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Snak posted:Right, but we're talking about this movie. This movie is about K becoming special because he witnessed a miracle. This is what's set up by Sapper's dialogue at the beginning of the film, and what K realizes has come to fruition at the end. How would you tell that story without coincidences? Hmm I am not sure I see this film playing with a tension between "miracle vs. coincidence" at least when it comes to the birth of Ana. It's more "miracle vs. earthly explanation," the mundane explanation presumably being that Tyrell deliberately created replicants capable of natural childbirth. Snak posted:What I'm getting at here is what you claim are problems with the story aren't problems. The problem is that you want a fundamentally different story. Gotta say, I think that's rather unfair. I've offered some pretty detailed explanations about why I perceived problems where I did, and I've admitted that a lot of them come down to taste or aesthetic preferences. For you to say "these are not problems" suggests that personal taste isn't valid, that problems either objectively exist or don't exist and you happen to be able to tell the difference without fail.
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Oct 27, 2017 01:03
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the coincidence makes the story possible, if the coincidence didn't occur there is no Blade Runner 2049. That's how fiction works.
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Oct 27, 2017 01:07
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It's not "playing with tension between miracle and coincidence" it's that something amazing happening because of a few coincidences IS an earthly (non-divine) explanation for a miracle. edit: ^ yeah, I think I tried to use to many words to say that.
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Oct 27, 2017 01:07
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I mean, do none of you people ever find a plot point in a movie contrived? Or unsatisfying? It feels like people are suggesting I'm on some crusade against coincidence ever appearing in a work of fiction (despite my saying on multiple occasions that it's fine sometimes).Snak posted:It's not "playing with tension between miracle and coincidence" it's that something amazing happening because of a few coincidences IS an earthly (non-divine) explanation for a miracle. Hmmm I don't think I understand what you're saying here, it just doesn't seem to parse. Perhaps you could rephrase the point?
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Oct 27, 2017 01:17
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Manifisto posted:I mean, do none of you people ever find a plot point in a movie contrived? Or unsatisfying? It feels like people are suggesting I'm on some crusade against coincidence ever appearing in a work of fiction (despite my saying on multiple occasions that it's fine sometimes). I hear what you're saying, but in this case I think you're over-reaching. I think the breadcrumbs of the investigation are brilliant in this movie. I have quibbles with other parts, but not that.
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Oct 27, 2017 01:18
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Of course I do. I certainly don't find your "WHY DON'T THEY ANALYZE THE MEMORIES" complaint to be a contrivance.
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Oct 27, 2017 01:18
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Snak posted:Of course I do. Yup, you've said that. And I've said several times that it is not necessarily a contrivance, it is an apparently incongruous situation that warrants a deeper look. I think we're meant to seek out a reason why Wallace fails to appreciate the significance of this superstar in his employ. I mean, as I said, he has a blind spot, and you might say thematically it's because his conception of reproduction is limited or flawed and does not encompass Ana's worldview. I do, however, continue to find it contrived that Ana just so happens to be the first and only person that K consults about the memory. I can sort of forgive it for the sake of efficiency in storytelling, but it still just seems way too convenient.
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Oct 27, 2017 01:31
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Why would he consult someone else?
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Oct 27, 2017 01:36
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Snak posted:Why would he consult someone else? He knows Wallace gets his memories from her right?
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Oct 27, 2017 01:51
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Snak posted:Why would he consult someone else? writer 1: okay, so K needs to figure out what this memory is all about. whether it's something that happened or something that's made up. and get this: he ends up going to THE WOMAN WHO GAVE HIM THE MEMORY, who is also THE REAL CHOSEN ONE, except he doesn't know that. at the end of the movie he'll figure it out and it will be a really powerful moment. writer 2: good, good. okay, so why does he go to her specifically? writer 1 (snaps fingers): because she's the expert. she's the go-to person on creating memories, so of course he'd go to her. writer 2: well okay, but why is she the expert? aren't there other experts? writer 1 (getting annoyed): doesn't matter. doesn't matter. she's just really really good at making memories. let's give her a line about why, since she's shut off from the world, she spends a lot of time making poo poo up. writer 2: well wait a minute, are you saying that no other memory creators are shut off from the world? maybe they're introverts or have bad asthma or something. writer 1: goddammit! okay, maybe she's really good because as THE CHOSEN ONE she understands what gets under replicants' skins. she knows what makes them tick, what they're fantasizing about. writer 2: wait a minute though, does she know she's the chosen one? writer 1: no. well, maybe. it's not clear. look, we don't have to spell it all out. we'll sort of leave it ambiguous and they'll come up with some poo poo on their own. writer 2: they always do (writers 1 and 2 laugh together at the gullibility of their audience, then bathe in a scrooge mcduckian pile of money)
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Oct 27, 2017 01:53
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I thought reading SMG page after page was tiresome, I'm sorry Manifisto, I'm probably just going to skip this argument. The movie says she's the best, the movie says she does the memories for Wallace, that's good enough for me.
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Oct 27, 2017 01:58
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What if you watched a movie without worrying about what the writers did or thought behind the scenes? I don't mean that in a snarky way.
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Oct 27, 2017 02:00
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In "The Lord of the Rings" it's such a contrivance that Sam happens to be Bilbo and Frodo's gardener, and if he didn't go on that quest AND if hobbits weren't so resistant to the effects of The One Ring, Sauron would never have been defeated.
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Oct 27, 2017 02:04
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Don't even get me started on Vader being Luke's daddy.
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Oct 27, 2017 02:17
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starkebn posted:I thought reading SMG page after page was tiresome, I'm sorry Manifisto, I'm probably just going to skip this argument. That's fine. I am honestly puzzled why it's even an argument. I said I thought it was contrived, and just a ton of people are trying to tell me that I'm wrong, it's not contrived. So I'm explaining my reasons and saying, look, it's probably just a matter of taste, and people are still going NO YOU ARE DOING WRONGTHINK BAD BAD BAD rather than just saying, "welp, I personally don't have an issue with it but it's always good to hear another perspective." Lord Krangdar posted:What if you watched a movie without worrying about what the writers did or thought behind the scenes? I don't mean that in a snarky way. You say you don't mean it in a snarky way but I don't honestly know how else to take it. I don't do that and I'm not sure why you would think I do; I'm interested in the work and not the writer. I was pretty clearly giving a hyperbolic illustration of what it might look like when a writer comes up with a contrived explanation for something.
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Oct 27, 2017 02:19
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Snak posted:It's also worth noting that the types of coincidences in BR2049 are the same kind as found in the original blade runner. J.F. Sebastian's character both living alone in a slum with no security and being buddies with the ultra rich and powerful Tyrell and having access to Tyrell's personal quarters seems like a pretty big coincidence. Eh. JF Sebastian's deal kind of works for me, honestly; he lives alone in a slum with no security because he's basically just a weird hobo, but he's also a mechanical/bioengineering savant, which is a skillset Tyrell has big and obvious use for. Tyrell doesn't really do anything to lift him up in a publicly-visible way, because it would shatter the illusion that it's all Tyrell's work, but is entirely willing to commiserate with him on a semi-secret basis. None of this is outright said, but the info given in the movie makes it fairly obvious in my opinion.
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Oct 27, 2017 02:44
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This movie was cool. the parts where it hinted at a sequel that will never happen were bad, but thankfully there weren't that many of them.
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Oct 27, 2017 02:57
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Manifisto posted:You say you don't mean it in a snarky way but I don't honestly know how else to take it. I don't do that and I'm not sure why you would think I do; I'm interested in the work and not the writer. I was pretty clearly giving a hyperbolic illustration of what it might look like when a writer comes up with a contrived explanation for something. What I meant in other words is that if you don't worry about the writer(s) then the idea of a movie being "lazy" means nothing anymore.
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Oct 27, 2017 03:04
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:Eh. JF Sebastian's deal kind of works for me, honestly; he lives alone in a slum with no security because he's basically just a weird hobo, but he's also a mechanical/bioengineering savant, which is a skillset Tyrell has big and obvious use for. Tyrell doesn't really do anything to lift him up in a publicly-visible way, because it would shatter the illusion that it's all Tyrell's work, but is entirely willing to commiserate with him on a semi-secret basis. None of this is outright said, but the info given in the movie makes it fairly obvious in my opinion. Besides hogging credit I like the idea that Tyrell underpays his most valuable employee.
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Oct 27, 2017 06:28
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Steve Yun posted:Besides hogging credit I like the idea that Tyrell underpays his most valuable employee.
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Oct 27, 2017 06:43
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He's definitely very socially awkward. He probably just lives in his little world and has the best necessities provided by money from Tyrell and he's happy.
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Oct 27, 2017 08:20
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Companies underpaying genius savants is something that definitely happens in the real world already, it's pretty drat believable that it's even more common in Blade Runner future.
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Oct 27, 2017 13:23
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I figure Tyrell letting him keep the friends he made is also part of his compensation for the work he does. As for Ana, I feel like the problem is that she's not really fleshed out enough to be as important as she is to the story. When we're told 'memory expert' and then we see her in her THX-1138 bubble and learn what she does, it's an acceptable part of the world. It's obviously reminiscent of Chew (the eye-designer) in the original, and works quite well on its own. But when it turns out that she's actually much more relevant to the rest of the plot, and is a character with a very specific past, then we do have to start wondering about those things, and they are just missing. I feel like the script doesn't seem to care in general about the details of how the child was integrated into society, to its detriment. It should only take a few minutes of thought for K to realize he couldn't possibly be a replicant baby raised as human that somehow got a replicant's job. His boss accepts the super vague explanation he gives far too readily as well.
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Oct 27, 2017 13:25
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It's almost like there was this thing called the blackout. It was already shown how lazy and complacent humans are with identifying replicants. Only K thinks to check if Rachel's body was human after seeing she had given birth. The steps to convert the child into a regular replicant would just be: 1) replace their right eye.
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Oct 27, 2017 13:28
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Manifisto posted:I recognize that it's kind of hard to judge what qualifies as a "coincidence" in hindsight. Still, setting aside the question of whether Ana's memory was given to one replicant or many, isn't it unusually convenient (to the plot) that she is designing replicant memories at all? This whole line of questioning and speculation is another example of how people are having an enormous amount of trouble following the narrative, because the storytelling simply isn’t that good. Nobody cares about the wooden horse, or Stelline, so we speculate about the ‘hidden meaning’ or talk about plot-level coincidences instead of what is simply happening in the film. Three crucial details are overlooked: 1) Stelline says that real memories are ‘messy’, while the memory we’re actually shown is very straightforward and banal. There’s nothing at all abstract about this ‘dream sequence’ - which means that we are not shown Stelline’s real memory, but rather her attempt at making sense of her own traumatic experience of being bullied as a child. Her artwork is her way of ‘putting things in order’ - making it artificial. The dream is a fake. This is why Stelline bursts into tears upon seeing the memory, but you don’t. Stelline is not a particularly good artist. Her artwork is therapeutic, for herself. Whenever Joseph initially experienced the memory of the toy horse, he was just... bored. The traumatic aspect came later. “Originally, when this scene took place, there was nothing traumatic in it: far from shattering the child, he just inscribed it into his memory as an event the sense of which was not clear at all to him. Only years later, when the child became obsessed with the question “where do children come from” and started to develop infantile sexual theories, did he draw out this memory in order to use it as a traumatic scene embodying the mystery of sexuality. The scene was thus traumatized, elevated into a traumatic Real, only retroactively, in order to help the child to cope with the impasse of his symbolic universe (his inability to find answers to the enigma of sexuality).” -Zizek 2) Stelline specifically cries when she sees the memory because she has been doing this for decades, and the furnace memory is one of her older works. Nowadays, when she makes a memory, it’s of a birthday party, or a bug with big eyes. Undoubtedly, she had forgotten all about the horse - until Joseph appeared. 3) In this artificial memory, Stelline briefly considers burning the toy horse, rather than have it stolen from her. But then, ultimately, she decides to hide it (despite the near-certainty that she would never see it again). The symbolism of the ‘burnt’ horse persisting in the ashes is fairly obvious, and it evokes Zizek’s distinction between a letter that is destroyed, and a letter that remains unsent.* In Hitchcockian terms, Stelline is obviously the film’s Macguffin, but the horse is an object of the second sort: “The second [Hitchcockian object] has the massive non-transparent presence; it is endowed with sublime and lethal materiality; it is the evocation of what Lacan (following Freud and Heidegger) called das Ding. [...] The second one is the object of the drive, the presence incorporating a blockade around which all the relations circulate.” -Luis Masnou “The role of the letter is assumed by an object that circulates among the subjects. Its very circulation brings out a closed intersubjective community. Such is the function of the Hitchcockian object: not the decried MacGuffin but the tiny piece of the Real which keeps the story in motion through being out of place (stolen and so forth) ... The story ends the moment this object arrives at its destination, returns to its rightful owner”. -Zizek Of course the film ends when Joseph takes the toy horse that he had always carried inside himself, and hands it to Deckard. At this point, he is able to die. This toy horse is effectively the same as the ring in Shadow Of A Doubt, which links Charlie to her double, her uncle of the same name. (It should be unsurprising that the director of Enemy makes Stelline the double of Joseph.) “The fascinating image of a double is therefore ultimately nothing but a mask of horror, its delusive front: when we encounter ourselves, we encounter death. The same horror emerges with the fulfillment of the Symbolic destiny as attested by Œdipus at Colonnus, when, after consummating the circuit and remunerating all his debts, he found himself reduced to a kind of soap bubble burst asunder — a scrap of the Real, the leftover of a formless slime without any support in the Symbolic order.” -Zizek Debating over exactly how many replicants have the horse dream is silly, since every replicant has a ‘horse’ of some kind inside of them. Every replicant has Stelline as their double. Joseph is simply the first to encounter his object ‘in the real world’. The problem of the film is that, where it is not hopelessly vague, it is too schematic. We are told-not-shown almost all the above, so the incredible impact of the events is only purported. We can only point to the horse and say “oh yeah; that’s the object of drive.” Hand Knit posted:Not die per se but yeah the psychological continuity approach does run in to trouble with going to sleep. Not actually. First, your brain never actually ‘turns off’ during sleep. It’s actually quite active, which is why dreaming is a thing, and you can be woken up with relative ease. You may not be [/conscious, but your brain is only ever off when it’s dead. But second, what happens to Joi 1 is not analogous to sleep. She has her mind’s information broadcast over wi-fi and then downloaded into a different body, so that there are (temporarily) two Jois. When this process is complete, Joi 1 is then shut down and discarded. In other words, she died. Again, there are a lot of better films that deal with the same subject matter: Prestige, Chappie, Oblivion.... The notion that there is only one Joi is some Star Trek transhumanism nonsense - the liberal obverse of Wallace’s Singularity-worship. But this is precisely what Joi(s) and Joseph believe. And as I noted before, this stance must ignore basic things like that Joi needs to consume batteries to survive, and that these batteries must also come from somewhere. Wallace, at least, is seemingly smart enough to know that you can’t ‘fill the universe with light’ without converting all available matter into such as lightbulbs. And batteries. * The preservation of the unsent letter is its arresting feature. Neither the writing nor the sending is remarkable (we often make drafts of letters and discard them), but the gesture of keeping the message we have no intention of sending is. By saving the letter, we are in some sense ‘sending’ it after all. We are not relinquishing our idea or dismissing it as foolish or unworthy (as we do when we tear up a letter); on the contrary, we are giving it an extra vote of confidence. We are, in effect, saying that our idea is too precious to be entrusted to the gaze of the actual addressee, who may not grasp its worth, so we ‘send’ it to his equivalent in fantasy, on whom we can absolutely count for an understanding and appreciative reading. The only qualification we should add is that we are dealing here not with a fantasy, but with the symbolic fiction, the big Other as the ideal witness in whom our message finds its full actualization. It is thus the very obstacle, the impossibility, the failure to reach the ‘actual’ addressee, which generates the perfect witness, the letter's purely virtual ideal addressee who takes note of it all and perceives its meaning. -Zizek
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Oct 27, 2017 18:45
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Not actually. First, your brain never actually ‘turns off’ during sleep. It’s actually quite active, which is why dreaming is a thing, and you can be woken up with relative ease. You may not be [/conscious, but your brain is only ever off when it’s dead. But second, what happens to Joi 1 is not analogous to sleep. She has her mind’s information broadcast over wi-fi and then downloaded into a different body, so that there are (temporarily) two Jois. When this process is complete, Joi 1 is then shut down and discarded. I still think this is a pretty big leap--it's hard to pinpoint what "die" can mean here without appealing to the supernatural.
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Oct 27, 2017 18:56
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porfiria posted:I still think this is a pretty big leap--it's hard to pinpoint what "die" can mean here without appealing to the supernatural.
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Oct 27, 2017 20:29
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The point is that isn't probably death in the way we normally use the term. If consciousness is just some moment to moment epiphenomenon of neural processes then making a perfect copy of someone/a computer program and then shooting one in the head may not be murder even if it is super disturbing. It's so hypothetical and probably impossible though that I'm not sure it's a particularly useful though experiment.
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Oct 27, 2017 20:55
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porfiria posted:I still think this is a pretty big leap--it's hard to pinpoint what "die" can mean here without appealing to the supernatural. Well, no. What you are asserting is actually the opposite - that Joi has some kind of literally-existing techno-soul that exists ‘inside’ a wifi signal (and therefore she can be smashed, destroyed, whatever, because she is duplicated indefinitely without consequence). That’s Joseph’s illusion. She is only the same to him.
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Oct 27, 2017 21:51
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why is ryan gosling so dreamy guys
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Oct 28, 2017 00:32
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SuperMechagodzilla posted:Not actually. First, your brain never actually ‘turns off’ during sleep. It’s actually quite active, which is why dreaming is a thing, and you can be woken up with relative ease. You may not be [/conscious, but your brain is only ever off when it’s dead. But second, what happens to Joi 1 is not analogous to sleep. She has her mind’s information broadcast over wi-fi and then downloaded into a different body, so that there are (temporarily) two Jois. When this process is complete, Joi 1 is then shut down and discarded. I agree with your argument on the second point, but this is an extremely facile way to look at persistence of consciousness or continuity of the self. Your brain absolutely "turns off" during sleep in the sense that your brain isn't one unit, it's a byzantine assembly of parts that function in tandem, and which function differently while asleep. A phenomenological approach to consciousness isn't claiming the brain is a sense-computer that runs Consciousness, it's looking at consciousness as a process or experience that exists as it's happening, *because* it's happening. Your brain continues to exist physically, but the continuous experience of consciousness does not. "Sleep" could still be analogous to "death" in that framework, regardless of the whether or not the brain is still doing stuff in a neurochemical sense. Definitely, though, JOI copying herself to a totally different device is not quite the same as sleep and evokes all the copy/delete Transporter Problem poo poo.
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Oct 28, 2017 01:20
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His ability to stare off into space in unparalleled
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Oct 28, 2017 01:21
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The scene with the rachel knock-off was really jarring, it felt really wrong. I believe this is why they did not use the original actress' face.
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Oct 28, 2017 05:55
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Wild Horses posted:why is ryan gosling so dreamy guys would you bang him
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Oct 28, 2017 07:29
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he's too pure for that
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Oct 28, 2017 10:17
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Xealot posted:Definitely, though, JOI copying herself to a totally different device is not quite the same as sleep and evokes all the copy/delete Transporter Problem poo poo. Joi, and AI more generally, are interesting because they make real some of the weirder challenge that come out of Transporter cases, specifically the ones that deal with multiple "people" at the end. Like if you get scanned and whooshed and reassembled in two different places. Or you get scanned and "reassembled" at a new location, but the you that stepped into the first transporter is never disassembled. The Joi-emanator case might actually be closer to a split brain case than a transporter case, but shrug — I don't think this is so relevant to the movie. As for the movie, right now I'm thinking about how it's important that Joi could be a person, separate from whether or not she actually is. Since she could be a person, she is at least afforded the status of moral patient, irrespective of whether or not she's a moral agent. So, for example, Luv destroying the emanator is morally wrong because she is doing the sort of thing that would destroy a person, irrespective of whether not Joi actually is. I think this fits with Villeneuve's other movies, especially the end of Prisoners where the point is that Dover used the whistle to call for help (abandoning his survivalist rely-only-on-yourself approach) and the movie cuts out before it's shown whether or not he's saved.
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Oct 28, 2017 15:41
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Telephones posted:The scene with the rachel knock-off was really jarring, it felt really wrong. I believe this is why they did not use the original actress' face. I can't tell if you're being serious.
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Oct 28, 2017 15:57
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Wild Horses posted:why is ryan gosling so dreamy guys Should have been Mads Mikkelsen <3 <3 <3
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Oct 28, 2017 17:40
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Xealot posted:it's looking at consciousness as a process or experience that exists as it's happening ... Your brain continues to exist physically, but the continuous experience of consciousness does not. What you've presented is just a tautology where conscious experience exists, continuously, so long as the experience of consciousness is continuously existing. I am taking into account such as the non-conscious 'proto-self', which precedes the occurrence of the core and extended/autobiographical levels of consciousness.
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Oct 28, 2017 20:30
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Wild Horses posted:why is ryan gosling so dreamy guys Someone incorrectly stated that one of his eyes is lower, the truth of the matter is that his head is always slightly titled. Like a puppy.
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Oct 28, 2017 22:01
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