Blade Runner Tried To Warn You

Blade Runner 2049 is one of the most important films made this Century because the movie asked some incredibly important questions about modern society and the resultant loneliness with Blade Runner giving us an eerily realistic portrayal of how loneliness is created and enforced by the modern world of course the main character's Journey he battles with the same forces that shape our current society and at the end of the movie you'll realize just how deep the message truly is so to unlock these truths we need to jump right into the movie the film begins with a short backstory which sets up the context of the movie we introduced to the idea of man-made humans called replicants they can have engineered physical and mental attributes far more advanced than evolution of humans but the corporation that created them couldn't control them and collapse after large amounts of replicants when Rogue and rebelled this upheaval combined with near complete ecological collapse has left the world as a Barren Wasteland being saved only by advancements in artificial farming spearheaded by a man called Wallace A mysterious technocrat who has since created replicants that lack free will the older replicants that still have free will and survive the violent rebellions are now hunted by Blade Runners Blade Runners are police officers whose job it is to kill or retire Rogue replicants and the main character of this story is K a Blade Runner who is a newer model of a replicant and we're introduced to him in the first scene as he flies in a lone car above a vast gray complex and as he lands we see another man in a bright hazmat suit who pour some worms out of a dark liquid K invites himself into the other man's house where they begin a tense conversation as it subtly revealed that K is a Blade Runner and knows the farmer is replicant when the encounter descends into its inevitably final conclusion the farmer's superhuman abilities are obvious as he throws the other man through a wall K soon gets the upper hand and scans the farmer's eye with a machine confirming he's a replicant but as soon as he's about to execute the farmer he says something strange because you've never seen a miracle although this is just a normal day on the job for the Blade Runner the farmer's comment is still odd investigating further K finds a perfect yellow flower amongst the Ash and dirt to the farm and realizes it's a marker he scans the ground below it revealing a box but he can't investigate it yet as he needs to leave to outrun a massive storm and as he leads to realize just had a stupid in this world truly is and all of its monolithic enormity the world of Blade Runner 2049 is just so oppressive it evokes a sense of isolation and oppression and despite seeming utterly alien everything in Blade Runner does almost feel familiar that same feeling of enormity like you're just a single grain of sand in a massive desert it's just as present in that all the mega cities that we live in today and it's this very real atmosphere this detached Western alienation that we throw in these giant dystopian mega cities is what gives the movie so much weight it shows the ever-present feeling of loneliness that Western mega cities feel but in this vast and uncaring world there's enormous room for a journey of Truth and Discovery at first it seems impossible to find meaning her especially with technology complicating and slowing him down so K Powers through although the results of Australia are far from what you'd expect in fact Kay's journey is incredibly similar to the journey that everybody is forced to make today and by studying case Journey we can therefore learn a lot more about who we are and our place in society but there's a lot of things standing in case way and they're the same things that stifle people's authentic desires and needs today one of the ways that Blade Runner draws a very big parallel to real life is through its architecture the buildings and Landscapes and Blade Runner are manifestly horrid even seeing them briefly gives you a feeling of impenetrable loneliness and insignificance and whilst they may be hauntingly beautiful from afar living around these sorts of buildings is horrifying that's why people living in mega cities today are all too familiar with this feeling the sense of dread that these concrete monstrosities permeate just the presence of modern architecture is enough to give a place an oppressive and great atmosphere this is true of nearly all of today's Mega cities and only compounds the awful Mental effects of scratching out a living in the modern world The Bleak on naturalness of this architecture is just incompatible with a happy fulfilling life and that's why in Blade Runner this brutalist architecture is matched by the brutal lives of the people that inhabit it and we'll see what I mean throughout the rest of the film because in the next scene we learned that the Blade Runner's name is Officer KD6 or just K he lives a very harsh life of violence which is only made worse by the constant harassment cake ads for being a replicant they occupy a much lower social class than organic humans acting as slaves or tours from naturally born humans K is forced into complete subservience to his boss following her every command to the letter you're telling me telling me no if you show signs of devancy like emotion he'll get retired just like the farmer this is then enforced through a strange hypnotic test that measures his emotional reactions K takes this test after the job is done but after a nervously long process he gets too fine and is allowed to go home and even though he doesn't really know her yet this is the first part of K's Journey towards truth and weirdly enough this links him with the color scheme and Blade Runner because the key scenes in this film are yellow and this is often seen as the color of truth and the right path whereas red only leads k a stray the yellow flower is the first part of Kate's heroic Journey this is his Call to Adventure and is all a part of the concept of the hero's journey now this concept was first laid out and fooled by the psychologist Joseph Campbell and it's made up of three overall stages which each have their own different parts first the hero is given the Call to Adventure whether it's figurative or literal they refuse to call it first until they're given Aid by a mysterious figure and learn more about the LIE they're living in but an overwhelming threat forces them out of their usual world and into the unknown across this journey the hero is forced to make hard decisions and sacrifices but during this time they also learn the meaning behind their life whether it's because they're the middle chosen one or they have something unique that the world needs regardless this is the path to following your destiny and eventually reaching truth and Enlightenment which the hero can use to defeat the main threat and find their place in the world and for K this all begins with a yellow flower but it's the next realization that will really set the ball rolling but to understand this next realization we need to understand the lifestyle of k k is a representation of the average lonely man in society he lives in a dingy apartment in poverty and when he comes home we hear his girlfriend shouting from another room okay it's ready I hope you're gonna like it whose name is later revealed as Troy but joy isn't just a normal girlfriend she is simply sentient AI with her only physical representation existing as a hologram she's not even real there is no real deep connection she's a program but K uses this AI to mask the pain of his loneliness loneliness is a key theme in Blade Runner and the character of Joy makes an incredibly accurate parallel with the world today you see Joy plays the role of a supportive housewife but we can't help but notice that she's literally tied to the house and later on we also learned that she's programmed to love K most like unconditionally in fact K has complete control over her down to her feature's voice and even her eye color designed to be the perfect girlfriend she has no choice but to fulfill her purpose and even though Kate does feel some artificial love for her it's still incredibly limited and we get the sense that Kane knows all of this he's all too aware of his Bleak surroundings when he's asked later about her and he calls her very realistic although it's clear that this romance doesn't have any real basis there is no dance of courtship or finding out what the other person thinks and feels instead it's completely safe cold and sterile Joey lacks the ability to even consider not loving K and this makes the whole thing so boring and Bleak lacking any of the deeper levels that gives a relationship any meaning in the first place it's almost like an analogy for adult entertainment offering you the perfect woman the perfect body the perfect face complete quick gratification all in exchange of a horrible lonely long life but even without considering the question of Free Will Joyce has as a reflection of our society as well her role is to keep her complacent and smooth out his awful life she used to Anchor him down to make him never fulfill his purpose and to keep the ever-present loneliness and horribleness of case World from getting to him but at its caught it's all inauthentic and imperfect technology is fulfilling a role that just can't be replaced which is why it seems so clear that Joy's holographic Visage is just a few steps beyond the adult entertainment and girlfriend experiences that so many men pay for parasocial relationships people have with twitch streamers Instagram stars and only fans models sure Joy may seem real but she is a commodification there's nothing there she doesn't exist it's a soulless husk of a human being with case simply chasing a phantom only making him more and more lonely and the same process is happening right now today and the consequences for both men and women and modern society are horrific more and more men and women go without any meaningful connections we're lonelier than ever more depressed than ever more attached to our screens than we are the people around us it's all just a master hide up the horrible depressing dystopian lives and this is what's so depressing in Blade Runner when both K and joy come to embrace on the roof a call from the boss fries destroy mid frame and K is forced to answer confronting the brutal horrible reality that is his life where his boss demands that K come back to the office immediately as they found something once you start K is shown the contents of the box which turns out to be a coffin a woman's body has been found and it's decades old at first it looks like the farmer murdered her but it's just not the case instead she died in childbirth which becomes all the more shocking when we learned that she's also replicant now replicants are meant to give birth but somehow in a miraculous ton of events she had anyway now's case boss says this will break the world as they know it learning that replicants can also create life would break the final barriers between them and human beings forcing the world to come to terms with its gross treatment of sentient life but all of this can be avoided if K hides up the evidence and finds the child as soon as possible and their setup brings us to case overall questions journey to find the mystery behind this child this is K's program purpose so Kay goes to look up the genetic file of the baby but just as he finds it he's created by a new character called love now love is also replicant and works for Wallace a shadowy figure behind all of the new replicants the hidden technocrat running Society love does give him some info but it's all fratched and muddled but eventually he gets the name Deckard from a recording that was made and using this info K talks to an old colleague of Descartes who also gives him cryptic information love who is updating Willis and what happened now Wallace is a crazed megalomaniac comparing himself to God he's the hidden Elite the top 0.01 and behind his virtuous finer Wallace has very dark plans for the future he hopes to create replicants that can give birth so that he can create a self-replicating population of slave labor for Humanity's expansion and he has created a new model of replicants but still has a lot of the secrets and in a grotesque Display of Power and cruelty he buys one of the new models then kills it as lies mean nothing to him it's all about more power and more greed and all of the people around Wallace are programmed to love and Obey him they have no choice and that's when Wallace reveals that he knows about the replicant child and tasks love to find them as well but Wallace isn't just the main antagonist for K though he represents a much larger and more expansive force of work in society now the habitus is a concept derived by sociologists to explain how Society molds people when someone is born they are barely subject to the attitudes and viewpoints of the people around them this process of absorption turns them into a reflection of this process and the values that have been instilled within them but when a society degenerates and people feel no connection to the society around them it also feeds into this process acts of isolation violence sexual dividency build up until eventually the habitus has been changed Twisted by the values that are false and detrimental to the people within it and that's why Wallace exists as a personification of this Twisted dystopian habitators forcing people into roles that are predetermined roles that are corrupted at the core and this is the same reflecting blade run as our own world people are unable to find meaning without proper guidance having to live authentically we look up to false Idols self-help gurus and any quick fix for our purposeless lives with our society forcing people into roles they never really wanted but were pushed into this horrible isolating box inevitably leading to loneliness and despair as people search for some hidden meaning but are unable to ever find it because they can never see outside of the box they live in but there's a problem for Wallace and the habitus eventually they will die eventually Society would change and when that happens both the habitus and Wallace will be unable to force their own will on replicants society as a whole so Wallace searches for replicant that can give birth and if he can achieve this then he will gain Mastery over people's Free Will and purpose forever and so the child that care is searching for will in fact unlock this hidden secrets and so the race is on and love hires some replicant prostitutes to get whatever information they can out of K so three of them walk over to him whilst he's looking at the pictures and they catch a quick glance before he notices two of them back off when they realize that K is a Blade Runner the third one strikes up a conversation and it's clear within this short conversation that K's loneliness is at the Forefront the K is an incredibly lonely man he's been desensitized by his perfect AI girlfriend just like adult entertainment does with so many men today and this has shut him off from the real authentic World by this point in the story K is at a dead end in his search he has no idea what to do so he goes back to the farm where they found the body and there he finds the secret compartments with a single sock hidden away as well as a day carved on a tree now the day it really matches one of Kay's memories that he believes were implanted into him artificially but after talking to Joy a dangerous possibility is made much more clear the memories could actually be real and this would mean that K would be the special child that everyone's been searching for and this is massive news for K and is a key piece in his heroic Journey because so far his life has been almost meaningless or at least lacking any authentic goals or purpose but now K stumbled down a rabbit hole that could confirm his meaning and place in the world now philosophers have talked about meaning in lots of different ways for centuries but one of the most prominent modern Western philosophers to get attention for their theories was schopenhauer he saw people were being fitted into predetermined roles by Society without the freedom to escape from the rose they're forced to live out their lives in service twirling away a late but that they have no connection to I stated from the product of motive and no sense of attachment to their work and this forces people to ask the questions of where the meaning of life comes from and in both the world of the Blade Runner and our world today this seems to be an increasingly pressing problem and in Blade Runner this analogy is literal replicants are designed for and made to fulfill roles that don't give them any fulfillment or purpose but to fulfill their slave master and the same is true in the real world they're not in such a literal sense even if technology hasn't stripped people a free will like in Blade Runner it still put them in a box where we're forced to twirl away for a system made of a billions of people a system that's almost too large to notice or care about the individuals it's made up but in finding out that he might be the mythical child of a replicant care has been given a glimpse of light a chance to escape his meaningless existence with the film showing that there is a way out of sharpen house pessimists to view of the world and Care is going to do everything he can to hold him to this home so Kay goes back to his place where he had the memory Linked In the date and what he finds only confirms his belief the same wooden toy in his memory that he thoughts was fake is still there and once he's retrieved it case hit by the realization that he is special and that he has a higher purpose to water wars which is only reinforced by Joy who gives him a real name and to confirm this Theory even further Kay goes to check whether his memory is an implant or not to do this he heads to a specialized lab where the woman responsible for creating replica memories lives she's immunocompromised meaning that she can't leave a room and has been there as a child so she watches K's memory tears in her eyes and tells him that it's all real what he remembered really did happen and his life really does have a greater meaning up until this point K had been holding in all of his emotions but when K learns that his memory is actually real it's all too much it means that he is the replicant child and that his life as a Blade Runner is all a lie and this knowledge is all too much for Kate who lets out years of raw pent-up emotion and one short outburst dad all the loneliness the sacrifices the false Mission his whole life is built around and soon after leaving the lab Kay is promptly arrested where he's taken him by his boss and is subjugated to the emotion tracking Baseline test K predictably fails but saves his own life by lying to his boss that he found the child and killed them she lets him go and K heads home to see Troy but when he gets home Joy has a surprise for him she has hired The Prostitute from earlier to sync with her also that she can experience real lovemaking with K and even though technology looks close to the real thing it still hasn't cleared the unbridgeable Gap it's all a lie it's just another form of instant gratification that's holding case life down all for the benefits of the powerful few and so just before the prostitute leaves she places a tracker on K so that Wallace can follow him and suddenly K is on a timer he knows the authorities are tracking him down and before he leaves he transfers Troy to the portable device and erases her from the house so that her memories can't be mined for information on K this means she's tied to the vice if it's destroyed then she will die with it love then shows up to the apartment shortly after and finds out that they've disappeared meme K finds out that the wooden toy he found was from Las Vegas which is now an eradicated Wasteland love next goes to CK's boss but kills her when she tells him that K killed the child as nowhere to be found and after hacking into the computer system using her dead body love learns that K is in Las Vegas the case still ahead of her and makes his way to the Bruin City where he finds Descartes who kay now believes is his father where they talk and discuss the mother of the child a replicant called Rachel but before they go any deeper into the discussion love shows up with backup kidnapping Descartes and leaving k for Dead who is heavily wounded but number four Love Kills Joy by stepping on her portable device killing the only strand of his past life K is now completely alone although his luckily rescued and taken in by shadowy secret society of replicants the woman who planted the tracker earlier is there to welcome him where they tell Kay about their plans to rebel against humanity and free themselves of Wallace and the government's control they even tell him to kill Deckard the Star Wars learning about the child but what's more important for Kate is the information they have for him Rachel had a daughter not a son which means that K isn't the chosen one the memories he had were implants from the real girl K doesn't have a predetermined higher goal to strive towards it was all a facade instead he's only one person in the world and his whole journey up until this point has only been meaningful into fires that helped other people on their Journeys his life has been meaningless for himself he has been a slave and this realization breaks Kate down it's the total reverse and what his whole journey was about but this doesn't just represent the end of case Journey it also means the end of his world his identity who he is case mini has been founded on the belief that he is special that he matters for reasons completely outside of his control but without this Foundation to structure his identity off of K's world is crashing down he's even lost Joy his only companion in life so his k-steps outside we're treated to one of the most powerful scenes in the movie where a massive hologram of Joy appears in front of K telling him that she can help with his deep-seated loneliness but this isn't actually Kay's Joy this is just an advertisement but even without knowing anything about him the Hologram calls K Joe only further confirming the feeling that case life has been built on lies Joey's love for him and even what she said in the most intimate moments were all designed and created by someone else it was all fake from the beginning and this one realization drives home shopping house pessimistic view of meaning the only thing that has meaning is to struggle to exist schopenhauer caused this the will simply the spirits and people that keeps them moving forward surviving is the only goal for the will and once you die there isn't any way to know what your life is like all the singular moments that made up your life will vanish and the philosophy of Blade Runner goes Way Beyond this for thousands of years people have grappled with the idea that without a higher source of meaning there were only the struggles of life in Buddhism this makes up the first two parts of the Four Noble Truths life is suffering and the path to suffering is what schopenhauer called the will but listen then teaches us that we need to rise above the will altogether Benicia also spent years in this very same question and came to a different conclusion whilst we can't find meaning outside of ourselves it doesn't mean that we can't create it the will the process of striving towards something isn't a futile struggle because it has no meaningful and purpose instead a psychologically strong person can change the world around them creating many after the choices that are laid before them it takes care our system to the abyss of life and create something worth caring about this is the meaning of life to create it yourself the more meaning you can create through your actions the stronger that you are and in our modern world this is even harder than it was before with people's value systems and the Habit has been completely fractured it gets harder and harder to discover what's actually truly valuable and meaningful in your own life because there is no set purpose anymore it's all twisted for someone else's game and as technology progresses it makes the distractions and Replacements all the more enticing but these are just dead ends empty of meaning all of this also leads to crushing loneliness as people are isolated by their world from the people around them and the world of Blade Runner is almost a dystopian prediction of the future where all the thoughts of today are maximized to the fullest but even in this Barren future K still has the strength to find meaning as we'll soon find out at first it seemed like K is going to kill Deckard falling into yet another predetermined role with Kate going out of his way to Ambush Descartes Convoy shooting down the other hover cars and forcing dakar's car to land but instead of just killing Descartes K tries to save him he fights love in a long and intense battle with both of them being Gravely wounded but even after getting stabbed multiple times Keva Powers love and pulls Descartes out of the sunken wreck only narrowly saving him from drowning for the first time ever Kay is an unsup predestined path they had before him this time it's real his purpose is authentic and his decisions are entirely his own so when he saves Deckard K creates a meaning for his journey he fulfills his heroic path and by this time he has figured out he was really the replicant child it is the scientist that worked at the memory lab her tears were never for K but because she was seeing her own memory and when K brings Dakar to see his daughter the journey is complete all of his struggle and loss and suffering have reunited the child and their father and it's in this act the K finally feels fulfilled he's discovered the meaning he's always been searching for and then the better sweet Ender in case it comes to his wounds but at the end of his life he finally got to understand what it's like to live for something real and that's why Blade Runner is such a massive movie and of course lots of his details and themes are left out to interpretation but what is very clear is his ability to give us a window into our modern world the purpose the loneliness the meaning of our place in modern T which is why the questions that they want to ask are integral to understanding our place in the world and as time passes by the message of the film will only become more and more important

Channel: Moon

Views: 2,022,131

Keywords: blade runner 2049, blade runner, harrison ford, ryan gosling, blade runner movie, blade runner 2049 explained, blade runner explained

Id: jT2S5QO6P80

Length: 20min 28sec (1228 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 04 2023