Cells, Interlinked

By Kathryn Fleishman

I first watched Blade Runner in my high school English class when I was sixteen years old, almost two decades after its initial release. We had just read Frankenstein, and now my teacher, a large, brilliant man in his thirties, prone to slamming his fists emphatically on the table, wanted us to compare the novel to this film. He had only been at our school a few months, but his high expectations, unorthodox pageantry, and newly minted doctorate rendered his attention rare and precious, like sunlight in the cold. We angled ourselves in the direction of his praise. I determined to say something about the film that would impress him. 

Blade Runner entranced me. The dreamy, gloomy Los Angeles of 2019 was at once palpable and unimaginable. Its visual details folded the voluminous pin curls and shadowy noir shots of the forties into the bright billboards and exaggerated shoulder pads of the synth-drenched eighties. The result was a weird aesthetic decadence, a future whose incongruity with the present relied as much on nostalgia as it did on speculation. 

In the replicants, man-made beings owned by humans and degraded as “skinjobs,” I glimpsed a celebration of the powers of self-stylization: Rachael’s bangs, Pris’s spray-painted lids, the delicate sequins embroidering Zhora’s skin. These pleasures were laid out against the dystopian endpoint of consumer culture: interminable cities, blackened skies, acid drizzles, constant surveillance. In Blade Runner’s 2019, environmental disaster and radical dehumanization were a matter of course, part of the polluted air that Angelenos breathed. It is understandable, the film whispered, maybe even necessary, to delight in and to detest the society into which you were born. Blade Runner posited the glamour of Hollywood as both the height and the nadir of an American aesthetic sensibility. Its relentless objectification suggested a liberating, potentially feminist message: if fully conscious beings were conscripted by an oppressive regime to do work and give pleasure, then at least one’s body could also be turned toward resistance and expression.

The shot that stayed with me most was the death of Zhora, a “skinjob” and a stripper, whom our narrator-protagonist Deckard, a shrewd detective turned “blade runner,” is hired to murder, or “retire.” As viewers, we are aligned with Deckard, but as Zhora runs—the multicolored lights of the city refracted in her eyes and across the panels of her clear plastic raincoat—we feel her terror: her animal flight, her desperate plunge through a series of plate glass windows, and finally her execution before an indifferent crowd at the edge of a garish arcade. Trapped behind the glass, clad in black lingerie identical to hers, are rows of mannequins. In death, as in life, Zhora is an object among others. 

The narrative parallels to Frankenstein were clear: the mad scientist, rendered heartless and inhuman in his quest for dominance; the sublime, that Romantic concept of overwhelming inundation, resurrected in postmodern fashion; and, of course, the monstrous and vengeful creation, both fearsome and sympathetic, who must be destroyed. Late in Shelley’s novel, the monster compels his creator to make him a female mate. Frankenstein begins to knit together this Eve, but as he works, he comes to fear her potential vanity, selfishness, and most of all, reproductive capacity; she could even crossbreed, in which case “a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.” Frankenstein tears her sutured body into pieces, places them in a chest, and sinks it to the bottom of the sea. 

*

This is not a story of #MeToo. Not exactly. It is a story about the air we breathe, about forms of sexism so ambient that it took me years, and a movie sequel, to feel them in my throat. 

Seventeen years after watching the original film, at the zenith of media coverage of #MeToo, I went to see Blade Runner: 2049. The sequel returns us to an even larger, darker Los Angeles, in which a seemingly less troublesome generation of replicants, programmed into total obedience, has been born. Our new blade runner K, himself a replicant, is, like Deckard before him, tasked with gunning down the remaining old models. While the first film stages an illicit relationship between Deckard and a replicant named Rachael, K is the owner of an adaptive, holographic AI “wife” named Joi, whose encoded desire for intimacy compels her to arrange a sexual encounter for K with a prostitute, during which she projects her own features over the sex worker’s. Watching the glitchy overlay of Joi and Mariette, each programmed, in her own way, for consent, my stomach turned.

Both Blade Runner and 2049 walk the raw edge between critiquing a system of gendered injustice and abetting it. Take, for instance, the crucial sex scene in the original. As Rachael plays the piano, Deckard tries to kiss her. She flinches, gets up, and walks away. He blocks the door, slams her up against a wall, and orders her: “Say, ‘Kiss me.’” Tearfully, she complies. “Say, ‘I want you,’” he continues. “I want you,” Rachel repeats back, trembling. The scene depicts, at best, a deeply coercive act and, at worst, rape. Under the conditions of Rachael’s existence, what do such echoes of consent even mean? 

As a teenager, I read this scene as intensely romantic. Deckard was teaching Rachael about her desire, awakening her as a sexual being. But what does it mean to be taught desire? We are told, as women, that we want to be thrown against a wall, roughed up, contradicted—that we might resist at first, then fall limp—that ecstasy is a female body taken over by someone else. Women, of course, can enthusiastically consent to this sort of thing. But there’s a cunning science in teaching women to desire their own coercion, to remain inert or come to life under a man’s masterful touch. It is a form of alchemy, too much like magic to be real, that men so easily transform women into objects. Tell us, again and again, that you can either sunder or sew together our bodies, that our resistance, then our acquiescence, turns you on, and it will become the air that fills our lungs.

*

Watching the Blade Runner films in the midst of #MeToo, I think of all the times I squeezed my way through a crowded bar or train and felt a disembodied arm around my waist, a hand between my legs, a slap or a grope or a squeeze. I think of the men I yelled at in bars for things they said to my friends and all the times they called me a bitch, a hag, or a slut for speaking back. I think of the stranger who stopped his motorcycle to pin me against a wall and run his hands under my thick winter coat, between my legs, calling me a whore. I think of the coworker who called me an “uptight little cunt,” the second date who shoved me out the door shouting “cocktease,” the family friend who slid a hand on my thigh under the dinner table, or the one who groped me from behind as I opened the fridge. I think of the PhD student who reached under my dress in a crowded room full of colleagues, of a professor who invited me to sit in his lap, of another who showed up at my house uninvited and drunk, asking to stay the night. I think of a handful of male students, their essays blistering with the odd invective about female arrogance or promiscuity, their teaching evaluations peppered with bile: “I enjoyed her delicious goodies,” one wrote. “Pun intended.”

I think of that inspiring high school teacher, the one who screened Blade Runner in class. He was indicted for perjury and sentenced to jail time this year following allegations of sexual misconduct with a student. Reading the reports of other, younger women who had been his students, my face burns. I see, almost verbatim, the conversations I had with him during his first two years as a teacher. His “personal reading assignments,” from Vladimir Nabokov to David Schick, surface in my mind, almost all of them stories of underage girls having sex with older men. I remember his invitations to watch movies at his house while his wife was out. I think of him blasting The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” leaning over to smell my hair, and asking what perfume I was wearing. I think of a dozen other little moments just like that, never quite over the line, simply part of the air I had breathed, being female, since the age of eleven or twelve. 

I spent half my life imagining him as a model for my own aspirations. There is truth in that; he was an extraordinary teacher. His confidence in my intellect shaped my teaching, my pursuit of a doctorate, even my particular investment in Nabokov and in film. But now the power he breathed in me catches, polluted, in my throat. Now I feel ashamed, remembering; now I feel unsure of what is mine.

*

In 2049, the LAPD tests K’s “baseline” whenever he returns from a kill. He is forced to recite a series of lines from Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, interspersed with questions designed to elicit an emotional response, during which time a machine analyzes his “levels” —that is, his ability to quash his feelings, to remain emotionally detached from his own actions. The lines, which recall the sensation of suffering a heart attack, at the nexus of life and death, are taken from a poem written within the novel:

And blood-black nothingness began to spin

A system of cells interlinked within

Cells interlinked within cells interlinked

Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct, 

Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.

These “cells interlinked” are the hinge point of the natural and the artificial in Pale Fire, Nabokov’s play on the many meanings of “cell” —a biological unit, a prison enclosure, a still film image, a clandestine political group. What K is meant to suppress in reciting them is his ability to be moved by beauty, to be reminded that his own life might be interlinked with anyone else’s. As a blade runner, as a replicant, and as a man, K’s livelihood depends, even thrives upon, his disaffection.

*

When I watch these films now, I watch the women. In Blade Runner: Rachael, a secretary, pressed up against a wall; Pris, a pleasure model, shot dead in an empty mansion; Zhora, a sex worker, falling through sheets of glass. In 2049: Joi, a hologram girlfriend experience, zapped before her lover; Lt. Joshi, a police chief, stabbed to death in her office; the ghost of Rachael, resurrected by Wallace, only to be shot while Deckard watches; Luv, a henchwoman of the patriarchy, strangled by K and drowned in the penultimate scene.

The female body is not just cut down, but cut to bits. A skyscraper-high ad projects a massive eye, lip, or thigh. The desert is strewn, in a revision of “Ozymandias,” with metonymic statues—a towering high heel, a mammoth buttock. Wallace, the mastermind behind the new, obedient brand of replicants, cuts a grown woman, just born, from her plastic bag, then slices into her uterus to check for a fetus while Luv looks on, trembling. He fingers the woman’s wet, fully formed body before killing her, as if unmolding the clay of life.

At the end of 2049, we are left with a brotherhood of “good men” —Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford —stumbling to safety on the beach. We are also left with questions. Are there female blade runners? What have sex and gender meant for replicants if only one has ever reproduced? And why is everyone white? It is virtually impossible to imagine a future American hellscape of slaves and sex workers that doesn’t deploy replicants of color—how else would society naturalize their dehumanization? 

Like Frankenstein’s monster, made of parts whose origins are forgotten in the final creation, slavery lurks hidden in the world of Blade Runner, which owes the dynamism of its dystopia to a very real material history that is whitewashed out of its diegesis. #MeToo is itself a phrase coined by a black woman named Tarana Burke a decade ago, only to be revived into fame by white celebrities. As Burke has said, “It wasn’t built to be . . . a hashtag that is here today and forgotten tomorrow. It was a catchphrase to be used from survivor to survivor to let folks know that they were not alone and that a movement for radical healing was happening and possible.” Survivor to survivor. Cells interlinked within cells interlinked.

Only one major female character survives each film: Rachael in Blade Runner and her daughter Ana in 2049. In the original, we last see Rachael getting into an elevator with Deckard to flee the city. Thirty years later, in a bubble-like space, the pale, virginal Ana sits projecting a world, isolated from the air everyone else breathes. She has Galatians disease, she tells K. Whether this refers to Galatea, Pygmalion’s own ill-fated pleasure model, or to the Bible— “But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, while the son of the free woman was born through promise” (Galatians 4:23) —remains unclear. Ana is cut off from the public sphere, performing the magical, reproductive work of mothers everywhere—making the memories of birthday parties and songbirds that will be embedded in the minds of replicants. 

By the time of the sequel, Ana’s own mother has died, and died giving birth to her, no less. In a country with the worst maternal mortality rate of any developed nation, the film’s depiction of female martyrdom to childbirth might be mordant critique or a regressive ode to the pious ideal of maternal sacrifice. A nostalgic Rachael model does briefly reappear in 2049, only to be murdered. Like the scene with the sex worker, the filmmakers created Rachael’s facsimile by layering young actresses over old images and recordings of Sean Young. Young herself, who does not appear in the sequel, joined the chorus against Harvey Weinstein this spring. She is also on record saying that she wept after filming her sex scene with Harrison Ford in Blade Runner, more than thirty-five years ago.

*

Both Blade Runner and 2049 treat their women like objects—that is part of their beauty, their argument, and their cry against injustice. But if you make women into objects to illustrate a point, they never really become subjects at all. They are reified; they become the means by which men measure their own humanity. One lesson of Blade Runner, intentional or not, is that our most cherished aesthetic objects—including women—can be hard to look at closely. Like Pris, hidden in an arrangement of automatons until the moment of attack, they begin, uncannily, to return that gaze. 

The hope, the sequel in our imaginations, begins with what we see at the close of 2049: an underground cell full of women, human and replicant alike, who have failed to obey. Cells, interlinked, form prisons, chains, borders, but also bodies, movements, stories. The nostalgia of Blade Runner’s aesthetic, and that of its sequel, is digital. It is digital in the sense of screen and hologram technology, but also in the sense of our hands, in the heightened desire for meaningful touch—our fingers searching in the dark, a haptic nostalgia for textured fabrics, handmade objects, fleshy bodies, and reels spinning thousands of separate celluloid frames into one fluid tale. 

For what is a film, a person, or a revolution, if not a series of cells, interlinked?