mcc

glitch girl

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This post necessarily contains spoilers for Blade Runner 2049. If you haven't seen Blade Runner 2049, I suggest not reading this and just going and watching Blade Runner 2049.

…so. I really like Blade Runner 2049. Like I really like it.

I learned something wild about it yesterday. I'm going to take a minute to talk through the context, but if you just want to know what I learned, skip to "Dropping In" below.


My favorite scene in BR2049 is the "baseline test" scene. Ryan Gosling's character K ("KD6-3.7"), fresh back in from dispassionately murdering a man at the behest of the state, takes what the movie calls a "post-traumatic baseline test". The test is a Voight-Kampf test being performed in reverse.

"Blade Runner" / The Voight-Kampf test

The Voight-Kampf test is a fictional test that distinguishes baseline humans from synthetic "replicants". It is a little different in the Blade Runner movies than it is in the book. In the book ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", by Phillip K. Dick— I haven't read it, I've only had this explained to me)— in the book, the point of the Voight-Kampf test is that it does not work. The test is pseudoscience and the creepy questions are testing to see if you have the same value system as the parent culture. PKD is not interested in what it means to be human. He is interested in "what does it mean for a human to decide that another person is not a human?". PKD believes everyone is human and dehumanization is active work performed by the dehumanizer. In his book if you cannot give the correct answers to the Voight-Kampf questions, if you do not convince the tester that you feel the correct way about turtles, the culture literally dehumanizes you and you can be executed as a replicant.

The first movie is not interested in the same things PKD is interested in. The second movie is very, very interested in these things, but it's still in the first movie's continuity, so the Voight-Kampf still follows the first movie's rules.

You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It's crawling toward you. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?

In the movies, the Voight-Kampf test "works", but it's based on different principles. In the movies the questions and answers do not matter; turtles do not matter. What matters is that the process of being asked the questions is unsettling and produces emotional responses. The questions no longer have cultural content (the questions are actually the same, but the culture in the movie is different), they're just creepy. The testee is monitored during question and answer and a computer tracks whether things like their pupil and throat movements match human regular. Someone aware of neuroatypicality will immediately identify the unfairness of assuming everyone has identical emotional responses or identical somatic responses to emotion, but the first movie (which, in my opinion, is simply not as good) hasn't thought very hard about that. The first movie does think the test is unfair, but for a different reason; the movie concludes the reason the test successfully identifies replicants is not because replicants are inhuman, or even because they are neuroatypical, but because they are children. Replicants are born in adult bodies and only accumulate two to four years of memories before getting "retired"; the "incorrect" responses are in fact simply a child's responses. The movie posits a replicant with implanted adult memories would pass a Voight-Kampff test. Fine, whatever.

"Blade Runner 2049" / The baseline test

In Blade Runner 2049 the Voight-Kampf test is no longer used, for two reasons. First off, it is no longer needed, since replicants can be identified by barcodes in their corneas. Second off it would no longer work. Replicants now have implanted fake memories equivalent to their apparent age at birth, which under the movie rules mean a 2049 replicant that takes a Voight-Kampf test would pass it. The culture has become crueler and no longer feels it needs to work as hard to dehumanize someone. It no longer bothers with the arbitrary neurotribal metrics. It simply declares a group of people inhuman by circumstance of birth.

The "baseline", like the Voight-Kampf, consists of being asked a series of uncomfortable questions. Like the Voight-Kampf, somatic responses determine your score. Unlike the Voight-Kampf, there is a "baseline", a pre-memorized text the replicant has been assigned to keep in mind during the test. The replicant's job during the test is to ignore the questions and instead listen for any words or phrases from the baseline text. The questioner says, "What's it like to hold the hand of someone you love? Interlinked". K must reply "Interlinked" and not respond in any other way. The point of the baseline test is not to fail inhumans. The culture has already decided that K is subhuman. The baseline is testing to see if someone marked as inhuman is becoming human. The baseline text, like the questions, has heavy emotional content. The environment of the baseline test is designed to maximize stress; alone in a cold white cell, the interrogator harshly barking the questions, the testee unsettled by the alien noises and unblinking eye of the monitoring equipment. It would be nearly impossible to be in that environment and not have an emotional response. But the culture has decided that replicants do not have emotional responses. The state wants dispassionate murderers for its executioners, the economy demands uncomplaining workers. The perceived emotional shortcomings of the replicants have become part of their assigned social function. So a replicant which responds to circumstances like a human is declared defective and destroyed. The culture does not even think of it as a punishment. A part is malfunctioning and it gets replaced.

The culture first stereotypes a minority, and then demands the minority perform that stereotype or else be met with violence.

"Pale Fire" / within cells interlinked

I really like this scene, as cinema. Everything about it works. In general I tend to like what my wife Christine calls "the Saying Shit portion of the movie", in whatever movie, the point where someone is suddenly seriously intoning portentous free-verse poetry you can't understand. There are some movies where the movie's plot is not ultimately able to deliver on the portentious poetry meaning anything (see 23:36-23:56 here) but which I like anyway just because the saying-shit portion is in the moment so convincing. The baseline scene is the perfect "saying shit" scene. When it first starts you have no idea what is happening. The editing and sound are maximally disorienting; all you know is suddenly Ryan Gosling is saying terrifying poetry over shots of the LAPD headquarters. You find out why only after he's finished, and the movie takes a couple more hours to completely sketch out the full horror of what is being done to K here.

What I didn't find out until earlier this year was that K's baseline text is literal poetry. It's Vladimir Nabokov.

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.

That's from "Pale Fire" (another book I've had described to me but not read). The last five lines are K's baseline. "Pale Fire", like BR2049, is a story about a man who comes to the false conclusion that he is the protagonist of someone else's story. It's about something which is real and something which is merely interpreted, reflected ("The moon's an arrant thief / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun"). It's obviously relevant to BR2049's narrative, so if (as was the case for me) you've heard of Pale Fire but failed to identify the poem, then it feels pretty obvious why in a later scene at home the filmmakers briefly reveal K to actually own and be working through a copy of Pale Fire, apparently without a lot of success. (His hologram girlfriend doesn't seem to like it, anyway.) On my first watch I thought this was a cute if slightly forced reference; now, knowing the poem's source, this detail becomes not just natural but wrenching. K is a person marked as subhuman who struggles with a desire to be free he is not even allowed to acknowledge. He has been assigned this text that he has to perform noncomprehension of. But he wants to know what it means. He is working through Pale Fire because at some level he is trying to understand the context of this thing that has enslaved him.

"Dropping in"

Anyway, here's the wild part. That scene was actually written by Ryan Gosling. And the baseline test wasn't created for the movie. It's a thing from the real world.

Here's what I learned yesterday:

I was trying to find the text of the baseline scene. There's a video on YouTube but I was looking for a transcription. Instead I found this much, much longer "full text" on Reddit, along with a comment where the poster explains they transcribed it from the BR2049 art book. They go on to explain:

Ryan Gosling actually wrote this when trying to understand his character, and used a technique called "dropping in" to analyze writing from Nabokov's Pale Fire. He approached Villeneuve about it and he added it to the film

What's this?

There's a blog post here by screenwriter Jon James Miller that explains the concept:

Dropping-in is a technique Tina [Packer] and Kristin Linklater developed together in the early 1970s to create a spontaneous, emotional connection to words for Shakespearean actors. In fact, “dropping in” is integral to actor training at Shakespeare & Co. (the company the Linklater’s founded) a way to start living the word and using it to create the experience of the thing the word represents.

The process of dropping-in involves a teacher and student, the former asking questions and the latter repeating the word in the text (in bold below). The process gives each operative word depth and dimension and allows it to come into the body. Apparently, it can also release strong emotions. Once an emotional connection is made with individual words, then phrases or sentences can be strung together and “dropped-in.” Here’s an example from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the sentence:

“May All To Athens Back Again Repair”

May

Do you like the month of May? May.

Do you hate the month of May? May.

Do you say “May I?” May.

Say “all the days of May?” (three times fast)

A longer description is in this account by Shakespeare & Co student Catherine Bryne (search for "Our first session of scene work"), but that's the basic idea. This is literally the baseline test.

The baseline test is an actor's exercise.

My read of the Shakespeare & Co process is it's about exploring the emotional space around a word (to mangle a Tina Packer quote from the Bryne account, "revealing the multiplicity of meanings"). An actor should ideally understand the emotional content of everything they say, and since each word receives its own emphasis we might as well take that down to the level of a particular word. Packer wants an actor to fully, intuitively understand the implications of every word they speak. So the questions in her process force the actor to consider each word from a variety of angles. The actor isn't meant to answer the questions; it isn't a test. They're only meant to internalize each question. They're meant to fully experience the emotional content that the question charges the word with. The benefit of this, I imagine, is they make explicit to themselves their own emotional associations around the word and therefore probably those of the audience, and if the "Dropping In" is being performed in preparation for a particular role I assume they're trying to experience the questions "from the perspective of" the character and therefore understand their character's relationship to each word.

The baseline test adapts this process for evil ends. The questions push the replicant toward giving the text emotional associations. But they cannot let those emotional associations be felt. The text has to remain empty syllables, or the testee dies. The testee is being taught to suppress the exact feelings "Dropping In" was designed to tease out. "Dropping In" as practiced by the Shakespeare & Co is an intensely physical process, as described by Bryne, with all participants close and touching, eye contact being maintained; Byrne describes a feeling of intense bonding with her partner in the exercise, that the combination of intimate physical contact and emotional release unlocked strong maternal feelings in her. This element too is present in the "baseline" version, but turned sinister, all physical elements used to isolate K; the framing brings K closer to no one but establishes the interrogator as distant and K as subservient. K keeps eye contact with a lens.

The correspondence is so exact that if we assume Blade Runner to be set in "our" future— or the future of the 1980s at least— it's reasonable to imagine the baseline test is not just based on "Dropping In" from a screenwriting perspective but literally, in-narrative. Shakespeare & Co was founded in 1978, which is before the Blade Runner series' timeline diverges from ours. Shakespeare & Co has intentionally never set down the technique of "Dropping In" in writing, it's only taught person to person, so it wouldn't have been lost in the 2022 digital crash. It might as well be the case someone at the Wallace Corporation (co-opting everything without thought to context in the way tech does) literally learned about "Dropping In" and adapted it to design the baseline test.

Looking between this page scanned from the artbook and this (good) interview with Denis Villeneuve it appears how this scene got in the film is the very earliest script drafts had a more sedate inspection scene where an unseen man simply interviews K and asks him to read the Pale Fire poem without emotionally responding to it. The most romantic possible way of imagining how this became the final scene would be if Ryan Gosling actually spontaneously attempted "Dropping In" on the Pale Fire poem as a way of preparing for this scene, and in the process realized how similar "Dropping In" was to the Voight-Kampf, but I can't find anyone telling this version of the story who can trace it to a specific source that worked on the movie. Villeneuve's interview says only that Gosling brought the "Dropping In" idea to him during the brainstorming phase that followed the initial script distribution and that when filming started they shot both the version from the script and Gosling's concept and decided Gosling's was better. The artbook does confirm though that Gosling did write the script for the "Dropping In" version of the scene, which as originally filmed was 7 minutes long (!)— obviously impractically long, but the editor says he loved it because he had so much material to work with he could actually edit for rhythm when cutting down to what was eventually refilmed as the brutal 40-second take in the final movie.

One final angle we can look at this from. The baseline test was derived from an actors' exercise as part of the movie production. We could imagine the baseline test was derived from the same actor's exercise in the story continuity. But there's a reading in which the baseline test is being used as an actor's exercise in the movie, by K. The formal reason for the baseline test is to detect and purge emotion in replicants. But the replicants know that, which means from a "a system is what it does" perspective what they're really being tested on, and expected to refine over time, is skill in acting. When K fails his second baseline test toward the end of the movie it's explicit that his boss must pull strings to prevent him being immediately executed, but she does do it, implying when push comes to shove the system is less interested in whether replicants experience emotionlessness than whether they can show acceptance of the assigned role (subservient to the privileged group, unsympathetic to their own group) by way of performance. At this point the text, subtext, and metatext all converge.

I really like Blade Runner 2049.


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in reply to @mcc's post:

To be clear that entire paragraph is just a condensed transcription of something Christine Love said once during one of her many rants about why she does not like the first Blade Runner movie (Christine is a huge Dick fan and is consistently disappointed by every adaptation not by Richard Linklater), to the point where after I wrote the paragraph I literally called Christine over and asked "is this an accurate summary of your position"

this is an amazing essay you've written, and will be the thing that finally Pierces The Veil for me and gets me to watch the film (something Ryan Gosling is usually capable of on his own, but for various reasons that didn't work for BR 2049)

what a fantastic post, thank you for writing this up!

i love both blade runner films a lot, but each i like for different reasons (and i have issues with each, again for vastly different reasons), and you've put into words one of the primary reasons i love 2049. i knew a lot of the other background context (gosling writing the baseline scene, etc) but this is my first time learning in depth about "Dropping In." incredible stuff

This was enthralling to read. Lots for me to think about. I hadn’t realized the purpose of the Voight-Kampf test had been changed from the book. Despite enjoying PKD’s works I never thought about reading it for whatever reason. But I’d like to read the book now because that is a much more interesting reason for the test. I didn’t know that the baseline test procedure was based on something real either, or that Ryan Gosling had suggested it. The implications of the Dropping In technique and what K is doing with Pale Fire at home is going to be top of mind the next time I rewatch 2049. I like the first movie a lot but K is just a better and more interesting character to me. To watch, and learn about, and to see the world reflected in his image. The movie is driven by all of his attempts to understand himself, trying to understand and integrate into the culture that hates or devalues him, because maybe he feels that’s all he has to work with. Coming home to dinner with his AI girlfriend comforts him even if it’s tied up in the system that abuses him. It’s the “real” life that he is capable of obtaining. And these drives just conflict and rip everything apart. The movie is just so emotional and filled with friction.

This is so intense and honestly fascinating. I always felt that there were layers of meaning I was missing from the baseline scene, and this is such interesting material. Really bringing a new appreciation there, dang.

amazing read, thank you for writing this up.

it seems to me this process of dropping-in has already been appropriated by scientology. their use of e-meters while having a one-on-one with someone "deeper in" who is supposed to unemotionally read questions and remark when the e-meter blips just reeks of the baseline test.

Ok, they claim it's beneficial but i would argue it would be more beneficial without the e-meter and allowing for emotions.

Hm, well the scientology version of this might technically predate "Dropping In".

Scientology's processes often kind of just look like feral, homegrown psychotherapy techniques, because to a large extent that's exactly what they are, which is why Scientology processes can sometimes have some benefit, but probably never as much as therapy from the licensed/evidence-based world would. (It's also why Scientology is so doctrinally opposed to psychologists; that's their competition.) If there's a similarity to Blade Runner here I'd speculate it's probably because there's ultimately a shared parentage, IE, the use of probing questions in both Hubbard's techniques and PKD's Voight-Kampff test was probably guided by awareness of old-school Freudian psychoanalysis, which as I understand does have probing questions as one component. ("Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about your mother...")

Thank you so much for writing this. I'm glad I'm not alone in preferring 2049 over the original. I've always felt like 2049 took the things I liked about the original movie and made a story that was mostly about those things. I also love reading about behind-the-scenes stories in movies; a lot of people tend to think of movie-making as a very individual process wherein the director controls every aspect to make a singular vision, but in reality it's deeply collaborative and those collaborations ultimately make movies better. I'm following you now and I look forward to reading anything you write in the future!

Thank you for this wonderful deep dive which only made me love this film even more. Given the state of the industry, it is a miracle the film came together as good as it did.

Okay so this post is seven months old but I only just this second realized an entire additional level of intertextuality I missed the first time:

  • "Dropping in" was developed by Shakespeare & Co in Massachusetts
  • Obviously, they're a Shakespeare company
  • In BR2049, the text K/Gosling is performing "Dropping in" on is Nabokov's "Pale Fire"
  • As glancingly mentioned above, "Pale Fire" takes its title from "The moon's an arrant thief, And her pale fire she snatches from the sun"
  • Which is a Shakespeare quote

You can get from this scene to Shakespeare by two totally different paths! Fuck!

Fantastic post.

You should read Pale Fire, which is my favorite book. "[A] man who comes to the false conclusion that he is the protagonist of someone else's story" is not really an accurate characterization of either Kinbote or Shade. You might say that story presents the reader a puzzle about which of two characters has invented the other, though that's also a little reductive.

I think this is fundamental evidence that films aren't just their directors, films are the culmination of many people working together to synthesise a vision. Villenueve is defaulted to for praise, whether by reputation, systematically or otherwise.

The baseline test alone shows the brilliance of Ryan Gosling and why, I think, he is the reason why a film as.... pretentious(??) as Only God Forgives is made better... I do believe he understands a director like NWR, and works towards the vision set by him. A scene in that film was also 'created' by Gosling the same way the baseline test is the brainchild of Gosling.

In short, Gosling is just cool. BR2049 is amazing. Can't wait for Dune: Part Two.

This is fascinating; I definitely found that part of the movie intriguing and now I want to watch it again.

I do think this is weird though:

“May All To Athens Back Again Repair”

May

Do you like the month of May? May.

Because "May" the month and "may" the verb aren't the same word at all, they just happen to be spelled the same way.

So my theory above is that Dropping In is fundamentally about making the actor consider a range of ideas that are conceptually "near" the words in the line and so could influence the line's reception. If this is the point, then the exercise is really about anticipating all the ways that an audience (or, diegetically, a character) might spontaneously free-associate upon hearing (or saying) the word. And if this is the idea, then conceptual "nearness" need not refer to the word's actual dictionary meaning as used in context, because split-second reactions are not necessarily logical.