by characters caught in existential struggles, fleshing out the implications of posthumanism on identity, freedom, agency, and the very definition of what it means to be human.

Blade Runner 2049 begins with aerial shots of the landscape below, spotlighting a concentrically circled solar farm that formally resembles the panopticon: Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth century concept of the panopticon was designed to sanction all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single security guard from the center eye of the layout. Inmates of this prison cannot know when they are being watched, firmly establishing an omnipresent state of surveillance within the space of the prison. The cinematography of Villeneuve’s 2049 inspires theoretical meditations upon broader, postmodern concepts, such as this notion of an overarching panopticon greeting viewers of the film and guaranteeing heightened societal surveillance to ensue. Under the purview of the postmodern panopticon, Michel Foucault extends its implications into the twentieth century by the proposed concept of disciplinary societies, which outlines a condition of surveillance in contemporary civilizations. Gilles Deleuze, in his 1992 paper “Postscript on the Societies of Control” argues that Foucault’s disciplinary societies “initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure” but have, in the late twentieth century, been replaced by the more severe societies of control (Deleuze 3).

The inception of societies of control has given rise to an illusionary sense of freedom: in these societies of control, one must forego their privacy to achieve access beyond the barriers of control put into place (Deleuze 6). This is captured in 2049 within the scene of K’s baseline examination. In this scene, K is seated on a stool, alone in the panopticon, in a blanched, windowless cell. The first sight of him under examination is a shot of the back of his head, furthering the sense of exile this baseline test engenders. These back-of-the-head shots, which crop up throughout the film, create an arbitrariness to K’s identity, negating his individual potential. This facelessness works to destabilize his identity. In this scene, K’s unseen interviewer is a supervising officer, and the examination measures any emotional deviance experienced by Nexus-9 replicants (K’s own make and model) in the course of their police work. A bad result of the test is off-baseline, and three off-baselines means immediate retirement. Accordingly, K fails his baseline exam when he begins believing he might be the miracle child born from the replicant he finds buried beneath a dead tree at the start of the film. His stray in emotionality, which affects his score, indicates a level of nuanced humanity 2049’s LAPD does not allow.  Therefore, this baseline exam involves authority assessing subjectivity and punishing it if it has strayed in any emotional direction. This is a society of control, and K has no privacy in it whatsoever. The scene itself, with the demanding, disembodied voice recording K’s responses from behind a small optical lens is isolating for K, stressful for the viewer, and posthuman in its construction. This is an abrasively ontological examination that works to treat the replicant as the machine it is, looking at its metrics and bodily rates to judge if it is doing its job up to par, and if not, death is the punishment.

Stefan Brandt, in his article “The City as Liminal Space: Urban Visuality and Aesthetic Experience in Postmodern U.S. Literature and Cinema,” illustrates the conditions at stake in the original Blade Runner’s city, a city which has only been extended in the sequel 2049, so his claims hold true for both films. Brandt contends, “The postmodern city [as represented in recent U.S. cinema] is constructed as a symbolic place based on visions of liminality” (Brandt 553). The theme of liminality––as displayed in the constricting classifications enforced by the surrounding society of control which limit how the replicants are permitted to live––orchestrates this paper’s understanding of K’s entrapment. 2049’s city is a cache of signs and symbols, with meanings, not paper-machéd but digitally projected, atop other meanings: “the postmodern metropolis is spatially organized through strategies of fragmentation and decentering” to the point that “the tactile fabric of the city seems constructed as a mirror image of the mental constitution of its inhabitants, often reflecting feelings of confusion and bottomlessness” (Brandt 554). K must corral his individuality to stay in line with the totalitarian state’s limits. Brandt wields the term “postmetropolis” for the heterogenous mega city, that is “a place in which the surface is turned into the focal point of perception,” and this depthless surface is a hyperreal site of detours and impasses, “evoking an impression of inner depth by means of staged images and signs” (Brandt 554). Commenting on the convoluted meanings of the postmetropolis, Brandt remarks on how “postmodern fiction tends to utilize images of transcendence and boundary crossing,” which is in keeping with posthumanism’s boundary negotiating, and so from here, the flâneur, the metropolitan walker, the person who experiences the city first hand “becomes a key device in the authors' attempts to comment on processes of self-formation and overall social change” (Brandt 561). Through the action of walking and the achievement of movement through this partition-based space, “the city in postmodern fiction is staged as a liminal space, a space that symbolizes transition and chance. As an experiential space, the urban labyrinth offers the flâneur an enigmatic assemblage of indecipherable signs” (Brandt 561). While K is on his mission to discover whether or not he is the child born of replicant, he transgresses an obstacle course of signs––many of them large scale advertising of his love interest, Joi (Ana de Armas), a bodiless, image-driven A.I. designed by the Wallace Corporation as a beautiful woman who will cater to the desires of customers, telling them “whatever they want to hear”––and travels through the city’s up-in-the-air highways to abandoned wastelands and factories profiting from child labor. Through K, the viewer experiences 2049’s apocalyptic, dysfunctional landscape, crossing one boundary at a time, and never reaching any oasis where people have freewill, sanctuary from surveillance, or can enjoy the bounty of Earth, for there is none.

 Not only is K a flâneur, but he is potentially the Christ-like child which drives the plot of the film forward. K goes on his mission only to learn he is dismally not a miracle. He is just another replicant with a serial number inscribed on his bones. The serial number encapsulates K’s semiotic potential. As an unchanging signifier for replicant confirmation, this is yet another means to classifying and corralling the subjects in 2049. So, K’s prophesying is false and fruitless, for he winds up with the same boxed-in identity he began the film with. An identity which incites others to call him a “skinjob,” a derogatory term for a replicant. Death is K’s only escape from this society of control, limits, and disparagement. And he dies alone, reinforcing the film’s thematic polarity between a life entrapped or a life isolated, which the cinematography bolsters through highlighting the enclosed spaces and through presenting K, or the back of K, in barren, deserted landscapes, entirely alone.

The most prominent example of an environment of enclosure in the film is seen in Dr. Ana Stelline’s domicile. She lives in a sterile chamber, essentially a glass bubble, to protect her compromised immune system as she makes her living designing memories for the Wallace Corporation. This entrapment offers Dr. Stelline a supposed life of freedom, so long as it is behind glass. Moreover, she resides in an abstract, hyperreal space, constructing memories out of holograms in order to structure replicants’ personalities. Her job is a posthuman endeavor, for how can something as individual, experiential, and human as a memory be ersatz, synthesized, implanted? This is where answers to the question of what makes us human can be ferreted out of the film, for Dr. Stelline argues her memories enrich the lives of replicants, which betrays a level of depth and feeling on behalf of the replicants, subsequently demarcating them from crude machinery. So, memory, experience, and sentiment are demonstrated as the ingredients of humanity, and the replicants possess each. In this way, 2049 broadens the concept of humanity, elevating its subject to the posthuman realm. 

Dr. Stelline herself is the first replicant-born child, and she has Galatians Syndrome. This is a reference to the New Testament, and it is found in a letter from Paul the Apostle to early Christian communities in Galatia, begging them to have faith in Jesus. Since the film begins with the birth of a Christ-like child, replicants’ self-conception is reframed, augmented by this possibility of making life. The allegorical element of this reference points to how the opposition of law and faith has been around since the beginning of time. As K says himself, “To be born is to have a soul,” even though, according to the law’s imposition, replicants are soulless and treated as such. Wallace himself wants to change “The dead space between the stars,” that is, the barren womb of his infertile replicants. Therefore, potential replicant fecundity is the light at the end of the tunnel for the subjects of 2049. Looking to Galatians 4:8-9, it reads: “Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods. But now that you know God—or rather are known by God—how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable forces? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again?” (The Bible).  In the scope of the film, the replicant-born child is spoken of as a miracle, regarded as proof of an Immaculate Conception. The injection of this religious school of thought validates that when people are suffering––just as the replicants are suffering as an enslaved race of people––they look to the divine in supplication. Now that the replicants have a miracle on their hands, why should they remain enslaved? Dr. Stelline, the Christ-like child who has this metaphorical syndrome, is symbolic of the inevitable advent of faith in the lives of those oppressed by law. Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” is resonant of these ideas, as she states that cyborgs are “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism” and, “illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential” (Haraway 293).

The replicants’ desire to give birth is a reflection of their deeper desire to be human. This desire is seen in other posthuman texts, specifically the film Wings of Desire. Wenders’ film elucidates the celestial observations of an angel named Damiel, who floats over Berlin and is privy to every spiritual thought that passes through peoples’ minds. Damiel explains to his fellow angel companion how “It’s wonderful to live as spirit and testify for all eternity to only what is spiritual inside people’s minds. But sometimes I get fed up with this spiritual existence.” From here, he declares, “I don’t want to always hover above. I’d rather feel a weight within. Casting off this boundless freedom and tying me to the earth. At every step, every gust of wind, I’d like to be able to say, ‘Now’ and ‘now’ and ‘now’ no longer ‘forever’ and ‘for eternity.’” His line of thinking expresses a yearning to be human, which can only come from his nonhuman vantage point. Damiel’s nonhuman existence portrays the emptiness and isolation that plagues the existence of someone who is not recognized as human, and also not able to be recognized by humans. This is parallel to the replicants’ condition. His angelic perspective may afford him the opportunity to hear the thoughts of others, but it does not enable him to relate to them, for his invisible, spirit identity bars him from experiencing the real. Unable to engage with others, his posthuman inclination to “Be greeted by others, even with just a nod” corresponds to how ardently the replicants want to be treated as humans, rather than being ostracized and enslaved. Thus, Damiel’s entrapment correlates to his desire for a tangible human experience, which is symmetrical to the replicants’ individual and societal entrapment, giving rise to their aching to be human––nonhumans desiring human identity is a posthuman dilemma. As Rosi Braidotti explains in her book The Posthuman, it is impossible for humans to disidentify with their consciousness since it is the only tool they have for perception. If this perceptive apparatus makes humans what they are, then it is an epistemological leap to wonder what nonhumans perceive (Braidotti Introduction). In regards to replicants or Damiel the angel, each of these texts illuminate and verbalize what that perception is; and in both cases, it entails severe entrapment, both physically and mentally. 

Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot contains comparable spiritual inclinations and struggles with finitude. The sense of place in the play is aggressively pared down, and this minimalism serves as more than a mere backdrop; it functions as a psychological landscape that intricately mirrors the characters’ internal struggles, particularly their yearning for a godlike figure, namely Godot, to arrive and grant them reprieve from their entrapment. The existential void of Beckett’s physical stage becomes a metaphorical representation of the characters' unresolved psychic conflicts, along with symbolizing the futility, suffering, and aimlessness inherent to Vladimir and Estragon’s condition, ultimately revealing the intense impact of absence and longing on the human psyche. The scenery of Beckett’s play is unfalteringly barren. The playwright scrapes together a desolate landscape with a single dead tree, a country road, and a mound of dirt as its only landmarks. This deserted space acts as Vladimir and Estragon’s waiting room, thereby functioning as a quintessentially liminal realm. This is the in-between zone of life the two tramps are allotted. In this zone, on their arbitrary corner of dirt, people pass through and Godot never shows, but they wait ceaselessly nevertheless. Ruben Borg, in his article “Putting the Impossible to Work: Beckettian Afterlife and the Posthuman Future of Humanity” eloquently points out how “posthumans share a genetic past with human beings,” therefore, “the posthuman is already with us, even as it is yet to come” (164). This evokes the notion of boundary-crossing which afflicts each of the texts under consideration in this paper, for “posthumanity is always co-implied with humanity, that from the outset it was a constituent part of the human character, possibly a function of the eminently human faculty of self-transcendence” (164). As seen in both 2049 and Wings of Desire, the aspiration for transcendence is profoundly prevalent, and that aspiration defines the characters of Vladimir and Estragon. Borg explains how Beckett has labored to articulate this condition of self-externality” and “The implication is that in Beckett’s work, reality itself — reality as a whole — is suspended in a state of in-betweenness” (168, 170). When it comes to the posthuman, “Beckett’s ‘limbo’ is in this sense a peculiar conjunction of existential and ontological states (being-dead or being-alive; being-actual or being-virtual), a meeting of dialectical opposites, but without any possibility of a workable synthesis” (170). Therefore, “posthumanism and Beckett studies overlap on the question of finitude” which is at the heart of the conflict in Waiting for Godot: the finite condition of waiting for the impossible with no reward to ever come, which both characters endlessly endure (173). Borg states: “The reality of our posthuman future emerges in precisely this kind of liminal existence, this sheer indeterminacy into which the field of given (predetermined) possibilities and the impossible are folded together” (177). This is thematically linked to the liminal existence of the replicants in 2049. Moreover, K’s existential struggles are neatly adjacent to Vladimir and Estragon’s existential agony perpetuated by their waiting. Both characters encounter imposition––for K, his society imposes regulations upon him, and for Vladimir and Estragon, time and imposes itself on them. Beckett’s play has stood the test of time because of its acute insights into the experience of the human condition when humanity is rigorously neglected. He gets to the heart of the problem of what happens when people are brushed aside, forgotten, and left to their own devices to simply pass the time in his evocative script of aimless, repetitious life in nowhere land. This brings about the question: What are we meant to do with ourselves when no one else cares enough to help and our earth cannot provide for us? We waste away, pine after some obscure hope, and suffer. Beckett concots an environment that is stripped down, unrelenting, and vacant of love, hope, and aid. The same can be said of 2049’s society.

In a 1975 interview, Foucault said “One must remember that power is not an ensemble of mechanisms of negation, refusal, exclusion. But it produces effectively. It is likely that it produces right down to individuals themselves. Individuality, individual identity are the products of power” (Heyes 159). In 2049, power effectively bioengineers replicants. Breaking down these broader concepts, it stands that “power enables the identities we claim at the same time as it represses or limits us – and these two actions ultimately cannot be separated” (Heyes 160). Finalizing this discussion of entrapment by meditating upon Foucault’s analysis of power as “Janus-faced” is an apt way to understand the confinement which afflicts K and other replicants. Joseph Lewandowski, in his article “Rethinking Power and Subjectivity after Foucault” explains how this Janus-faced identity is produced by enacting power upon the modern human subject, contending that “Foucault sees power as that non-subject centered ‘system’ that produces or objectifies human beings: power is not an instrument or possession of an agent but rather part of the force field that constitutes her as a ‘docile body.’ The subject, then, becomes an effect of power. With another face, Foucault looks forward and sees the possibilities of individual subjects' capacities for self-making, thereby perceiving subjects as bodily sites of resistance to various networks of power and truth regimes” (221). These words convey the duality and allotment of K: a product of the powerful Wallace Corporation which has enabled him the life he claims but at the same time, represses and limits that life, as seen through the baseline examination. All of the replicants are born from the hands of a corporation, thus they can only exist from that power, but are subsequently enslaved by it. This systemic entrapment displaces K’s freedom, along with isolating Damiel, Vladimir, and Estragon from rejoicing in the freedom of being human with all of the nuance, liberty, and willpower that allows. The implications of their posthuman dilemmas upon their identities limit, confine, and entrap them, leading to existential struggles defining each work. Moreover, the implications of posthumanism on the conception of what it means to be human has since allowed for humanity to be present in nonhumans. The collective impact of these three works navigates the complexities of the posthuman condition, which is an experience necessarily entailing entrapment.

Works Cited

Borg, Ruben. “Putting the Impossible to Work: Beckettian Afterlife and the Posthuman Future of Humanity.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 35, no. 4, 2012, pp. 163–80. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.35.4.163. 

Braidotti, Rosi. “Introduction.” The Posthuman, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2013. 

Brandt, Stefan L. “The City as Liminal Space: Urban Visuality and Aesthetic Experience in Postmodern U.S. Literature and Cinema.” Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 54, no. 4, 2009, pp. 553–81. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41158465. 

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” The MIT Press, vol. 59, no. Winter, 1992, pp. 3-7. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/778828.

Haraway, Donna J. ““A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.”” Socialist Review, 1985, pp. 291-324.

Heyes, Cressida J.  Michel Foucault : Key Concepts. Edited by Dianna Taylor.Routledge, 2011. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=924390&site=ehost-live.

Lewandowski, Joseph D. “Rethinking Power and Subjectivity after Foucault.” Symplokē, vol. 3, no. 2, 1995, pp. 221–43. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40550376.