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Reading: Allegory and Symbol in Blade Runner 2049

Special Forum on Fredric Jameson and Allegory JUMP TO DISCUSSIONS

Allegory and Symbol in Blade Runner 2049

Keywords: Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology, Blade Runner 2049, Allegory,
Symbol

How to Cite: Dunk, J., 2021. Allegory and Symbol in Blade Runner 2049. Affirmations: of
the modern, 7(1), pp.46–54.

" Published on 11 Aug 2021 # Peer Reviewed $ CC BY 4.0

It is axiomatic in the scholarship and reception of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) that
the film uses replicants and artificial sentience as staging grounds for questions about
subjectivity under (late) capital rather than as avenues of futurist inquiry.[1] As such, it
shares in the broad category of allegory. The film is also recognised, however, as a text
saturated with imagism and often haunted by the more numinous mimetic category of
symbolism. It has been said that the argument about the humanity of the protagonist—the
“Deck-A-Rep” debate—is symptomatic of a more “elemental duality at the film’s
core,”[2] and indicates a conceptual rather than a thematic tension. In contrast, Denis
Villeneuve’s sequel Blade Runner 2049 (2017) has been described as, and criticised for,
resolving and foreclosing such productive uncertainties. While this may be true of the film
at the shallowest level of its plot, this article argues that at a subtler level it is more invested
in an unresolved dialectic between symbol and allegory as forms of representation and
modes of philosophical experience.

Symbol and allegory are old, multivalent categories, and they require a pragmatic measure
of unpacking. In Allegory and Ideology (2019) Jameson draws on Benjamin, Adorno, and
Horkheimer to align symbolic representations of subjectivity with a theological, pre-
modern concept of the unified self.[3] The nostalgia for this psychological episteme can be
situated as a marker of what these Marxist theorists have variously described as a crisis of
experience synonymous with modernity, more often associated with allegorical
representation. Andrew McCann pithily summarizes the distinction:

Simply put, the symbol incarnates an idea and as such belongs in the very
cosmology it evokes. It thus partakes of the timeless and the metaphysical. An
allegory, by contrast, is a representation of an idea, and as such is subject to the
mutability and arbitrariness of signification. A symbol is a sign taken as a wonder.
An allegory is merely a sign, though one that alludes to a lost horizon of symbolic
significance.[4]

So, where the symbol seeks to incarnate an idea, the allegory foregrounds its own
inadequacy to do so. According to Fitterman and Place, these forms may also interact
differently with the temporality of plot, the symbol deriving from an idea and gathering
images about itself, where allegory builds towards a gesture while jettisoning images.[5] In
essence the symbol is static and transcendent, the allegory temporal and historical.

Writing of the original Blade Runner, John Frow argues that Scott’s film “relentlessly
thematizes” the connection between vision and identity,[6] through its conspicuous use of
the human eye and its prostheses as motifs inviting an interrogation of perception as a
regulator of selfhood. 2049 shares this concern and, like its predecessor, opens with an
extreme close-up of a luminous green eye. In the earlier film the iris—often construed as
belonging to Holden or Roy Batty—is striated by the reflected flames of Los Angeles’s
pandemonic skyline. In the sequel, however, the eye is entirely without reflection and fades
into a panning aerial of a dystopian agricultural landscape marked by stark concentric
industrial circles. While agriculture has always been a form of industry, this sequence
signifies an acceleration of its relationship with more conventionally urban modes of
industry, and it indicates the completeness of capital’s destruction, and recreation, of
ecology. The sequence foregrounds the perennial concern of its franchise, the symmetry
between the scientific overdetermination of the replicant and the ideological
overdetermination of the subject. Within the semiotics of the eye in mind, this transition
works on both symbolic and allegorical levels. As an icon of consciousness, the original iris
shot through with petrochemical stack-flames almost nakedly invokes the transformation
of the modern subject. In 2049, however, the introductory iris is not static, but restlessly
searching, and it seems depthless, without reflection. The sequence in the newer film, and
its connection to subsequent shots of the sleeping protagonist K, invite more allegorical
interpretation. It is diegetically unclear to whom the eye belongs, and the subsequent
answers which the film provides undermine and interrupt the representational authority
with which its plot might be construed to offer closure.

The opening sequence of 2049 resonates with its predecessor’s crooked staging of
different conventional relationships between sense experience and personhood as such,
and Villeneuve extends this project, ironizing a number of the conventions of identity.
Scott’s film introduced the Voight-Kampff test, which separates human from replicant by
measuring pupil dilation against a series of hypothetical but emotionally suggestive
questions. Both films artfully explore the hybridity of their medium through this device,
where, as Frow notes, an amalgam of real people and fictional characters is foregrounded
as an ontological test. In addition to visual perception and facial recognition, Scott
problematizes the role of memory as a fixture of identity through the character of Rachel,
whose memories, and hence her own self-awareness, are an implanted fiction. Frow
argues that this is one of the ways in which the premise of the replicant “undermines the
grounding of all human identity either in memory or in the indexical link between
representation and the body.”[7] The hybridity emphasized by this reading supports Varun
Begley’s subsequent description of Scott’s film as “an opaque and resistant pastiche”
rather than a coherent aesthetic structure inviting stable interpretations.[8] However,
critics differ on Villeneuve’s approach to similar territory. Zizek criticizes it on Marxist
grounds for endorsing something like a “conservative-humanist” judgement of the
prospect of replicant revolution and for ostensibly reifying the biological family as a
domain exempt from ideology.[9] Kim makes this point in more conciliatory terms,
arguing that the film recovers a fugitive or spectral humanism from a post-human world.
[10] A final preference for reconciliatory answers is also the spur for Gregory Flemming’s
criticism of the film as vitiating its forbear’s provocations with neoliberal platitudes and a
vaguely Christic ambience.[11] As I mentioned above, Zizek’s and Flemming’s criticisms
are accurate with regard to the film’s content per se, but Villeneuve’s engagement with the
epistemology of his form is more ambivalent than they allow, particularly where it
resumes Scott’s dramatization of the uncertain link between narrative, representation,
and memory.

Where Rachael’s memories are fictions disguised as truths in the original film, the newer
model of replicants are aware of their artificiality, and K’s predicament is the obverse of
hers. Despite their condition these implanted memories pacify and regulate their hosts,
providing a more stable body of replicant labour. So where—according to one side of the
debate—Deckard is a replicant who retires other replicants under a pretence of humanity,
K does so openly. This is one of the shifts Villeneuve’s film observes in its franchise’s
world, away from the satanic romantic of Roy Batty’s rebellion and towards a seamlessly
overdetermined despair more reminiscent of Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism. Where the
thrust of the earlier film investigates Deckard’s unresolved humanity, K moves in the
opposite direction, questioning his own status as a replicant and suspecting himself to be
Rachael’s and Deckard’s missing hybrid child. His quest is overdetermined, and in
investing determinist ontology in birth and biology it does indeed seem to foreclose Scott’s
interesting uncertainties.

However, this reading is itself predicated upon a degree of essentialist nostalgia; even in
negating K’s humanity, memory is imbued with a symbolic power of instantiation
tantamount to ontology. According to this model, K is definitionally a replicant, and
therefore verifiably non-human, owing to a falsifiable relationship between memory,
biology, and truth. Villeneuve’s text does invite this reading, but like Scott’s it also contains
other tensions and dualities, which allow for the interpretation of memory not as a symbol
denoting a unified person, but as a fragmented allegory of complex historical experience.
Drawing on Deckard’s unicorn dream-sequence, K’s childhood memory contains a
wooden horse inscribed with the date of the replicant-messiah’s birth, which becomes the
linchpin of his human-theory. This memory first suggests and then disqualifies his status
as the missing child, and so it marks him as non-human in a final sense. But this
implanted memory, and by extension others, does partake indirectly of the real; its
engineer Stelline confirms that it was lived, simply not by K. Artificial memory is readable
as the film’s thesis of art: palliative and pacific, heartening in a heartless world. To borrow
Jameson’s classic formulation from The Political Unconscious (1981), artificial memory
seems to serve as an aesthetic resolution of social contradiction. It is also, however,
positioned as a potential vehicle of sublime but false symbolic meaning. Sapper Morton
tells K that the latter only accepts his subservient role as a blade runner because he has
never witnessed a miracle, referring to the “replicant birth,” but, ironically, K’s error is to
mistake a sign for a wonder.

K’s disillusionment, and the empirical distinction between the begotten and the made
which the foreclusive readings of Zizek, Kim, and Flemming make of it, does not nullify the
sign’s capacity to signify. Instead, it merely returns that function to history and locates it in
a secular order of representation. K’s memory can only be ontologically true or
ontologically false if memory itself is a symbolic instantiation of the unified subject who is
contiguous through time. However, if memory is itself a more allegorical representation of
a wayward and mutable temporal experience, then K’s memory, like Roy Batty’s death, is
an authentic experience of history. Moreover, when pursued to its logical conclusion the
premise of artificial memory, like that of the replicant itself, ironizes or suspends the
distinction between “real” and artificial memory in general, particularly as it is
represented in film. The viewer processes the false or misallocated memories with the
same instruments as those they use to process other scenes in the film, and the viewer
invests these memories with the same authority. Indeed, the verifiably artificial memories,
which the viewer witnesses Stelline creating out of nothingness, are more “real” than
other scenes in 2049 in a number of ways. In particular, they reflect a world nearer our
own, with living plants and animals.

Villeneuve plays with and agitates the distinction between ontological and non-ontological
memory—or symbolic and allegorical representation—in two other key respects:
Deckard’s relationship with the nominally true past signified by Rachel, and K’s
relationship with the definitionally artificial present signified by his holographic lover Joi.
Where the earlier film’s messianic iconography primarily attends Roy Batty, the
theological lustre of the symbol is most blatant in the presence of the newer film’s
antagonist Niander Wallace, whose obsession with a new creation is punctuated by
ziggurats, guttural chant, and an aisle of replicant prototypes suspended like statues of
saints. The Blade Runner world is among other things a consistent exploration of filmic
hybridity, and Villeneuve notably furthers this exploration through Wallace’s offer to
Deckard of a recreated Rachael. The uncannily perfect resurrection of Sean Young’s image
from the iconic 1982 scene in which the two protagonists first meet signals an inversion of
Scott’s distribution of motifs. Recalling the Christic images which punctuate Roy Batty’s
through-line, this sequence in 2049 emphatically aligns the power of the numinous
symbolic with the industrial sublime of an accelerated dystopia, and a far more terrifying
godhead. Wallace’s progeny have, after all, peopled many more worlds than those of
Yahweh. Deckard’s ambivalent rejection of the reborn bride—“her eyes were green”—
marks the shrunken dimensions of possible rebellion in this new dispensation, and it
aligns that autonomy with the flawed and mutable condition of allegorical memory. Sean
Young, of course, has brown eyes and is shown to have them playing Rachael throughout
the original film, with the exception of a single close-up shot of the Voight-Kampff
scanner when Rachael is initially tested by Deckard. Eloquently enough, some viewers
construe this shot to be a continuity error. Positioned within a dialectic between symbolic
and allegorical tendencies, this sequence can be read as an ambivalent abjuration of the
former and a complex mediation on film’s uniquely uncanny temporality. As critics have
noted, a key strand of 2049’s plot is structured by a theological narrative with symbolic
motifs and ontological claims. The film’s narrative, however, is luxuriantly dilatory like its
predecessor’s, and this quest-structure is inflected by such concentrated degrees of irony
and nuance that its biological implications cannot be treated as thetic.

Other than a handful of elliptical conversations with Deckard, K only interacts substantially
with the holographic companion Joi, played by Ana de Armas, who like him exercises an
indeterminate degree of compromised autonomy. Despite being a designed and marketed
mechanism of wish-fulfilment, she seems to possess agency, and their relationship
appears both affective and personal. The ambiguity and hybridity of their condition, and
the many obstacles it seems to raise for the binary implications of the film’s primary quest,
are most evident during the sequence where Joi employs a replicant sex worker, with
whom she merges to an uncertain degree, to engage in physical sex with K. Similarly,
earlier in the text K buys her an “emanator” with the bonus he receives for “retiring”
Morton. This furnishes Joi with the ability to leave K’s apartment and to experience
something like physical sensation, which she exercises by going out into the acidic rain on
the building’s rooftop. Zizek’s argument that 2049’s humanist gestures attempt to exempt
“the family from key social conflict” cannot be applied to the posthuman case of K and Joi,
and complicates its application elsewhere.[12] The scene discussed above lingers on Joi’s
simultaneous agency and sensation, but it is nonetheless deliberately interrupted by a
message from K’s employer, which overrides her like an app on a phone. This
notwithstanding, it can be argued that Joi’s involvement in and support of K’s human
thesis—encapsulated in an obscure belief in his special providence and designated by the
pet name “Joe,” inferring the rather clumsy allusion, Joseph K—renders their relationship
yet another palliating illusion, a pretence of humanity like the others, which in its negation
merely reinscribes the ontic biological category of the human. However, this position
collapses the text’s intricate and considerable engagement with the replicant relationship
in deference to an idealised human connection entirely absent from it. Rather, the
philosophical condition of their experience is more usefully positioned as hybrid and
unresolved, overdetermined by their conditioning and function under capital, but
nonetheless a limited form of autonomy and experience allegorical of others.

These ambivalent and imperfect portraits of partial and uncertain agency form stark
contrasts with Wallace’s vatic proclamations of destined galactic imperium, and indeed,
with Roy Batty’s quest and apotheosis in Scott’s film. The irresolution and unease of this
contrast is deliberate and effective, exemplified by the irony of Deckard’s response to the
questionable reality of his dog: “ask him”. To clarify my departure from the text’s other
critics: the contradictions of (artificial) subjectivity under late capital, what Jameson calls
the “struggle between personification and a certain modernity,”[13] are not symbolically
resolved, transcended, or answered, but rather dramatized in sharp relation. Similarly, at
the level of form the unresolved tension between symbol and allegory expands meaning
and resists interpretive closure. In manifesting the unity of material and transcendental
objects, the symbol depends upon a stable and linear temporal field, but according to
Jameson the structure of allegory sharpens historical contradictions and in so doing
fractures the illusion of continuum.[14] The hermeneutic effects of this process are
dramatically demonstrated during the closing scenes of Villeneuve’s film. In her sterile
chamber Stelline is observed to manipulate light, motion, and sound to create memory, but
she is also multiply seen to manipulate memory’s timescale, pausing, accelerating, and
rewinding visual structures analogous to film. When a mortally wounded K delivers
Deckard to Stelline—the source of the memory and apparently the “true” replicant-
human messiah—his dying body is gradually obscured by descending snow. This forms a
visual allusion to Rutger Hauer’s “tears in rain” soliloquy, and the musical motif from that
scene plays. However, when the gaze follows Deckard into the building the viewer sees
Stelline alone in the dark weaving a current of snow, manipulating or constructing the
scene the viewer has just witnessed. With compelling concision, this sequence unmoors
the text’s internal order; the film’s time-scale circles back on itself to form a helix, leaving
the viewer with no means of anchoring the filmic present in time or fixing the
epistemological condition of anything they have witnessed within the all-ironizing
premise of representation as memory. While it does contain a Hollywood quest with
symbolic nostalgias and closed symbolic answers among its panoply of resources, 2049 is a
decidedly and artfully open text.

To argue that Villeneuve’s Blade Runner is structured by a formal dialectic between symbol
and allegory—and a concomitant philosophical dialectic between theological nostalgia and
posthuman transformation—is to consider it finally as allegorical, in the rarefied sense of
the term used by Jameson in Allegory and Ideology. Here allegorical interpretation
emphasizes the conflictual, particoloured, impure, and inadequate condition of ideology:

Allegory raises its head as a solution when beneath this or that seemingly stable or
unified reality the tectonic plates of deeper contradictory levels of the Real shift and
grate ominously against one another and demand a representation […] Allegory
does not reunify those incommensurable forces, but it sets them in relationship
with one another in a way which, as with all art, all aesthetic experience, can lead
alternately to ideological comfort or the restless anxieties of a more expansive
knowledge.[15]

This condition of anxious relation, which Jameson also calls the “interechoing of
narratives,”[16] is an astute description of Blade Runner 2049’s internal structural
epistemology: the film thematizes the ineluctable hybridity of the subject and foregrounds
the problematic role of memory, and memory’s precarious temporality, within that
condition. It does not contain or imply an Archimedean vantage from which one could
demonstrate that its narrative is not a story Stelline tells herself in a darkened room to
explain or to allegorize her own experience. In its final shot Deckard places his hand on the
glass barrier of her sealed studio, which in turn synchronizes with the filmic lens. The
effect of this gesture is significantly negative, reinscribing the abyssal edges and limits of
representation, and beyond them what Adorno calls in Aesthetic Theory (1970) the Ur-
history of subjectivity.[17] Its second movement, however, is a form of consolation or
affirmation within that negation. Adorno argues in the same work that the expression or
communication of the work of art is more accurately described as the affect generated by
the impression of failed, impossible expression. This concluding sequence is a lyrical
dénouement for a film which thematizes the intractable contradictions of subjectivity, and
one which resonates with Jameson’s point that, given that consciousness cannot be
conceptualised or adequately represented, the “self is thus an allegorical structure in its
own right.”[18]

[1] Gregory C. Flemming, “From Questioning to Answering: The Paranoid Dialectics of P. K.

[2] Varun Begley, “Blade Runner and the Postmodern: A Reconsideration,” Literature/Film
Quarterly 32.3 (2004): 186-92 (p. 186).

[3] Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (London: Verso, 2019), p. 48.

[4] Andrew McCann, “Patrick White’s Late Style,” in Ian Henderson and Anouk Lang, eds,
Patrick White Beyond the Grave: New Critical Perspectives (London: Anthem Press, 2015), pp.
117-28 (p. 121).

[5] Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place, “Notes on Conceptualisms,” in Andrea

[6] John Frow, Character and Person (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 293.

[7] Frow, Character and Person, p. 294.

[8] Begley, “Blade Runner and the Postmodern,” p. 186.

[9] Slavoj Žižek, “Blade Runner 2049: A View of Posthuman Capitalism,” The Philosophical
Salon (30 October 2017): https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/blade-runner-2049-a-view-
of-post-human-capitalism/.

[10] Sharon Kim, “Pale Fire: Human Image and Post-human Desire in Blade Runner
2049,” Journal of Science Fiction 3.3 (November 2019): 8-19 (p. 7).

[11] Flemming, “From Questioning to Answering,” p. 525.

[12] Žižek, “Blade Runner 2049.”

[13] Jameson, Allegory and Ideology, p. 346.

[14] Jameson, Allegory and Ideology, p. 34.

[15] Jameson, Allegory and Ideology, p. 34.

[16] Jameson, Allegory and Ideology, p. 48.

[17] Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Christian Lenhardt (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1984), p. 165.

[18] Jameson, Allegory and Ideology, p. 54.

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