Blade Runner 2049 and the Violent Creation of Self

Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve, 2017

I realize most of you are probably tired of hearing me talk about Blade Runner 2049 at this point—but I think it works quite well to illustrate a primary driver of man’s relationship to violence.

I doubt it will come with any great uproar if I assert that Blade Runner 2049 is at its core concerned with the nature of what constitutes a person having a “real” self. After all, I think it would take a severe case of media illiteracy to come to a different interpretation regarding a film about a synthetically created man with a false memory of who he is.

Granting me that, I also don’t think it’s much of a reach to say that the world of Blade Runner is imbued with an oppressive ennui that deprives the individual of agency in their fate. It’s a world that is dead, impersonal, and lacking anything resembling meaning.

Ryan Gosling’s character K’s primary emotional relationship—if it can even be called that—consists merely of artificial attachment to an AI named Joi. K’s foil in Luv seems to lack any sort of genuine relationship outside of her obsession with attaining affirmation from her creator Wallace. In short, both characters lack any serious ability to assert themselves as individuals when we are first introduced to them.

Which gets me to the draw of violence.

For Luv, killing K would make her in her own words “…the best one [replicant]”, fulfilling an existential validation as being the highest form of replicant. It’s Nietzsche’s nihilistic violent attainment of self through the exertion of one’s will upon the world. In exerting her will, she shows that she is real.

Now in fairness—Nietzsche likely would have argued that her violence lacked the creative power of a Great Man in rebellion against the illusory social structure he is born into since the meaning that she derives from her attempt at killing K is mediated through her subservient drive to attain recognition from Wallace.

But let’s assume that Luv’s attempt to kill K was entirely for Luv’s own self-assertion—it would fail to produce the self-consciousness that is essential to an authentic creation of a real self.

Put differently, in practice, this is merely the violence that The Judge in Blood Meridian speaks of when he exclaims,

“…everywhere upon it [the world] are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.”

Luv seeks out sovereignty by exerting her will over all that she encounters. To be real is to have dominion over others. It is a fleeting form of self-creation, it cannot provide recognition from an Other as an equal that affirms your existence in the world. As Hegel puts it in the Phenomenology of Spirit,

“…trial by death, however, cancels both the truth which was to result from it, and therewith the certainty of self altogether.”

Although Luv’s violence may suffice to provide some sense of agency in the world—it means essentially nothing.

Mirroring Luv throughout much of the film; K is told repeatedly that he is “special” as the progeny of a human and a replicant. He would be the first of his kind, ushering in a new civilizational epoch in the film’s world.

Echoing the manner in which the Nietzschean “New Philosopher” remakes the world in his own image, we’re repeatedly told this child would “break the world”. He would be literally and figuratively a New Man in the world. The sort of being that Nietzsche envisions as holding the creative force to make meaning in the world.

K is differentiated from Luv however with the revelation that his memories were merely implanted—and Joi was just repeating generic advertising slogans back to him. K is in fact not special in any sense of the word. Lacking the artifice of illusory notions of grandeur, he is forced to reckon with his normalcy.

It doesn’t seem like terribly much of a leap to posit that the role of Replicants in Blade Runner 2049 is akin to Hegel’s bondsman—Wallace even goes so far as to proclaim they are created because humanity, “Lost our taste for slavery.” K attaining his self-consciousness can be likened to negations of the various false consciousnesses that are stripped from him through the film.

Or as Hegel says in his section on the Lord and the Bondsman in the Phenomenology of Spirit,

“…this objective negative element is precisely alien, external reality, before which it trembled. Now, however, it destroys this extraneous alien negative, affirms and sets itself up as a negative in the element of permanence, and thereby becomes for itself a self-existent being.”

K attains his self-consciousness through the negation of all aspects of himself that were mere lies designed to prevent his authentic existence in the world. This brings me to K’s use of violence.

K killing Luv isn’t just the exertion of his will upon the world for its own sake; but an extension of K’s recognition of Deckard’s consciousness as the same as his own. In the same manner that Hegel’s Bondsman sees the world reflected back on him in his labor and affirms his existence, Deckard’s willingness to die on behalf of his daughter affirms K’s genuine self-existence.

To put this another way, K is finally able to realize the words of another character in the film that dying for the right cause is the most human thing we can do. K lying down in the snow to die at the very end of the film reflects this shared sense of humanity with Deckard.

This isn’t to say that the killing of Luv isn’t a necessary act of self-creation. Hegel is quite clear that genuine self-creation arises from work in the world. The Bondsman cannot attain true self-consciousness from a retreat from the world but from his labor in the world itself. Recognition of the Other requires our work in the world to realize.

Luv engages in a lesser form of this action; she merely asserts that she is real. K—through his relationship with Deckard—is given the mutual recognition that provides an authentic self-consciousness.