Blade Runner 2049: Rick Deckard is a WHAT

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DeimosRising: Oct 17, 2005; �Hola SEA!

I'm hoping for relentless fuckup manchild gosling from The Place Beyond the Pines personally.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2016 18:12

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 00:39

DeimosRising: Oct 17, 2005; �Hola SEA!

Magic Hate Ball posted:

It's like all PKD stories, the questionable reality is more about us making meaning of our own lives than wondering what our lives mean (see also: the questionable ending to Minority Report that directly references Solaris).

Yeah and it's irrelevant (which is sort of an argument for not including the origami stuff because doesn't much) since the best read is still the same: whether Deckard is a replicant or not makes no difference. The distinction was always arbitrary and illusory. Roy Batty was a real person with real feelings and real ethics and real confusions. Rachel is a real person. Deckard is a real person. The story attacks this from a different angle with all the synthetic animal stuff, which is just a minor motif in the movie, but every version of the story is pretty much in sync.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2016 07:33

DeimosRising: Oct 17, 2005; �Hola SEA!

I read a list of the names of picasso's paintings, they sound stupid. Guy's a chump imo

# ¿ Aug 26, 2017 19:13

DeimosRising: Oct 17, 2005; �Hola SEA!

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

I adore Enemy.

I'll go out on a limb and say of all the hundreds of times two movies with extremely similar premises have been released at the same time, no other pair is as good as Enemy/The Double

I'm sure I'm forgetting some pair of classics but they're both very good

# ¿ Aug 29, 2017 07:00

DeimosRising: Oct 17, 2005; �Hola SEA!

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Continuing from a post in GenChat.

That's actually part of my issue with the film. There is a definite problem a lot of sci-fi has, where they become enamored with a base concept and it quickly grows into full-blown Star Trek fantasy bullshit.

Here the fantasy is transhumanism: "what if a character were completely disembodied? She could live in the cloud!" And we consequently end up with multiple hologram POV shots - POV shots that appear, impossibly, from the perspective of the character who doesn't have physical eyes. A hologram without a source, that blocks light despite having no mass....

Villeneuve is well-read enough; the character is a very explicit reference to Zizek's writings - specifically when she serves up a holographic steak, and when she recruits a prostitute to serve as her body. This is a direct reference to Zizek's reading of the novel Prey, where the villain is a evil swarm of nanobots that takes over the protagonist's wife and turns her into a beautiful and uncaring 'bitch-monster':

"In the final confrontation, we then get both Julias side by side, the glimmering Julia composed of the swarm and the exhausted real Julia.
[...]
Here, we are not talking science, not even problematic science, but one of the fundamental fantasy-scenarios, or, more precisely, the scenario of the very disintegration of the link between fantasy and reality, so that we get the two of them, fantasy and reality, the Julia-swarm and the �real� Julia, side by side, as in the wonderful scene from the beginning of Terry Gilliam�s Brazil, where food is served in an expensive restaurant in such a way that we get on a plate itself a small patty-like cake which looks (and probably tastes) like poo poo, while above the plate, a colour photo is hanging which shows us what we are �really eating,� a nicely arranged juicy steak... This, then, is how one should read Prey: all the (pseudo) scientific speculations about nano-technology are here as a pretext to tell the story of a husband reduced to a house-job, frustrated by his ambitious corporate vixen of a wife."
^{-Zizek, The Family Myth in Hollywood}

Villeneuve uses identical imagery (the only difference being that Joi is the unfailingly servile 'housewife') to say that Joseph K. needs to overcome his Jerkoff fantasy and grow as a person or whatever. So all that remains, at the end, is this excremental remainder - this whore who he feels no attraction to. The narrative hints at a Vertigo thing, where the story is about K's prostitute girlfriend trying very hard to be treated as a real person, since he's trapped in that logic of "you don't need to pretend to like me...." That's the subtext of the scene where she approaches him on the street, while she's on the job, and he treats her as a complete stranger.

But again, this is all fantasy. We have the same problem as in the Rachel clone scene, where (as in the recent IT) you have this copy with its own thoughts and feelings, but the hero doesn't love it - so it gets shot in the face and disposed of, to the audience's shrugs of indifference. There is really no recognition, by anyone, that Deckard's 'green eyes' comment has condemned an innocent woman to her death.

The point where fantasy becomes sci-fi is the point where you start wondering how she eats and breathes, and other science facts. Of course, Joi eats batteries and excretes heat, just like any phone. But things get trickier when you try to explain how she can walk around and see things. The only way she can wander around is, of course, if the device in Gosling's pocket is borderline-omniscient, always passively scanning the environment and constructing a flawless simulation for her to walk in. And this ultimately means that Joi was always real, occupying the 'matrix' level of symbolic reality, while Gosling has dropped out of reality and into an odd fantasy where he patrols a postapocalyptic robot world.

A number of people here have commented on the newborn Rachel scene so I don't think it's fair to ascribe "indifference" to an imagined audience. But I haven't noticed anyone reading the scene as a condemnation of Deckard, just an example of how totally Evil Jared Leto is.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2017 00:33

DeimosRising: Oct 17, 2005; �Hola SEA!

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

Right; everyone�s chomping at the bit to debate whether the hologram is a human, when that skips the question of whether the hologram is a hologram at all. Thematically, Joi exists �off-world� - in the same dimension as �real animals�, �real trees� and so-on. She is only metaphorically a hologram. And Deckard�s daughter acts as something of a gatekeeper between the realms.

I�m not interested in moralistic condemnation of individuals. I�m talking about the ideology of the film that, despite obvious christological themes, is almost solely preoccupied with a particular love for friends, family, etc.

I agree with you on that and the scene is a perfect example (Deckard doesn't care because she's not "his" Rachel) I just think it's not whether a putative audience gives a poo poo or not that determines how we interpret it.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2017 02:37

DeimosRising: Oct 17, 2005; �Hola SEA!

Arglebargle III posted:

.
[*]Niander Wallace is a single phoneme away from Neanderthalis.

Idgi. Apart from that not being a word (it's neanderthalensis) I don't see what significance you're imputing there. Is it some kind of extinction/replacement parallel?

Al Cu Ad Solte posted:

I am absolutely baffled and terrified that anyone could think the live action Ghost in the Shell was anything but forgettable, unnecessary garbage.

Ignoring the hilariously unselfaware whitewashing that they clumsily integrated into the plot itself, you've got stilted acting from the lead, an unwieldly and pointless cast (they added a new female character to the team...so she could have two lines), a hodgepodge of GitS Greatest Hits Scenes (but completely misunderstanding what made those scenes great) and a storyline that wouldn't be out of place inside of a superhero origin story.

How can they be "unselfaware" while writing it into the plot? That seems like the definition of self aware, a level of meta commentary that borders on preciousness

HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:

They're all really good!

I think Prometheus is a step above the others but yeah.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2017 18:02

DeimosRising: Oct 17, 2005; �Hola SEA!

Young Freud posted:

The other thing about the why the pregnancy is so important to the resistance depends on if Deckard is a human or not. While a replicant Deckard means that replicants can breed with each other and it's just presumably a lost art, a replicant-human hybrid means that replicants can breed with humans until their DNA is indistiguishable, intermingling to the point the whole last ideological barrier is rendered moot.

The ability of e.g. white and black people to have children with one another sure as poo poo didn't prevent the erection of ideological barriers between them

# ¿ Oct 16, 2017 08:43