Do Android Detectives Dream of Electric Cowboys? Western Retrofuturity in Blade Runner 2049

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article proposes that although Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is, like the 1982 Ridley Scott film to which it is a sequel, most obviously located within the genres of science fiction and neo-noir, it in fact engages extensively with the history of the Western genre. Villeneuve’s film, I argue, is a crypto-Western, recuperating Western conventions within the aesthetic superstructure of other genres. Blade Runner 2049 thus exemplifies how even our most future-facing popular culture can exhibit ghostly traces of nostalgia for popular frontier mythologies. The film engages with the debt that the figure of the fictive detective owes to the dime novel cowboys of earlier literature, locating its central thematic discourses about the nature of (post)humanity in a long American tradition of narrative art that glorifies the ‘rugged individualist’. Meanwhile, in the film’s world, human over-exploitation of the environment has, ironically, made the wilderness conditions of the mythologised Western past possible once more. This does not, however, render Blade Runner 2049 a film incapable of imagining the future. Rather, I suggest, the film’s future is plausible precisely because it reckons with the adhesiveness of the past, and little in the American past looms larger than the real-and-imagined old West.