Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

This paper explores the work of the image in Blade Runner 2049 (2017), through its intertextual dialogue with the novel Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. The book’s title alludes to Shakespeare’s lines on the moon, whose stolen light is a pale or diminished fire: a derivative beauty. The movie is full of such derivative fire. It is itself a derivative film, as a sequel, and portrays a world full of “replicants,” androids who are the pale fire of the human image. The remaining humans thus live enveloped in simulacra: artificial intelligence, online environments, simulated intimacies that may be the sole remainder of what they represent. The central character, police officer K., is a replicant with a holographic girlfriend. He discovers during a case that he may in fact be a human. The possibility awakens in him an intense desire to be human, which parallels his quest to find the lost blade runner, Rick Deckard, who may be one of the only human characters in the film. Significantly, K. keeps a copy of Pale Fire in his apartment. While the police use it to keep K. in subjection as a replicant, the novel provides a blueprint for the film’s representation of simulacra as the response to traumatic loss, and it also outlines the movie’s strategies for retrieving human meaning in the midst of replication and derivation. The derivative images of Blade Runner 2049 ultimately serve to incite desire for the human, through imagining its extinction in the pale fire of film.