you know what? prisoners surprised me at how good the sound was in that movie. watched it with my wife in the theater and remarked how good it sounded. i thought it was just because that was the first movie i saw in a theater after a long time. that was our first date night after my son was born and it took some time for my wife to agree to let someone watch our son.
BLADE RUNNER 2049: White Appropriation of Black Oppression
I saw this film while couched between two questionably smelly white dudes on their “bro night out.” It was the film’s opening night at New York’s Loews AMC Theatre, and the place was packed — the air seemed charged as earnest speculations and hearty laughs filled the huge hall. I was certainly impressed just by the sheer size of the audience, but it wasn’t until days later I realized that every person I could see there was white.
I had gone down to Brooklyn to hear Ta-Nehisi Coates speak only nights earlier. There, it was the diversity, not the size of the crowd that I noticed first. Every culture, race, and language seemed to be represented there as I edged my way through the crowd. But back at the AMC, while trying to find space for my large-popcorn-for-one, I took no notice to the uniformity of my neighboring five hundred moviegoers. This, however, is not uncommon. Diversity is a delightful spectacle to the white liberal. I can feel free of a guilty white heritage, and camouflage myself in the “other,” hiding in the size of an audience, and blending in with my eager laughter and desperate applause. Ironically, this environment of racial awareness, where liberal white people flock to to be alleviated of their guilty heritage, is the only real environment that white people even think about their heritage in the first place. After all, I most certainly was not thinking about race in that AMC. My only concern was people’s judgements on my choice of beverage size. And that is because there was no race in that theatre; in fact, there were no white people there at all. There were no white people there, because there were no black people there. And white people don’t have to be white, not until there’s an “other.”
To be clear, this uniformity at AMC was not created through some kind of Nazi-esque movement like Charlottesville; those ‘very fine people’ knew quite well that their fellow marchers were white. This gathering at the AMC theatre was a different kind of danger. Should any of those New Yorkers have been asked if they were racist, they would have most likely said “no.” Yet having a space that is void of cultural considerations due to its sameness is racism, and being consciously or unconsciously complicit in that ignorance is to be racist. If that last sentence upset you, and you are white, I will put it in a more cushioned way that black advocates have created; “you can always be a better ally.” In this line of thinking, all white people are racist because they have the option to forget about race, and therefore can become complicit in their innate privilege. Having privilege doesn’t inherently speak poorly of your character as an individual; it’s what you do with that privilege. And that night at the AMC theatre, I had unconsciously decided to forget about it and watch a movie. And that’s where this all gets interesting.
The movie in question was Blade Runner 2049, directed by French-Canadian Denis Villeneuve, and starring American actors Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford. The three hour sci-fi epic takes place in a universe where humans have harnessed the power to bioengineer and practically grow other human-like creatures. These creations are called “Replicants,” who are used primarily for labor and are considered to be the “slaves” of the dystopian landscape of future Los Angeles. Some Replicants go rogue and are hunted down by a special kind of detective, called a Blade Runner. Immediately, there is the obvious issue that humans and replicants look exactly the same, which the first 1982 film deals with, as Harrison Ford’s character wrestles with his identity. In Blade Runner 2049, we follow Ryan Gosling’s character, a thought-to-be Replicant, as he grapples with his identity, and gradually becomes part of “The Resistance.” The film’s plot largely capitalizes on the sentiments of the underdog, rebellion, and justice, all of which stem from the surrounding world of oppression. The cast includes Wood Harris, who performs as the owner of a rundown orphanage in the middle of the garbage heap that once was San Diego; Ana de Armas, performing the role of Ryan Gosling’s software girlfriend; and Dave Bautista, who is killed within the first five minutes of the film. Other than that, replicants and humans alike, are played by almost exclusively white people.
Of course, there are certainly other movies that have much much whiter casts (Moonlight. Sorry, I meant La La Land), but Blade Runner stands out because without a diverse cast, the movie is just selective white appropriation of systemic racial oppression. With Blade Runner, white audiences are never required to leave their comfort zones of white fragility to enjoy a compelling story about bigotry and persecution. Ryan Gosling is the new Chiwetel Ejiofor as he tries to escape the unjust fate he was given at birth.
Am I overreacting? No, I don’t think so. This is an American film franchise, created by Scott Ridley, who, in the first film, refers to Replicants as “slaves” in the opening text. Humans are even caught throwing around words in the film like “skin-job” as a sort of sci-fi racial slur. America, a relatively young country, is built upon two types of oppression: Columbus’ version of Manifest Destiny, and slavery. So an American film that is about oppression is going to be hard pressed to deny any racial or political connotations. This all said, Blade Runner does not shy away from it’s story’s close ties to those American historical forms of prejudice. And I find nothing wrong with art that explores those narratives through extended metaphor, but something feels off when the majority of the characters are white. Especially when those characters stand upon the shoulders of those affected by slavery and the consequential centuries of systematic racism.
Cast and crew of Avatar 2
And while on the subject of whitewashing the narrative of racial subjugation, why not bring up James Cameron’sAvatar. This movie was infamously compared to the plot of Pocahontas, but the cast itself was about as diverse that a 2009 mainstream Hollywood movie could get, featuring Zoe Saldana and Michelle Rodriguez… and then everyone else. But look at a photo of the crew assembled thus far for the sequel set to come out in 2020. That’s a lot of pale hands for such a racially charged storyline to be in. After all, the way a story is handled and told does not begin or end with the people seen on screen. Blade Runner had 16 producers, 13 of whom were white, 11 of whom were male. If a film’s funding is almost 70% white men, and has a primary cast that is comprised of mostly white actors, then one can agree Hollywood’s narratives continue to be dominated by a white point of view. Blade Runner goes one step farther, as it attempts to address America’s racial persecution through extended metaphor of Replicants and Humans still through Hollywood’s caucasian lens.
White audiences watching a white character being subjugated to sci-fi racism can invest safely. We’re obviously now in the land of make believe if anyone is randomly pulling over Ryan Reynolds. Moviegoers can pick and choose what parts of the African-American experience they want. They cheer the underdog, they hiss at the police force, but once the movie’s over, they will go home, and post #blacklivesmatter from a distance. If you want the movie to truly be about Replicants vs. Humans representing a futuristic Cowboys vs. Indians, put actors of color on both sides to represent what 2049 will look like. If the filmmakers believe that 2049 Los Angeles will be somehow practically ethnically cleansed, that’s another movie. As the film stands now, it succeeds at targeting a white audience who can comfortably dip their toe in what it feels like to be systematically persecuted.
I’m sure if there were more people of color in the film, White America might not be able to invest with such ease. We’ve seen this countless times: The Help, The Butler, 12 Years A Slave, Selma, Moonlight, even Girl’s Trip. These movies are seen by white people as racially educational or guilt inducing. Blade Runner 2049 was a sequel running on a huge pre-existing legacy, and wanted to play it as financially safe as possible. So they catered it to their 1982 audience; white people. It’s guilt free, heart-racing, artistic… it even occasionally makes you feel gleefully socially conscious when you notice parallels of modern day racism in the movie. But that glee is a very safe pat on the back. The Replicants are literally called slaves… it’s not very hard to miss. We should instead pay attention to how the story is being told and by whomit’s being told. And right now, which is a long way before 2049, it’s important that audiences everywhere, but primarily white audiences, recognize the necessity of diversity in cast and crew, especially when it comes to this narrative of oppression.
The first thing you notice about Blade Runner 2049 is how stark it is. Opening in a desolate, grey field where Ryan Gosling‘s Officer K confronts Dave Bautista‘s Sapper Morton, the world of the Blade Runner sequel steadily unfolds into the cyberpunk mecca that we were first introduced to back in 1982.
It’s clear that director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Roger Deakins don’t want to ape the neon-drenched griminess of the original, instead delivering an oppressive urban labyrinth that parallels the dense claustrophobia of modern Hong Kong high rises. Only one-third of the way through the film do we see hints of a vibrant neonscape cutting through the smog and rain that covers the futuristic Los Angeles. And with that neon: holograms of dancing women in anime-inspired outfits, cute Hello Kitty-style machines, Chinese characters and Japanese kanji galore.
It amounts to a stunning, dissonant image in one of the most gorgeously shot movies of the year, and not an unfamiliar one: science-fiction movies have long borrowed East Asian imagery as a visual shorthand to portray a more globalized society. It has roots in none other than the original Blade Runner, which drew from the burgeoning Tokyo and Hong Kong metropolises of the time, as well as the rapid globalization in the ’80s. With the massive cultural influence that China, South Korea, and Japan wield today, it’s no huge leap to assume that in the near future, every city would be a cultural melting pot with East Asian influences run amok. But in Blade Runner 2049, it feels less like a nod to those influences so much as it feels like window dressing.
When East Met West: The Rise of Cyberpunk
Los Angeles is known as one of the United States’ most colorful cultural melting pots, housing a Chinatown that had become so synonymous with the gritty underbelly of the city that it inspired the title for one of Hollywood’s most famous film noirs. From that Chinatown spawned the makings of the classic cyberpunk aesthetic — Ridley Scott’s Blade Runnertook that Chinatown-set, gritty neo-noir aesthetic and ran with it.
With 1982’s Blade Runner and William Gibson’s seminal 1984 novel Neuromancer came the birth of cyberpunk, a sci-fi genre heavily influenced by Japan’s technological boom of the 1980s and Tokyo’s rapidly rising metropolis. After visiting Japan, Gibson once said:
Modern Japan simply was cyberpunk. The Japanese themselves knew it and delighted in it. I remember my first glimpse of Shibuya, when one of the young Tokyo journalists who had taken me there, his face drenched with the light of a thousand media-suns – all that towering, animated crawl of commercial information – said, ‘You see? You see? It is Blade Runner town.’ And it was. It so evidently was.
Cyberpunk blew up in the ’90s, and you could see it in everything from The Matrix, to Total Recall, to anime itself. Ghost in the Shell, Akira, and more all depicted a futuristic, grimy vision of Neo-Tokyo whose visuals can be traced back to Blade Runner and Neuromancer. It’s a cyclical nature of inspiration, see — from Tokyo to America, back to Tokyo again.
“The work that has influenced me the most in my anime profession would be, of course, Blade Runner,” Cowboy Bebopand Samurai Champloo director Shinichiro Watanabe said in an interview about his Blade Runner anime short. There’s been a cross-pollination of ideas and influence between the two countries for years — just look to “god of manga” and Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka’s influences in Disney’s Bambi, and Disney’s subsequent “plagiarizing” of Tezuka’sKimba the White Lion for their ’90s film The Lion King.
These sci-fi films depict a future where cultural boundaries don’t exist. One of the tenets of sci-fi is its potential to predict innovations or technologies within our reach. At the rate that the world is globalizing — on a political, cultural, and social media level — the vision that Villeneuve has for Los Angeles in 2049 is probably not far off. But amidst all Chinese or Japanese slogans and imagery draped over skyscrapers, where are all the East Asian people?
The ‘Firefly’ Effect
Firefly was an ambitious, witty, and wonderful sci-fi series that was gone too soon. But it’s been long enough since the series was unceremoniously cancelled by Fox that I can say this: Firefly has a race problem. While it was inspired for showrunner Joss Whedon to give his western space opera a Chinese twist, there aren’t many (or any) Chinese characters in the series to back up this piece of world-building.
Chinese culture in Firefly is so ubiquitous that all the characters curse, write, and read in Chinese. Yes, I know the Chinese curses were a clever way for Whedon to bypass prime time TV censors, and yes, I know that in the Fireflymythology, China and the United States are the two remaining superpowers. But for all the Chinese spoken in the show, for all the Chinese-inspired design and fashion in the series, there was barely a Chinese character to be seen. There is approximately one documented minor character of Asian descent in the series, and a few extras who were spotted. It’s odd to have Chinese culture be so dominant, and not have one Chinese character establish a presence.
Blade Runner 2049 runs into these same pitfalls. While the Asian-influenced imagery remains further in the background than it did in the original Blade Runner, where the sequel goes wrong is the utter lack of Asian characters. I spotted maybe two extras of Asian descent — one in the false memory that Carla Juri’s Dr. Ana Stelline was creating, another in a fleeting shot behind Officer K when he’s approached by Replicant prostitutes. And the one character with an Asian-inspired name — Robin Wright’s Lt. Joshi has a traditionally Indian surname — is most assuredly not.
So if East or South Asian culture or language is so powerful, who is it for?
Angelica Jade Bastien at Vulture makes an interesting point about sci-fi’s tendency to depict a post-racial world in which the white characters — often dehumanized and oppressed — exist in a strange space between the Asian-inspired landscapes and the allegories for minority oppression which they are acting out. “Science fiction has long had an uncomfortable relationship with Asian cultures, which are mined to create visual splendor in order to communicate otherness,” Bastien writes. “[R]ace is relegated to inspiration, coloring the towering cityscapes of these worlds, while the white characters toil under the hardships that brown and black people experience acutely in real life.”
Like Bastien notes, sci-fi stories don’t reckon with real-life minority narratives, instead preferring to turn them into allegory. This is an effective technique, no doubt, but assumes that this futuristic world we’re introduced to is a post-racial society in which culture has become so globalized that racial and cultural borders don’t exist — but these societies are still predominantly white.
Living in a Material But Not a Post-Racial World
One of the best depictions I’ve seen of a cross-cultural future was in Disney’s Big Hero 6, an often overlooked superhero-lite movie released in 2014. The protagonist, Hiro, is a half-Japanese, half-American boy genius living in the somewhat clunkily-named San Fransokyo — an amalgam of San Francisco and Tokyo.
But less than a clumsy merger of the San Francisco skyline with Japanese-inspired artifacts, Big Hero 6 creates a rich world in which the two cities comfortably mesh the old with the new, much like the neon-drenched Tokyo that became an inspiration for many a cyberpunk metropolis in the ’80s.
At the time of the movie’s release, The New Yorker‘s Roland Kelts called the elegant-yet-eclectic design of San Fransokyo a “marvel of architectural alchemy”:
“Shibuya skyscrapers with pulsing video screens hug San Francisco’s iconic Transamerica Pyramid. Victorian Mission duplexes line hilly San Fransokyo neighborhoods, aglow from the pink-white light of Japanese cherry blossoms in full bloom below. Trains from the Yamanote and Chuo lines, two of Tokyo’s central and most popular railways, stream by on elevated tracks. The sprawling Yokohama Bay Bridge connects the financial district to San Francisco’s East Bay, which may well be home to Oaksaka and Berkyoto in this Japanamerican universe.”
As much as I point to Blade Runner 2049 as one of the perpetrators of the problem of choosing “costume” over “collaboration” (see: this Vulture roundtable discussion on where the line of cultural appropriation should be drawn), the original Blade Runner managed to avoid this stumbling block. Perhaps it was because its neo-noir style was as much ingrained in the Chinatown of Los Angeles as it was inspired by the Hong Kong skyscrapers, or perhaps it was because Rick Deckard negotiated with as many Asian noodle sellers and seedy pawn shop owners as he interacted with those of other ethnicities. Whatever the case, this is one of the few places where the sequel falls short of the original.
Still, there are other films that sit uncomfortably on the periphery. Ghost in the Shell divorced itself of any cultural context completely by moving the setting from a futuristic Tokyo to the ambiguous New Port City — though that setting still retained its cyberpunk East Asian influences. This means that the 2017 Ghost in the Shell tangled entangles itself with its own representation and diversity problems — there are a few Asian characters and one of the two recognizable actors featured (Rila Fukushima) is a geisha robot. In Ghost in the Shell, the vague nods to all cultures only make the film feel more hollow and aimless — a shell, you might even say.
A Future to Look Forward To
Blade Runner 2049‘s missteps with race don’t detract from the powerful story it tells about the will to live, and love. Rather, Villeneuve’s film becomes an interesting confluence of issues that have been simmering beneath the surface of sci-fi for a long time now.
It only becomes noticeable when held up to the original film, whose influences become all the more stronger even as Blade Runner 2049 becomes less about any cultural inspiration than it is about an all-encompassing message about humanity. Blade Runner 2049 comes at a time when Tokyo is no longer than awe-inspiring cultural metropolis that spawned so many cyberpunk stories and movies. It comes at a time when the future looks less like the colorful, grimy neon lights of Blade Runner and more like the dense, smog-filled labyrinths. So the story it tells is no longer one that is rooted in our current paranoias and beliefs, but rather a universal story about the abstract concepts that Villeneuve comes to again and again: cycles of brutality, and cycles of empathy.
I wish I could say I had a better conclusion — but then again, who does?
my wife was heated. she said it felt like her heart got ripped out (similar to what cp described). she got the next 3 movie picks after that
Keaton was good. Lathan is fine.
Did you see both?
Anyone?
