A World Within Logos — Deckard’s Hellish Dream
Trust beauty, just say ya love
Deckard’s casino-house in Blade Runner 2049 is a chaotic utopia of symbols. After the birth of his daughter and the death of his companion Rachel, he fled to the ruins of the abandoned city of Las Vegas, his only companion being a dog of unknown origins and an out-of-place colony of bees in the desert. Vegas has become a husk of the shining gambling-night life it means for us now, without anything but the washing sand around it and within it.
When K meets Deckard, the first thing Deckard does is quote the line from Treasure Island: “You mightn’t happen to have a piece of cheese about you now, would you boy? Many a long night I dream of cheese — toasted.” Many have thought of the implications that line can have, but the thing that interests me is that the first time he could even speak with another human being for the past 29 years, and the first thing he decides to do is a pop cultural reference. And K recognizes the reference, which to an extent surprises Deckard.
When asked how he found Deckard, K says he “Heard the piano.”
The world of Blade Runner is one of scathing critique, but also one of unparalleled beauty for me. There is something very alluring to the dark cityscape, the harsh lights, the masses of people flowing to and fro; it is clearly a very “ugly” city, so why is it so beautiful? The same can be said of all the spacious locales associated with rich, high class people in the movie. Monolithic spaces filled with almost no one, surrounded by apocalyptic forms and figures. These are clearly pointing fingers to vanity and excess of the rich, so why is this form so unnerving, and yet, so alluring? Both these spaces are polar opposites of each other, and both contain within them the text of the unnerving and the surface of pleasantry.
To me, Deckard’s casino gives me an answer: in the casino, Deckard was able to become one with the symbols, without the weight of what those symbols have to represent.
K and Deckard’s encounter becomes combat in the lower floor of the casino, which has an almost “Overlook Hotel After The Atomic Blast” aspect. Everything is filtered through these intense orange hues. Bombs set off as K runs into an auditorium of sorts, and Deckard turns on the hologram system in them, which then makes the space a nightly blue, as a glitched out Elvis sings Suspicious Minds. During their fight you see dancers of many figurines dancing on the tables to no music, you see Liberace playing the piano, a multicolored Marilyn Monroe, eventually coming back to Elvis singing “I Can’t Help Falling In Love”. “I like this song,” bluntly says Deckard.
Deckard’s stranding left him free to engage in purely what a loss of sacredness means. And it’s not for nothing that in the concert room, the holograms imitate Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. Andy Warhol, who used both, has multiple times said that his art means nothing, that his meaning is exclusively on the surface. I believe him. But the only way to talk about him is to make these symbols symbolize. It’s to make Monroe into death and Elvis into fakeness, we can’t in Warhol take those things at face value. But in Deckard’s casino theater? His elvis hologram is free to sing without anyone questioning him on it. His Marilyn Monroe is free to be beautiful without that beauty being tragic. His halls are free to be as empty or as busy as he wants them to be. He has truly become free from the grasp capital has on symbols.
Because there is no one but Deckard and K in there.
Compare it to the cityscape of the movie: beautiful as it is, I’m never allowed to run as free as I am in the casino, because at all stops we have to deal with the other. This always present Other, which is also manifested in the format itself: we are being fed these images through directors, writers, designers and countless actors populating the space and territorializing it. This “hell is other people” attitude is also present in the orphanage-dump we see earlier in the movie, why is it not as pretty as the abandoned city of Las Vegas? Because we are constantly reminded of the pain and poverty abound in that area. But not in the Casino.
I am not claiming that it is an utopia. Clearly it is a very lonely and vacant dreamscape. And when I compare it to the Overlook Hotel, we don’t need to think very far to remember how loneliness ended up manifesting there. Isolation is not the answer. But under capitalism, socialization poses an incredibly varied way of inflicting pain in you, purely by ascribing painful meanings to things out of your control, and repressing you from finding beauty in something that has brought others so much pain, alienation and sorrow. Think of the scene in Parasite where Mr. Kim has to drive the rich Madame Choi while she thanks the heavens for the rain that just destroyed Kim’s house. We are clearly supposed to find her position distasteful and showing how unaware of the proletariat struggle the Park family truly is, but the idea of thinking the rain is good is not something that can be considered morally outrageous in the movie’s eyes without the context given to us by getting to know the Kim family and their struggle. The only way to truly and unashamedly “Love” the rain would be for it and yourself to be entirely isolated from the people said pain could hurt, and the same I think is true of the claustrophobic design of the city and the unnaturally empty design of the richer rooms: we can’t 100% say either are beautiful because we will remember the pain the entire system that created those environments are.
Kodwo Eshun once said that Vangelis’ soundtrack for Blade Runner was “As futuristic as the Titanic,” a statement which I agree with. And the same could be said in double for the Hans Zimmer & Benjamin Wallfisch soundtrack for the sequel in my opinion. It is a simulation of a vague assumption of what the future sounds like. It is not a copy of a copy, the topic Baudrillard always returns to, instead it’s a copy of a prediction, which is a far weirder place of existence. But the use of the music in this scene strikes at another, more standard point of nostalgic expression: the literal use of Elvis tunes, corrupted by time, but still chugging along.
Mark Fisher has done extensive work on the idea of Hauntology, this concept of lost futures as expressed through art, and one of the main figures he used to talk about it was The Caretaker’s Memories Of The Haunted Ballroom, an album centered around music from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. In the text Home Is Where The Haunt Is: The Shining’s Hauntology, Fisher writes:
The conceit of The Caretaker’s Memories from the Haunted Ballroom has the simplicity of genius: a whole album’s worth of songs that you might have heard playing in the Gold Room in The Shining’s Overlook Hotel. Memories from the Haunted Ballroom is a series of soft-focus delirial-oneiric versions of Twenties and Thirties tearoom pop tunes, the original numbers drenched in so much reverb that they have dissolved into a suggestive audio-fog, the songs all the more evocative now that they have been reduced to hints of themselves. Thus Al Bowlly’s ‘It’s All Forgotten Now’, for instance, one of the tracks actually used by Kubrick on The Shining soundtrack, is slurred down, faded in and out, as if it is being heard in the ethereal wireless of the dreaming mind or played on the winding-down gramophone of memory.
This futuristic overlook then is showcasing us stuttering, digital holograms of Elvis as a futuristic version of Caretaker’s hissing vinyl and slurred analog warm-cold play.
In the 29 years he spent in the casino, Deckard was able to engage with all the aspects of capitalistic gaudy, rococo-esque excess, without putting up a front to anyone else. Unlike K, he doesn’t respond to superiors who interrupt his love story with his hologram, and unlike the audience, he is not invited to look at all the symbols enforced to him in a critical fashion. The desert of Las Vegas has become an un-territory that has never been reabsorbed into the capitalism we see in the rest of the movies. It has the vast emptiness of the rich areas, and the chaotic personality of the bustling city life. The only reading happening in those scenes are ones we, the lowly 2020 cynics, can enforce in it. Deckard couldn’t care less, he still likes the song.
The logos around him have at the same time lost power to connect to other people, who would enforce meaning onto them and obligate Deckard to react to the logos in favor of the other people, but they have retained their entirety for Deckard to react to. It is a lonely world brought about by tragic circumstances, but it’s not a world devoid of joy. K looks for Deckard on a specific mission; he has brought external meaning, critique and bite into Deckard’s world, with a good heart and decent intentions, but unknowingly, he was followed by the entirety of the outside world, who manage to bring Deckard back to the sprawling conspiracy the movie is about. K brought cynicism. K brought the critical lens. K brought the violence back into the logos, and all for an assumption that was, after all, incorrect.
But for those 29 years, Deckard was locked in a nightmarish paradise of referentials without references, of product without commentary, of pure unrestrained and unfeathered consumption of cultural product without capital.
It was a World Within Logos.
