Bladerunner 2049: was Ryan Gosling's Character Officer K reminescent at all of Joseph K in Franz Kafka's novel The Trial?

Long: In the beginning of the film Officer K "retires" Dave Batista character Sapper Morton, during which Morton tells him that Officer K is "content shoveling shit". To me this implication is that Officer K is a slave, and not only is he a slave, but he is happy being a slave, and may not even know he is one. This reminds me of Joseph K in The Trial, who is a slave to perceived authority in the society, he actually happily gives up his own autonomy and follows corrupt perceieved authority, and even helps the corrupt pseudo-authority evade legitimate auyhority, and when he is being stabbed to death he still doesn't even realize his slave-ish mistake.

In the movie, Bladerunner 2049, to me it almost seems like this is another futuristic synthetic version of Joseph K, a sci-fi mystery retelling of The Trial, except in this version we see K break free of his self-imposed, or in this case actually imposed(?), constraints. Officer K has the fortune of meeting Morton, and finding the bones of a natural-birth synthetic, now he knows that he is more than just a thing, he knows that he can have soul too.

Officer K's authority figures actually tell him that he doesn't have a soul, Officer K is then defined by something outside of himself, and previously he would acquiesce to that external self-definition, what other choice would he have? His authority figures have coercive power over him.

Spoiler: Officer K thinks for a while that he was the natural birth, the Pinochio made real, the strings cut, and his baseline identity changes. This world cannot allow these things to make their their own identity, to make their own destiny.

Officer K then realizes he isn't the natural birthed synthetic, but not before he gets to meet his "father" believing he is the son. This is not innocuous, because in this world believeing you are something makes you that thing, believing you are real makes you real, believing you have a soul, gives you a soul. Much like Joseph K in The Trial, he believes he is a slave to this pseudo-authority figure, and so he is. Is this much different than our real-world? Is a man good if he believes he is good? What other definition of "good" could there be besides belief?

Officer K meets his mother to, the woman who gave him memories, and if memories are not life, then what is? These are both philisophical works of art after all.

In the end Officer K realizes he is not the God Child. But he also realizes that he was a real person regardless of that, he was real all along, or as soon as he believed he was, and the thing the society was stealing from him was the belief that he was real. In the end his mother, the real God Child, the maker of dream, the architect of memory, she appears to manipulate broader reality itself (if not just Officer K's reality), she is making snow in the dreamscape and then outside it is snowing on Officer K. Is this the conclusion of an intelligence explosion? A machine learning how to learn, the singularity, manipulating reality itself? And what about Wallace?

When K finds the horse from his memory, he realizes that either he is real or he has the memory of a real person, that's part of the mystery and adventure that Officer K must travel. In this moment Ana de Armas' character Joi, Officer K's holographic girlfriend, tells him a real boy needs a real name; Jo. This is interesting because later on he meets an advetisement for Joi and that one calls him "a Jo", it sounds similar to "a John", or someone who pays for the company of women. In this story, Officer K is realizing how hollow his existence really is/was. The harsh reality of actually seeing the world for what it really is, maybe just a simulation on a simulation, symbols on symbols ad infinutum. Where then is the realness? Is life really suffering?

Why does the God Child Mother give Officer K her memory in the first place? Do bees represent life? Life in the radio-active desert. Why is K so mad when he realizes his memory is real? Did he love his own prison as much as Joseph K? Whose life was more real? Joseph K believed in the pseudo-authority he submitted to, and so from his perspective it wasn't pseudo-authority, it was real. And Officer K realized the truth of who he was or what he had the potential to be, but it killed him just the same way Joseph K's beliefs killed him.

What is real? Are these two works fundamentally explorations of ontology? Is what we believe is real become real? I mean, it's almost heavily suggested by both works, one being in the past and one being set far in a future setting. What is reality if not what we believe and percieve? They even sound similar, if phonetic etymology has any value.

What should we judge Officer K's and Joseph K's lives on? Do we have the right to judge them? In the end did they both have their own subjectively fulfilling adventures? What does it mean to be a slave and not know it?

Anyway, these are two deep and philisophical works of art that seem to be interlinked thematically, so I thought I might explore some of it.

Submitted July 23, 2018 at 05:22PM by WhoaEpic https://ift.tt/2mAKY5q