About halfway through Blade Runner 2049, the main character, K, a replicant – an artificial, manufactured human – returns to the police station for his post-trauma baseline test. Much earlier in the film, director Denis Villeneuve has already shown viewers how this test normally works: in a small, entirely white, windowless room, K sits alone, facing a monocular device installed into the wall with a vertical slit for a speaker. Through this speaker, the authoritative male voice of the Interviewer dictates phrases rapid-fire at K, who, in turn, repeats the phrases back to the Interviewer in whole or in part, sometimes just repeating keywords, but always in equally rapid-fire fashion, with no hesitation.

This second time around, though, K has a problem: he has just uncovered evidence that he may not actually have been manufactured, that he might instead have been conceived by a replicant, which would make him a machine somehow born organically from another machine. This possibility is so unthinkable that K cannot respond to his interrogator with appropriate promptness, leaving the dictating voice to declare the replicant nowhere near baseline and prompting an immediate suspension, disarmament, and danger that K understands all too well. As a blade runner whose job it is to “retire” rogue replicants, K is now a rogue himself and subject to termination – all because he might be born of a replicant woman.

K’s situation makes for a classic dystopian scenario: what happens when the machines become indistinguishable from humans but wield far greater powers, physical and computational, than we mere homo sapiens? Will the machines take over? Will they eliminate their poor hapless human “creators,” especially when dystopian scenarios, by definition, turn a withered eye on the very ideas of “civilization” and human “progress”? As Lieutenant Joshi, K’s human supervisor, says at the very idea that a replicant could conceive and bear a child, “This changes everything.”1 When the line between humans and machines disappears, the result will be catastrophe.

These questions and concerns are old ones for the silver screen, with a long history dating back at least to Fritz Lang’s landmark 1927 sci-fi epic, Metropolis. But one of the key elements that distinguish Villeneuve’s dystopian scenario from Lang’s and others that appeared on screen in the nine decades between is the more recent film’s clever, highly suggestive use of a 20th-century writer whose relationship with totalitarian regimes and the literature of dystopia is endlessly complex and instructive. Swatches of K’s baseline test quote Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov in his 1962 novel Pale Fire, a bizarre minotaur of a text that shows up in K’s apartment, a well-thumbed paperback copy which, according to the screenplay,2 is the only book in K’s home. Nabokov’s presence in K’s story deepens and complicates the dystopian themes in a variety of ways, particularly because Nabokov’s work fiercely champions the triumph of the individual artistic imagination over the historical forces of oppression that gave birth, in the 20th century, to the very concept of totalitarianism. Nabokov’s literal survival into his 70s itself attests to a kind of victory over the political regimes that authored such massive, sweeping violence across the globe during his lifetime. Born in Russia in 1899 as the son of a Russian diplomat and jurist, Nabokov fled his homeland in 1919 in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution for Europe, only to then flee Europe a couple of decades later with his Russian-Jewish wife and child for America, managing to escape France mere weeks before Hitler’s tanks rolled through Paris.3 But even as a survivor of deadly ideological violence, this permanent exile of a writer took a hardline aesthete’s stance against the very idea of political engagement in literature, insisting that the true artist ignored and transcended politics, instead carving out a “private footpath” completely separate from the broad track of history which it runs along beside (Nabokov, Speak, Memory 24), defying the forces of politics in their unceasing efforts to commandeer or simply swallow up the life of the individual artist. In short, Nabokov wrote his books to show how the inspired imagination of the artist can and must triumph over mere history.

Central to Nabokov’s moral aesthetic of defiance is the role of memory, which informs imagination and makes artistic creation possible. As an exile who sought to preserve a perfect image of the pre-Soviet Russia where he had developed the foundations of his art, Nabokov made memory his muse, the source of inspiration for the poems, plays, and works of fiction that he would spend his lifetime devising. Empowered with imagination, memory is, in fact, not just (as neurologist Oliver Sacks has characterized it) the sine qua non basis for a person’s identity,4 but, still more for Nabokov, the chief weapon in the unending battle with time and the oppressive claims of history. Nabokov filled his autobiography, Speak, Memory, with declarations of memory’s triumph over mere time, transcending and dissipating its power at will, removing its constraints to open up a spiritual universe of possibility to the individual imagination.

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip ... This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern—to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal. (Nabokov, Speak, Memory 117)

It must be quite a luxury not to believe in time, to claim the means of atemporal ecstasy in the face of modern regimes and technologies that destroyed human lives by the millions. But that is precisely the prerogative that Nabokov claims in Speak, Memory and throughout his work, establishing himself as the incorrigibly gleeful rogue, “fractails flying” (Nabokov, Lolita 228), whom no one and nothing can control or even co-opt, the indissoluble individual who simply cannot be assimilated.

Clearly, Blade Runner 2049 director Villeneuve and his scripter, Hampton Fancher, appreciated the irony of invoking a Nabokov novel so prominently in their dystopian movie. In addition to having K quote from Shade’s poem during the trauma baseline test, they have him say to Joi, his virtual paramour, that she cannot really want him to read that book to her because she hates it. As a holographic projection of an idealized spousal companion, Joi presumably finds the novel’s slippery treatment of “reality” a little too real, or at least unflattering. Like the rest of Nabokov’s work, Pale Fire could aptly be subtitled Speak, Memory because it too works not to believe in time, to use memory to fire the imagination against the mere dictates of history. Set up as a scholarly edition of the final work by a fictional New England poet named John Shade, the novel incorporates two seemingly distinct texts: the four cantos of Shade’s poem, which he named “Pale Fire,” and the much longer notes of his neighbor and colleague at Wordsmith College, Charles Kinbote. Shade’s poem is autobiographical, focusing on his childhood, his marriage, the loss, by apparent suicide, of his only child, Hazel Shade, and his subsequent attempts as the grieving parent to make peace with his daughter’s death by finding a way to communicate with her ghost. Kinbote’s notes, in sharp contrast, dispense with the details of Shade’s intensely personal, grief-haunted story to tell his own story as Charles the Beloved, the last king of a distant northern land called Nova Zembla, from which he was exiled in the wake of a political revolution, if we are to believe him, and from which an implacable assassin named Gradus – a “clockwork toy,” as the novel refers to him (Nabokov, Pale Fire 38) – is relentlessly stalking him to end his life and cement the ideological success of the revolution. So it is quite fair to characterize both narrators of Pale Fire as Nabokovian memory artists, both seeking not simply to turn back the clock, but instead to make its endless revolutions irrelevant to what matters the most to them, to what they must use their writing to re-establish, at least in their imaginations: for Shade, his lost daughter, and for Kinbote, his lost Zembla. By shoe-horning these two different characters and sensibilities together into a single fiction, Nabokov uses a fundamentally parasitic relationship – Kinbote sponging off of Shade’s grief – to make of Pale Fire an unusually complicated embodiment of the whole idea of individual artistic creation, allowing both characters somehow to emerge whole from Kinbote’s shameless theft of Shade’s poem.

The connections with the plot of Blade Runner 2049 are irresistible and ingenious. Several aspects of K’s characterization invoke Nabokov’s Kinbote. It turns out that the replicant conceived and born by a replicant is not actually K, but the daughter of Deckard, the titular protagonist of Ridley Scott’s 1982 predecessor film, Blade Runner, and Rachael, the replicant whom Deckard falls in love with in the original. Deckard, we learn in this later film, cut off all ties with his daughter before she was born and has no idea if she survived or where she would be – for her protection, he says, when K finally tracks him down in the final stages of the sequel. Through K’s subsequent efforts, Deckard “dies” to the system that has been hunting him down as the ultimate rogue replicant and, being “dead,” finally gets to meet his daughter at the very end of the film. K’s relationship with Deckard thus makes for an inspired reworking of Nabokov’s novel, in which Kinbote’s very selfishness as an annotator spins out a complex counterpart text that allows the reader to see how Shade (the name itself a synonym for “ghost,” of course) apparently does get to make contact from beyond the grave with his daughter. By becoming, with K’s help, a “shade” to the totalitarian system, Deckard is allowed the same gift that Nabokov’s Shade receives.

This transplantation of a mid-20th century novel’s theme into a 21st-century science fiction film’s story seems bold, if not improbable. It resembles, in important ways, what adaptation scholar Timothy Corrigan defines as appropriation: “Appropriations are transformative adaptations that remove parts of one form or text (or even the whole) from their original context and insert them in a different context that dramatically reshapes their meaning” (26). It also, arguably, both resembles another, even more radical form of adaptation, what Robert Stam refers to as transtextuality, a theory of usage with the “potential of socializing art by recasting it as transindividual and collective, emanating not from the individual artist’s demiurgic brain, but rather from larger networks of socially shared meanings” (241). Stam’s Bakhtinian or heteroglossic model does not exactly proclaim the death of the author, but it does draw on the work of Gérard Genette, particularly the concept of “hypertextuality,” to describe the relationship between the “’hypertext,’ and an anterior text or ‘hypotext,’ which the former transforms, modifies, elaborates or extends” (Stam 241), suggesting the power of the successor text to completely rework the predecessor for its own purposes.

But both theories, of appropriation and of transtextuality, emphasize the critical effects of the adaptation, the later work changing the earlier work to expose some of its limitations or cultural contingencies. And that’s where Blade Runner 2049 does the opposite, instead authenticating Pale Fire in its ingenious realization of the novel’s theme of artful misreading. The irony of Kinbote’s self-serving, even solipsistic efforts as Shade’s annotator is that the more he digresses from Shade’s poem to tell his own story, the more he throws into relief the poignant themes of Shade’s poem. Similarly, the harder K works to prove he is the replicant-of-replicant-born , the closer he brings Deckard to a reunion with his daughter that should be impossible. But perhaps most tellingly, Blade Runner 2049 finally achieves, as an independent work in its own right, much the same relationship with Nabokov’s Pale Fire as Kinbote does with Shade: derivative, even parasitic, on the one hand, but simultaneously protective, reverent, and revitalizing.

Trauma, Memory, and Identity

This transformation of the novel’s themes is the work that Blade Runner 2049 does to update the long tradition of dystopias on the silver screen. In particular, the film works effectively to fuse trauma and memory in the formation – and deformation – of an individual’s identity. Hollywood’s conventional three-act story structure encourages every movie to send its protagonist on a journey in which the experiences depicted in the early and middle portions of the arc fundamentally change the protagonist’s sense of self in the third and final act. But in K’s case, as a replicant with no emotions (or “no soul,” as Joshi puts it), can he “grow” or “change”? Is there any kind of experience for a machine with no authentic recollections of a childhood or of a gradual development of the adult self over time that could galvanize memory into a new identity and sense of self? Can K be traumatized into becoming fully human?

The concept of trauma seems made to order for such tantalizing philosophical questions about memory and identity. In his book Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust, Joshua Hirsch describes trauma as an inability to assimilate an experience into the flux of “memory” in the way that we normally do unconsciously.

[Trauma] is . . . a crisis of representation. An extreme event is perceived as radically out of joint with one’s mental representation of the world, which is itself partly derived from the set of representations of the world that one receives from one’s family and culture. The mind goes into shock, becomes incapable of translating the impressions of the event into a coherent mental representation. The impressions remain in the mind, intact and unassimilated. Paradoxically, they neither submit to the normal processes of memory storage and recall, nor, returning uninvited, do they allow the event to be forgotten. (15-16)

In other words, the traumatic experience effectively and devastatingly ruptures the flow of time and its natural connections to human consciousness, making the traumatic experience something that can recur, with all of the bodily sensations playing out in our perceptions inescapably and irresistibly in the presence of the right kinds of conditions.

The relationship between traumatic memories and ‘normal’ ones is complicated but also highly suggestive for this film’s treatment of K’s Nabokovian story. And here again, the work of neurologist Oliver Sacks proves useful. In his 2012 book Hallucinations, Sacks describes the early twentieth century’s rejection of the model of memory as a static repository in favor of a dynamic and contingent process, one that not only allows but likely requires memories to evolve over time: “We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection” (158). In a footnote, Sacks elaborates by invoking the work of Frederic Bartlett at Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s to show that we should “think in terms not of a static thing called ‘memory,’ but rather a dynamic process of ‘remembering,’” (165) and he quotes a passage from Bartlett that suggests the creativity not just of “memories” but of the very remembering self:

Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience… It is thus hardly ever really exact. (qtd. in Sacks 165)

While Sacks does exempt traumatic memories from this characterization of dynamic memory, writing that “some memories do, seemingly, remain vivid, minutely detailed, and relatively fixed throughout life,” especially “traumatic memories or memories carrying an intense emotional charge and significance” (158), the key idea of memory as not just an “imaginative reconstruction,” but as an actual “construction” of the imagination chimes perfectly with Nabokov’s art of memory as the source of a person’s identity. In fact, one could argue that identity itself is, for Nabokov, a work of memory art, which makes K’s questions about his memories and his identity all the more resonant.

To explain Blade Runner 2049’s contribution to the history of dystopian art through the lens of Nabokov’s art of memory, I will briefly review some defining elements of both utopian and dystopian narratives and invoke some key elements from the first of Nabokov’s two dystopian novels, 1938’s Priglashenie na kazn’ (Invitation to a Beheading).5 Ultimately, what I would like to show is how Blade Runner 2049 realizes an improbable transformation of Nabokov’s memory artist in K, a machine with no actual memories of childhood, but an individual who nevertheless refuses simply to be assimilated, one whose very existence repudiates the utopian aims of the regime that claims him as its own.

Invitation to a Dystopia

K’s ability both to serve as the mechanized product of a dystopian vision and to embody a memory artist who gains entrance to Nabokov’s otherworld of individual metaphysical freedom points up close connections between utopian and dystopian art. In his book Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide, M. Keith Booker usefully defines dystopia not as a genre per se but a contingent (even parasitic) mode– work that responds to utopian literature’s “quest for the ideal society” by situating itself “in direct opposition to utopian thought, warning against the potential negative consequences of arrant utopianism” and delivering a “critique of existing social conditions or political systems, either through the critical examination of the utopian premises upon which those conditions and systems are based or through the imaginative extension of those conditions and systems into different contexts that more clearly reveal their flaws and contradictions” (3). Booker further defines dystopian literature as works whose “principal literary strategy [is] defamiliarization: by focusing their critiques of society on imaginatively distant settings, dystopian fictions provide fresh perspectives on problematic social and political practices that might otherwise be taken for granted or considered natural and inevitable” (3-4). Unsurprisingly, Booker also connects the “flood” of dystopian work in the 20th century to the “rather dark turn taken by a great deal of modern cultural criticism” from the likes of Nietzsche, Freud, Bakhtin, Adorno, Foucault, and many others (4).

Booker does not include Nabokov in this list, but the strategy of “defamiliarization” in the midst of social and political homogenization certainly finds its way into Nabokov’s work, especially in the aforementioned Invitation to a Beheading. Protagonist Cincinnatus C. is caught in a nightmarish totalitarian regime that is desperate to assimilate and homogenize him, to make him useful or at least controllable like everyone else. But these efforts prove futile, and Cincinnatus’s life is finally, inevitably forfeit as a result. The novel opens, in fact, with Cincinnatus being sentenced to death for the bizarre crime of “gnostical turpitude,” which amounts to being opaque in a society where everyone else is properly transparent to the state and its apparatus of control.

From his earliest years Cincinnatus . . . carefully managed to conceal a certain peculiarity. He was impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his guard a bizarre impression, as of a lone dark obstacle in this world of souls transparent to one another; he learned however to feign translucence, employing a complex system of optical illusions, as it were—but he had only to forget himself, to allow a momentary lapse in self control, in the manipulation of cunningly illuminated facets and angles at which he turned his soul, and immediately there was alarm. (11-12)

Confined to a prison cell without being told the date of his execution, helplessly opaque Cincinnatus resorts to writing to cope with his extreme alienation from the material world that everyone else inhabits, his corporeal self barely present in the cell where he is constantly visited, his mind ceaselessly comparing the boundless, rewarding world of his imagination to the dull, deadly reality he has to live in literally.

In my dreams the world was ennobled, spiritualized; people whom in the waking state I feared so much appeared there in a shimmering refraction, just as if they were imbued with and enveloped by that vibration of light which in sultry weather inspires the very outlines of objects with life; their voices, their step, the expressions of their eyes and even of their clothes—acquired an exciting significance; to put it more simply, in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterwards it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted life. (68)

For Cincinnatus, as Nabokov’s tender creation, the hellish utopia that subsumes and forcefully homogenizes human beings constitutes a kind of unreality, and his story ends when his defamiliarization from the “real world” he was born into finally releases him into a world akin to the “captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal” world of his imagination. Tellingly, Cincinnatus’ dreams further isolate him from the society of the transparents; he has a secret life, separate from theirs and unavailable to them – making him all the more suspect and his life all the more forfeit.

Correlated Patterns

In Pale Fire, the confines that both the poet Shade and the annotator Kinbote must find a way to transcend are not as literal as Cincinnatus’s prison cell, but the consequences of their defamiliarization from the world around them are just as telling and dramatic. For Shade, the process of reconnecting with his dead daughter is a process of finding correspondences between the natural world that he lives in and what he imagines as the spirit world that she must have moved on to and from which, if he can recognize the signs, she is continuing to communicate with him. Shade’s story falls into a tradition of narratives built on the death of a beloved child (a plot device that Nabokov also uses memorably in Bend Sinister and Lolita), and his poem provides a version of a traumatic, memory-arresting incident in the seizure Shade suffers during a reading. In fact, what the poet experiences is an actual death from which he is later revived.

My heart had stopped to beat,
It seems, and several moments passed before
It heaved and went on trudging to a more
Conclusive destination. . .

I can’t tell you how
I knew – but I did know that I had crossed
The border. Everything I loved was lost
But no aorta could report regret.
A sun of rubber was convulsed and set;
And blood-black nothingness began to spin
A system of cells interlinked within
Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
Against the dark, a tall white fountain played. (Pale Fire 58-59)

Sometime after his restoration, Shade comes across a newspaper article in which a woman also reports seeing, during a death-like experience, a tall white fountain, prompting Shade to visit her in hopes that the correspondence of their deathly visions will verify the existence of a world connected to but beyond ours where he can reunite with his daughter. When Shade learns, though, that the “fountain” referred to in the article was actually just a typo for “mountain,” he’s left to wonder if, in fact, the mistake that seemingly falsifies his hopeful theory constitutes the real proof of a metaphysical realm everywhere in contact with and communing with ours.

Life Everlasting – based on a misprint!
I mused as I drove home: take the hint,
And stop investigating my abyss?
But all at once it dawned on me that this
Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;
Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream
But topsy-turvical coincidence,
Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.
Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find
Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
Of correlated pattern in the game. (Pale Fire 62)

Seeking an exact correspondence, Shade learns to settle for the much greater gift of “[s]ome kind of link-and-bobolink,” not a perfectly matched “text,” but “texture,” which opens up new possibilities for contact with those in the otherworld beyond ours.

Although he’s much less verbally expansive than Nabokov’s poet, K, the replicant protagonist of Blade Runner 2049, comes to share Shade’s revelation. In fact, K’s post-trauma baseline test has him repeating a key image of Shade’s interwoven realities: “Cells interlinked within/ Cells interlinked within cells.” In this image of life’s building blocks, too intricately woven into a whole to be parsed, there is no simple beginning or end: it is texture, not text, an infinitely intricate pattern, not a slavishly linear march from first word to last. Just as Shade finds his image of the fountain to persist in memory, an experience of ecstatic trauma, one might say, K’s revelation that he is not actually the replicant born of a replicant moves from initial despair to resolve and even to inspiration, to contrive a means to connect Deckard to the daughter who was, for her own protection, rendered a ghost at birth in the totalitarian system into which she had, impossibly and dangerously, been born. In effect, K helps Deckard escape and transcend the system and thus to take on a role that the system would not allow: a loving parent, though a replicant.

This is perhaps both the most ingenious and the most generous gift that Blade Runner 2049 bestows on its replicant protagonist: he gets to be both Shade and Kinbote in the dystopian world of the film. Like Shade, K gets to see the tall white fountain of apparent evidence that he was born, not made, and when the truth is revealed that his evidence was a cleverly planted textual error designed to erase the true replicant infant from the official records, he gets to follow Shade’s example in seeing precisely this error as the salvific contrapuntal theme. Again, to borrow Shade’s terms, K realizes that his life is bound up with Deckard’s actual daughter in a web of sense, of texture, and he gets to use that connection as a means (to borrow Shade’s terms) to some “real hope.”

Baseline Tests

Several scenes in Blade Runner 2049 use clever technical strategies to realize these complicated symbolic and philosophical correspondences with Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Three of them particularly stand out: the pair of baseline tests already mentioned as well as K’s fateful meeting with the Blade Runner world’s version of a memory artist, Dr. Ana Stelline. These scenes carefully use camera perspectives and optical effects to suggest the dualities of K’s identity and existence. The meeting with Dr. Stelline also helps to set K up as a counterpart of Nabokov’s Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading, a prisoner condemned to death who effectively dreams a whole new world of possibility into existence, one in which he will not die the mere puppet of a dystopian state.

Visually, the baseline test scenes work much like two sides of the same coin, with the camera perspective and cutting designed to enforce a correspondence between the mechanized Interviewer and the human machine of an interviewee. In the first baseline test scene, director Villeneuve uses one of his signature strategies in the film, a sound overlap, to add extra pressure to the aggressiveness of the post-trauma protocol, dubbing the Interviewer’s questions over several shots of K arriving at the police station and the interview cell. Placing the camera high and behind the subject in an initially stationary frame, Villeneuve slowly glides the camera over K’s left shoulder and past his head and then uses a rack focus to reveal that the voice we have been hearing issues not from a human interrogator, but from the device affixed to the wall, white on white. An ominous high-pitched screeching sound, apparently non-diegetic, grows louder and louder as the camera closes in on the revelation of the mechanical interrogator, the camera eventually pushing K completely out of the frame as the high-pitched screeching reaches its crescendo, synchronized with K’s repetition, at the Interviewer’s command, of the key phrase, “Within cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked,” three times. The second shot in this two-shot scene appears only when K has repeated Shade’s phrase three times and the screeching has stopped, prompting a cut to the Interviewer’s point-of-view showing a loose three-quarter single of K in his interrogation chair, bruised and bloodied but calm and apparently untraumatized (see Figure 1).

This payoff view of our protagonist verifies his perfect placidity, which is to say, his perfect controllability, even after killing a fellow replicant. After following his orders in the killing, he is now, this scene emphasizes, following the orders of the aggressive Interviewer perfectly, who rewards him – like a condescending circus master for whom the show animal has just performed a trick perfectly – with the flattering label “constant K” before announcing that K can now go pick up his bonus. Everything about the visual strategy emphasizes the absolute hierarchy that governs the exchanges; K earns his complimentary epithet and bonus not because he has just killed another replicant, but because he always follows orders instantly and perfectly, with no pause even for consideration, with no possibility for anything but compliance. Thus, while there are technically two characters in this scene, there is only one that matters, the authoritative Interviewer; K matters and, one could argue, even exists only insofar as he confirms the absolute authority of the mechanized voice. It is a perfect demonstration of dystopian aesthetics, the faceless voice of the state exerting absolute power over its enslaved functionary. Moreover, this interview (such as it is) makes a mockery of the theoretically therapeutic goals of administering a “post-trauma” test. Clearly, the Interviewer does not care if K has actually been traumatized and will suffer long-term psychological damage from his actions. Instead, the only point of concern is whether K remains perfectly compliant, whether he can continue to function as the dystopian regime’s implacable killer.

The second baseline scene takes advantage of the stylistic choices of the first one to show that K has been successfully traumatized into moral choice. To help signal this dramatic change, this sequence is much more dynamically edited than the first baseline scene, using crosscut singles to increase tension between K and the Interviewer, jamming seventeen shots into a 50-second sequence that includes two cutaways to Lieutenant Joshi in her office, whereas the first one spreads its five shots (including the three of K’s arrival at the station) generously over 1:23 of screen time. Other technical choices enhance the contrast. Instead of beginning with a view of K and gradually revealing the Interviewer, the second baseline scene begins with a tighter framing on the Interviewer device and proceeds to cut back and forth more and more rapidly to frontal close-ups of K that are not an eyeline match for the Interviewer, the baseline POV perspective from the previous scene subtly but significantly altered, perhaps irrecoverably. Moreover, K’s expression is (at least by comparison) somewhat strained, in notable contrast to the placid look he wears in the earlier scene, and he hesitates at a couple of crucial junctures to repeat the key baseline terms back to the Interviewer (see Figure 2).

As the sequel to the first baseline scene, this second one emphasizes the traumatic effects of K’s newfound belief that he was born biologically, that he is human in ways no other replicant has been or, supposedly, could be. The machine made precisely and perfectly to follow orders, even when those orders require him to kill other replicants, is now too human and alive, at least morally, to automatically comply with the Interviewer as he always has.

Memory Artist

The encounter that has traumatized K so beautifully is his meeting with Dr. Ana Stelline, the artist employed by replicant manufacturer Niander Wallace to provide his merchandise with plausible memories of childhoods and human identities they never had. K’s meeting with Dr. Stelline is ingeniously designed to play off the visual and vocal dynamics of the baseline test scenes. It is also the only scene in which K actually does lose his grip on his emotions, screaming at the end of his technically mistaken revelation and kicking the chair aside before stalking out of the building, where he is immediately arrested and brought in for the second baseline test. The chamber where Dr. Stelline and K meet is clearly designed to evoke but also crucially to depart from the baseline interview room, and the camera perspectives emphasize not just the presence of two people talking to each other, but also, through a series of subtle reflections and movements, the way these individuals exist within the frames with their counterparts. In effect, director Villeneuve and his cinematographer Roger Deakins create ghostly reflection selves of both Dr. Stelline and K to suggest how they exist simultaneously within shots that otherwise would otherwise function as singles, showing only one of them. In addition to invoking the famous madhouse interrogation scene in The Silence of the Lambs between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter, the visual strategies deliver a magnificently Nabokovian touch, using one of the touchstone themes of Pale Fire – the poet’s and the annotator’s inseparability from each other, even within their individual texts and stories – to provide K with his tall white fountain, his cosmic misprint of an error. K sees in this other person’s response exactly what he wants to see; evidence of his own unprecedented origin as a replicant-of-replicant-born when, in fact, she’s actually talking about herself. In fact, you could easily call the scene “K through the Looking Glass,” inverting the world in an act of self-serving aggrandizement, but in the process, also discovering (exactly as Nabokov would have it) a whole new world of imaginative and moral possibility.

The six-and-a-half-minute scene of this fateful encounter comprises more than 50 ingeniously constructed shots. A pair of long shots establishes key spatial and interpersonal implications. The camera shows Stelline in the foreground in the midst of one of her memory construction scenes, kneeling in a lush green forest when we see K enter as a silhouette in the deep background, exposing the artificial nature of her nature reverie. K’s entrance causes her to turn around and the greenscape to begin to fade out in sections as she approaches him; when it is gone completely, we can see the enormous round, white-walled chamber in which she lives and creates adjoined to the much smaller but also white-walled antechamber which K has entered and to which he will be confined throughout the conversation (see Figure 3).

The disparity is clearly symbolic: as the memory artist, the bestower of human identity, Dr. Stelline works within a vast set of possibilities, one whose boundaries extend beyond the frame itself, whereas K is confined to a much smaller space, not much larger than the white-walled baseline room, in fact, suggesting the confines of his very existence as a helplessly enslaved replicant. But, as confining as K’s antechamber is, it is an extension of Dr. Stelline’s life laboratory, sharing its rounded contours, suggesting possibilities for its occupant that would be impossible in the conventionally right-angled baseline interrogation chamber. The design of the building both distinguishes and subtly connects Stelline and K.

When Stelline sits down opposite K and invites him to conjure the memory that he’d like to verify as real, the careful connections to the baseline test arrangement become even more clear and suggestive. In the baseline test, the Interviewer speaks through a vertical slit of a speaker, but Dr. Stelline’s window into K’s mind is horizontal, equally white but clearly less sinister with a human being looking through it as K conjures the memory. The glass that protects her compromised immune system within the sterile bubble provides a reflection of K looking over her shoulder as she looks into his memory, similar to the position that the symbolically named Joi, K’s digital companion, has just assumed when K first finds the archival evidence that seems to prove he was born, not made. When the camera cuts to the opposite perspective for a single of K at the moment of mistaken revelation, Dr. Stelline’s reflection briefly appears in the midst of K as he stands to kick away his chair, blending them visually at the same time as their life stories are most inextricably blended in K’s imagination (see Figure 4).

Most crucially in this scene, as both a reference to and a sharp contrast from the baseline tests, we see Dr. Stelline and K together in a two-shot, both of their faces visible, in a low angle profile framing, allowing them to exist both individually and together in a way that K and the Interviewer never inhabit the screen together during the baseline tests, despite all of the other correspondences in the setting and the dialogue exchanges (see Figure 5).

Both K and Dr. Stelline are performing great favors for one another, Dr. Stelline confirming the reality of what is actually her childhood memory in a way that allows K to mistake it for his own and to respond by resolving to find a way to meet the replicant he now feels sure is his father. And in doing so, in recalling Deckard from beyond the falsified bureaucratic grave into which he has carefully disappeared, K will set into motion a sequence of events that will culminate with Deckard’s reunion with Stelline, his daughter whom he had sought to protect at all costs by “dying” himself.

The Comic and the Cosmic

All of these carefully orchestrated machinations beautifully realize both clear and latent themes in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. K and Stelline can never touch, separated by the glass bubble that keeps her alive, but they coalesce in their traumatized responses to the childhood memory of bullying and survival. Like Nabokov’s Shade and Kinbote in Pale Fire, a father and daughter are reunited from beyond the grave by the self-serving, manufactured trauma of a third party who has no natural relation to them. All of them, in their improbable, tenuous connections to one another, are defined by haunting, indelible memories and inspired to new possibilities beyond hope, when their lives seem forfeit to the dystopian world into which they were born or within which they were made, a world where individual vision and memory and identity are only welcome when they can be commodified and packaged into a simulacrum of a human being. All of them get to realize and embody a favorite Nabokovian aphorism about the generously divine absurdity of our existence: “[O]ne likes to recall that the difference between the comic side of things, and their cosmic side, depends upon one sibilant” (Nabokov, Lectures 104). For Nabokov, such apparent errors of perception actually constitute triumphant revelations that we are not confined to our bodily existences.

In the end, then, K gets to share with Nabokov’s Shade this most generous of revelations about the very mistakes we make, the blending of the painfully comic with the boundless and joyfully cosmic. In the strange world that Shade describes, K too can, improbably enough, stray and find enduring companionship with those who already dwell there.

In life, the mind
Of any man is quick to recognize
Natural shams, and then before his eyes
The reed becomes a bird, the knobby twig
An inchworm, and the cobra head, a big
Wickedly folded moth. But in the case
Of my white fountain what it did replace
Perceptually was something that, I felt,
Could be grasped only by whoever dwelt
In the strange world where I was a mere stray. (Nabokov, Pale Fire 59)

More Human than Human?

Beyond the ingenious connections between specific scenes in the film and resonant themes in the novel, what is the best way to understand the relationship between these two very different works? Among other instructive questions, is Nabokov’s novel essential to Villeneuve’s film?

The quick answer is no. It is not hard to imagine the film omitting any reference to the novel at all in telling the story of a new generation blade runner reuniting an old blade runner, a fugitive from an earlier era, with the latter’s daughter. If the goal was to thicken the film’s cultural reach with allusion, K’s baseline mantra could have come from almost any literary source, particularly one with a dubious sense of nostalgia about lost innocence or a seemingly unbridgeable gulf between the child and the adult selves. It is not hard to imagine, for example, Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience cycle or the dreamchild motif from Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland supplying similarly rich allusive material for Villeneuve’s film. Thus, while the idea of film adaptations has grown far beyond mere models of fidelity, the interchangeability of Pale Fire with other literary works in the film’s symbolic schema seemingly precludes a case for the film as an “adaptation” of Nabokov’s novel. From this perspective, Pale Fire is, in fact, arguably just a stray itself in the strange Hollywood world of Blade Runner 2049.

But it is a fortuitous stray, particularly in light of the film’s complicated relations to the mythology of the blade runner character. Villeneuve’s film was a much-belated sequel to the 1982 film Blade Runner, which was itself a creative adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Both the films and Dick’s novel question the boundaries between the human and the non-human, between the organic and the synthetic, between the real and the unreal, leaving their protagonists to come to grips with their own dubious perceptions of themselves and their relationship to a blighted world. In the earlier film, Elden Tyrell, the head of the Tyrell Corporation that makes replicants, delivers a line that resonates both backward to the novel and forward to the much later sequel and its use of Pale Fire: “More human than human.” Does the dystopic goal of the evil corporation – to make the copy somehow more authentic, more real, than the source work – apply to the film’s resetting of key themes from the novel? Does transferring Kinbote’s and Shade’s intertwined but distinct quests into K’s gift to Deckard make the theme of connecting the fleshly and the mortal to the elusive, tantalizingly spiritual still more meaningful, at least for 21st century audiences? Is Blade Runner 2049 more Nabokovian than Nabokov?

The film engages these questions with a pair of late scenes that take on extra significance in this context. Both Deckard and K are forced, in consecutive scenes, to respond to bad copies of the non-human women they have loved, Rachael and Joi. And both reject the copies with which they are presented, but they reject them for opposite purposes. When Niander Wallace, the corporate magnate who took over for Tyrell, presents the new version of Rachael, Deckard draws near with apparent wonder and receptivity, but he soon dismisses her scornfully because she was given the wrong color eyes. The attempt at mimesis fails. Deckard turns his back to her and steps toward the camera, but the careful blocking allows viewers to see Luv, Wallace’s replicant factotum, step forward in the background and execute the replacement Rachael with a single shot to the head. The symbolism is unmistakable and irresistible. Deckard is refusing the lie of interchangeability, the idea that the copy can ever match the original, even if the original was herself a copy (see Figure 6).

In the very next scene, a bloodied K moves slowly along a high walkway in the city and is faced with a giant sex doll fantasy of Joi, nude with pink skin and a garish wig of bright blue shoulder length hair, her eyes dark and fixed. This travesty of Joi repeats lines that she has spoken to K earlier in the film, telling him once again that he looks “like a good Joe,” but she does so salaciously this time, not lovingly (see Figure 7).

Following on Deckard’s rejection of Rachael, this scene looks like it will be the final straw for K. In his last scene before this one, K has learned from the rebels who are determined to free replicants from slavery that he is not – as he had thought, encouraged by Joi – the child of replicant-born. Faced with this disillusionment, devastated to know that neither he nor the world he inhabits is what he thought they were, K is ashamed before this mockery of Joi and her tawdry come-ons. Initially when he faces her, and the camera cuts to singles of his face in the darkness, K’s face is bathed in a pink glow, his expression helpless and desolate as he lowers his head, avoiding her gaze, his life clearly bereft of meaning and purpose since the revelation that he is not Deckard’s son. But as the projected Joi persists with the flirtatious offers, a new possibility occurs to K, who clearly decides that his life can still have a purpose if he reunites Deckard with his actual child, sacrificing himself for the restoration of what another replicant, early in the film, has called a miracle, the organic, bodily birth of a sentient machine. To signal the shift in K’s mind from despair to newfound purpose, his face in the final crosscut single of the scene is no longer bathed in pink light, but in blue, his eyes and jaw subtly registering his new resolve. The giant Joi has turned and walked away, rejected like Rachael in the previous scene, but for the sake of K’s productive self-sacrifice, not Deckard’s despair. In voiceover, the leader of the rebels is heard repeating a line that she has previously spoken to K: “Dying in a good cause is the most human thing we can do.” Somehow, ironically, K has been inspired by the crassly commercial version of Joi to do whatever he can to help Deckard to find real joy with his real replicant daughter. He will sacrifice himself to become “human” (see Figure 8).

As described earlier, in Pale Fire, the poet John Shade has an almost identical moment when his despair over a cosmic joke of a mistake turns into a source of unlikely inspiration and hope. The fountain that he had thought he shared with a woman who claims to commune with the dead has turned out to be a mountain, the line that he read a mere misprint that he thought would prove to be the key to “Life Everlasting” (62), as he puts it. But that very mistake becomes the source of newfound resolve.

Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find
Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
Of correlated pattern in the game,
Plexed artistry, and something of the same
Pleasure in it as they who played it found. (62-63)

The plexed artistry of correlated patterns that Shade recognizes and embraces can work as a metaphor for Blade Runner 2049’s tangential but endlessly suggestive relationship with Pale Fire. Each work remains discreet, but they overlap, creating a weave that suggests the possibilities of a spiritual kinship, a vision held in common by two very different works and two very different artists, a filmmaker and his screenwriters creating a vision that meshes with the novelist’s in improbably fruitful ways.

In the respectful, even celebratory relationship that Blade Runner 2049 establishes with Pale Fire, the philosophical perspective seems fundamentally optimistic and affirming, even couched within the dystopian scenario. This cosmic optimism works perfectly for Nabokov, as long as it allows his work to remain itself, unappropriated, a fierce defense of the unassimilable artistic imagination. He provides just such an ending for Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading, in fact, one that allows for the execution to happen, but not in a way that actually kills his dear protagonist. The ending that he bestows on Cincinnatus also works as a description of Blade Runner 2049 and the way it does not so much adapt Pale Fire as find in it a boon companion, a sibling work of art, whose existence on its own independent terms affirms the later work’s recognition and incorporation of the novel’s staunch philosophical defiance to history on behalf of the individual’s identity.

Everything was coming apart. Everything was falling. A spinning wind was picking up and whirling: dust, rags, chips of painted wood, bits of gilded plaster, pasteboard bricks, posters; an arid gloom fleeted; and amidst the dust, and the falling things, and the flapping scenery, Cincinnatus made his way in the direction where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him. (Invitation to a Beheading  180)