Vitality and reproduction in Blade Runner 2049

Abstract

Abstract:This article traces the connections between Denis Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and the increasingly aggressive reach of contemporary biocapitalism, which seeks to turn even the basic building blocks of life itself into engines of profit. The film's preoccupation with the reproductive capacity of its replicants registers and allegorises collective anxiety about this vampiric tendency in contemporary capitalism, while the posthuman subjectivity of the chief protagonist, K (Ryan Gosling) offers the possibility of a revolutionary line of flight away from the dead-ends of liberal humanism and its self-defeating focus on heteronormative family construction.