by Andre Seewood
In both Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, the notion of white-skinned replicants as escaped slaves does not fit the historical and representational iconography that we associate with slaves as being both black and engaged in menial labor. Neither film gives us a glimpse of the ‘slave labor’ that the replicants were engaged in on the off-world colonies. Therefore, the written preamble in both films about replicants being used as slave labor in off-world colonies does not become a significant theme in either film. From the perspective of dispassionate black spectators, all we see are white people killing other white people for somehow not being authentic white people. The replicants are near perfect reproductions of white people that even the authentic white people in pursuit are unsure about until after they have been killed. It is in this way that one might consider both Blade Runner films as mediations about white-on-white crime. “Do white people kill other white people for not acting like authentic white people,” might be an alternative title for both films. Furthermore, does being a slave for the benefit of white people automatically revoke one’s status as human?
When we think of whites as slaves their slave status is always considered temporary, if it is acknowledged at all. The indentured servitude of the Irish in America and other immigrating ethnicities who were often thought lower than blacks within the American racial hierarchy before the Civil War was a temporary status and not a permanent condition. Blade Runner 2049 continues this temporary status because 1) we don’t see the ‘replicants’ performing the drudgery associated with slave labor, and 2) the new Nexus models of replicants have hidden themselves within the fabric of a white supremacist society so carefully we don’t think of them as runaway ‘slaves’ but instead as mere targets for Officer K aka “Joe” (Ryan Gosling) the replicant killing replicant. But there is a significant change between Scott’s Blade Runner and Villeneuve’s sequel. In Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve attempts to reveal the social prejudice against replicants by having other ‘police officers’ derisively call Joe the Blade Runner a “Skin job”. We also see a derogatory slur against “skin jobs” on the door of Joe’s apartment. But these attempts to reveal the prejudice against replicants in the future as inauthentic white people does little to resolve the questions of how racism against people of color is continued in this future by the lack of diversity that we see represented on the screen.
The first Blade Runner was filled with images that made a fetish of Asian iconography that is continued within Blade Runner 2049 with a gigantic holographic naked Asian prostitute that propositions Joe as he walks on the streets of Los Angeles alone. More offensive is the decision to cast black actor Lennie James as the overseer of a child labor sweatshop and Barkhad Abdi (of Captain Phillips) in an even smaller role of little importance. And it doesn’t help that the first person killed in the film is David Bautista an actor of Filipino descent but who can be read as “white” within the image which inaugurates the conception that Blade Runner 2049 is a film about white male dramatic agency and the degree to which it will be exercised is solely under the control of the white male in the lead role of the film: Ryan Gosling as Officer K/Joe.
We don’t look at the Blade Runner films as stories of slavery, slave rebellion, and execution; we don’t look at the science fiction of white authors and filmmakers as metaphors of slavery (even if they explicitly reference the peculiar institution); we don’t accept white people as slaves and that the condition of slavery is a permanent characteristic of their racial identity because we have been taught through culture, ideology, and filmic conventions that slave status is always something permanently inhabited by a black body.
