Tears in the Rain: A Brief Look at the Marxist Themes in Blade Runner 2049

 

 

Before I begin, I would like to issue a warning that this will contain spoilers for the plot of the movie. If you haven't seen it yet, I would recommend watching it.

Blade Runner 2049 is the sequel to the blockbuster movie Blade Runner, which was released in 1982. The movie's setting alone depicts an obvious portrayal of a capitalist dystopian future, as the world has been ravaged by disease, war, and famine, and the big corporations of the world effectively control what is left of it. Kendrick (1999) demonstrates that "Aliens" (1986) shares a similar setting and plot, where the future is depicted as a capitalist dystopia where an evil corporation calls the shots, and the workers are either productive or left for dead.

K walks toward the ruins of Las Vegas

The plot depicts a battle between the combined forces of the Wallace Company and the Los Angeles Police Department against the Replicants, or clones that resemble everyday humans. In the movie, the Blade Runners, including the main character, K, and, formerly, Rick Deckard, are hired by these two organizations and tasked with hunting down replicants that have escaped their captors. Essentially, the replicants are slaves to whoever is controlling them because they were bioengineered to be workers or to fight wars for humans while resisting having their own thoughts or opinions.

Replicants are seen as the working class in Blade Runner 2049, as they are designed only to work and not to think for themselves. The Blade Runners, specifically K, are viewed as the middle class, as he has authority over other replicants and can afford some expensive equipment, such as his projector for his AI girlfriend, but is still under the control of the police department.

Sellnow (2017) states that "Many mediated popular culture texts offer preferred readings that reinforce hegemony. Sometimes, however, a mediated popular culture text will challenge the status quo argument about who ought to and ought not to be empowered and why. Critics label these texts as oppositional readings" (Sellnow, 2017, p. 120). Overall, the plot and the setting both demonstrate that the artifact of Blade Runner 2049 represents an oppositional reading, as both are against the norm of the positive view of capitalism and the wealth structure of today’s society, even if it is viewed in the future.

Another big example of the movie being an oppositional reading from the plot is against the dominant ideology that it is better to be a man. The premise of the movie is that K is tracking down a rogue replicant that was biologically born from another replicant. This had been theorized to not have been possible before the discovery was made, so K was tasked to hunt down and kill the hybrid replicant to prevent word from getting out about the birth, as it would essentially prevent the large corporations from continuing to use them as slaves. This is because the evidence would show that they are living beings and deserve rights in the same way that humans do.

Near the end of the movie, K makes a discovery that makes him believe he was tasked with destroying. However, in the last stretch of the movie, it is revealed that one of the characters helping him, Dr. Ana Stelline, was the replicant all along. He believed that he was following the cliche of being “the chosen one,” and the audience was led to believe it as well, when, in reality, it was Ana, a female freelancer who designed memories for the replicants, who fit that role.

So, the plot of the movie was centered around a woman being the key to saving the replicants from their captors, and the male character had no vital role other than happening to stumble across the evidence of the birth and putting the pieces together to bring the important characters together.

While the mystery certainly couldn’t have been solved without K, him not being the most vital character to the situation subverts the norm that male characters are usually found in more important roles in movies.

So, this leaves the question: "What other movies, or similar artifacts of media, attempt to go against the hegemony of gender roles in this way or through a similar way?"

References

Kendrick, J. (1999). Marxist overtones in three films by James Cameron. Journal of Popular Film and Television, 27(3), 36-44.

Sellnow, D. D. (2017). The rhetorical power of popular culture: Considering mediated texts. Sage Publications.