Ian Campbell

Near the end of the first act of Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), Joi (Ana de Armas), the hologram girlfriend of the protagonist, K (Ryan Gosling), expresses the desire to cheer him up after a hard day. K is a Replicant, a vatgrown human gengineered for strength, reflexes, perception and, as the film’s opening crawl states, obedience. The crawl also describes K’s job: a Blade Runner is a police officer whose primary job is to “retire” renegade Replicants by killing them. K’s hard day has included killing another person for the crime of unauthorized existence; he also undergoes what the overlay text tells us is a “post-traumatic baseline test.” In this test, he repeats back to an unseen interviewer words from seemingly arbitrary phrases as a demonstration that he remains obedient. Joi pulls from a book on the table an image of that book;.Viewers see her from K’s perspective holding up the book; its title and author, Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, are clearly visible, framed by her hands near the center of the screen.[1] “Let’s read,” she says, to which he responds, “You hate that book.” She shrugs, tosses the image to the side, changes her outfit in the blink of an eye and asks him to dance. The presence of Pale Fire is a brief illusion in the film, perhaps something intended to provide Blade Runner 2049 (BR49) with reflected depth or glory, in the manner that BR49 takes from the original Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and the title of Nabokov’s novel and the poem within the novel take from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. Yet the arbitrary phrases K repeats in his test of obedience are in fact lines from the same poem. Joi may discard the image of Pale Fire, but the deliberate framing of the book encourages viewers to investigate how it might reflect upon the film.

This essay will argue that the presence of Pale Fire in BR49 repositions the film as metafictional science fiction: the film demands to be watched and re-watched in conjunction with other texts it references, including Pale Fire, in much the same manner as Nabokov’s novel demands to be read and re-read. The disjunctions and misdirections in the novel, centered on whether and to what extent its narrator can be trusted, enable us to view the film’s implied successful revolution by Replicants against their masters as an appealing but ultimately false narrative. The film places viewers in a position structurally equivalent to readers of Pale Fire and to K inside BR49’s story—we are led to jump to an attractive conclusion even though we are shown evidence that the conclusion is unjustified. The film uses a particular visual motif of focusing on holographic illusion as illusion, especially around Joi, in order to both distract from and draw attention to the misdirection. Both Blade Runner films are science fiction (SF). If we read them through the understanding of SF literature as estranging conditions in our own world as a means of reflecting upon those conditions, we can understand that both films estrange the growing dominance of corporate power in their respective eras. The first film shows that this dominance can be slowed, arrested or even reversed, if only through violence. BR49 appears to make the same point, but attention to Pale Fire and to the visual motif of illusion enables a reading of the film as much bleaker, where opportunities to challenge corporate power are always already foreclosed.

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For those who have seen Blade Runner (BR) but not BR49, the sequel presumes that Deckard (Harrison Ford) and Rachael (Sean Young) are indeed able to live outside the reach of corporate power, if only for a couple of years. The protagonist of BR49 is K, a Replicant who serves as a Blade Runner in the collapsed ecosystem of midcentury Los Angeles. After “retiring” a Replicant, he discovers traces of what prove to be the bones of Rachael and that she, also a Replicant, gave birth. This promises to upend the society of BR49, in that the difference between Replicants and born humans is no longer empathy (as in the first film) but rather the capacity to reproduce. There is a rebel Replicant underground, who believe the child will lead them to a successful revolution against their corporate and human oppressors. Joi helps K convince himself that he is the now-grown child; he tracks down Deckard, who is the only one who knows that the child is in fact Ana Stelline (Carla Juri), a designer of implanted memories sequestered in her lab on the pretext that she has an autoimmune condition. When the Wallace Corporation, the successor to the first film’s Tyrell Corporation, captures Deckard in order to extract the secret from him, K intervenes. He kills Wallace’s (Jared Leto) Replicant enforcer Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) and frames Deckard as dead so that Deckard might reunite with his daughter without fear of Wallace tracking them down. K dies as a result.

Blade Runner and SF

Both Blade Runner films are SF. They were conceived and marketed as such, and designated as such in major databases such as IMDB and Box Office Mojo. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls the original Blade Runner “the most influential SF film.”[2] For how we might analyze SF films, Annette Kuhn established five categories, one of which is reflection, where a film embodies real-world sociocultural issues, such as the perception of 1950s SF film as Cold War paranoia.[3] In this essay, I will focus on the parallel trope in criticism of SF literature, cognitive estrangement. The term comes from the work of SF critic Darko Suvin, who, in turn, took “estrangement” from the works of playwright Bertolt Brecht, who defined it as “a representation [that] allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar.”[4] This is often phrased as “a reflection in a distorting mirror.” For Suvin, the alternative imaginative framework of an SF text contains a novum or new thing. Suvin borrows the term “novum” from another of his chief influences, Ernst Bloch, defining it as a “totalizing phenomenon or relationship deviating from the author’s and implied reader’s norm of reality.”[5] The novum is plausible as an extrapolation from currently-understood science or as a rewrite of history based on the appearance of the novum before the time in which a work is set, hence “cognitive.” The work of SF uses the consequences of the novum’s presence to reflect upon or question the current conditions in the author’s society. In both films, the novum is Replicants, which are cognitive in that in 1982 it was a plausible future extrapolation to 2019, and are cognitive in 2017 as an extrapolation from the first film. SF and metafiction are of course not mutually exclusive; SF grandmaster Robert A. Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast has its characters jumping between his own and others’ fictional worlds, while much of Phillip K. Dick’s work has metafictional elements. (Blade Runner is the film adaptation of Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)

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There are at least as many readings of BR through cognitive estrangement as there are cuts of the film; Replicants as slaves is one of the more common approaches. Judith B. Kerman argues that Replicants are lower than slaves:

Although Mosaic law allowed slavery, the slaves of the Israelites had clear legal rights, based specifically on empathy,
the memorythat the Israelites had been slaves and strangers in a strange land (Ex 22:20). It is obvious that the replicants
have no such protection, and they are even, by definition, excluded from empathy (their own, and human empathy toward them).”[6]

Yet slavery is the reflection in the distorting mirror; BR discusses it openly, most notably in the climactic scene on the rooftop. I believe the mirror reflects the real-world effect of the growth of corporate power in the years leading up to 1982. Government that represents the interests of citizens has been reduced to violence in the service of unelected oligarchs such as Tyrell; people live in darkness lit by enormous advertisements, while the CEO lives like a pharaoh. Humans, born or Replicant, have little to no say in the direction or structure of their society. BR49 maintains essentially the same paradigm, with Tyrell replaced by Wallace and rain by snow. The ads are holographic now, but Replicants remain slaves.

Pale Fire and Blade Runner 2049

Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a work of problematic, very funny, and often absurd literary analysis; it is also a moving meditation on death and grief. The poem “Pale Fire,” written by recently-deceased American poet-professor John Shade, is presented with foreword, annotation, and index by Charles Kinbote, a professor from the possibly fictional Baltic country of Zembla. In the poem, Shade muses on his life, most notably the death by drowning of his teenaged daughter Hazel. This appears quite straightforward and often trite, though, in fact, it is self-reflective and complex. The poem’s primary theme is of Shade overcoming his grief through his faith that the patterns he sees in the world are indicative of a life beyond his. Kinbote, who may or may not be the exiled king of Zembla, argues that the poem is about his own life as king, the overthrow of his regime, and his subsequent escape and flight to America. He backs up his claim through highly improbable and discursive readings of the poem and the unsupported assertion that he convinced Shade to write his story in the guise of the poet’s own. The novel culminates with the reveal that Shade was murdered just after he finished the poem. Kinbote claims the killer is an assassin sent by the new Zemblan regime to assassinate him; the man is likely a local criminal who mistakes Shade for Kinbote’s landlord, the judge who sentenced him to prison. Kinbote takes advantage of Shade’s widow’s grief to make off with the index cards upon which the sole copy of the poem is written, then presents to us the poem and his preposterous reading thereof. We have no guarantee the poem is as Shade wrote it; we have no guarantee Shade even wrote the poem; the lack of guarantee is in many aspects precisely the point of Pale Fire. Kinbote himself may or may not be a figment of Shade’s imagination (or vice versa); he also may be V. Botkin, a paranoid and delusional visiting professor.

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The indeterminacy of Pale Fire makes it as studied and argued-over a text in literary criticism as BR is in criticism of SF cinema. The novel addresses the interplay between authors and readers as much as the stories of Shade’s or Kinbote’s lives. Many of the earliest critiques framed the novel as a “puzzle box” or “jewel box,” both in admiration of its construction and to imply that a sufficiently careful reading could tease out the answer to the puzzle.[7] For a generation, critics argued enthusiastically for different, and often mutually exclusive, positions on the roles of poet Shade and commentator Kinbote,[8] or Kinbote’s “real” identity as V. Botkin.[9]  Pale Fire is “a text of absolute uncertainty.”[10] Many critics address Nabokov’s long interest in the writing of chess puzzles in between writing critically-acclaimed bestsellers in his adopted language[11] and curating the Lepidoptera collection at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.[12] Chess puzzles typically only admit one solution, hence the hypothesis that Pale Fire also does. Thomas Karshan argues that the entire text is a game, and we need to read it “playfully,” without regard for definite truth, because to solve the puzzle would be to end it, and the novel “equates ending with death.” For Karshan, the desire to find the solution is what drives readers to perform the difficult work of decoding that “initiate[s] us in the play of thought” and transforms readers into writers.[13] For Maurice Couturier, the search for the solution to the puzzle is always already doomed to fail because of “various elements of overdetermination” within the text.[14]

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In the poem, Shade, in search of solace for his grief, succumbs to one of the fits to which he is sometimes subject:

And blood-black nothingness began to spin

A system of cells interlinked within

Cells interlinked within cells interlinked

Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct

Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.[15]

These are, of course, the very words K and the interviewer exchange in the baseline test in BR49. Viewers may not recognize them as lines from the poem, but after seeing Joi present the book, and hearing the words again later in the film when K botches the test, they may look up the words and find that they come from the novel. Readers who scan the section of the poem surrounding these lines will find that the “tall white fountain” is a nebulous representation of proof of an afterlife. Shade reads a newspaper story about a woman who, after a near-death experience, also recounts seeing a tall white fountain. When Shade seeks out the source, he finds that the article contains a misprint: the woman saw a mountain, not a fountain.[16] It’s a curious choice for a test of obedience. To repeat the tall white fountain is, in fact, to misspeak, to misinterpret. K may have read or even reread Pale Fire; he may have started it but stopped reading because Joi “hates that book”; he certainly learns to misspeak and thus to disobey over the course of the film.

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I will undertake a critical reading of BR49 through the 1999 monograph on Pale Fire written by Brian Boyd, also a biographer of Nabokov. Boyd writes about the experience of multiple readings of the novel, especially insofar as this replicates the process of scientific discovery.[17] In the first of Boyd’s three approaches to the text, he begins with the foreword before moving to the poem, and thence the commentary and index. From the second paragraph of the foreword, it’s evident that Kinbote interjects more of himself into the commentary than is proper for an academic editor. For Boyd, this leads to a fork in the path at the end of the fifth paragraph, where Kinbote urges readers to see his note on line 991.[18] Readers who turn to the note will be able to follow a trail of cross-references leading to the revelation that Kinbote (believes he) is the exiled king of Zembla. Readers who turn to the notes will then frame the poem in a rather different manner than does the linear reading Boyd believes readers will follow once they have dismissed Kinbote as unreliable. The remainder of the foreword, for linear readers, gives no further cross-references, but ample evidence to question Kinbote’s competence, his custody of the poem, his relationship to Shade, his personality, sexuality, and sanity. Shade’s poem, then, becomes for linear readers the “true” story, especially given its humility and lack of bombast, and Kinbote an intruder trying to hijack it for his own ends.[19]

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In BR49, K does not enter the story with the preconceived idea that he’s the chosen one or “specimen,”[20] nor is he played as a comic figure or unreliable narrator, but he’s still clearly framed as the protagonist of the film. Once he finds the wooden horse, even though he knows full well he’s a Replicant with implanted memories, he’s smitten with the idea that he’s the specimen—the protagonist of his own story. Ana Stelline, the real specimen, tells him “someone lived” his memory of the horse. K’s reaction to this is extreme emotion; first-time viewers accustomed to the tropes of film understand he believes himself to be the “someone.” He ignores or transcends his own programming, learns to lie, and exhibits a considerably broader range of emotion. In this reading, BR49 is rather more subtle than Pale Fire; whereas the novel foregrounds Kinbote’s unreliability, the film encourages viewing Ana not as the specimen—though she lives in a specimen jar—but as a tertiary character. To the extent that BR49 gives us the story of the real specimen, it only takes place in one long sequence at the precise midpoint of the film and in a very brief penultimate scene. Most of what viewers see in the film is K’s story. In this reading, having Joi hold up an image of Pale Fire reads as something of a wink and a nod to the sort of clever people who know their modern literary classics, much as the references to Shakespeare, Swift, Pope, Eliot and others in the poem—especially those that Kinbote ignores or misinterprets in the commentary—are clues laid for readers by Nabokov, the chess puzzle designer. The presence of Pale Fire is a clue to first-time viewers that they ought not to be nearly as shocked or crushed as K himself is when the narrative of him as the specimen turns out to be false.

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Boyd’s second approach to Pale Fire imagines readers giving the novel a rereading, forearmed with the knowledge that Shade is dead and Kinbote an egoist or madman. Careful examination of all four sections of the text leads readers to visiting Russian professor V. Botkin. The stress caused by Botkin’s exile compels him to reimagine himself first as Kinbote, then as King Charles of Zembla. Boyd finds much support in the text for this reading, where Botkin, desperately in need of affirmation or distraction from suicidal ideation, imposes upon Shade’s tolerance and gentle nature to try to induce Shade to write about the delusional Zemblan narrative, which Botkin constructs from their mutual colleagues and the objects and books in his landlord’s home.[21] This makes of Kinbote a tragic figure rather than a buffoon or villain.

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Viewers who rewatch BR49, forearmed with the knowledge that Ana is the specimen, may find that it adds nuance but relatively little in the way of structural difference. While a second viewing can bring additional pathos to K’s role in creating his own delusion,[22] it doesn’t refocus the film. Nevertheless, this rewatching does draw attention to the sheer emptiness of K’s physical and emotional life in the film’s first act. Gosling plays his movements in the initial scenes as jerky and robotic, his face a mask. K knows what he is: a created being, a mostly inhuman killer of humans who are trying to be human. He’s aware that his “childhood” in the orphanage with the toy horse is a set of implanted memories, designed to create emotional responses that mimic those of a human and thereby make him more obedient to his masters. Yet he warms as he begins to believe he might be a born creature, one with a soul, as he puts it to Joshi (Robin Wright). His face softens and grows more expressive and his movements looser. A rewatching with the knowledge that he’s delusional underscores his alienation and provokes sympathy, in a manner analogous to how rereaders of Pale Fire might sympathize more with Kinbote/Botkin and his need to do anything to make himself feel that he matters. K knows that if he’s the specimen, Wallace is going to try to vivisect him, but that’s only in one respect worse than another night eating grubs after another day killing his own kind, with his only company a hologram girlfriend.

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Boyd’s third reading, or “re-rereading,” centers upon putting in abeyance the conflict between text and commentary in favor of tracing the paths that do exist. He begins his re-rereading by identifying the central question posed by the poem: whether there is an afterlife and whether something of Shade’s daughter Hazel survived her death. While Shade explicitly dismisses her “survival as conventional ghost, phantom, shade,”[23] he ends the poem believing that his sense of order within chaos implies that she is in some way still alive. Through close re-rereading of the poem and commentary, and of the apparent gibberish of the message Kinbote says Shade and his wife and daughter received in a purportedly haunted barn, Boyd grounds an argument that Hazel or her spirit is alive within the poem, but that Shade is unable to perceive this. Boyd interlinks the names of butterflies, one of Kinbote’s many missed cues, and one of Nabokov’s other works of fiction, to scaffold a more general argument that in the text and world of Pale Fire, the dead send messages to the living, who can perceive the messages as phenomena but not as carriers of meaning. The message in the barn is not gibberish but a warning from Shade’s Aunt Maud; the Red Admirable butterfly mentioned near the end of the poem is Hazel-as-Psyche. Both try to deter Shade from walking to Kinbote’s house, where he will be killed, but Shade cannot understand their efforts as messages, much less decode them.[24] Participation in the quest for meaning both leads readers to the hidden presence of the dead yet alive and transforms Pale Fire into a metafictional text; readers become aware that the text foregrounds its own construction and exhibits slippage among levels of narrative.