Humanity is mankind’s fundamental distinction. Our mortality and self-conscious state, our ability to feel and find reason, to create meaning, to change and to aspire. Our naturistic need to love and to be loved - most relevantly, the desperate need to hold on to love for dear life once we’ve found it - all which we refer to as ‘the human condition’. Decades after its introduction in the release of Blade Runner in 1982, a film considered beyond its years, the post-apocalyptic world of Blade Runner returned. Taking place in its titular time period, Blade Runner 2049 follows the story of main man Officer KD6-3.7, or simply K - except, his classification as a ‘man’ is still in question. Produced in a lab by entrepreneurial businessman Niander Wallace, K is a state-of-the-art Nexus-9 replicant, a bioengineered being working for the Los Angeles Police Department. Referred to as a ‘blade runner’, K has been assigned with the task of ‘retiring’ less obedient older model replicants. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, 2017 sci-fi thriller Blade Runner 2049 acts as a sequel to its original namesake in regards to plot, while still putting forth its own strikingly different ideas and a uniquely profound conceptualisation of the human experience. With the strategic pairing and use of several key film aspects throughout the movie, Villeneuve accentuates one of humanity’s weakest links - the concept of grief, and our resulting inability to let go of the past.
Undoubtedly, the love a father has for his child is unmatched. It’s unconditional. Nevertheless, “Sometimes to love someone, you’ve got to be a stranger.” The delivery of this line breaks through silence with a staggering strength. With such simple words, the image of this hard shell of a man which once stood before our protagonist has been torn out from its roots. Hunted, Deckard was forced to leave the mother of his child long before birth. He never had the chance to love his daughter in the way that most fathers would dream to. Love is an elemental part of the spectrum of human emotions, and yet rarely can we fully understand it - rarely is it as easy as instinct. Loving someone doesn’t always mean being with them at every given chance, or even being remotely involved in their life. In this case, loving his family meant he would never get to see them, never get to hold them. It meant letting go of the ones he loved the most. Cruelly, this often necessary choice is also the hardest. Deckard’s words hang in the air long after they’ve left his mouth, the absence of music throughout the entirety of his conversation with K adding to the dialogue’s already intense nature. It conveys the depth of his words to the audience without need for elaboration or further context. For no more than a moment, we catch a glimpse of Deckard’s most vulnerable, genuine self - a man who experienced loss like no other. The silence shortly comes to an end when Deckard leaves the room, leaving K alone to process all that had been said. A soft clink can be heard as he slips a coin into the jukebox at the far side of the bar, and a song begins to play. Slow in pace and accompanied by a progression of minor blues chords on the piano, Frank Sinatra begins to sing. A song titled ‘One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)’. Aside from the sorrowful tone and slow tempo which perfectly reflects the downhearted atmosphere of this scene, the story behind the song is also rather fitting. “But this torch I found, it’s gotta be drowned or it soon might explode… So make it one for my baby, and one more for the road.” Written and originally sung by Johnny Mercer, ‘One for My Baby’ was inspired by Mercer’s alleged long-standing affair with American actress Judy Garland. These particular lyrics resonate with the theme at hand, describing the writer’s love for a woman - love that he could no longer act upon. Much like Deckard, he had to let her go. Sometimes to love someone, you’ve got to be a stranger.
Each shelf is lined with the relics of Deckard’s past. Everything contained within the walls he surrounds himself with reminds him of better days. From the centuries-old antique paintings which lay disregarded on the floor, to the shelves upon shelves of books telling stories of years passed. A photograph of Rachael sits idly on Deckard’s desk in a frequently polished golden frame. A row of hand-carved wooden animals occupy the remaining space, a similar finish to the wooden horse which K carries in his pocket - the horse originally made by Deckard for his unborn daughter. The surface they rest upon seems to serve no ulterior purpose. The placement of each item (the mise en scène) encapsulates Deckard’s finest hours. Every trinket and memento is a reminder of all that he has lost - his past, a place he can’t leave and a dream he refuses to wake from. Each object of importance shares a pristine appearance, proof of their delicate and regular maintenance. Diegetic sound plays a role in the creation of this image; the clinking of glasses against an old countertop bar, the sound of metal against metal as a coin rolls into the jukebox, the flicking of buttons and the whirring of disks as they begin to spin and the music begins to play. The music itself, decades old. These sounds are all reminiscent of the past, unusual and almost out of place in their current futuristic time period. The complementary nature of this diegetic sound paired with the mise en scène of the sequence effectively emphasises this idea for the audience. It shows how the room itself reflects Deckard’s inner struggle to let go of the past, and how this makeshift home of his helps to preserve it, keeping the memory of his loved ones alive in the only way he can - for this is what we do to remind ourselves of the places people hold in our hearts. We mask our walls with photos of their smiles, we fill our shelves with items symbolic of inside references, their letters, books with their hidden messages contained within the pages. We do everything in our power to ensure their impact never fades from our lives. The original Blade Runner focused inherently on mortality, and replicants’ endless fight to extend their life spans. In his final moments, Nexus-6 replicant Roy Batty delivered this memorable speech. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” Taking one last look back on his short life, he hopelessly tries to cling on to his final moments. Even the darkest of memories induce a sense of nostalgia, finding beauty within the chaos. It’s hard not to look back on even the most perilous of times with sentiment when the clock is running out - without the bad, you can never experience the good. Every breath Roy takes is an attempt to prevent the inevitable. Looking now at Deckard, we see their fight never ended. In truth, it only became more complicated, as it is no longer a fight to merely survive, but a fight to truly live: a struggle not only to delay death, but to hold on to all of life’s greatest beauties.
As K confronts the man he believes to be his father, his face is tinted by the orange glow of Las Vegas’ radioactive ruins. The decrepit city lies just beyond vision, mounds of artefacts and graves of once grand architecture, having long ago succumbed to the wrath of time. The venue of an era’s fondest memories and greatest accomplishments, lost to the dust. An extreme scale of saturation adds a layer of unease to the scene, warm tones contrasting with deep blue eyes as a close-up shot of K captures a sense of sentiment otherwise lost - a conscious decision made by the director to draw attention to both characters’ innermost thoughts, making the audience feel as if they too were involved in the conversation. The familiar vacancy which often inhabited his eyes was now replaced with clear grief. At last K stood face-to-face with his creator. The man who gave him life, but didn’t care enough to stay and guide him through it. Jaw visibly clenched, K listens as Deckard explains his role in the grand scheme, and how the blackout prevented any attempt to find his child. “Did you want to?” A second close-up suggests K’s fear of the answer, his gaze piercing, the inner corners of his eyebrows raised. The shot places emphasis on the smallest indications of emotion, and comparatively, Deckard’s apparent apathy. Two halves of the same story converge, loss stemming from a common source and sculpted differently by each’s own struggles. Deckard may have lost the ones he loved, but the pain in K’s eyes was for something far more invaluable. He grieved for what he never had. This feeling isn’t one easily defined by a single word in the English language, or by any other for that matter. Para-nostalgia, anemoia, hiraeth... All terms which are similar, but not interchangeable. Despite a lack of definition, it isn’t uncommon. We often experience overwhelming nostalgia for that which we’ve never experienced - whether it be a time before our existence, a connection with someone we never had, a detail from our past which isn’t real or a moment we wish had gone differently. It’s another recurring example of the intricacy of human emotion - one so complex, words simply can’t describe it. K felt a sense of nostalgia, longing for memories he never experienced. His childhood, the love of his mother and father, happiness - things he simply never knew. And yet, he missed them. Comparing this scene to others throughout the film, an interesting conclusion can be drawn in regards to Villeneuve’s intended purpose of colour. For the majority of K’s on screen appearance, the surrounding setting is devoid of saturation. Take the scene in which K finds out his memories are real, for example. After leaving the facility, he is amidst light grey skies, treading through a blanket of pure white snow. During the scene where K fails his baseline test, he is enclosed in an all white room. He’s usually seen in monotonous white or monochrome settings. This is, until he travels to Vegas to meet his father. A brilliant orange glow is cast across the entirety of the city. The simulation on stage at the casino shows musicians dressed in bright shades of pink, blue, and every colour under the sun. This use of contrast in colour subtly suggests that in a sense, vibrancy had been brought into his life. When evidence suggested that K was human, he fed into this dream, relied on it, and found hope in it. It was a lesser than perfect narrative. Even still, believing in it was necessary. In this alternative to his story, he was no longer just another cog in the machine, but instead a man with direction. Letting go of this fantasy would be devastating - it would darken his world once more. After all, there’s no desire more human than the want to find purpose.
