Bladerunner 2049

I saw this on cable the other day, didn't see it in theaters because of all the reviews it got. I'm glad I saw it, because wow does that make me think.

As I recall, there were two major critiques of this movie:

• Doesn't even come remotely close to a Bechdel-test pass, and treatment of women over all is shit.
• My, that's a future full of white people.

Now that I've watched it, I'm pretty sure both of those are intentional. Let me explain.

The first Bladerunner was released in a time when a lot of fiction was following a certain theme:

The future is not OK.

This was back when we were all certain we'd die in nuclear fire and the human race would have to scratch itself up to civilization through a cancerous wasteland of environmental toxicity, a new ice-age, and mutants. We got stories about surviving that. Stories about things that happened so far after that people mostly don't think about it. Stories about the kind of small social group societies that a fall from civilization would create.

Elfstones of Shanara happens after such a holocost.
The Mote in God's Eye happens after such an event, but the social scars are still evident.
Shadowrun the tabletop gaming system replaced a nuclear holocaust with a magical one.
An entire genre of "return to the old west" style neo-westerns that replaced Indians with mutants.

Bladerunner is no different here. Most of where it differs is in the kind of grim meathook future we get. And the one in the original one was kinda cyperpunky, The tropes are all there, and some of them started with this movie:

• Constant rain.
• No sunlight, and what there is, is heavily filtered.
• Canyons of streets.
• Neon colors everywhere.
• Any joy in the world is small-scale, in the moment.
• Streetmarkets. Lots of streetmarkets.

But that's just the visual aesthetic, which definitely was repeated elsewhere in the 80's and 90's. I want to mention this because it directly affects what Bladrunner 2049 is: an homage to a previous work in a previous time.

So, a grim meathook The future is not OK style film, written and produced today, and yet descends directly from the previous stuff. Right from that we can tell that this will not be a bright future by any means, nor one to be held up as a 'what we could be if we try'.

What did they do? They managed to envision a future that was the white-gaze dystopia we've all be fighting. It's got all kinds of goodies:

• A return to overt slavery in the form of Replicants.
• Using slaves to remind the lower classes that they're better than someone and to be happy about it, thus keeping them in their place.
• Fantabulously wealthy people in a world of paupers.
• The message that the only way to save this destroyed world is to do more of what we've already done. More slavery! It's the only way to thrive!
• The male gaze is the hard-coded default in everything. The female form is objectified from beginning to end, in every advertisement, replicant, and everything in between.

Hell, there is one (1) woman in the thing that isn't a replicant, and she's a bought-in slaveholder. There are two (2) obviously black people who talk in it, and the rest of the non-white cast are all light-skinned (also, the muted color-palate means its easy to miss an actor's race; can't rely on skin color alone). This is a white-supremacist future we're looking at, consistently so.

White supremacists futures are also misogynistic as fuck, and this one is no different. No wonder the treatment of women is shit, it's baked into the world-building.

There is something that the old stories did that this one also does, and that's realize that showing a completely shit future is bad storytelling so they leave the reader/watcher with a sense that things might possibly get better soon. In the original Bladerunner that was the overthrow of the Tyrell Corp that made all the replicants. In the early Cyberpunk stories it was getting a truth out where others can see it, and hoping. It's often a thin, scant thread. But that thread is there. It's in this one too.

As an homage it owns the source material and the deeply problematic future it built. It does not pretend that this is a nice world. It doesn't even try to recast the future to be more 'realistic' because that wasn't the point. The very point is that this is a white-supremacist future and all that entails, giving us a story that leaves us with the hope that the slaves might finally have the tools to liberate themselves. Maybe. If things go just right.

For that kind of story it's fucking brilliant.

However

That's not how it was marketed. Since the white-male gaze is the default in SF works, the marketing was all return to the world and suchlike, making everyone think they were a Deckard. Because this wasn't marketed as a return to the 80's style of grim-meathook futures, audiences were not set to expect those genre-conventions, so it earned quite a lot of righteous criticism.

To contrast, there is another film that did much the same thing as Bladerunner 2049, but got the marketing right. I'm talking about the 2012 Dredd movie that starred Olivia Thirlby and Karl Urban. This movie was an homage to the Judge Dredd comics that got their start in 1977, and was set in a post-nuclear megacity dystopia. It was a modern telling of an old style of story, in a deeply problematic setting. It was fucking amazing, and it was sold as just that. I think it did $20M total box-office, which earned out its production costs and some profit. If you have any love for the original material I endorse the hell out of this movie. If you haven't and are at all squeamish about splatter, stay the fuck away.

Anything doing an homage to a problematic period like the 80's We're all going to die style of story-telling is going to have limited critical and intersectional appeal. You can definitely play in the after-the-fall setting using the modern story telling, and Handmaid's Tale,The CW's 100, and Greg Rukka's Lazarus comic are doing just that. But doing it in 80's style? There will be problems. And like re-reading those old classics, you have to remember the time.