https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=DPOQPkQCJoA
Blade Runner 2049 shows us an exhausted world. A world that is kept alive only by artifice, by technology. The earth is dead, fertility is impossible, and there is universal alienation. Images showing a disjunction between heaven and earth, thought and body, meaning and fact will repeat themselves over and over. And it is the search and the miraculous possibility of a new world rising out of death. A search for the possibility of true life, something real as this joining of heaven and earth, of masculine and feminine towards a child, which is the driving force of the movie. This is Jonathan Peugeot, welcome to the Symbolic World. There are many possible images of the end of a world, and the movie strings several of them together. Something happens in California, which is the western tip of western civilization, the place where the sun sets, where the day ends. We see this giant wall which artificially holds out the ocean, holding off the flood. But the strongest image is one of saturation. When something is full, when something is saturated, it means it has exhausted its possibility. And in this case, like an old woman having reached menopause, the world of Blade Runner is no longer fertile. The opening scene shows us this saturated world. Too many buildings, too many structures, too many people. The main character is dozing off in his flying car. The first image of Kay’s general numbness. He’s a fabricated slave, a useful body. He sees himself as a creature without a soul, as he tells us later. He in fact does not have a name. Kay is only a serial number. Replicants are artificial people. Like Pinocchio, they are wooden puppets without strings. Like the Golem of Prague, their superior strength is generated by man to serve man, but is always in danger of turning against those they are made to serve. This is of course an image of the body itself, with all its own volitions, all its own desires, which don’t always align with our will. But it’s also the most intimate understanding of technology as an augmentation of the body. Plato describes the body as the chariot of the soul, which brings us along to our goals, but can turn against he who holds the reins. So all the images of technology causing demise, the nuclear bombs which render parts of the world uninhabitable, the overwhelming advertisement, are all there to excite the passions. The farming of food is done in a toxic climate. All of these images culminate in this technology of the human, which is so close, so intimate, so melded to man himself that it is both the ultimate tool and the ultimate danger all at once. And the Blade Runners slice between the two sides. As the movie begins, K comes to a site where stands a dead tree, the last residue of a fruitful connection between heaven and earth, masculine and feminine. And there, as an image of the dead earth, he discovers the dead mother beneath the tree. The finding of the dead mother is provoked by a hint of the possibility of life, a flower on the toxic earth. So K has killed the giant who guarded this mystery. And now the mother presents herself as a riddle K must answer, a search for meaning which also becomes a search for identity. You could say that the movie is yearning for an alignment of extremes, a place where all the disjointed dualisms can align to create something real, a miracle, a child in this sterile world. It is a search for three things, the three terms. A search for the father. A search for the feminine, the wife, but mostly the mother. And it is a search for how they come together in the miracle of a child. In this search for alignment, disjunction is emphasized over and over. K knows his memories don’t fit with his actual past. His artificial girlfriend Joy appears as an ideal loving partner, embodying the masculine fantasy of a wife serving him dinner. She is the encouraging partner and the seductive lover all at once, yet she is only a ghost, a bodiless fantasy. She cannot be the mother. We are reminded of that when shown images of the advertisements which feature her out there in the city. The unresolved duality of meaning and fact, spirit and body appears strongest in food and in sex. When K eats his dinner, a hologram of a tasty meal is projected over this bland synthetic gelatin. And also when Joy searches for intimate contact with K, she must find a body. And her relation with K is then portrayed as a hybrid, a duality of soul and body which does not fully align. Of course, seeing through this extreme imagery, we should recognize that this disjunction between thought and action, ideal and embodiment, even the disjunction between our image of ourselves and our actual place in the world are something we live with every day. And so more disjunctions come. We encounter several images of the feminine, the lieutenant who is the guard of the city like Athena, the virgin goddess, like the holy virgin herself who was the guardian of Constantinople. The feminine in its role of virgin is the keeper of purity. The wall between the inside and the outside. And of all people, the lieutenant sees the danger of the situation. That humanity has created a wall separating that which is augmented and artificial, that which is human and natural. But as the world exhausts itself, she knows and sees with the mystery of this new mother that the wall might come down and flood her world. And she’s right. And so she wants to destroy the child, the possibility of bridging the two sides. For this would mean the end of humanity as she knows it. But she’s also blind to the sterility of the situation, how all is exhausted, and that this miracle child is also an image of the future. The revolutionaries are presented to us towards the end of the movie, led by a woman as well. They embody the fears of the police lieutenant and want to free the replicants, not only free them but replace humanity. They also want the child and they believe this child will lead their revolution against humanity. Of course their plans do not align, for the child when we meet her is fragile, creative and sensitive and is not in any way a revolutionary. In fact she works as a supplier for Neander Wallace in order to create a better life for replicants. Neander Wallace is the tyrannical father, a blind technocrat who appears as a Nimrod figure, often shown on a strange island, seeing the world only through technology. His language and action places him as the paroxysm of hubris, speaking as if he is a god creating angels, searching for the one thing he cannot replicate through his technical means. Fertility. Life. The mother as a natural potential for the future. Wallace has to manufacture the future through extreme means, through synthetic foods and synthetic replicants. He wants the child so that he can control the future. So that by having fertile replicants he can solve the problems of this world which is empty of possibility. And by sending out more colonies to more new places. Because he overestimates his capacity to control, he does not seem to see the danger of the revolutionaries, and how self-replicating replicants would turn on their makers as they did in the past. And so you have four factions who are searching for this place where heaven and earth met, where masculine and feminine produced a miraculous child. These four factions together explore the relationship between identity, order and chaos, the shape of the future, and how all of these align. K is searching for the father and the child as a solution to his identity, the possibility of crossing over and like Pinocchio becoming a real boy. The lieutenant wants to preserve the limits and the borders of the world, prevent the replicants from crossing over, and in that way prevent the flood of chaos and confusion. Wallace wants control, to master the father in order that he relinquish the child, so that Wallace can also master the feminine and continue to saturate the universe with his vision. The revolutionary replicants want to be free, they wish to kill the father so that the feminine child can lead their revolution against Wallace. A nice correlated pattern, a contrapuntal theme, cells within cells interlinked in the spinning blood black emptiness of K’s numb existence. K goes to find his father twice, once he goes out into the fiery desert of post-nuclear Las Vegas. And here we see Deckard hiding in the strange vestige of what Vegas represents, luxury and artifice, gambling as the edge of reason and order. And we also find the past, fragmentary incoherent memories of a distraction culture, the broken down residues of the feminine as desire inducing fantasies, and of course Deckard amidst this forgetting himself and his alienation from all that he loved by alcohol. The second time K goes to get Deckard, it’s not in the fire, but in water. But we’ll get to that a bit later. The child, the question of the child is of vital importance. At the beginning, before the clues come together, there’s another place where things are not aligned, the gender of the child, masculine or feminine. And we need to back up and look at this from a perspective of the whole movie if we want to understand the symbolic structure and maybe understand the politics as well. There are two presentations, one masculine with K and the other feminine, Dr. Anastellin. K is a hunter and executioner like Deckard, a replicant who kills replicants. And that way he is all that is severe and oppressive, a tool of the system. If we think of the child as the future, we have to wonder what would be that future. Dr. Anna on the other hand is presented as not only the daughter, but the mother. Her name, Anastellin, seems to be a play on Maristella, a title of the Virgin Mary referring to her as the star of the sea. Anna itself means grace or favor. Her mother Rachel, like the Rachel of the Bible, had been barren and childless and through prayer had received grace and her womb was open. And God remembered Rachel, heeded her and opened her womb. Anna is also shown in stark contrast to the rest of the movie as soon as we see her in a luscious green forest creating and molding an insect. Unlike the masculine father god, Wallace, who creates and destroys with cold calculation and control, Anna lovingly fashions memories to make the lives of replicants as rich as possible. So we are presented with two opposing views of creation. The cruel control of the blind masculine and the loving tenderness of the feminine mother earth figure. When K is finally faced with things lining up, this happens with a shattering of his fantasy world. His fantasy girlfriend is destroyed. He descends only into the body. He is saved by the body part of his intimate encounter, the prostitute, and then down, down into the flooded basement where he is told it was his imagination, wishful thinking. He is not the child. The future is female. And he leaves disillusioned, told he should kill the father to protect the child. This understanding of his disjunction is then brutally repeated as he meets one last time the holographic projection of Joy. Once before, and insisting that he is a real boy, Joy had wanted to give him a name, Joe, a name to fit a true identity. But now he discovers that Joe is just a generic name used by the Joy program to entice him to desire. He sees the flashing sign, everything you want to hear, everything you want to see. It had all been an illusion. And then all becomes aligned. No more confusion. The general representation of the masculine and feminine does not bode well for the politics of this movie. It’s all the usual and exhausted wailing at the patriarchy. All of it is there. But it seems like the actions of Kay at this point saved the movie from just being propaganda. Kay had been an executioner. And once again, the revolutionaries want him to play that role, but instead he decides to go out past the wall, out into the chaos, and saves the father from sinking into the deep. And having found something real, having found something undeniably real, as the revolutionary woman tells him that dying for the right cause is the most human thing we can do, and he has found the right cause. He has found something real, not technological monsters created by Wallace, not the revolutionary delusions of a replicant army, but the relationship between Deckard and Anna, the possibility of a father and a daughter being reunited, the possibility of life on a human scale as the true future, the embodiment of that co-related pattern in the game, a system of cells interlinked within one stem, and against the dark, a tall white fountain played. If you enjoyed this content and our exploration of symbolism, get involved. I love to read your insights and questions in the comments section. You can also share this video on social media to your friends, and if you can, please consider supporting us financially through Patreon or PayPal. 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