Blade Runner 2049, storyform thoughts? [SPOILER ALERT]

analysis
#1

Thoughts?
SPOILERS BELOW

my rough thoughts:
OS problem: Activity>Understanding>Interpretation>Equity: everyone is dealing with the fragile balance between humans and replicants, their relative status. the discovery of evidence that a replicant was able to give birth throws this balance into jeopardy for the few who know about it, bc if replicants can give birth then their status would be raised to “soulful” beings no lesser than humans, unique and special at birth (not replicas).

MC problem: Fixed Attitude>Memories>Falsehood>Equity: K overlooks his questionable memory of being a child, believing it is an implant, then later believing it is real, back and forth, diverting his investigation into deeper and deeper trouble. All the while he tries to remain cool and “above base line” (i.e. artificially balanced) so that he is not retired himself. his attempt to maintain his stable cool, amidst intrigue around his childhood memory, cracks. Also to other people (humans and other replicants, he’s always getting called out for being mr cool guy slave amidst obvious inequity just below the surface of the 2049 culture)

I wasn’t able to identify a clear influence character or relationship thru-line. main candidate for IC is Deckard, but he arrives too late and is unknown to K for at least half the story, unless his influence as an anonymous father figure count. Joi could have been an interesting IC but she is gone too soon and maybe not written with enough agency to offer K a perspective other than the idea that he’s special. but it turns out he’s not special at all.

Is Luv/Wallace the protagonist? like michael clayton style? who ultimately fails to understand the truth about Deckard/replicant birthing?

Good or Bad Judgement?
#2

I was thinking about this when I saw the movie on the weekend and I think there’s a near-perfect IC handoff from Joi to Deckard. Note how she dies just a short while after we meet Deckard, and the two of them are never in the same scene. Both of them push K into thinking of himself as a person rather than a replicant. Joi keeps trying to give him a name, telling him he’s special…etc. One of the first things Deckard does (after he’s done beating him up) is ask K his name and then refusing to accept a serial number as an answer. K, like most people in this world, thinks there’s a clear boundary between a human and a replicant. You’re either one or the other. Joi and Deckard both (sequentially) challenge K into believing that the line is much more blurry than he once believed.

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#3

ah cool. that’s beautiful.
this interpretation (the hand off IC view) suggests beings from a wide spectrum of status (an AI hologram to an old timer) basically knows and feels that each replicant is unique/special and deserving of namable status. K is both mr cool guy for trying to be down with being a slave cop, but also mr clueless for not allowing himself to feel this obvious inequity in 2049 world and to entitle himself to be a Joe, not just a K.

the ending is a strange feeling: K acts out of his programming but isn’t really creating an inequity, he’s allowing the revelation of replicant birthing to remain obscured. at the same time, he remains a nobody (not the miracle child of deckard). Maybe its that even in spite of learning he’s a nobody, he has gained a will to do things his way. A case of OS: failure, MC: good?

#4

I’ve been trying to work out a storyform for this for days. The storytelling is so subtle, it’s impossible!

I think Sebastian absolutely nailed the IC stuff. When I saw it, I loved it but didn’t feel particularly emotionally engaged so I had assumed there was a Nolan-esque lack of an RS. The hand-off might explain that.

I’m also down with the OS in Activity (investigating the evidence; being pursued by Luv) and Understanding (getting to the bottom of what’s going on; figuring out how the pregnancy could work). Interpretation is a good guess, and I think it may be right. I’m torn between Interpretation and Conditioning. Conditioning, I think, works well as an issue since we have the baseline stuff in which K is conditioned to respond calmly; there are the replicants conditioned to go out and kill; and then suddenly one replicant that managed to break her conditioning to get pregnant. But then I’m not sure what I think the problem could be.

I think in your example, @cora, the problem might be Inequity rather than Equity. The balance is thrown out of wack by an apparently pregnant replicant – an inequity to the balance. In the opening sequence, Bautista’s character asks K why he only kills his own kind – an inequity. Jared Leto’s character is upset that, somehow, a replicant has been able to get pregnant – something he could never do. And that eventually leads Deckard to find his daughter, bringing balance to that particular inequity of their lives.

Now, the ending I’m not sure on. Somehow, it felt to me both bittersweet and a happy ending at once. K, I think, is definitely a ‘good’ resolution. But I’m not sure on the Outcome. If the goal is to ‘understand how a replicant can get pregnant’, I think it has to be a failure. Nobody really understands HOW it happened. K finds out it’s Deckard’s kid, and Leto’s character gives a little explanation about it being ‘the last trick’ but there’s never an explanation given as to how exactly it all came to be. But, assuming the problem is Inequity, there’s not really any new balance at the end except for Deckard and his daughter. Or is that enough to make it a success? I have no idea.

#5

My sense was that the OS goal was to find the replicant baby. People have different motivations for that (Wallace wants to learn how to use replicants to increase their numbers because he can’t do it with his current methods, K is motivated by his sense that maybe he’s not just a machine, Deckard wants to stop people from finding the replicant baby to protect her, the woman we meet late in the story wants to stop people from finding the replicant baby because that would harm the revolution she’s working on, Luv wants to find the baby because she wants to prove that Luv herself is still the best replicant.) But all of those things are character motivations. What unites everyone in the story is the search for the replicant baby, not their reasons for doing so.

If this is correct, then the outcome is success. Despite K’s vague smile at the end, I suspect the story judgment is bad: he’s not who he hoped he’d be, and in fact appears to be dying. He never found out who he truly was (outside of having an implanted memory like all other replicants). He isn’t even sure if Joi really loved him because of the scene where the giant-sized ad is talking to him and we keep having it emphasized that it tells you what you want to hear, then the kicker: the ad calls him “Joe”, removing the meaning it had when his Joi gave him that name because now we know it’s just a generic, built-in response.

My usual disclaimer: I could be totally wrong about this and usually am.

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#6

Hey @decastell, I think this movie is a good test case for your “things share domains” idea. Hear me out:

  1. The OS is in Situation because the Universe has been thrown out of whack by the fact that a replicant child exists. The Universe has been violated.
  2. K has to put up with lots of crap because he is a replicant: people don’t like him solely because he’s a skin job.
  3. The IC pair that’s been identified are both in Situation: Joi’s problems come from being in a device; Deckard is trapped in Vegas.

Throw your analysis at this and see if it feels right.

(You should not be surprised to know that I do not think this is right. But I’ll admit that I have two very different possible storyforms worked out and I’m trying to determine which I like more and, more importantly, why.)

#7

When I throw the movie at the model, I get a completely different result:

OS: Activity (Searching for the replicant child)
The inequity isn’t caused by the existence of the baby – she was around for at least two decades and wasn’t causing problems for anyone. The conflicts are caused by the things people do in search of the baby: destroying evidence, killing witnesses…etc.

MC: Situation (K)
K’s conflicts all relate to him being a replicant – except that maybe he’s not a replicant - except that actually he probably is a replicant – except that . . . etc. If he really is the born baby then he’s going to be hunted forever, if he isn’t, then no one cares who he is. Right from the beginning we see how his life is controlled by his situation: he has no choice about his job, he lives in a crappy place where everyone hates him…etc.

IC: Fixed Attitude (Joi -> Deckard)
Unlike K, Joi and Deckard have no question about whether or not he is a real person. Joi has “always known he’s special” (I think she says this to him). Deckard long ago dealt with these questions, and came up clear that a replicant is just as much a human being as anyone else. They both challenge K to see himself as a person, not a thing. “Joe is your name,” Joi insists, and this being only one of many occasions on which she insists he’s a person. “K isn’t a name, it’s a serial number,” Deckard says. “What’s your name”

RS: Manipulation (Unconventional Family)
Joi and K manipulate each other in fascinating ways as they toy with whether to pretend to be a married couple. They have all these fake rituals of him asking if she wants a drink when of course she can’t drink. She alters her appearance as she goes through the cycle of possible relationship roles (dutiful wife, sex kitten, actual person who actually cares about him.) He pays a fortune for an emitter so she can go places. But they also seem to pull back at times, with K insisting the relationship’s not real. With Deckard, he suddenly meets a man he realizes might be his father (if K is himself the replicant child). That’s taken away from him when he learns he’s not the one everyone’s looking for, but he ends the story by telling Deckard, “Go see your child”. He’s come to grips with the fact that he’s alone (though this might dip into the MC as well, but it’s clearly the end of the RS).

I would therefore place the Concerns in Doing, How Things Are Changing, Impulsive Responses, and Playing a Role.

Of course, this is highly likely to turn out to be completely wrong if past experience is any predictor. At the end of the day I’m looking at what an audience would take away from the film (and what it appears the writer is trying to say), rather than a more abstracted consideration of theoretical underpinnings that might exist prior to the movie.

#8

I just recapped the movie via wikipedia and themoviespoiler and I somehow missed that entirely when watching it. You’re absolutely right. Robin Wright’s character sends K out to find and kill the child. And then Wallace sends Luv out to find the child. Yes, certainly seems like that’s the goal. Not sure how I missed it. I think I was sidetracked by the other thematics that kept popping up, but even then, the movie feels much more like it’s exploring the upper left quadrants than any others. I’ll have to think about it a little more.

#9

It’s like you don’t even want to consider that the different throughlines share a domain. No wonder we don’t have any examples of movies with shared domains… :wink:

#10

You’re trying to kill me now, aren’t you? :wink:

I’d happily consider identical throughlines, but in this case, Joi and Deckard’s influence on K isn’t to do with their situations but rather their beliefs (fixed attitudes). While Joi might be a hologram (a situation), that wouldn’t matter if she just acted like the artificial wife/sex kitten we presume her to be at the beginning of the movie. It’s specifically because she keeps insisting that K is special that pushes him to change his perspective. After she “dies” and he sees the giant ad for her, he’s not hurt because she’s a hologram: he’s hurt because the ad calls him “Joe”, which makes him question if Joi ever really thought he was special, or if she was just telling him what he wanted to hear.

Now, Sixth Sense – there’s a movie with two throughlines in situation :wink:

#11

You’re going to drive me to write an article or something.

If you really want to drive yourself crazy, I think Cole says something specific in the movie that makes a demonstrative case that Malcolm is not in Situation. Go see if you can find it!

#12

Hah! @jhull would say you’re looking at the character’s point of view and not the objective storyform. You must now do penance with twelve Hail Mary’s and a recitation of the sixty-four Dramatica elements.

#13

Not a chance. Not a one.

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#14

I’ve been exploring some potential storyforms to see if my brain can connect the dots, but I’m having some real problems (that will result in me rewatching the movie sometime this week).

Re: Goal of Obtaining. My biggest problem with this one is that the thematics feel off. Attitude, perhaps, works and so could Self-Interest. But where do we see Morality and Approach within the story? The elements beneath those quads feel even more alien to the storytelling. Self Interest, perhaps, could have an argument (Pursuit/Avoid/Control/Uncontrolled) but it still doesn’t really line up for me.

And even going beyond that to K – his concern of The Future (Openness/Preconception/Delay/Choice)? I don’t see any of that in him.

The IC in Subconscious works well, however. I can easily see that working. But the other throughlines don’t seem to fit in my eyes.

It certainly seems that the goal is Obtaining, but the thematics seem much more upper-left – Understanding/The Past/Memory/Conceptualizing. Especially if you count Deckard’s daughter as an IC (since she has a serious influence on his memories).

It’s possible that the Upper-Left quads are just a benchmark, but I don’t recall it having the ‘feel’ of an Obtaining story. As I said, I’ll revisit it sometime this week with an open mind and report back.

#15

I’m pretty sure the filmmaker intended the scene of K lying back and looking up as a welcome acceptance of his true self. Dying is not an indicator of Judgment from the Author’s objective point of view (the point of view the storyform presents). A character can die and in that death be at peace with their personal issues (was I born or manufactured?).

OS: Physics
MC: Universe
IC: Mind (Joi -> Deckard)
RS: Psychology (Unconventional Family - great label!)

Finding the replicant baby is not the source of inequity. He finds her earlier on…yet the film carries on with some semblance of narrative drive - usually an indicator that there is something else at work here…

Both Deckard and Joi share the same source of drive (IC Problem) that challenges K to reconsider his own reality. Really cool hand-off as @decastell suggested.

#16

Well, I’m pretty sure I’m just sticking my head back in the lion’s mouth here, but this feels like it’s crying out for a response because this is a perfect example of what makes interpretation a subjective process: the elevation or privileging of one piece of data over another – in this case, the one second shot of a character looking up, rather than, say down, sideways or just closing his eyes.

Imagine for a second a movie in which the MC is a drug addict who spends the entire movie trying to kick the habit, only at the end to die of a drug overdose with a heroin-induced smile on his face. Do we conclude the story judgment is good? No, because for an entire movie someone’s been trying to kick the habit and in the end it killed them. Is it possible that the filmmaker’s message is that you just need to accept who you are and die from your addictions? Maybe.

In the case of K, we have an MC who spends the entire movie dealing with three things: trying to survive the people who are attempting to kill him, the desperate need to find out that he’s special (i.e. not just a generic replicant with implanted memories), and finally, that he’s worthy of true love. You can allocate the third to the RS, of course, but it certainly crosses over into the MC throughline.

When we end the movie, what do we have? K is dying from his wounds, he’s definitely not special as a replicant, and he’s learned that even the name Joi gave him was just an automated response (as shown by the building-sized ad who calls him “Joe” while neon lights flash “See what you want! Hear what you want!”

From the “I” perspective, “I” wanted to live, to discover that I was special, and to be loved. I ends up bleeding out on the steps while Deckard goes to reunite with his daughter.

You wrote: [quote=“jhull, post:15, topic:1268”]
I’m pretty sure the filmmaker intended the scene of K lying back and looking up as a welcome acceptance of his true self
[/quote]

As you’ve said before, the filmmaker might intend one thing, but the message of the movie might be another. What’s equally possible in the filmmaker’s choices – and I suspect more likely in terms of the movie’s final message, is that the story judgment is intentionally ambiguous. Should we feel like K resolved his problems and came to a good end? Or should we feel like the search for self is pointless? As has been said of the original Blade Runner and the question of whether Deckard was a replicant: there is no true answer.

For us to seek objective confirmation that this is to be a Judgment: Good story, we would need to see K adopting a new context. What we get is a vague-maybe-kinda-possible-smile in a few frames. We have to ignore everything that came in the third act and decide that this one set of frames were the important ones. Is it possible that the message of the movie is, “don’t worry about dying alone and unloved because that still makes you a person”? Maybe. But that is one of a couple of reasonable subjective interpretations, not an objective one.

All of which raises a question for me: does Dramatica account for movies that intentionally have ambiguous story judgments?

#17

So you think the Authors we’re making the point that K’s decision to save Decksrd was a Bad thing?

#18

No, but you also don’t get to define the binary option on whether story judgment is good or bad based on any criteria you want to set. In this case, you’re saying the criteria for whether story judgment is good is based on whether K decided to save Deckard – but that’s his role in the OS, not the MC throughline. The MC throughline is about the situation of being a replicant, and in K’s case, this manifests in his life being in danger, the fact of whether or not he’s the “chosen one” (the child), and whether he can be loved. That’s what his situation is about – not whether he would or wouldn’t sacrifice himself for someone else.

#19

The storyform is a holistic impression of an argument. Resolve Outcome and Judgment are a couple of them that work together to prove the message of the story.

Luke’s decision to Trust resulted in Success and was a Good thing. Angier’s decision to stay steadfast in his Desire resulted in Success but was a Bad thing.

It’s Story Judgment, not Main Character Judgment, and it’s the emotional part of the Author’s argument. Frequently we see this in the guise of whether or not the Main Character resolves their personal angst. But in cases where the Authors Judgment might come across ambiguous, it can help to look at the combination of these story points to determine the best balance.

#20

Okay, but in the only resource I have for this kind of thing - The Dramatica dictionary - it says: “the author’s assessment of whether or not the Main Character has resolved his personal problem.”

That seems pretty cut and dried, doesn’t it? Has there been some kind of redefinition of story judgment outside of the book itself?