Part II Structure and Narrative 6359_Herbert and Verevis.indd 63 05/05/20 7:25 PM 6359_Herbert and Verevis.indd 64 05/05/20 7:25 PM CHAPTER 4 The Edge of Reality: Replicating Blade Runner Constantine Verevis I walk along a thin line darling/ Dark shadows follow me/ Here’s where life’s dream lies disillusioned/ The edge of reality ‘Edge of Reality’ (Giant-Baum-Kaye 1968) A dapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) was, at the time of its initial theatrical release, a critical and commercial disappointment. In the years that followed, home video formats helped establish Blade Runner’s cult following, and by the end of the decade the film’s reputation was well enough established for Scott to prepare a tenth anniversary Director’s Cut (1992) and, subsequently, for its twenty-fifth anniversary, a definitive Final Cut (2007). Divested of voiceover and tidy ending, these re-visions added to the mysterious undercurrent of Scott’s movie – namely, the question as to whether blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) was himself a replicant (a bioengineered human) – and opened the way for a sequel. Co-screenwriter Hampton Fancher reported that a Blade Runner sequel had been under consideration from as early as 1986, and while the film generated three sequel novels by K. W. Jeter (beginning with Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human, 1995) and other transmedia tie-ins, the film sequel – Blade Runner 2049 – did not appear until 2017. Produced by Scott, featuring Ford, directed by Denis Villeneuve and promoted by three short prequel films – Blade Runner 2022, 2036 and 2048 – the (near) real-time sequel leaves Deckard’s true nature open to debate, to focus instead on ‘K’ (Ryan Gosling). ‘K’ is a next-generation blade runner, a NEXUS-9 replicant 6359_Herbert and Verevis.indd 65 05/05/20 7:25 PM 66 C O N S TA N T I N E V E R E V I S whose self-awareness and gradually emerging free will provide opportunity to interrogate ideas of artificial consciousness in ways that rework Scott’s film and compound the fan speculation regarding Deckard’s status as replicant. This chapter looks at Blade Runner and its many ‘sequels’ – the Blade Runner 2019 ‘trilogy’ (1982, 1992, 1997), the Jeter trilogy (1995, 1996, 2000), the three prologue sequels and Blade Runner 2049 – to investigate how these works clarify and extend the problem of human authenticity explored in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? More particularly, this chapter shows how Blade Runner 2049 operates as a ‘reboot-sequel’, and as such demonstrates how the film retraces its precursor(s) – narratively, stylistically, existentially – at the same time as it extends them. In May 2011, Warner Bros. announced its plans to make both sequels and prequels to Scott’s Blade Runner (set in November 2019, this total work – the US theatrical release and its revisions – is hereafter referred to as BR2019). Overseeing the project for Alcon Entertainment, producers Broderick Johnson and Andrew A. Kosove declared there was no interest in remaking the property, but rather in continuing on with Blade Runner as a franchise: ‘to be clear . . . we cannot remake Blade Runner. As a legal matter, we have not bought the remake rights . . . we can only do prequels or sequels’ (quoted in Orange 2011). Premiering some six years later (October 2017), Blade Runner 2049 (hereafter BR2049) was sometimes reviewed in the context of contemporary reboot practice (see, for example, Dry 2017; Tallerico 2017), but was more typically described as a (much belated) sequel. However, any easy distinction between the continuation of a sequel (or series) and the repetition of a remake (or reboot) immediately obscures the fact that the process of continuation – of sequelisation – is always also a process of repetition: of characters and actors, settings and story worlds, plots and scenarios, and (most significantly) titles of properties (Perkins and Verevis 2012: 2). More than this, while the contemporary serial formatting practice known as the ‘film reboot’ is often distinguished from the remake for the fact that it is (typically) a franchise-specific concept – that is, the remake is singular and the reboot is multiple – BR2019 here, too, complicates any easy definition, existing (even before the appearance of BR2049) as ‘a set of multiple film texts [but, unusually, one] without cinematic prequels or sequels’ (Hills 2011: 7, emphasis in original). At once a sequel and a remake – a film that simultaneously extends and replays elements of BR2019 – BR2049 can be understood as a film that reboots a franchise: that is, a (serialised) property that operates according to the protocols of both organic and (following Mittell 2018) operational seriality. The first of these terms – organic seriality – accords with the most typical practices and definitions of serial forms: namely, ‘an ongoing narrative released in successive parts’ (Hayward in Mittell 2018). As Jason Mittell explains, this type of definition points to the two essential components of (organic) seriality – namely, continuity and gaps: 6359_Herbert and Verevis.indd 66 05/05/20 7:25 PM THE EDGE OF REALITY 67 continuity suggests long-form storytelling, repetition and reiteration, consistency and accumulation, historicity and memory, and potentials for transmedia expansion . . . However, ‘serial’ is not simply a synonym for vast, as the whole must be segmented into installments broken up by gaps, leading to temporal ruptures, narrative anticipation, moments for viewer productivity, opportunities for feedback between producers and consumers, and a structured system for a shared cultural conversation. (2018: 228) Mittell goes on to note that serial continuity (organic seriality) is typically based around narrative events: ‘a text is considered serialised when events accumulate with a degree of consistency’ (2018: 231). In the case of BR2019 this question of ‘consistency’ is however no simple thing, in part because there is no single, definitive version but (at least) three principal versions (no one of which displaces the others),1 and the textual engagement with each of these ‘cuts’ varies not only from one to the other but also over time. Accordingly, BR2049 picks up narrative events not only after a thirty-year interval (gap) in story time, but also after a real-time feedback loop of thirty-five years during which time fans had interrogated various versions (and different endings) of BR2019 for what they might reveal about Deckard’s status as a replicant, and speculation about his fate upon electing to go rogue and flee with his quarry, Rachael (Sean Young). At the beginning of BR2049, officer ‘K’ (Ryan Gosling), a NEXUS-9 replicant employed by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as a blade runner, arrives at a desolate rural farmhouse where he confronts and ‘retires’ Sapper Morton (Dave Bautista), an earlier model NEXUS-8, taking his serial number-stamped eyeball for the record. As K is leaving the property, he recovers from beneath a gnarled dead tree a military footlocker that contains the bodily remains of a female replicant. Forensic analysis and investigation subsequently reveal that the remains are those of Rachael, the NEXUS-7 replicant who apparently died giving birth to Deckard’s child. For fear of the dire consequences of revealing that a replicant was capable of giving birth, K’s superior, Lieutenant Joshi (Robyn Wright), moves to destroy the evidence and orders K – who is programmed to obey commands – to find and retire the replicant child. Continuing his investigation back at the farmyard gravesite, K finds a significant date, carved at the base of the tree, that triggers a recurring childhood memory and leads K, and his holographic girlfriend Joi (Ana de Armas), to think that he himself might be the miracle child, a ‘real boy’ born of woman, rather than manufactured. K’s quest to understand if his memories provide evidence of his humanity leads him first to Dr Ana Stelline (Carla Juri), a gifted memory designer, and eventually to Deckard who, missing for the last thirty years, lives in seclusion in a derelict Las Vegas hotel deep in the 6359_Herbert and Verevis.indd 67 05/05/20 7:25 PM 68 C O N S TA N T I N E V E R E V I S Figure 4.1 Deckard emerges from the shadows, Blade Runner 2049 (2017). (now) radioactive Mojave desert, surrounded by holographic ghosts of Elvis (and other iconic twentieth-century performers) and haunted by the loss of his beloved Rachael and the absent child whom he gave up years before so as to protect it from detection. In his first appearance, Deckard emerges from the shadows, grizzled and hostile, his movements led by the double-barrelled pistol he has aimed at K. Deckard provides few answers to K’s questions – least of all offering any clues to the (implicit) question of whether he is human or replicant – but Deckard’s appearance (a full 100 minutes into the film) nonetheless responds to three decades of (fan) yearning, ‘merging the specter of the past with the fears of the future’ (Kohn 2017). By contrast, BR2049 is more forthcoming around the cumulative reasons for the advanced environmental degradation of the Anthropocene, and developments in the mid-twenty-first century manufacture of replicants, providing a capsule summary in its opening text (itself an update to the crawl that opens BR2019):2 REPLICANTS FOR USE OFF-WORLD. THEIR ENHANCED STRENGTH MADE THEM IDEAL SLAVE LABOR. AFTER A SERIES OF VIOLENT REBELLIONS, THEIR MANUFACTURE BECAME PROHIBITED AND TYRELL CORP WENT BACKRUPT. THE COLLAPSE OF ECOSYSTEMS IN THE MID 2020s LED TO THE RISE OF INDUSTRIALIST NIANDER WALLACE, WHOSE MASTERY OF SYNTHETIC FARMING AVERTED FAMINE. WALLACE ACQUIRED THE REMAINS OF TYRELL CORP AND CREATED A NEW LINE OF REPLICANTS WHO OBEY. 6359_Herbert and Verevis.indd 68 05/05/20 7:25 PM THE EDGE OF REALITY 69 MANY OLDER MODEL REPLICANTS – NEXUS 8s WITH OPEN-ENDED LIFESPANS – SURVIVED. THEY ARE HUNTED DOWN AND RETIRED. THOSE THAT HUNT THEM STILL GO BY THE NAME . . . BLADE RUNNER Aspects of this backstory are further explained across the duration of the film, but a more elaborate account of these events had already been previewed at Comic-Con 2017 (Fine 2017) and also provided in the form of three official Blade Runner sequel films (prequels or prologue sequels to BR2049) that appeared on the Web (in non-chronological order) in the months leading up to the theatrical release of BR2049. The first sequel, the animated short Blade Runner 2022: Black Out (hereafter BR2022), opens with a title card – ‘Los Angeles May, 2022’ – and crawl which explains that, with the expiry of the Replicant NEXUS-6 model, the Tyrell Corporation has developed a new NEXUS-8 line of replicants, who now possess open-ended lifespans equivalent to those of regular humans. This causes a massive backlash among the human populace, who use the Replicant Registration Database to find and hunt down the bioengineered humans. In response, an underground replicant freedom movement sets out to destroy the Tyrell Corporation’s database of registered replicants, so that they can no longer be tracked. The so-called ‘blackout’ of their actions (an electro-magnetic pulse detonated somewhere on the West Coast) is addressed in two cards at the end of the film: The Blackout, which led to the prohibition of Replicant production, sealed the fate of the TYRELL CORPORATION. It took over a decade for the WALLACE CORP. to win approval to manufacture a new breed of Replicants. Just five minutes in duration, the second sequel, Blade Runner 2036: Nexus Dawn (hereafter BR2036) picks up the narrative hook of the final line of text, to look in on a hearing that creator-entrepreneur Niander Wallace (Jared Leto) is called to in order to defend his technically illegal investment (banned after the blackout of 2022) in the manufacture of a new generation of subservient and controllable NEXUS-9 replicants. The third sequel, Blade Runner 2048: Nowhere to Run (hereafter BR2048), released around five weeks before the premiere of BR2049, follows a brooding Sapper Morton (Bautista) through the streets of Los Angeles. Upon witnessing a backstreet assault, Morton savagely beats up the group of thugs, his superhuman strength attracting the unwanted attention of a passerby who reports him to the LAPD as a likely rogue NEXUS-8 replicant. This call to the authorities connects directly to the opening of BR2049 in which K locates Morton on a secluded protein farm, 6359_Herbert and Verevis.indd 69 05/05/20 7:25 PM 70 C O N S TA N T I N E V E R E V I S and (taken together) all three of the sequels dramatise key events that have occurred since BR2019, and explain developments in the mythology of both replicants and blade runners. The serial continuity evident in and through these short films (and the Comic-Con preview notes) relates not only to narrative events, but also to BR2019’s future vision. The film’s reputation as ground-breaking science fiction much resided in its visual grandeur and dread-filled rendering of an environmentally degraded Los Angeles, as imagined by Scott and his team, including ‘visual futurist’ Syd Mead; production designer Lawrence G. Paull; art director David Snyder; special effects supervisors Snyder, Richard Yuricich and Douglas Trumball; and cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth. Scott Bukatman comments not only on BR2019’s dark dystopian city, but also on the ‘brilliance’ (in both senses of the word) of its ‘visual density’, a panoramic vision that offers ‘an urban experience of inexhaustible fluidity, endless passage and infinite perceptibility – a utopian vision . . . as distinct from a vision of utopia’ (Bukatman 1997: 56, emphasis in original). BR2049 works with all of this, not only delivering on spectacle and an enhanced, immersive soundtrack, but also by extending (sequelising) BR2019’s signs of greenhouse warming to a future in which climate change has caused sea levels to rise dramatically, requiring that a massive sea wall be built along with Sepulveda Pass to protect the Los Angeles basin. The area south of Los Angeles lies in waste, an endless scrapheap, and to the east Las Vegas, now a ghost town, glows orange with radioactive dust. As in BR2019, towering billboards for multinational corporations, such as Sony, continue to dominate the cityscape, though (somewhat eccentrically) K’s wedge-shaped spinner (flying car) is from a lesser player in Peugeot. More than this, in making Los Angeles an ongoing link between it and earlier film versions, BR2049 renders Los Angeles (as Bukatman would have it) as a ‘complex, self-similar space – a fractal environment’ (Bukatman 1997: 58) through which the disembodied eye, and itinerant consciousness of the viewer, can wander/wonder. As is evident from the description so far, the temporal gaps that structure the various Blade Runner instalments – BR2019, BR2022, BR2036, BR2048 and BR2049 – define it as serial storytelling, and the continuity and consistency of its narrative events – its organic seriality – mark out BR2049 as a ‘true sequel’ (even if it is not exactly clear which cut of BR2019 it sequelises). By contrast, a second line of inquiry – the approach Mittell describes as ‘operational seriality’ – opens up to practices of cinematic rebooting. The latter takes less of an interest in the narrative events and temporal gaps that structure serial storytelling (and which the prologue sequels seek to bridge) to investigate nonnarrative continuity, or those ways in which texts that are difficult to term serialised based on their narratives can be understood as ‘embedded within cultural practices of seriality outside the narrative realm’ (Mittell 2018: 232). 6359_Herbert and Verevis.indd 70 05/05/20 7:25 PM THE EDGE OF REALITY 71 Mittell counts among these practices the proliferation of paratexts that fill serial gaps with extratextual material, typically to extend engagement across media platforms. This paratextual sprawl is often used to augment narrative series and franchises – notably those properties (Star Wars, Star Trek, Batman, Bond) typically described as ‘true reboots’ – through toys, games, novelisations and the like, but, as Mittell points out, these paratexts can also be found in the case of a ‘self-contained’ film such as BR2019 (2018: 234). For Mittell, the several different ‘official’ versions of BR2019, along with numerous other official and unofficial paratexts that extend and augment the film, suggest a ‘serialised feedback loop of production and consumption, turning a seemingly [singular] finished film [BR2019] into an ongoing conversation’ (Mittell 2018: 235). Mittell’s understanding of operational seriality pushes against the continuity of organic seriality (sequelisation) to emphasise instead ‘discontinuities and differences . . . [and] trace the ongoing story of [a] film’s making and remaking’ (2018: 235; see also Verevis 2019). Such an approach is consistent with Matt Hills’ assessment that BR2019 is ‘a single film title which has . . . mutated into a franchise by virtue of [its] textual variation[s]’ (Hills 2011: 7). Barry Atkins further explains when he writes (in an essay that precedes BR2049 by more than a decade): It has been some time since it was possible to discuss Blade Runner as if it were a single and fixed text that might be considered in isolation from its history of multiple prints, or detached from its vast array of intertexts, paratexts, references and allusions . . . Even before the release of Ridley Scott’s authorised Director’s Cut in 1992, the film was already caught in a web of references to other texts, from its credited relationship to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its appropriation of the term ‘blade runner’ from William Burroughs’ screenplay title, Blade Runner: A Movie (1979), [through] to its density of intertextual allusion to a range of cinematic genres. (2005: 79) Atkins goes on to argue that even BR2019’s appearance in ‘such an apparently definitive and authorised form’ as the 1992 Director’s Cut does not nullify the fact that Blade Runner remains ‘a firmly plural text that resists any sense of closure toward the singular’ (2005: 80). This is (literally) borne out by the appearance of the 2007 Final Cut, a version which is no more or less ‘definitive’ than any of the others. Moreover, the question of Blade Runner’s multiplicity is not only a matter of its various film (and VHS and DVD) versions, but also that its textuality is complicated by the existence of other authorised transmedia paratexts. These include (but are not limited to): the 1982 reprint of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, published as Blade Runner, with a note explaining that its pages contain the ‘brilliant science fiction novel that became the source of the motion picture’ and encouraging readers to ‘discover an added dimension on encountering the 6359_Herbert and Verevis.indd 71 05/05/20 7:25 PM 72 C O N S TA N T I N E V E R E V I S original work [Dick’s novel]’; the 1982 novelisation, Blade Runner: A Story of the Future by Les Martin, derived from the Hampton Fancher and David Peoples screenplay (based on the Dick novel) and illustrated with more than sixty stills from the film; the 1982 Marvel Comics adaptation by Archie Goodwin et al.; the (expanded) 1994 Vangelis soundtrack; the 1997 Westwood Studios Blade Runner PC game; and (pre-eminently) the three officially licensed K. W. Jeter sequel novels – Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human (1995), Blade Runner 3: Replicant Night (1996) and Blade Runner 4: Eye and Talon (2000) – which repeat and continue not only BR2019’s narrative but also elements of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In all likelihood prompted by the success of the 1992 Director’s Cut, Jeter’s first sequel novel, Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human, follows on directly from the film, and was apparently intended to form the basis for a sequel film to BR2019 (C. Gray 2005: 149). In accordance with its generic lineage, it opens with a line of hard-boiled fiction – ‘When every murder seems the same, it’s time to quit’ (1995: 3), and quickly moves to find Deckard who, since the events of BR2019, has been living in a remote cabin with Rachael, who lies suspended in a transport sleep module designed to delay the ageing process of replicants during their travel to the off-world colonies. Across the novel, Jeter integrates elements from both Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and BR2019, and expands the story world into one of templants – that is, ‘original’ human templates that are the basis of replicant ‘copies’ – in order to introduce the (new) character of Tyrell’s niece, Sarah, who is the templant for (and thus identical to) Rachael. Jeter additionally finds ways to resurrect several characters from BR2019 – J. F. Sebastian, Pris and Roy Batty – and then sets Deckard and the blade runner Dave Holden (recovered from wounds inflicted in BR2019) about hunting for the notorious missing ‘sixth replicant’ mentioned by Deckard’s captain, Bryant, in a detail left over from an earlier script treatment for BR2019, and which had allowed fans to speculate that Deckard himself was the extra replicant. The 2007 Final Cut had actually corrected Bryant’s dialogue, thus invalidating the premise for The Edge of Human, but this erasure only seems to underline the fact that the appeal of the film’s multiplicity-in-singularity is that it resists the fixity of a definitive and authorised form. Jonathan Gray discovered exactly this through discussions with Blade Runner fan communities, which indicated that they valued BR2019 for its power to immerse them in a detailed fictional world. Significantly, the fans welcomed the idea of a sequel film – or ‘side-quel’ – that would expand the Blade Runner universe and enrich it through additional material, but only upon the condition that any additional instalment preserve BR2019’s multiplicity-insingularity sense of aperture: that is, rather than close down its meanings and resolve its debates, a Blade Runner sequel-reboot had to maintain itself as an open whole, especially with respect to the question of whether Deckard was, or was not, a replicant (J. Gray 2005: 114). 6359_Herbert and Verevis.indd 72 05/05/20 7:25 PM THE EDGE OF REALITY 73 All of this is to say that BR2019’s variant futures do not lead (organically) to a single authentic version, but rather that Blade Runner is a text that becomes ‘more legible when treated like an ancient manuscript . . . a palimpsest, with each extant version layered atop a previous one’ (Westphal 2017, emphasis added). Conventional wisdom suggests that reboots wipe a narrative space clean for future textual production, but BR2049 reveals another logic at work, creating a new narrative space by adhering to the complicated textual multiplicity that already defined the franchise: that is, BR2049 does not set out to explicate questions raised in BR2019, but rather to compound them. It does this most evidently by introducing K, a blade runner character, and then having him repeat and retrace the narrative events and thematic concerns (around the authenticity of memory and identity) raised in/through the character of Rick Deckard. This is done, however, in an inverted way: Deckard is a human blade runner who, through his interaction with and pursuit of the NEXUS-6 replicants, especially Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), and his own developing feelings for NEXUS-7 prototype Rachael, comes to realise the ambiguity of human-replicant definition. K, on the other hand, is a replicant blade runner (serial number KD6-3.7) who, through the course of his investigation and tracking of the replicant child, experiences a shift from biosynthetic to human consciousness, one that similarly calls into question the human-replicant divide. Bukatman makes two important observations with respect to this division and the key question: ‘Is Deckard a replicant?’ (and, conversely, ‘Is K a human?’). The first (consistent with the aforementioned fan observations) is that asking the question – and maintaining its ambiguity – is far more important than determining the answer (Bukatman 1997: 80). The second is the observation that BR2019 develops two oppositions from Dick’s novel – human/replicant and human/ inhuman – of which (according to Bukatman) only the latter is really important. As he explains, the first raises a philosophical problem: how do know you are human? The second, instead, leads to a moral problem: what does it mean to be human? (Bukatman 1997: 68–9). In BR2019, Deckard, ‘[whose] status as human – physically, psychically, morally – is increasingly in doubt’ (1997: 81), recovers his humanity through an empathic response and connection to Rachael; in BR2049, the initially compliant and subservient K gradually discovers his humanity and emergent free will through his self-sacrificing actions to spare Deckard and protect the miracle child. K’s moral journey – his quest for identity and meaning – is also an act of detection, beginning with the flower at the base of the dead tree which marks the location of the box of human remains, ceremoniously buried beneath its roots. After visiting the Wallace Corp. archive, which contains a partial audio file of Deckard’s Voight-Kampff test of Rachael, K seeks out Gaff (Edward James Olmos) – the LAPD officer who accompanied Deckard in his pursuit of the rogue NEXUS-6 replicants – who tells him Deckard has ‘retired’, and 6359_Herbert and Verevis.indd 73 05/05/20 7:25 PM 74 C O N S TA N T I N E V E R E V I S will not be found. Seeking further clues, K returns to the farmhouse where he discovers the numbers – 6 10 21 – carved at the base of the dead tree. Startled by his find, the numbers immediately provoke in K an involuntary response – a flash of recollection – which he subsequently explains to Joshi is his memory of a toy wooden horse, with an inscription on its base, that he had as a child. K further recalls that, pursued by a group of boys who sought to take the horse away from him, he hid it in a cold furnace. What K does not tell Joshi, though, is of the ‘dangerous coincidence’: the fact that the inscription on the horse and carving on the tree carry the same numbers: the date, 6.10.21. DNA records in turn lead K to the Morrillcole Orphanage in San Diego (the city now a bleak waste-processing district for Greater Los Angeles) which he recognises as the location of the childhood dream, and where he finds the carved horse, still wrapped in cloth, in the furnace where it was concealed years before. Urged now by his virtual consort, Joi, to accept the fact that he is a ‘real boy’, K (still cautious) moves to determine how one might differentiate a real from an implanted memory. This leads him to Dr Stelline, a designer of replicant memories (and Wallace Corp. subcontractor), who – upon asking K to picture his memory – is moved to tears, affirming: ‘yes, someone lived this . . . This happened.’ Now shaken to the core, K responds – ‘I know it’s real. I know it’s real’ – and exits the laboratory thinking he is, indeed, the miracle child. BR2049 begins with a literal act of excavation and, like an archaeological dig, it encourages K, and the film’s viewers, to assemble fragments of the past and of the future, to put together pieces of its original(s) and its sequel(s). It does this, as Roland Barthes would have it, by directing the viewer toward the rewritten text: ‘not the real text, but a plural text’ (1974: 16, emphasis in original). This is, at least in part, enabled in and through the figure-matrix of the horse, and its link to the unicorn symbolism of BR2019. In the 1982 U.S. Theatrical and International cuts, the unicorn appears only at the end of the film as a silver origami figure, a calling card left by Gaff to tell Deckard that he has decided to spare Rachael’s life. Much of the interest in the leadup to the release of the 1992 Director’s Cut was that it would restore, in the sequence that follows Rachael’s first visit to Deckard’s apartment, Deckard’s reverie: a brief, fourteen-second shot of a unicorn ambling through leafy, misty woods. Included too, but differently, in the 2007 Final Cut where it comprises two shots and appears as a vision, rather than a dream (see Brooker 2009), the unicorn footage explains why the origami facsimile left on Deckard’s doorstep is so significant. It suggests that, just as Deckard proved to Rachael that she wasn’t human with the story of the spider outside her bedroom window, Gaff had access to Deckard’s own memory banks: in other words, it demonstrates that Deckard, too, is a replicant, probably another prototype NEXUS-7. The (inverted) symbolism of unicorn and horse – one 6359_Herbert and Verevis.indd 74 05/05/20 7:25 PM THE EDGE OF REALITY 75 ‘proves’ Deckard is a replicant, the other that K is a real boy – is further underlined by K’s earlier visit to Gaff, which serves no narrative function but during which the latter fashions, in ‘homage’ to Dick, an origami sheep. In another way, Deckard’s reverie, which (at least in the Director’s and Final cuts) is the only glimpse of a natural, green world and is set to the sound of Vangelis’ ‘Memories of Green’, connects Deckard directly to Stelline, first encountered in a verdant, holographic forest (and the only green in BR2049). And, finally, it is Doc Badger’s (Barkhad Abdi) carbon testing of the toy horse – a reprise of the Cambodian street merchant’s analysis of the snake scale Deckard finds in replicant Leon’s bathtub – that leads K to Deckard. For many, Deckard was last seen getting into the lift in his apartment building with Rachael, the doors closing (perhaps) to trap them – both now fugitives – in a world from which they seek to escape. The U.S. Theatrical and International cuts responded to disastrous sneak previews (March 1982) by revising this bleak ending, adding a coda in which Deckard and Rachael escape the dark city, winding their way by car through a pristine landscape and, in another major adjustment, with an added voiceover narration in which Deckard explains: ‘Gaff had been there [to Deckard’s apartment], and let her [Rachael] live. Four years he figured. He was wrong. Tyrell had told me Rachael was special. No termination date. I didn’t know how long we’d have together . . . Who does?’ (see Sammon 337–56). The additional footage – aerial shots of wide mountain vistas – came in the form of out-takes from the opening montage of The Shining (Kubrick, 1980) in which Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) drives his family to the remote Overlook Hotel, and was at odds with the film’s future vision of Los Angeles steeped in endless rain, and of planet Earth in an advanced state of degradation. The Director’s and Final cuts again pared back the ending, leaving Gaff ’s last words – ‘It’s too bad she won’t live! But then again, who does?’ – to resonate, and contribute to the sense that BR2019 is a film ‘saturated in melancholy, overshadowed by death and peopled by ghosts’ (Dalton 2016). BR2049 underlines the discontinuities and differences of operational seriality, working with both endings to show that Deckard has retreated to a remote and deserted Overlook-type hotel where (like Jack Torrance) his company – aside from a (replicant?) dog – is that of ghosts: spectres of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra. When, following their altercation, Deckard and K call a truce and retreat to the bar, the seriality is not linear, nor even ‘tabular’ (Barthes 1974: 30), but dreamlike – oneiric. This is evident not only in Deckard’s recollection of the past – ‘her name was Rachael’, he tells K – but also in its sketching of a ‘large circuit’ (see Deleuze 1989; Verevis 2005), recalling Jack Torrance at the Overlook Hotel bar where he discovers to his surprise, for it is an apparition, the bartender Lloyd, played by none other than Joe Turkel, BR2019’s Dr Eldon Tyrell. 6359_Herbert and Verevis.indd 75 05/05/20 7:25 PM 76 C O N S TA N T I N E V E R E V I S Figure 4.2 Rachael replicated, Blade Runner 2049 (2017). All the while that K has been undertaking his investigation and search for the identity of the child, he has been tracked by Luv (Sylvia Hoecks), a ruthless, robotic replicant, and lieutenant to Niander Wallace, who is desperate to secure the child for what it may reveal about the secret to replicant reproduction which (lost in the ‘blackout’) has so far eluded him. In the film’s final panel, Deckard is apprehended by Luv and taunted by Wallace, who produces a near-identical version of Rachael in a vain attempt to extract from him the whereabouts of the child. Moreover, in a moment that occludes rather than explicates questions of identity, Wallace suggests that Deckard’s meeting with Rachael was predestined, that it was an algorithm rather than love that brought them together. Meanwhile, K meets Freysa (Hiam Abbass), leader of the replicant underground, who in telling him that protecting Rachael’s daughter is their absolute priority (‘dying for the right cause is the most human thing we can do’) also brings him to the realisation that he is not the messianic child, that the memory of the wooden horse was real, but that it was Stelline’s, not his. In a final altruistic act, K rescues Deckard, dispatching Luv in the process, and (though mortally wounded) takes him to the Stelline Laboratories to be reunited with his long-lost child. In his final moments, K lies down on the steps of the building, holding out his hand to the touch of the lightly falling snow. Significantly, the experience – of snowflakes alighting on his upturned hand – matches that seen earlier in the film when, following his initial visit to Stelline, K left believing, for the first time, that he really is human. The gesture is also matched to a shot of Stelline who stands – hand outstretched – in a virtual drift of snow, just as Deckard enters the building. In these moments – including the final shot of the film in which Deckard, wordless, places his hand on the glass that separates him from Stelline – K’s humanity, his human consciousness, is affirmed through sensation, and his affinity with the natural world. 6359_Herbert and Verevis.indd 76 05/05/20 7:25 PM THE EDGE OF REALITY 77 Figure 4.3 Deckard finds his daughter, Blade Runner 2049 (2017). The final moments of BR2049 reprise and retrace – remake as they serialise – those of BR2019, in particular Roy Batty’s expiry in the rain, with its emphasis (in his famous death soliloquy) on the experiential: ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe: attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain’. Just as significantly, BR2049 reprises its precursors’ open ending, Deckard’s tentative meeting with his daughter – the miracle child – and the coming storm of the replicant uprising, suggesting (but for the fact that, like its precursor, BR2049 performed well below expectation at the box office) that the film might be the middle instalment in another Blade Runner trilogy. In this respect, BR2049 would also align with those descriptions of reboots which require that the new film (ideally) initiates a whole new series, a revived franchise. As Brooker reminds us, ‘Blade Runner began in 1982 as an older kind of text – a film adaptation of a novel and expanded . . . into a cross-platform phenomenon’: ‘an unruly multiverse, a map of possible routes, a network of alternatives rather than a single narrative’ (2009: 90). At the time of BR2049’s release, Villeneuve noted that the film was made from the ‘tension’ between BR2019’s different versions (Westphal 2017), a comment that suggested an understanding of the textual and cultural practices of seriality that characterised the multiplicities of the franchise. This chapter has argued that BR2049 contributes to this network of versions, describing it as a ‘sequel-reboot’: a serialised property that operates according to the complementary protocols of linear-organic and tabular-operational seriality. In retracing its multiple pasts, BR2049 outlines and extends – without diminishing the labyrinth and mysteries of – its possible futures. 6359_Herbert and Verevis.indd 77 05/05/20 7:25 PM 78 C O N S TA N T I N E V E R E V I S NOTES 1. Hills refers to the three most circulated versions of BR2019 – the Original Theatrical release (aka U.S. Theatrical Cut, 1982), the Director’s Cut (1992) and the Final Cut (2007) – to suggest ‘a trilogy of one film’ (2011: 7). Others discuss further versions. See, for instance, Will Brooker’s (2009) account of five versions – the three aforementioned, along with the 1982 Workprint and 1982 International Cut – released on the Blade Runner: The Final Cut five-disc Collector’s Edition DVD. See also Paul M. Sammon’s (2017) exhaustive discussion of these and other versions. 2. The BR2019 crawl (the same in all versions but the Workprint) reads: Early in the 21st Century, THE TYRELL CORPORATION advanced Robot evolution into the NEXUS phase – a being virtually identical to a human – known as a Replicant. The NEXUS 6 Replicants were superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them. Replicants were used Off-world as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration and colonization of other planets. After a bloody mutiny by a NEXUS 6 combat team in an Off-world colony, Replicants were declared illegal on earth – under penalty of death. Special police squads – BLADE RUNNER UNITS – had orders to shoot to kill, upon detection, any trespassing Replicant. This was not called execution. It was called retirement. 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