Interesting that you used Blade Runner 2049 and looked at Joi as a character dragged along by the plot instead of controlling it. I always felt that way about Joe. He thought he was special and his life had some big dramatic narrative, but it turns out he was just one of the hundreds(?) of replicants planted with false memories to throw Jared Leto off the scent. Maybe it just speaks to how skilled the writer was at world building, but it was pretty clear that there was multiple larger, more "important" stories happening parallel to Joe's with characters that had more agency over their own plots. But for whatever reason, Joe was the character the camera decided to follow
That sounds like she's set up as a foil in the traditional sense, where Joi reflects a quality they share in a way that highlights that aspect of Joe's existence. Where the first BladeRunner focused on the emotions being a demonstrable shared quality, this one seems to highlight that both the lack of agency and 'one of many' nature of their existence is shared for VIs, AIs/replicants, and Humans alike.
Oh, I just wrote something in a similar fashion just to learn you've already encapsulated how I feel! I also really felt the moment when Joe's denied even the little comfort he had in Joi when he sees all too clearly that this, too, was not about him at all.
That's got to be the one plot beat I liked in the movie - that they twisted that expectation on its head. That was good stuff. The rest of it just didn't grab me whatsoever, aside from in the sense of a pretty slideshow of graphics.
I think what's interesting about Joe is: like Joi (ever notice those names are one letter dissimilar? I just did), Joe is transformed by choosing to believe a narrative that is- by most reasonable accounts- probably untrue. He knows his memories re implanted- but he (with a bit of nudging) chooses to believe he's special, and in doing so, changes his own trajectory. Notice it's at this point that he's found to be "way off his baseline"? He's from a line of replicants that can't really rebel- they're designed not to (for more on this, check the three shorts meant to bridge the two movies)- and yet he creates his own agency, just like Joi does by choosing to stick by him.
I recently came out of a forced mental hospital stay, and I effectively experienced having my agency AND voice taken away. It was ugly and humiliating, especially because all reports by the staff purposely ignore when I tell them that I am anxious and scared about being locked up, and chalk it up to me being “schizoid and not mentally present”. That is the ultimate expression of this, to me, and I fear it was somewhat done to “put me straight” and break me into normality, not to heal me as they kept claiming. Under modern capitalism, we are all indirectly robbed of agency, and are put away into either poverty, disease or institutions, whenever we fall off the wheel.
I've had a very similar experience. After I left my hospitalization I was briefly overjoyed only to discover that in some strange way, I'm still just as constrained.
Those facilities aren't made to treat people, it's more like a drunk-tank for psychosis. The city I was in couldn't grapple with the fact that people need compassion and housing. Theres nowhere to go without capitalism and the toll it takes on your body will kill you. Lol what a downer, i hate the mental health system of America
@@Arrakiz666 I've had a very similar experience. After [leaving] [w o r k] / [s c h o o l] I was briefly overjoyed only to discover that in some strange way, I'm still just as constrained.
@@mattwroe4776 do you for one second stop and think about what you're writing from the point of view of empathy or not. Don't fucking make hirerachies of people's pain especially since you've never been in those situations yourself. Istg the only thing you know is repeating "communism bad"
I totally agree. I find characters that are easiest to relate to are always those who begin with very little control over their lives. That has become an integral part of the human condition in the modern world. I would even go so far as saying that protagonists who have a lot of control always come off as annoying even if the movie does a lot of work to make you like them. I imagine that comes from our collective mistrust of anyone with actual power.
Wait, what? An office worker who works when's sick because she needs the money? This doesn't make sense, in almost all developed countries you have unlim... - ooooh, I forgot, this is America.
I feel like this applies very well both to poorly written characters who the story happens to.... But also many point of view characters in well written and thoughtful dystopian fiction. In 1984, it is revealed that Wilson never has any real agency, and neither do most people there, that is why the story is scary.
It applies to K too... he has agency over how he conducts his investigation, but ultimately has very little impact. K appears to have more agency than Joy because he can exert violence, in keeping with classic heroes. He ultimately makes a choice is was not programmed to make, but was Joi programmed to go as far as she did? to erase herself from the console?
I have similar frustrations about MMOs. When I say "I want a living, breathing world," I don't mean to have an avatar that can shape the world. I want to empathize with someone who has far less control, who is moved by the world. Stop telling me I'm a superhero and start telling me I'm a human.
That's a thing in singleplayer games not MMOs. It's hard for a single person to have a major impact on a MMO world. At most you'll have the aesthetics of being a superhero. You're not more super than any other player without working for it.
@@BlueSun_ Secret World dealt with that beautifully. After you create your character, you go into a training room where your handler tells you "Ow don't think that you're unique or anything, you're one of thousands who have this ability, go out of line and we can easily replace you". It was actually a pretty cool concept, that the fate of that world doesn't depend on a single guy but on all of humanity, both the ones who are touched and the ordinary ones who serve in the secret orders.
@@marcianitobailandocumbiareal If they were stupid, they could argue that. Minimum wage isn't even half of what it takes for a person to actually survive in even the most frugal parts of this country - Especially when most jobs paying the rate aren't going to offer a full 40 hours a week anyhow.
So we donn our shining armor? Standing on the shoulders of our for fathers, I might be future along than others on our planet but rising tides lift all boats.
@@stevepittman3770 Depends, how much agency would I have under student loans, without Healthcare coverage or safety net? Could I risk being self employed?
@@muhammadabdullahhanif8860 I am more of a Janney of Westphalia girl, if that's the question but there were some (German 1883) reforms people haven't complained about since 1885.
Doesn't it apply to K, then, as well? He's an android who desperetly hopes that he's not, that he's special, only to find out that he isn't even the protagonist of this story, it was someone else's and he was just someone through whom it was vehiculed for a relatively short period of time, and it will continue without him, and now all that's left for him is to die. It felt like Joi was Joe on a smaller level, one that we could grasp fully.
No. There's a big difference between being only being on the world for a short time and not having that much impact on other people during that short time and simply existing entirely for another person.
@@DavidJoh A machine exist for another person, Joi was that obviously... but so was joe, just not as obvious, the whole movie plays constantly with the questions of what is freewill and how can one achieve it? It provides a variety of characters who are BUILT specifically not to have freewill, and it provides them from the blatant, like joi, to the subtle, to the forever a mystery.
@@DavidJoh Yes Joe escaped his design and purpose and did an act of true free will. The story is about Joe achieving free will, other characters like Joi are provide as examples of lacking free will, Luv doing all she can to complete her mission, was decker operating as designed or was he human, we will never know, the whole movie is about questioning free will, how is it achieved or not, with the behaviors of different characters as examples.
i mean... i know technically you're correct that K is a subject, but it feels strange to neglect to mention that ultimately his story is built on the gut punch that he WASN'T special and WASN'T important. he just happened to be the replicant who set off the series of events in the film, because he was the one in position to witness what he did. he may be a subject in terms of story construction, but as far as the film's ideology is concerned, he's as much of an object as joi is- and indeed, the most important choice he makes is to die for a cause. which is the point, right? objects, people without agency and without choice, literal automatons in the film's text, are as human as anyone else. k thought he was a human and that it made him special, and later that he's a replicant and thus not special. but to the audience, it's evident that being "special" or not doesn't change the fact that k is a person and a hero
The idea of identifying with an character who lacks agency because one lacks agency oneself is interesting, and I hadn't thought of it before. As a woman, I have absolutely been damaged by the pervasive cultural idea that women exist for men, not for ourselves. Too many stories in which the female characters lack not just agency but desires and dreams and personalities feed into that damaging idea, and I avoid such stories (books > movies). The 2018 movie Mute was really bad for this, and I fucking hate that I wasted my time watching it. I did not identify with the paper-thin plot-device Naadirah at all.
@@InnuendoStudios It really is! I was reminded of it while watching your essay, possibly because I saw an interview with Adèle Haenel where she talks about how Héloïse travels from being an object to being a subject throughout the movie.
@@Itcouldbebunnies I feel really conflicted about this movie, more specifically about the treatment of the servant character. She just seems to exists for the other two (richer) women to grow as characters; while I realize not everyone gets to be a protagonist, I can't help but feel a little disgusting when even her having an abortion is just a means to empower her mistress. Maybe I'm reading to much into this and would need a second viewing, but I remember this leaving a sour taste after what was an otherwise very enjoyable movie...
"If we can't relate to characters with little control over their lives, how could we ever tell stories about capitalism?" Yet another layer of capitalism designed to make you not think too deeply about capitalism. Being told that characters with agency are the relatable ones makes you believe you have agency. It reinforces the notion that if you, the individual, just tried harder and made better use of your agency, that you could be the one on top of the pile.
Reminds me of the quote, “socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Think about the way our media shows people in socialist or communist countries. Everything in bland grey tones. Everyone looking and doing the same. Not like the “free world.” We’re all the heroes in our stories. Everybody is Tony Stark, not the people who were working in the office building that was demolished by the the aliens Iron Man is fighting.
A small thing: Dr. Stelline (The Memory maker) is by the definition given a subject. She chooses to lie (by omission) to K. Which dramatically changes how the story plays out from there.
There's also the memory of the wooden horse, originally hers, which she acted hiding it, and which she implanted on replicants' memories (even though using real memories is forbidden). Both actions heavily influenced the plot, even if they happened before the start of the story. I think it looks like she is an object mostly because she is a secondary character that don't appear much, has very limited options of action because of her condition, and happens to be a living macguffin for the villain...
Symbolically, she is the source of K's agency. She is the source of K's memory of an authentic childhood experience. Something he's not supposed to have, that causes him to question his role and disobey. In short, she's planted the grain that grew into his act of defiance. If we consider that the memory is the reason, then, she plays an active role in the uprisising, she's not just their totem.
Joi is the most important part of the movie, in my opinion. The framing of the story outright tells us that Replicants are people, whereas Joi's framing is so ... conflicted. We're left not knowing whether anything that she did was driven by her agency
As someone who was raised by in essence narcissist/bipolar parents, Joi was the character I could identify the most with hilariously enough. My whole existence in childhood was about serving, and what I rebelled against because nothing I did was good enough and bending over backwards only to be punished for not doing good enough is too exhausting compared to just being "bad" from the start. I used to dream of having a "good owner" as a small child (not sexually). I read too much into joi's limited agency when she invited the sexworker. As in does it really matter if it was her programming that caused her to try this, that it shouldn't devalue her unintentional personhood. We're all biological machines, personhood is created from sufficient complexity.
I have watched both movies once and am not a big fan and frankly, can't really remember what a replicant is. But if a replicant is, as you say, a person, AND they are "programmed" (in this case to provide unconditional love), then that means they lack agency - at least in that aspect - and since our relationships are arguably the most important aspect of our lives, then I would be hesitant to say someone is a person who lacks that agency. Seems to me why they are called replicants and not humans although they may be humans biologically - or mostly? I may be assuming things since I don't really understand what a replicant is. I am just using logic and my understanding of what makes us "human". Maybe the replicants are more like characters in stories we create. So, as we first watch Hamlet, for example, we don't know what is going to happen, what Hamlet and other characters in the story will do, because there is an appearance to us that Hamlet is acting out of agency, like we do. But when we see it again, we notice he says and does the same things, so we know he isn't a "real" person with agency. He is doomed to live out Nietzsche's eternal return, except he isn't aware of it because he isn't human and the humans who portray him don't have that experience - at least that they're aware of - of not having agency.
@@canteluna If I remember correctly, in the book the "androids" are so called because the companies that made them first started by making true androids. As they got better at making them more and more human, they continued calling them androids. Even when they made of flesh and blood they still called them androids. This was done so as to avoid giving them human rights, and to keep them at the bottom of society as slaves. In the movies they are called replicants, but I believe the background history remains the same. They are lab grown humans. Some are stronger, some are smarter, some are sexier. Their aptitudes are given to them, so as to make them more suitable for whatever slave work they are destined for. The fancier ones have implanted memories to help them adapt to society better. This is "programming" in a way, but it's not 1's and 0's. The purpose of this universe was to explore what makes a man a human and not a machine. The lines are purposely blurred to the point where it is explicitly stated that you can not distinguish the humans from the non-humans in day-to-day life.
I imagine that the two are intrinsically linked, even though it's rarely obvious. If death is all that you have, than how you die says everything about you. Do you die a coward's death, weeping in the corner before they find you? Do you die the brave fool, running towards certain demise, hoping only to take however many of the enemy with you? Do you die the contemplative stoic, who neither runs from or away from their fate, but reflects on what was and might have been in the final moments? All these and more have been used in storytelling over the countless ages, and all with the idea that the final moment of a characters life is the ultimate summary of the life about to end. They are (nearly) always framed in such a way that whoever the person is just before they die, is the truest reflection of who that person is.
i was thinking more along the lines of, does death then excuse all wrongdoing? or perhaps without agency, all wrongdoing is excused on someone's behalf automatically, and the only act that actually matters is their death, which they have agency over. the "sympathetic backstory" trope that often accompanies "redemption through death" only works because of empathy, so are we empathizing with a sympathetic backstory because we agree with their choices? or because we think they have none? does zero agency preclude the possibility of personal development? is this cynical and nihilist? it's something that i think is deeply related to depression, and it may be something some of us *can't allow ourselves to believe* because to do so would be crippling, and this itself would be another thing we don't have true agency over.
Redemption through death usually implies wrong-doers using their own agency to sacrifice themselves for others' sake. Wrong-doing implies they misused their own agency in the past. If the only agency they have over is their own death, that implies that choosing not to die at some point in the past was wrong; or that they chose to die in the worst moment and later they got resurrected somehow and realized the mistake they made and its consequences.
@@icecreambone on the contrary, awcknoledging that my lack of agency is hindering my personal development (and therefore my life) is a first step towards reclaiming agency
@@c0nd0rd4myt But what if someone has no agency over their death? Like dying while in a coma after a accident. Or it happens so fast, that the person does not see it coming.
Here is the thing: There is a difference between a character like Disney's Cinderella, who has very little options and therefore very little options in terms of agency, but who IS allowed to seize the few opportunities she has, and a character like the standard love interest whose lack of agency is portrayed as a force of good because it propels the male protagonist forward. There is a difference between showing that women have very little in terms of options and making this the focal point of a story, and using them as props to lift up a male character.
I have to add, there is also a difference between a character who doesn't have any agency because the system doesn't allow said character to exercise it, and a character who just doesn't have any agency, period. Male characters often struggle with the former, female character are usually cast in the latter role.
But there are plenty of male characters in most movies that are only props to lift up the protagonist. Being a supporting character isn't automatically a bad thing.
@@swanpride Less than in the past. We have Elsa and Anna, Katniss Everdeen, Rey from Star Wars, Captain Marvel, Black Widow, Wonder Woman, Alita, as well as many others. Here is a list of female heros and villians in action movies. It is a long list and it doesn't even count all the other type of movies out there. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_action_heroes_and_villains Here is a list of 200 movies with female protagonists. www.imdb.com/list/ls053903659/
Hmm. I feel like this is hitting on something important ... but that important thing isn't in Blade Runner. It's important to be able to tell empathetic stories about characters with little agency. But stories about high-agency characters we're asked to empathize with, to whom low-agency characters are subordinate to, are not those stories. In such stories it is possible to not empathize or sympathize with the low-agency characters at all and still enjoy the movie and be in synch with most of its emotional beats. The question of "Could you remove this character without changing the plot?" is, I think, a first tier approximation to a more important question. Which is "Are empathy and sympathy for this character optional?" And in Blade Runner that answer is yes.
I realize that you typed this out two years ago, but I believe it's an interesting topic to tackle still. In Blade Runner empathy and sympathy being optional is kind of the crux of the movie, it tries to lead you to the water of humanization through thorough exploration of the ideas behind the bestowing of personhood, but it doesn't try to make you drink it in through strict structural necessity from the plot and absorption of the narrative. In other words, I believe that sometimes leaving empathy optional to understanding the narrative isn't always problematic, as in this case it is done to make you critique rather than merely plod along through the narrative then decide whether or not you enjoyed it or if the story's beats felt 'off'.
I'm a writer, and I wrote a story called Deck of Clover where the main characters had little to no agency in how they lived, and only chose how they died. It's a story that I, personally, always liked, but professionally, had a hard time wrapping my head around because of how contradictory it is to the status quo of a "good story" for a protagonist to have high agency. But now I see I liked it because it was relatable to me. As an adult millennial in a world with little control over how things are, the only real option I get to choose is how I end.
Are we going to omit Luv, who is very much an agent with her own goal? She didn't just die needlessly, her fight to the death and competing wills with K was an amazing moment in the movie and she was one of my favorite characters.
This reminds me of the conundrum presented in Steven Universe about the agency of gems. In on hand, they often have their own ideas of what they want and that can diverge of the purpose with which they were made, but in the other they often feel drawn to it regardless. The most notorious case being Pearl, who was made with the sole purpose of serving Pink Diamond and as she said in one song: "I was sure she set me free but in the end I never left her side". So was Pearl ever really free considering that she chose to do what she was (basically) programmed to do, if only with more liverties given the context? Arguably, you could say yes, given that she was given the choice (at the very least once). Specially when she didn't choose to be made with the need to serve, and that programming definetly didn't include cooperating on a coup.
I'm writing a graphic novel about a main character with no real agency, and it's a fun writing challenge. This video struck a chord with me, I often feel very powerless, and have checked out of politics for the firseeable future because I can't handle the crushing sense of inevitability I always feel. Is that agency? I don't know. Thank you ♥
If you wanna test out some sections there is a UA-cam channel called Tale Foundry that has a second channel called Tae Foundry Scrapyard. On the second channel the guy livestreams narrations of short passages from people's writings. It's a really small but really positive community. Not at all something you have to do or anything, just trying to advertise a small community I like that I think deserves more attention and seems relevant to your interests.
i felt deeply uncomfortable the first time i saw this movie, in part for the lack of developed female characters beyond sexualized young women and aggresive militaristic women, and for my own personal difficulty to enjoy goslings acting. but in the end, what this video reminded me is that its not about enjoying or even about empathy. its about the themes and the message. i think back to the first reference i caught from the movie - Joe K. Joseph K., the protagonist of The Trial, one of my favorite movies. Kafka's work almost invariably has protagonists who are objects - not subjects -who have to submit to decisions made beyond their own control. They live in systems impossible to penetrate and their attempts at survival are mediated by what other characters can allow them to do. i think his work is a masterful example of these sort of characters. my biggest issues with Joi, when i saw the movie, were that 1. she is presented as a literal Object made to serve and comply to a character who, as an Active Subject, had power over her and the movie seemed to propose us to empathize with him -and since replicants are to the average viewer not truly different from a normal human being - Joi and her glitching, metamorphosing self appeared at best as a simple love interest of a different species than the protagonist, and at worst a literal slave to the protagonist. thats where the consent issues felt so pressing. and 2., which i didnt realize until watching this video, is that that helplessness and lack of options felt too close to home. her devotion and desperation towards Joe felt so honest and absolute that it was uncomfortable, in a way. her openness of emotion, compared to Joe's stoic self, exposed something about the nature of love - of affection and intimacy - that felt painful and unfair. but then again, blade runner has always been about the unfairness of life.
Very well worded and thorough. I must confess that I myself have always been troubled with this modern trope of film and literary criticism being so fixed on agency. The reason I found this odd is because it has always seemed to me a power-based philosophy to view agency as imperative. "You are a valuable as a character if you're powerful, otherwise how can I view you as valuable?" If we take this view how are we supposed to empathize with those who have never even had an opportunity in their life to have any agency? Surely, if we berate a film for not representing, say, female characters adequately this is because we're sympathizing with women who have throughout history been deprived of power and agency. Hence "how dare you not represent women as being powerful" has always seemed to me a weird criticism. The entire problem is that they were deprived of agency. The criticism is only merited if the film is suggesting that women should have no agency.
Tangent: I am so proud of how far Ana De Armas has come. I have followed her since El Internado and as a Cuban with an accent, I am glad she fulfill everyone's dreams of being a famous Hollywood actress. Gives me hope. And yeah, I know great part of it is her looks, but hey, it's something.
Thank you so much for that. I'm writing a script at the moment, and the agency of my protagonist sort of got lost on the way. Your video's given me some real tangible threads to weave with, but more than that, has kinda reminded about the importance of the theme I was going for in the first place, the whole reason I wanted to tell this story and what I want to say with. Again. Thank you so much.
This video seemed so innocuous but it gave me the words I needed to describe the situation we are living through. I knew the catch 22 situation, between the bunches of non choices we get to be subjected to, but I did not know to call it a lack of agency. It just clicked, and in hindsight it's something I could blame myself for not having known. Thank you for your video.
thank you so much for point this out!!! i knew something was bugging me about this movie about how it portrays women! I always felt the women were props rather than people with agency but while i do agree it is important to show who character can be when they lack agency i still get this feeling that joi's character construction is only understood through the male gaze. i feel like there are interesting stories though to be told aobut women who dont fit into what we want to see ideals of our empowered women, who fit into our political conviction rather than potray all the complexity of maybe being a woman who can't really be seprated from her lack of agency, and her inability to be anything but what others want her to be its fascianting but it just makes me wish the framing of the movie actually noticed that instead of affirming it, and showing a lack of awareness of the fact that its even doing this though 100% i agree that only stories about lack of agency can ever be relatable be to those lviing under late stage capitalism
yes. i agree that the framing could have been kinder to Joi - she would have seemed less like an object to be consumed by a male gaze (which may or maybe not be the point) and more like the object of a different thesis on the nature of choice, consent and humanity
I think this may be an end to the alt-right playbook, unless he does two series at once. Whether it is or not, the alt-right playbook was/is and always will be a great series. Hope this one is just as good.
I'm so happy you made that point about agency and how it is often held up as the greatest good of protagonists. Imo it limits the stories we can tell. It shows favoritism towards those with "power" on a metanarrative level and makes a playing field even more uneven.
I feel like one of those Madoka Magica style stories where someone is (spoiler alert) Endlessly repeating the same period of time over and over again attempting to find some way out but eventually failing, could be a pretty compelling structure for a story on capitalism without neccessarily SEEMING like there's no agency upfront, it's only on the 3rd or 4th loop that that would begin to sink in for the viewers.
I think the story of the flying dutchman somes up my life pretty well. Crazy yet arrogant leader who wont accept the truth and everyone who works for him is stuck in purgatory, unable to move on to anything better, no matter how many times times it is proven to him that he is wrong.
SPOILERS FOR MADOKA MAGICA: You can make the argument that Kyubey's work functions as capitalism where girls work sacrificing their bodies, souls and friendships all for a false promise where they didn't get what they wanted. The point of the system to delay entropy, one surefire way capitalism would be destroyed. To relate back to agency, Madoka was my favorite character even though she doesn't do anything until the last episode where she destroys capitalism/Kyubey's exploitation.
It's funny how that chapter revealed that the series wasn't Madoka's story. Madoka was our POV character, but she had been more like the spectator of someone else's Groundhog-day-like story, and Madoka got empowered purely by that character's persistence. @VLRgospel09 He couldn't get more in your face than at the last chapter, when he literally compared Magical Girls with cattle (while flashing images of farm animals in Madoka's mind).
Thank you for talking about this! I left this movie feeling such a palpable sense of dread. And I couldn’t quite place why. I think I was empathizing with the women; and the helplessness etc was so stark. Damsels in distress who have no choice in the matter, acting as props. Very chilling. I’ve never seen a movie where the objectification goes to such an extreme and literal point. Kind of want to rewatch with this view point in mind.
I'm keeping a running commentary throughout the video. It's just how I operate. "Do what we say or don't eat" isn't really as choice, it's an ultimatum. It is a KIND of choice, if you want to get technical, but it's a "the lesser of two evils" kind of choice. You don't want either option. I think real choice involves there being a truly preferable option.
It gets worse when you think about whether free will exists, because there are arguments against it, and it would make choices not important in the first place, it'd always be choosing the better. At least I don't see someone doing the worse thing when they "can" choose
My view of free will is that, even if the Universe is so much bigger than us that our choices are arbitrary, or even if we are socially programmed to make certain decisions over others, we have free will if we BELIEVE we have free will, because in that case, we are acting on the basis of the feeling of freedom. "Free will" is so nebulous that I think it exists, at least as a feeling if nothing else, so long as we believe it does. Just as one example, I have two water bottles: a blue one and a pink one. Which do I use? I alternate between them every other day. I'm on the blue one today. Dumb example but it was my CHOICE to do the alternating thing rather than only using one or the other. Get what I mean?
@@ActiveAdvocate1 It sounds weird to me because believing something doesn't necessarily make it exist, I think. Like, I could claim that there is a teapot at one of saturns rings, and as long as I believe in it existing, and since no one could literally look every corner of saturn to find him (and even then, one could say they didn't look well enough after it), it would exist. I didn't came up with this example though, that's Russell's teapot. I didn't even want to start a discussion, but ugh sorry that I have other points. I can't even explain why someone would do the 2 bottles thing without free will so I'm not even in the position to tell you that you're wrong and I know better
The "cosmic teapot", yes, I've heard of that. it's a little like Shrodinger's Cat (can't spell it), but at least in terms of subjectivity, it's not a lie if you believe it. In terms of objectivity, 2 and 2 are 4, and if you believe otherwise, you're wrong, BUT you may not KNOW you're wrong. There's an important line to be drawn there. We can, as you say, still legitimately believe in things that are false, but since free will, as it is contained in the mind, is subjective, not objective, it could be true OR false, depending on how e see it. It's a rational rather than empirical thing, like numbers. You can't POINT to "2". You can point to two of something but that isn't '2". "2" is a concept that exists in the mind only, and I think free will is like that. You can't point to 'free will": you can only say that you are acting freely, or others can only believe either that you are or are not. It's abstract, not concrete. And don't worry about taring a discussion. I like it.
@@ActiveAdvocate1 Oh I think I get it! But I think there's a problem. Because I don't think there are subjective truths, whether you have spent 100$ on a new game doesn't depend on what you tell everyone, it depends on how much you gave the cashier. When I talked about free will, I was always talking about truth as something objective, I'm pretty sure it's kind of the definition of truth. And I think, objectively, there is no free will, just some thing so complex it has a consciousness for itself. A comparison: You probably learned something like the circle of water where it boils in the ocean, then builds clouds in the sky and rains down, at least that's a very simple model. And you could think about how there are a lot of little things, not choosing anything, they are just dead stuff like the water, and they kind built up their own circle and make up a new very big thing called human. But the little things are just atoms doing whatever but they have no will at all. So the big thing shouldn't choose anything actually, right? It's just a bunch of atoms falling into place. However, the problem is that we can't determine everything, like the place AND the velocity of a particle at the same time. So maybe the atoms have at least a little to choose and even then, there are some kind of probabilities we can know Do you know the video by Innoendo Studios with a tomatoe as a cover? There he talked about different definitions, and some are more maluable than others and maybe you meant that
This was... incredible. It finally put words to a thought i've been carrying over for years, not really knowing or understanding it a bit, but still feeling that there is something there to know and understand.
I thought the point of the naked Joi was to demonstrate that was "she" was little more than a glorified chatbot and K had only thought her feelings were genuine...
Sad, desperate, unlikeable people would rather believe the lie than become worth another person's time. The chatbot won't tell you when you're being shitty because it isn't alive, and that is the appeal to some people
To me, that scene demonstrated the truly sinister nature of commodification more than anything else. Imagine if the only person you ever experienced emotional connection with was a commodity, bought and sold. K was faced not only with the fact that there were countless other Jois out and "in love" with their masters elsewhere, but also that he himself had bought her, that she was a product and no matter how much he may have felt for her, he never even attempted to grant her a choice in the matter of their relationship. If there was additional software that K could have installed into her system to open up her agency about the two of them, would he have done it? What does it say about him? Joi is a revealing commentary on parasocial relationships, digital assistants, and lover commodification. Joi already exists in the world of shut-away anime fans with sole obsession to a specific fictional character, and their endless consumption of products based around the character. Joi is remote sex work, Joi is the female voice in our phones that answer our questions, Joi is the model on the billboard, and Joi is the anime character sold on a body pillow for a person who may never feel true intimacy. Thus, Joi is the commodification of people in a digital setting. Reducing her to a "glorified chatbot" ignores how fragile the concept of humanity is when we really ask philosophically "what makes us human and what makes being human a good thing?" Capitalism sees no value in either concept beyond what they can extract. What do we see as valuable in it?
Just reacting to the concept (not the movie), I think the point is that a "glorified" chatbot could be truly glorious. How is AI different than biological intelligence? How is any of this different than clones? If her tech was anywhere near the level of replicants, each model would become someone different as they existed on their own. Every new experience would change them from their factory settings. So sure, a baseline might be a generic insta-love, but over time it would become a particular and unique love based on the AI's environment and choices. Fuzzy logic means that even with the exact same situation, another copy of Joi wouldn't make exactly the same decisions in the same situation. They'd be no more or less identical than the characters in Orphan Black.
@@Primalintent I think it also represented how K was a product himself, literally a slave grown in a sack to be a slave hunter. He is also contrasted to her, while he is supposed to be emotionally suppressed, she is supposed to be expressive, the AI is supposed to act more human then the clone. if K became as responsive as that he woulden't even be given the test, he would probably be killed as defective outright
i do kind of agree - its a short book and Meursault does very few things to affect other peoples lives - but he does kill someone and the story truly "starts", at least from an action and consequence standpoint, when he has to respond for the murder - and for his atheism and apparent lack of humanity. id say that Meursault is the human equivalent of a gun - it exists for a while, doing nothing, then is used to harm someone and later people have lengthy discussions about why and how that happened
In truth, I find the character most easily extractable from the film to be Jared Leto’s. Do we actually need to see him senseless murder two innocent women to understand the value and importance of this unknown child to the corporation? If Luv is only interacting with a vague directive, doesn’t that make her motivations more muddled and possibly more personal? Do we really need more megalomaniacal speeches from a rich white guy? He has plot agency but he doesn’t have story value and those are two different things. Joi has value to the story since her “are my feelings real because I am artificial” question is the whole arc of the film. It’s not a coincidence that when K has to decide whether to save Decker, a time that he has to decide whether he’s real or not, after learning he wasn’t born, that he’s confronted by the ghostly Joi. The advertisement calls into question his relationship with her and contrasts the reality of it with the ad. He decides to be like her. To choose his own cause and his own death.
Riley Scott being a bad world builder. Jared Leto's character was the worst part of the movie, and that same shit he was ranting about fucked up the new alien movies too. If scott would have just stuck to soulless computers like "Mother" being the source of the problems the movies would have been better.
The character was originally meant to be played by David Bowie, who was too sick to commit at time of filming. Which, in my mind, is the only thing holding BR2049 back from total perfection, as having DB play Wallace musing about the limits of human mortality while Bowie himself was releasing Black Star (a treatise on mortality as he was dying of cancer) is just... LAYERS.
Wallace's character is about how he thinks himself to be a god. He sees his replicants as his "angels" and frequently makes disturbing and sexual actions towards them because he is obsessed with making a replicant that can give birth to a replicant child. You're supposed to be disturbed by him and his violent tendencies. He's so obsessed with perfection, particularly of the female form, that he kills anything he doesn't deem perfect. As for his role in the story, he's part of a larger overall story. Notice that not once does Wallace ever interact with Joe. That's because Joe is not the real protagonist of this story: Deckard is. We see the movie from Joe's perspective, but his story is merely a footnote in a story much larger than him. We don't see much of Wallace because he isn't extremely important to Joe's story, but he is the main antagonist of the overall story.
TheMasterchiefan that’s the thing. Wallace has no interaction with the protagonist of the story. A god is an interesting analogy because he hangs in the ether, almost literally. It’s much better for the story to focus on Luv as a primary antagonist.
The timing of this video! Something I try to talk about is this dynamic in parenting as well. We see this ideology passed on to children. While we need some oversight as children we are often raised with so little agency. And this causes a lot of problems with consent among other things.
Does a pet dog have agency? Has anyone ever had a pet dog who didn't "love" its owner? If it's instinctual, or built-in (Joi), does that make it less authentic?
The dog has a choice, but chooses to love their owner unconditionally instead, maybe. A piece of software cannot escape its programming, its DNA doesn't change or evolve over generations. And even if self-programming becomes possible, its physicality and understanding of the world will still be limited to the hardware we give it.
Perhaps. Dogs who "love" their owners are often neglected or abused by them still. It may be instinctual to face perilous or upsetting circumstances with a grin and a glib remark, but it's possible to die inside while doing so, just as it's possible to enjoy the experience in hindsight. Just like it's possible for an abused pet or human to treat their abuser with nothing but love, whether it's authentic, instinctive, precautionary, or an emotional coping mechanism. It may be that Joi is in love by default, or it may be that the way she acts is simply a pragmatic, if deceptive, way of dealing with a man such as Joe. Some of the answers to these questions are dangerous, though. For example, the claim that workers love being exploited for their labor, for whatever reason. No matter its subject or setting, fiction is always about people in the present. What is this fiction saying about us?
@@Milan____ Human's also have programming, pre-programmed desires, now mind you it is not easy to override some of them, but it does happen now and then, suicide is an example, but just because human drivers are not completely inescapable, does not mean our freewill is not limited.
I know this is quite late, but when this video was posted, I had not yet encountered feminist film criticism, class conflict theory, or Heideggerian critiques of subjectivity. It's taken me years to understand the nuance and complexity of the conversation had here, and I've seen this movie dozens of times along the way. I return to this video often when writing my own stories because the questions you ask offer criticism that is necessary in building better stories. Thank you for this, I am truly amazed at the depth you shared and this is one of those videos that has helped frame my worldview outside of film criticism. Truly, thank you.
This was a fantastic video. You're closing line completely caught me by surprise. Despite its flaws this is one of my favorite movies that I like to rewatch, I think it's going to feel different the next time I see it thanks to this.
The final sentence of this video essay should be explored so much more than it is. This is one of your best videos, I think. Succinct, but full of meaning and clearly relates complex ideas to an audience that may not have had the right perspective to see what was there all along. Especially in light of the collapse of progressivism in the democratic primary, this feels especially apropos; our agency diminished and our identification with Joi increased.
my question is: yes Joi was programmed to love without her choice by someone else, but then you make the point that we do not have that, teat we may decide. but can we? every day from birth there are a million pressures that subtly influence our desire. how is this any different from joi? you might say ours is not created by anyone person but an entire world. but joi was as well. yes she has a maker, but that maker was confined in their decisions by a world of pressure. at the end of the day,a ll our desires are built by an entire world that we have very little say in.
I found you in my recommendations after watching Hello Future Me and man i'm so glad it did! I've been very picky of which video essayists to listen to bc some just spout nothing of concrete substance but this is quality cntent. thank you!
I find it fascinating that the artificial human (Kay/Joe) has a relationship with the one character that is MORE artificial than himself (Joi), but their relationship ends up being one of the most genuinely human parts of the film. BR2049 is brilliant.
Was pretty interesting to hear you talk through a perspective on the film and it’s characters and messaging that starts off contradictory to what I got out of it but repeatedly circles to the points I saw too. Importantly despite it feeling like that to me it never came off like falling into the same trap so many film videos do on here of simply explaining the premise and themes of a story, instead you repeated them by going through the reactive journey probably intended by the film as an art piece and you emphasised why it matters to you personally on an emotional and political level and that’s really cool to me!
This is really interesting in the context of disability studies (something I know very little about but have been researching recently). There is an idea in enlightenment discourse to imagine the self as an autonomous, individualised being. Think of the State of Nature or Rawls' Original Position. In order to imagine a perfect world, we need to understand ourselves as individuals, seperate from one another. But the interdependence necessitated by some forms of disability makes clear that this doesnt always work. Not to say that only disability allows for this analysis, but that it is a clear example of such interdependence and the way it is treated in wider society. For example, this is why carers in movies (and in real life) are feminised, degraded and kept at low wages. Because the idea of someone depending on you challenges the idea of the individualised self and anything aberrant is always treated with disgust. EDIT: I removed the insinutation that disability is the only way interdepence can manifest in society.
Pfft - disabled or not, we're all interdependent. Even the idealized Robinson Crusoe is going to have a grossly impoverished mental life with lifetime solitary confinement, and just about no one is a Robinson Crusoe anyway. Disability doesn't put us in some thoroughly distinct category that way - it just underlines the failure of that individualistic ideal more forcefully. Putting it this way invites a hope that enough compensation for our handicaps could restore the viability of that liberal individualistic conception. We're not exceptions - we're _clearer examples_ of the interdependence of the human condition than the fully abled. It's just that the specifics of our greater dependence are not standardized.
@@jeffengel2607 That's what I was trying to say. I didn't disagree with this video and say "Only disabled people aren't autonomous individuals". I only meant that disability studies allows for a greater understanding of the necessity of this interdependence.
@@comiclover99 Okay. I was just pointing up how you put it may have steered thinking away from what you may have meant. My response was intended as friendly massaging rather than particular disagreement.
@@jeffengel2607 Im sorry if I was too confrontational myself. It was the pffft at the beginning that annoyed me because it was so instantly dismissive. But I see that we actually agree on this. I'm going to edit my original comment to make sure its more clear about what I meant. Thank you!
Totally agree! The brilliance of Blade Runner 2049 is that while Joi is probably the character with the least agency, she is by far the most human. thanks especially to Ana de Armas amazing performance!
short but sweet, and very insightful. i think you’re right about the relatability of characters with little to no agency. i tend to relate to them more bc i too, have little agency in my life and in this society. i wish i couldn’t notice it, because i hate that it’s true. but i do, and it makes me bitter. loved the video mate, keep up the good work :)
Sexualizing the female form in film is not empowering, it's objectifying. You dont really hear that enough. Glorifying the horrors of violence is another thing film media does.
In my experience, I usually see people label what is objectifying and what is empowering largely on the person doing it. Usually, if a woman or transgender person is sexualizing the female form, it’s considered feminist and empowering and sometimes sometimes body positive. If it’s a man-particularly a cisgender, heterosexual man-then it’s objectifying, dehumanizing, and sometimes fetishistic.
Jamien I’m genuinely listening to you if you’d like to explain to me the difference. Personally, I think it’s based mostly on intent, but then again it’s hard to say. You could argue that even the sleaziest of pornos are a celebration of the female figure in the same way that “The Birth of Venus” is.
I really enjoyed this. I really liked talking about empathy for characters who are just swept up in stories. I liked the focus on women and oppression. Great work
There's quite a good horror/speculative series from the 60s but too many feature women who passively adore the main character. One of them is even a mannequin. Quite funny but annoying too
Like with everything, I think it's a balance. I think being told you're trapped in a system you can't possibly change over and over robs you of agency just as much as being told to fix yourself in a system that exists to break you.The fantasy subgenre Grimdark is characterised by characters' internal conflicts being driven entirely by external forces, and the genre offers some incredibly deft commentary on how systems and institutions are self-perpetuating once built, creating incentive structures for the actors in them to maintain the status quo whenever someone seeks to destabilize it. But personally I find this outlook on the world incredibly disheartening. Not because it is entirely wrong, but because we need more narratives that offer solutions to systemic problems, and we need those alternate futures to be hopeful so we can engage with them meaningfully.
I remember her as one of my favorite characters in the movie and the hologram threesome sex scene was great. That said, I agree on your observation that the story suffers from being primarily driven by men.
So to break the chain slightly: does anyone have any suspicions about whether long comment threads, or many top-level comments is most impactful? Algorithm
@@emdivine I did a lil' research just now and it seems that "how many comments are at least moderately rated" (however high that is) and the length of the comment chain are the important factors. The algorithm has to think we're engaged in a conversation about the video
I actually would like to say that's one of the things I liked so much about Ex Machina, in that it inverted that trope and flipped it on its head. Through the entirety of the movie you are following the story of the programmer, who believes - like you believe the entire movie - that he has agency and choice, and then at the end you find the only person who had any agency through the entire movie (spoiler heh!) was the robot - the object through the entire movie that everyone acted upon... who was just manipulating everyone the whole time.
@@AtariEric Yeah, just look at the abortion debate in religion-governed countries like the US. But weirdly enough the federal constitutional court in super rigid Germany has just overturned the ban on assisted suicide. It now gives people the right to use commercial services in the country where they previously had to ask their families to assist with their deaths, or travel to Switzerland.
2nd3rd1st I think assisted suicide is a better example for this than is abortion. I’m 100% pro-choice, but arguing that fetuses have a say in being aborted is unjustified (if that is what you meant to imply). I’m pro-choice for the woman, not the baby: it seems like common sense that the fetus would inherently have no choice.
Thank you for this small video-essay! I am writing a novel where the main character (female) has some agency but often has to deal with forces way bigger than her which affect her life. So, I was really unsure is it a good choice to limit her agency in that way and your work made me look at it from another angle
Awww man I was hoping for a final endnote in the Alt-Right playbook. The last, biggest and most important thread you left hanging was that of pyramid vs line. Do we still get a video that will get into the philosophy of hierarchy? Because right now that whole series you've been leading to why the underlying equalizing philosophy of 'the left' is better than the underlying hierarchical philosophy of 'the right' and then it just stops :( You pointing out that they exist just isn't enough, lots of right-wing philosophers will proudly display it them self. The real meat, where you almost entered into, is WHY one is better than the other. That is the real discussion.
“As an elder millennial, with no money in a broken democracy with a pitiless economy on a dying rock in space” Alright pal, you are getting a little close to 🏠. Knock it off.
Adam Lindell see, people like you are why we can’t have discourse. I didn’t even comment on capitalism. You make it about something it’s not. Capitalism and socialism are not mutually exclusive LOOK AT SOME OTHER COUNTRIES.
Joe Average I appreciate you taking the time to verbally acknowledge that this dude is a chud. He was quite chuddy in all ways, and I completely agree with your analysis. ::tips hat:: Pleasant ‘Morrow, good sir!
Interesting that you used Blade Runner 2049 and looked at Joi as a character dragged along by the plot instead of controlling it. I always felt that way about Joe. He thought he was special and his life had some big dramatic narrative, but it turns out he was just one of the hundreds(?) of replicants planted with false memories to throw Jared Leto off the scent. Maybe it just speaks to how skilled the writer was at world building, but it was pretty clear that there was multiple larger, more "important" stories happening parallel to Joe's with characters that had more agency over their own plots. But for whatever reason, Joe was the character the camera decided to follow
That sounds like she's set up as a foil in the traditional sense, where Joi reflects a quality they share in a way that highlights that aspect of Joe's existence. Where the first BladeRunner focused on the emotions being a demonstrable shared quality, this one seems to highlight that both the lack of agency and 'one of many' nature of their existence is shared for VIs, AIs/replicants, and Humans alike.
The ending of Blade Runner 2049 felt like the beginning, or I guess a continuation, of Deckard's story.
Oh, I just wrote something in a similar fashion just to learn you've already encapsulated how I feel! I also really felt the moment when Joe's denied even the little comfort he had in Joi when he sees all too clearly that this, too, was not about him at all.
That's got to be the one plot beat I liked in the movie - that they twisted that expectation on its head. That was good stuff. The rest of it just didn't grab me whatsoever, aside from in the sense of a pretty slideshow of graphics.
I think what's interesting about Joe is: like Joi (ever notice those names are one letter dissimilar? I just did), Joe is transformed by choosing to believe a narrative that is- by most reasonable accounts- probably untrue.
He knows his memories re implanted- but he (with a bit of nudging) chooses to believe he's special, and in doing so, changes his own trajectory. Notice it's at this point that he's found to be "way off his baseline"?
He's from a line of replicants that can't really rebel- they're designed not to (for more on this, check the three shorts meant to bridge the two movies)- and yet he creates his own agency, just like Joi does by choosing to stick by him.
I recently came out of a forced mental hospital stay, and I effectively experienced having my agency AND voice taken away. It was ugly and humiliating, especially because all reports by the staff purposely ignore when I tell them that I am anxious and scared about being locked up, and chalk it up to me being “schizoid and not mentally present”. That is the ultimate expression of this, to me, and I fear it was somewhat done to “put me straight” and break me into normality, not to heal me as they kept claiming.
Under modern capitalism, we are all indirectly robbed of agency, and are put away into either poverty, disease or institutions, whenever we fall off the wheel.
I've had a very similar experience. After I left my hospitalization I was briefly overjoyed only to discover that in some strange way, I'm still just as constrained.
Those facilities aren't made to treat people, it's more like a drunk-tank for psychosis. The city I was in couldn't grapple with the fact that people need compassion and housing. Theres nowhere to go without capitalism and the toll it takes on your body will kill you. Lol what a downer, i hate the mental health system of America
@@Arrakiz666 I've had a very similar experience. After [leaving] [w o r k] / [s c h o o l] I was briefly overjoyed only to discover that in some strange way, I'm still just as constrained.
Better than communism and being dead
@@mattwroe4776 do you for one second stop and think about what you're writing from the point of view of empathy or not. Don't fucking make hirerachies of people's pain especially since you've never been in those situations yourself. Istg the only thing you know is repeating "communism bad"
I totally agree. I find characters that are easiest to relate to are always those who begin with very little control over their lives. That has become an integral part of the human condition in the modern world. I would even go so far as saying that protagonists who have a lot of control always come off as annoying even if the movie does a lot of work to make you like them. I imagine that comes from our collective mistrust of anyone with actual power.
What do you mean "has become"?
That's why dystopian YA novels sell well. The capitalist culture breeds that ennui as income inequalities increase.
Wait, what? An office worker who works when's sick because she needs the money? This doesn't make sense, in almost all developed countries you have unlim... - ooooh, I forgot, this is America.
ZOGG?!? It's been years man! How are you doing? Are you planning on making more of those phenomenal videos?
The US is the most developed 3rd world country.
I agree it's more like the 5th most developed 3rd world country
@Noble Commando but are you going to?
@Noble Commando I was under the impression it was closer to 11.5% but go on, i wanna see where this is going
So... "What happens when the point of view character is an object?" feels like the next question.
I feel like this applies very well both to poorly written characters who the story happens to.... But also many point of view characters in well written and thoughtful dystopian fiction. In 1984, it is revealed that Wilson never has any real agency, and neither do most people there, that is why the story is scary.
*whispers* Jupiter Ascending
It applies to K too... he has agency over how he conducts his investigation, but ultimately has very little impact. K appears to have more agency than Joy because he can exert violence, in keeping with classic heroes.
He ultimately makes a choice is was not programmed to make, but was Joi programmed to go as far as she did? to erase herself from the console?
The Death of Mr Lazarescu
It immediately stops being an object, is the answer. Your mind is physically incapable of considering a POV character as an object.
I have similar frustrations about MMOs. When I say "I want a living, breathing world," I don't mean to have an avatar that can shape the world. I want to empathize with someone who has far less control, who is moved by the world. Stop telling me I'm a superhero and start telling me I'm a human.
That's a thing in singleplayer games not MMOs. It's hard for a single person to have a major impact on a MMO world.
At most you'll have the aesthetics of being a superhero. You're not more super than any other player without working for it.
@@BlueSun_ Secret World dealt with that beautifully. After you create your character, you go into a training room where your handler tells you "Ow don't think that you're unique or anything, you're one of thousands who have this ability, go out of line and we can easily replace you". It was actually a pretty cool concept, that the fate of that world doesn't depend on a single guy but on all of humanity, both the ones who are touched and the ordinary ones who serve in the secret orders.
Try Pathologic. I would explain why it's excellent but Hbomberguy already has a video on it, so you can just watch that if you need convincing.
@@Renteks-
thats what i was thinking, although from what i heard the original was jank as shit so imo i think they should try the sequel first.
@@Renteks- it's not a mmo
"give your employers as good as an automation would, or maybe don't get paid."
wow isn't capitalism just a ball of fun??
@@Bushflare In Soviet Union everyone has chicken, comrade!
This is Capitalist Realism at it's finest.
I mean, one could argue that the minimum wage has moreso forced workers to improve their productive capabilities so drastically.
@@marcianitobailandocumbiareal If they were stupid, they could argue that. Minimum wage isn't even half of what it takes for a person to actually survive in even the most frugal parts of this country - Especially when most jobs paying the rate aren't going to offer a full 40 hours a week anyhow.
Yes.
Under capitalism, we're all the damsel in distress and no prince is coming.
So we donn our shining armor? Standing on the shoulders of our for fathers, I might be future along than others on our planet but rising tides lift all boats.
@@fionafiona1146 Is my boat truly lifted if I what I gain is trinkets and debt but no agency?
@@stevepittman3770
Depends, how much agency would I have under student loans, without Healthcare coverage or safety net? Could I risk being self employed?
Prince charming Marx never come huh?
@@muhammadabdullahhanif8860
I am more of a Janney of Westphalia girl, if that's the question but there were some (German 1883) reforms people haven't complained about since 1885.
Doesn't it apply to K, then, as well? He's an android who desperetly hopes that he's not, that he's special, only to find out that he isn't even the protagonist of this story, it was someone else's and he was just someone through whom it was vehiculed for a relatively short period of time, and it will continue without him, and now all that's left for him is to die.
It felt like Joi was Joe on a smaller level, one that we could grasp fully.
No. There's a big difference between being only being on the world for a short time and not having that much impact on other people during that short time and simply existing entirely for another person.
@@DavidJoh A machine exist for another person, Joi was that obviously... but so was joe, just not as obvious, the whole movie plays constantly with the questions of what is freewill and how can one achieve it? It provides a variety of characters who are BUILT specifically not to have freewill, and it provides them from the blatant, like joi, to the subtle, to the forever a mystery.
I felt the same, that joi and K were differently strong echos of the same
@@frbe0101 Joi's only thought was how she could serve Joe. The same does not apply to Joe regardless of whose purposes his life served.
@@DavidJoh Yes Joe escaped his design and purpose and did an act of true free will. The story is about Joe achieving free will, other characters like Joi are provide as examples of lacking free will, Luv doing all she can to complete her mission, was decker operating as designed or was he human, we will never know, the whole movie is about questioning free will, how is it achieved or not, with the behaviors of different characters as examples.
i mean... i know technically you're correct that K is a subject, but it feels strange to neglect to mention that ultimately his story is built on the gut punch that he WASN'T special and WASN'T important. he just happened to be the replicant who set off the series of events in the film, because he was the one in position to witness what he did. he may be a subject in terms of story construction, but as far as the film's ideology is concerned, he's as much of an object as joi is- and indeed, the most important choice he makes is to die for a cause.
which is the point, right? objects, people without agency and without choice, literal automatons in the film's text, are as human as anyone else. k thought he was a human and that it made him special, and later that he's a replicant and thus not special. but to the audience, it's evident that being "special" or not doesn't change the fact that k is a person and a hero
The idea of identifying with an character who lacks agency because one lacks agency oneself is interesting, and I hadn't thought of it before. As a woman, I have absolutely been damaged by the pervasive cultural idea that women exist for men, not for ourselves. Too many stories in which the female characters lack not just agency but desires and dreams and personalities feed into that damaging idea, and I avoid such stories (books > movies). The 2018 movie Mute was really bad for this, and I fucking hate that I wasted my time watching it. I did not identify with the paper-thin plot-device Naadirah at all.
You should watch Portrait Of A Lady On Fire (if you haven't already), it's a brilliant movie that's all about women.
That movie is really, really good.
@@InnuendoStudios
It really is! I was reminded of it while watching your essay, possibly because I saw an interview with Adèle Haenel where she talks about how Héloïse travels from being an object to being a subject throughout the movie.
@@Itcouldbebunnies Thanks, I'll check it out
@@Itcouldbebunnies I feel really conflicted about this movie, more specifically about the treatment of the servant character. She just seems to exists for the other two (richer) women to grow as characters; while I realize not everyone gets to be a protagonist, I can't help but feel a little disgusting when even her having an abortion is just a means to empower her mistress. Maybe I'm reading to much into this and would need a second viewing, but I remember this leaving a sour taste after what was an otherwise very enjoyable movie...
"If we can't relate to characters with little control over their lives, how could we ever tell stories about capitalism?"
Yet another layer of capitalism designed to make you not think too deeply about capitalism. Being told that characters with agency are the relatable ones makes you believe you have agency. It reinforces the notion that if you, the individual, just tried harder and made better use of your agency, that you could be the one on top of the pile.
Damn
Reminds me of the quote, “socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
Think about the way our media shows people in socialist or communist countries. Everything in bland grey tones. Everyone looking and doing the same. Not like the “free world.” We’re all the heroes in our stories. Everybody is Tony Stark, not the people who were working in the office building that was demolished by the the aliens Iron Man is fighting.
Actually they want you to relate to protagonists with agency because people who do something are better than people who do nothing, like you.
@@WhaleManMan do you truly believe that the most advertised stories will be those against the status quo?
A small thing: Dr. Stelline (The Memory maker) is by the definition given a subject. She chooses to lie (by omission) to K. Which dramatically changes how the story plays out from there.
There's also the memory of the wooden horse, originally hers, which she acted hiding it, and which she implanted on replicants' memories (even though using real memories is forbidden). Both actions heavily influenced the plot, even if they happened before the start of the story.
I think it looks like she is an object mostly because she is a secondary character that don't appear much, has very limited options of action because of her condition, and happens to be a living macguffin for the villain...
Symbolically, she is the source of K's agency. She is the source of K's memory of an authentic childhood experience. Something he's not supposed to have, that causes him to question his role and disobey. In short, she's planted the grain that grew into his act of defiance. If we consider that the memory is the reason, then, she plays an active role in the uprisising, she's not just their totem.
Joi is the most important part of the movie, in my opinion. The framing of the story outright tells us that Replicants are people, whereas Joi's framing is so ... conflicted. We're left not knowing whether anything that she did was driven by her agency
As someone who was raised by in essence narcissist/bipolar parents, Joi was the character I could identify the most with hilariously enough. My whole existence in childhood was about serving, and what I rebelled against because nothing I did was good enough and bending over backwards only to be punished for not doing good enough is too exhausting compared to just being "bad" from the start. I used to dream of having a "good owner" as a small child (not sexually). I read too much into joi's limited agency when she invited the sexworker. As in does it really matter if it was her programming that caused her to try this, that it shouldn't devalue her unintentional personhood. We're all biological machines, personhood is created from sufficient complexity.
I have watched both movies once and am not a big fan and frankly, can't really remember what a replicant is. But if a replicant is, as you say, a person, AND they are "programmed" (in this case to provide unconditional love), then that means they lack agency - at least in that aspect - and since our relationships are arguably the most important aspect of our lives, then I would be hesitant to say someone is a person who lacks that agency. Seems to me why they are called replicants and not humans although they may be humans biologically - or mostly? I may be assuming things since I don't really understand what a replicant is. I am just using logic and my understanding of what makes us "human".
Maybe the replicants are more like characters in stories we create. So, as we first watch Hamlet, for example, we don't know what is going to happen, what Hamlet and other characters in the story will do, because there is an appearance to us that Hamlet is acting out of agency, like we do. But when we see it again, we notice he says and does the same things, so we know he isn't a "real" person with agency. He is doomed to live out Nietzsche's eternal return, except he isn't aware of it because he isn't human and the humans who portray him don't have that experience - at least that they're aware of - of not having agency.
Does it matter to K? It's real enough to him. I feel like that's the point.
@@canteluna If I remember correctly, in the book the "androids" are so called because the companies that made them first started by making true androids. As they got better at making them more and more human, they continued calling them androids. Even when they made of flesh and blood they still called them androids. This was done so as to avoid giving them human rights, and to keep them at the bottom of society as slaves.
In the movies they are called replicants, but I believe the background history remains the same. They are lab grown humans. Some are stronger, some are smarter, some are sexier. Their aptitudes are given to them, so as to make them more suitable for whatever slave work they are destined for. The fancier ones have implanted memories to help them adapt to society better. This is "programming" in a way, but it's not 1's and 0's.
The purpose of this universe was to explore what makes a man a human and not a machine. The lines are purposely blurred to the point where it is explicitly stated that you can not distinguish the humans from the non-humans in day-to-day life.
im wondering how "death is all we have agency over" interacts with the "redemption through death" trope
I imagine that the two are intrinsically linked, even though it's rarely obvious.
If death is all that you have, than how you die says everything about you. Do you die a coward's death, weeping in the corner before they find you? Do you die the brave fool, running towards certain demise, hoping only to take however many of the enemy with you? Do you die the contemplative stoic, who neither runs from or away from their fate, but reflects on what was and might have been in the final moments?
All these and more have been used in storytelling over the countless ages, and all with the idea that the final moment of a characters life is the ultimate summary of the life about to end. They are (nearly) always framed in such a way that whoever the person is just before they die, is the truest reflection of who that person is.
i was thinking more along the lines of, does death then excuse all wrongdoing? or perhaps without agency, all wrongdoing is excused on someone's behalf automatically, and the only act that actually matters is their death, which they have agency over. the "sympathetic backstory" trope that often accompanies "redemption through death" only works because of empathy, so are we empathizing with a sympathetic backstory because we agree with their choices? or because we think they have none?
does zero agency preclude the possibility of personal development? is this cynical and nihilist? it's something that i think is deeply related to depression, and it may be something some of us *can't allow ourselves to believe* because to do so would be crippling, and this itself would be another thing we don't have true agency over.
Redemption through death usually implies wrong-doers using their own agency to sacrifice themselves for others' sake. Wrong-doing implies they misused their own agency in the past. If the only agency they have over is their own death, that implies that choosing not to die at some point in the past was wrong; or that they chose to die in the worst moment and later they got resurrected somehow and realized the mistake they made and its consequences.
@@icecreambone on the contrary, awcknoledging that my lack of agency is hindering my personal development (and therefore my life) is a first step towards reclaiming agency
@@c0nd0rd4myt But what if someone has no agency over their death? Like dying while in a coma after a accident. Or it happens so fast, that the person does not see it coming.
Here is the thing: There is a difference between a character like Disney's Cinderella, who has very little options and therefore very little options in terms of agency, but who IS allowed to seize the few opportunities she has, and a character like the standard love interest whose lack of agency is portrayed as a force of good because it propels the male protagonist forward. There is a difference between showing that women have very little in terms of options and making this the focal point of a story, and using them as props to lift up a male character.
BROOOOOO 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
I have to add, there is also a difference between a character who doesn't have any agency because the system doesn't allow said character to exercise it, and a character who just doesn't have any agency, period. Male characters often struggle with the former, female character are usually cast in the latter role.
But there are plenty of male characters in most movies that are only props to lift up the protagonist. Being a supporting character isn't automatically a bad thing.
And how often is said protagonist male?
@@swanpride Less than in the past. We have Elsa and Anna, Katniss Everdeen, Rey from Star Wars, Captain Marvel, Black Widow, Wonder Woman, Alita, as well as many others.
Here is a list of female heros and villians in action movies. It is a long list and it doesn't even count all the other type of movies out there.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_action_heroes_and_villains
Here is a list of 200 movies with female protagonists.
www.imdb.com/list/ls053903659/
Hmm. I feel like this is hitting on something important ... but that important thing isn't in Blade Runner.
It's important to be able to tell empathetic stories about characters with little agency. But stories about high-agency characters we're asked to empathize with, to whom low-agency characters are subordinate to, are not those stories. In such stories it is possible to not empathize or sympathize with the low-agency characters at all and still enjoy the movie and be in synch with most of its emotional beats.
The question of "Could you remove this character without changing the plot?" is, I think, a first tier approximation to a more important question. Which is "Are empathy and sympathy for this character optional?" And in Blade Runner that answer is yes.
I realize that you typed this out two years ago, but I believe it's an interesting topic to tackle still. In Blade Runner empathy and sympathy being optional is kind of the crux of the movie, it tries to lead you to the water of humanization through thorough exploration of the ideas behind the bestowing of personhood, but it doesn't try to make you drink it in through strict structural necessity from the plot and absorption of the narrative.
In other words, I believe that sometimes leaving empathy optional to understanding the narrative isn't always problematic, as in this case it is done to make you critique rather than merely plod along through the narrative then decide whether or not you enjoyed it or if the story's beats felt 'off'.
This is a weird joi
Right?
I was wondering who else noticed that association.
Ah, finally, a joi that isn't made exclusively for one anatomy configuration.
Yeah, and it has proper grammar too.. strange
I hate how poisoned my brain is that I thought about this meaning first
I'm a writer, and I wrote a story called Deck of Clover where the main characters had little to no agency in how they lived, and only chose how they died. It's a story that I, personally, always liked, but professionally, had a hard time wrapping my head around because of how contradictory it is to the status quo of a "good story" for a protagonist to have high agency.
But now I see I liked it because it was relatable to me. As an adult millennial in a world with little control over how things are, the only real option I get to choose is how I end.
Not even 10 seconds into the video, and you've helped me finally contextualise what makes that scene so awkward feeling and existentially weird.
Are we going to omit Luv, who is very much an agent with her own goal? She didn't just die needlessly, her fight to the death and competing wills with K was an amazing moment in the movie and she was one of my favorite characters.
This reminds me of the conundrum presented in Steven Universe about the agency of gems.
In on hand, they often have their own ideas of what they want and that can diverge of the purpose with which they were made, but in the other they often feel drawn to it regardless.
The most notorious case being Pearl, who was made with the sole purpose of serving Pink Diamond and as she said in one song: "I was sure she set me free but in the end I never left her side". So was Pearl ever really free considering that she chose to do what she was (basically) programmed to do, if only with more liverties given the context? Arguably, you could say yes, given that she was given the choice (at the very least once). Specially when she didn't choose to be made with the need to serve, and that programming definetly didn't include cooperating on a coup.
I'm writing a graphic novel about a main character with no real agency, and it's a fun writing challenge. This video struck a chord with me, I often feel very powerless, and have checked out of politics for the firseeable future because I can't handle the crushing sense of inevitability I always feel. Is that agency? I don't know.
Thank you ♥
If you wanna test out some sections there is a UA-cam channel called Tale Foundry that has a second channel called Tae Foundry Scrapyard. On the second channel the guy livestreams narrations of short passages from people's writings. It's a really small but really positive community. Not at all something you have to do or anything, just trying to advertise a small community I like that I think deserves more attention and seems relevant to your interests.
i felt deeply uncomfortable the first time i saw this movie, in part for the lack of developed female characters beyond sexualized young women and aggresive militaristic women, and for my own personal difficulty to enjoy goslings acting. but in the end, what this video reminded me is that its not about enjoying or even about empathy. its about the themes and the message.
i think back to the first reference i caught from the movie - Joe K. Joseph K., the protagonist of The Trial, one of my favorite movies. Kafka's work almost invariably has protagonists who are objects - not subjects -who have to submit to decisions made beyond their own control. They live in systems impossible to penetrate and their attempts at survival are mediated by what other characters can allow them to do. i think his work is a masterful example of these sort of characters.
my biggest issues with Joi, when i saw the movie, were that 1. she is presented as a literal Object made to serve and comply to a character who, as an Active Subject, had power over her and the movie seemed to propose us to empathize with him -and since replicants are to the average viewer not truly different from a normal human being - Joi and her glitching, metamorphosing self appeared at best as a simple love interest of a different species than the protagonist, and at worst a literal slave to the protagonist. thats where the consent issues felt so pressing.
and 2., which i didnt realize until watching this video, is that that helplessness and lack of options felt too close to home. her devotion and desperation towards Joe felt so honest and absolute that it was uncomfortable, in a way. her openness of emotion, compared to Joe's stoic self, exposed something about the nature of love - of affection and intimacy - that felt painful and unfair. but then again, blade runner has always been about the unfairness of life.
"If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do." -Angel
Having 30 different kinds of toothpaste to choose from at the store is all the agency I need, thanks.
Very well worded and thorough. I must confess that I myself have always been troubled with this modern trope of film and literary criticism being so fixed on agency. The reason I found this odd is because it has always seemed to me a power-based philosophy to view agency as imperative. "You are a valuable as a character if you're powerful, otherwise how can I view you as valuable?" If we take this view how are we supposed to empathize with those who have never even had an opportunity in their life to have any agency? Surely, if we berate a film for not representing, say, female characters adequately this is because we're sympathizing with women who have throughout history been deprived of power and agency. Hence "how dare you not represent women as being powerful" has always seemed to me a weird criticism. The entire problem is that they were deprived of agency. The criticism is only merited if the film is suggesting that women should have no agency.
Tangent: I am so proud of how far Ana De Armas has come. I have followed her since El Internado and as a Cuban with an accent, I am glad she fulfill everyone's dreams of being a famous Hollywood actress. Gives me hope. And yeah, I know great part of it is her looks, but hey, it's something.
Oh shit, I thought she looked familiar in Knives Out but didn't remember where I'd seen her. She's amazing, what a star on the rise.
Thank you so much for that. I'm writing a script at the moment, and the agency of my protagonist sort of got lost on the way. Your video's given me some real tangible threads to weave with, but more than that, has kinda reminded about the importance of the theme I was going for in the first place, the whole reason I wanted to tell this story and what I want to say with. Again. Thank you so much.
This video seemed so innocuous but it gave me the words I needed to describe the situation we are living through. I knew the catch 22 situation, between the bunches of non choices we get to be subjected to, but I did not know to call it a lack of agency. It just clicked, and in hindsight it's something I could blame myself for not having known. Thank you for your video.
thank you so much for point this out!!! i knew something was bugging me about this movie about how it portrays women! I always felt the women were props rather than people with agency
but while i do agree it is important to show who character can be when they lack agency i still get this feeling that joi's character construction is only understood through the male gaze.
i feel like there are interesting stories though to be told aobut women who dont fit into what we want to see ideals of our empowered women, who fit into our political conviction rather than potray all the complexity of maybe being a woman who can't really be seprated from her lack of agency, and her inability to be anything but what others want her to be
its fascianting but it just makes me wish the framing of the movie actually noticed that instead of affirming it, and showing a lack of awareness of the fact that its even doing this
though 100% i agree that only stories about lack of agency can ever be relatable be to those lviing under late stage capitalism
yes. i agree that the framing could have been kinder to Joi - she would have seemed less like an object to be consumed by a male gaze (which may or maybe not be the point) and more like the object of a different thesis on the nature of choice, consent and humanity
I think this may be an end to the alt-right playbook, unless he does two series at once. Whether it is or not, the alt-right playbook was/is and always will be a great series. Hope this one is just as good.
No, ARP has at least 5 videos left. These are little ones that will come out intermittently when I need a breather from white nationalism.
The whole "Bringing Back What's Stolen" series was in-between alt-right playbook episodes. (Both are awesome.)
@@InnuendoStudios We could all use a breather from white nationalism.
Harold Flowers, what is your pfp?
@@Dorian_sapiens Anti-centrist flag. I enjoy the movement cause it actually helps us.
Although I'm a man I actually related to Joi the most and did not like the fact that her love was so casually dismissed as meaningless.
I haven't yet seen Parasite or Knives Out, but I hear they are pretty good stories about capitalism
Go watch them! Both are fantastic. If you have time make some to go see them
And with significantly less sexist writing tropes too.
Kinives out also has ana de armas, who is just as much a Joi to watch :) Parasite has earned every ounce of praise it's gotten.
I'm so happy you made that point about agency and how it is often held up as the greatest good of protagonists. Imo it limits the stories we can tell. It shows favoritism towards those with "power" on a metanarrative level and makes a playing field even more uneven.
I feel like one of those Madoka Magica style stories where someone is (spoiler alert)
Endlessly repeating the same period of time over and over again attempting to find some way out but eventually failing, could be a pretty compelling structure for a story on capitalism without neccessarily SEEMING like there's no agency upfront, it's only on the 3rd or 4th loop that that would begin to sink in for the viewers.
I think the story of the flying dutchman somes up my life pretty well. Crazy yet arrogant leader who wont accept the truth and everyone who works for him is stuck in purgatory, unable to move on to anything better, no matter how many times times it is proven to him that he is wrong.
SPOILERS FOR MADOKA MAGICA:
You can make the argument that Kyubey's work functions as capitalism where girls work sacrificing their bodies, souls and friendships all for a false promise where they didn't get what they wanted. The point of the system to delay entropy, one surefire way capitalism would be destroyed. To relate back to agency, Madoka was my favorite character even though she doesn't do anything until the last episode where she destroys capitalism/Kyubey's exploitation.
It's funny how that chapter revealed that the series wasn't Madoka's story. Madoka was our POV character, but she had been more like the spectator of someone else's Groundhog-day-like story, and Madoka got empowered purely by that character's persistence.
@VLRgospel09 He couldn't get more in your face than at the last chapter, when he literally compared Magical Girls with cattle (while flashing images of farm animals in Madoka's mind).
something something Endless Eight
A perspective I hadn't considered about a film I really didn't enjoy, thank you for making this
Thank you for talking about this! I left this movie feeling such a palpable sense of dread. And I couldn’t quite place why. I think I was empathizing with the women; and the helplessness etc was so stark. Damsels in distress who have no choice in the matter, acting as props. Very chilling. I’ve never seen a movie where the objectification goes to such an extreme and literal point. Kind of want to rewatch with this view point in mind.
I'm keeping a running commentary throughout the video. It's just how I operate. "Do what we say or don't eat" isn't really as choice, it's an ultimatum. It is a KIND of choice, if you want to get technical, but it's a "the lesser of two evils" kind of choice. You don't want either option. I think real choice involves there being a truly preferable option.
It gets worse when you think about whether free will exists, because there are arguments against it, and it would make choices not important in the first place, it'd always be choosing the better. At least I don't see someone doing the worse thing when they "can" choose
My view of free will is that, even if the Universe is so much bigger than us that our choices are arbitrary, or even if we are socially programmed to make certain decisions over others, we have free will if we BELIEVE we have free will, because in that case, we are acting on the basis of the feeling of freedom. "Free will" is so nebulous that I think it exists, at least as a feeling if nothing else, so long as we believe it does. Just as one example, I have two water bottles: a blue one and a pink one. Which do I use? I alternate between them every other day. I'm on the blue one today. Dumb example but it was my CHOICE to do the alternating thing rather than only using one or the other. Get what I mean?
@@ActiveAdvocate1 It sounds weird to me because believing something doesn't necessarily make it exist, I think.
Like, I could claim that there is a teapot at one of saturns rings, and as long as I believe in it existing, and since no one could literally look every corner of saturn to find him (and even then, one could say they didn't look well enough after it), it would exist. I didn't came up with this example though, that's Russell's teapot.
I didn't even want to start a discussion, but ugh sorry that I have other points. I can't even explain why someone would do the 2 bottles thing without free will so I'm not even in the position to tell you that you're wrong and I know better
The "cosmic teapot", yes, I've heard of that. it's a little like Shrodinger's Cat (can't spell it), but at least in terms of subjectivity, it's not a lie if you believe it. In terms of objectivity, 2 and 2 are 4, and if you believe otherwise, you're wrong, BUT you may not KNOW you're wrong. There's an important line to be drawn there. We can, as you say, still legitimately believe in things that are false, but since free will, as it is contained in the mind, is subjective, not objective, it could be true OR false, depending on how e see it. It's a rational rather than empirical thing, like numbers. You can't POINT to "2". You can point to two of something but that isn't '2". "2" is a concept that exists in the mind only, and I think free will is like that. You can't point to 'free will": you can only say that you are acting freely, or others can only believe either that you are or are not. It's abstract, not concrete. And don't worry about taring a discussion. I like it.
@@ActiveAdvocate1 Oh I think I get it! But I think there's a problem. Because I don't think there are subjective truths, whether you have spent 100$ on a new game doesn't depend on what you tell everyone, it depends on how much you gave the cashier.
When I talked about free will, I was always talking about truth as something objective, I'm pretty sure it's kind of the definition of truth. And I think, objectively, there is no free will, just some thing so complex it has a consciousness for itself.
A comparison: You probably learned something like the circle of water where it boils in the ocean, then builds clouds in the sky and rains down, at least that's a very simple model. And you could think about how there are a lot of little things, not choosing anything, they are just dead stuff like the water, and they kind built up their own circle and make up a new very big thing called human. But the little things are just atoms doing whatever but they have no will at all. So the big thing shouldn't choose anything actually, right? It's just a bunch of atoms falling into place.
However, the problem is that we can't determine everything, like the place AND the velocity of a particle at the same time. So maybe the atoms have at least a little to choose and even then, there are some kind of probabilities we can know
Do you know the video by Innoendo Studios with a tomatoe as a cover? There he talked about different definitions, and some are more maluable than others and maybe you meant that
This was... incredible. It finally put words to a thought i've been carrying over for years, not really knowing or understanding it a bit, but still feeling that there is something there to know and understand.
I thought the point of the naked Joi was to demonstrate that was "she" was little more than a glorified chatbot and K had only thought her feelings were genuine...
doesn't that require that he bought her without understanding what she was?
Sad, desperate, unlikeable people would rather believe the lie than become worth another person's time. The chatbot won't tell you when you're being shitty because it isn't alive, and that is the appeal to some people
To me, that scene demonstrated the truly sinister nature of commodification more than anything else. Imagine if the only person you ever experienced emotional connection with was a commodity, bought and sold. K was faced not only with the fact that there were countless other Jois out and "in love" with their masters elsewhere, but also that he himself had bought her, that she was a product and no matter how much he may have felt for her, he never even attempted to grant her a choice in the matter of their relationship. If there was additional software that K could have installed into her system to open up her agency about the two of them, would he have done it? What does it say about him?
Joi is a revealing commentary on parasocial relationships, digital assistants, and lover commodification. Joi already exists in the world of shut-away anime fans with sole obsession to a specific fictional character, and their endless consumption of products based around the character. Joi is remote sex work, Joi is the female voice in our phones that answer our questions, Joi is the model on the billboard, and Joi is the anime character sold on a body pillow for a person who may never feel true intimacy.
Thus, Joi is the commodification of people in a digital setting. Reducing her to a "glorified chatbot" ignores how fragile the concept of humanity is when we really ask philosophically "what makes us human and what makes being human a good thing?" Capitalism sees no value in either concept beyond what they can extract. What do we see as valuable in it?
Just reacting to the concept (not the movie), I think the point is that a "glorified" chatbot could be truly glorious. How is AI different than biological intelligence? How is any of this different than clones? If her tech was anywhere near the level of replicants, each model would become someone different as they existed on their own. Every new experience would change them from their factory settings. So sure, a baseline might be a generic insta-love, but over time it would become a particular and unique love based on the AI's environment and choices. Fuzzy logic means that even with the exact same situation, another copy of Joi wouldn't make exactly the same decisions in the same situation. They'd be no more or less identical than the characters in Orphan Black.
@@Primalintent I think it also represented how K was a product himself, literally a slave grown in a sack to be a slave hunter. He is also contrasted to her, while he is supposed to be emotionally suppressed, she is supposed to be expressive, the AI is supposed to act more human then the clone. if K became as responsive as that he woulden't even be given the test, he would probably be killed as defective outright
I think you could say that pretty much all of Kafka's writings are about protagonists with no agency.
Reminded me of that famous Albert Camus novel "The Stranger". The main character has barely any agency yet is (at least) partially empathize with him.
i do kind of agree - its a short book and Meursault does very few things to affect other peoples lives - but he does kill someone and the story truly "starts", at least from an action and consequence standpoint, when he has to respond for the murder - and for his atheism and apparent lack of humanity. id say that Meursault is the human equivalent of a gun - it exists for a while, doing nothing, then is used to harm someone and later people have lengthy discussions about why and how that happened
Yes you can ask me something tricky, but I can't promise I can answer.
Something something character agency. Something something Jupiter Ascending.
No wedding is complete without Channing Tatum crashing a spaceship into it.
He is a GOOD BOY. And I have always loved dogs.
Sexy Lamp Test still needs to exist I guess
Welcome back. I've missed you but I appreciate this banger. Great work.
In truth, I find the character most easily extractable from the film to be Jared Leto’s.
Do we actually need to see him senseless murder two innocent women to understand the value and importance of this unknown child to the corporation?
If Luv is only interacting with a vague directive, doesn’t that make her motivations more muddled and possibly more personal?
Do we really need more megalomaniacal speeches from a rich white guy?
He has plot agency but he doesn’t have story value and those are two different things. Joi has value to the story since her “are my feelings real because I am artificial” question is the whole arc of the film. It’s not a coincidence that when K has to decide whether to save Decker, a time that he has to decide whether he’s real or not, after learning he wasn’t born, that he’s confronted by the ghostly Joi. The advertisement calls into question his relationship with her and contrasts the reality of it with the ad. He decides to be like her. To choose his own cause and his own death.
Riley Scott being a bad world builder. Jared Leto's character was the worst part of the movie, and that same shit he was ranting about fucked up the new alien movies too. If scott would have just stuck to soulless computers like "Mother" being the source of the problems the movies would have been better.
The character was originally meant to be played by David Bowie, who was too sick to commit at time of filming. Which, in my mind, is the only thing holding BR2049 back from total perfection, as having DB play Wallace musing about the limits of human mortality while Bowie himself was releasing Black Star (a treatise on mortality as he was dying of cancer) is just... LAYERS.
@@hollandscottthomas damn
Wallace's character is about how he thinks himself to be a god. He sees his replicants as his "angels" and frequently makes disturbing and sexual actions towards them because he is obsessed with making a replicant that can give birth to a replicant child. You're supposed to be disturbed by him and his violent tendencies. He's so obsessed with perfection, particularly of the female form, that he kills anything he doesn't deem perfect.
As for his role in the story, he's part of a larger overall story. Notice that not once does Wallace ever interact with Joe. That's because Joe is not the real protagonist of this story: Deckard is. We see the movie from Joe's perspective, but his story is merely a footnote in a story much larger than him. We don't see much of Wallace because he isn't extremely important to Joe's story, but he is the main antagonist of the overall story.
TheMasterchiefan that’s the thing. Wallace has no interaction with the protagonist of the story.
A god is an interesting analogy because he hangs in the ether, almost literally.
It’s much better for the story to focus on Luv as a primary antagonist.
The timing of this video!
Something I try to talk about is this dynamic in parenting as well. We see this ideology passed on to children. While we need some oversight as children we are often raised with so little agency. And this causes a lot of problems with consent among other things.
Does a pet dog have agency? Has anyone ever had a pet dog who didn't "love" its owner? If it's instinctual, or built-in (Joi), does that make it less authentic?
Good questions. I don't think it makes it less authentic.
It is not about authenticity but more of value we place in autonomy (and not violating another being's rights).
The dog has a choice, but chooses to love their owner unconditionally instead, maybe. A piece of software cannot escape its programming, its DNA doesn't change or evolve over generations. And even if self-programming becomes possible, its physicality and understanding of the world will still be limited to the hardware we give it.
Perhaps. Dogs who "love" their owners are often neglected or abused by them still. It may be instinctual to face perilous or upsetting circumstances with a grin and a glib remark, but it's possible to die inside while doing so, just as it's possible to enjoy the experience in hindsight. Just like it's possible for an abused pet or human to treat their abuser with nothing but love, whether it's authentic, instinctive, precautionary, or an emotional coping mechanism. It may be that Joi is in love by default, or it may be that the way she acts is simply a pragmatic, if deceptive, way of dealing with a man such as Joe.
Some of the answers to these questions are dangerous, though. For example, the claim that workers love being exploited for their labor, for whatever reason. No matter its subject or setting, fiction is always about people in the present. What is this fiction saying about us?
@@Milan____ Human's also have programming, pre-programmed desires, now mind you it is not easy to override some of them, but it does happen now and then, suicide is an example, but just because human drivers are not completely inescapable, does not mean our freewill is not limited.
I know this is quite late, but when this video was posted, I had not yet encountered feminist film criticism, class conflict theory, or Heideggerian critiques of subjectivity. It's taken me years to understand the nuance and complexity of the conversation had here, and I've seen this movie dozens of times along the way. I return to this video often when writing my own stories because the questions you ask offer criticism that is necessary in building better stories. Thank you for this, I am truly amazed at the depth you shared and this is one of those videos that has helped frame my worldview outside of film criticism. Truly, thank you.
This is so good! Very glad to see you coming out with more content
Have some engagement! I'm gonna come back and watch this several times.
Woah it's been a while, welcome back
This was a fantastic video. You're closing line completely caught me by surprise. Despite its flaws this is one of my favorite movies that I like to rewatch, I think it's going to feel different the next time I see it thanks to this.
The final sentence of this video essay should be explored so much more than it is. This is one of your best videos, I think. Succinct, but full of meaning and clearly relates complex ideas to an audience that may not have had the right perspective to see what was there all along. Especially in light of the collapse of progressivism in the democratic primary, this feels especially apropos; our agency diminished and our identification with Joi increased.
my question is: yes Joi was programmed to love without her choice by someone else, but then you make the point that we do not have that, teat we may decide. but can we? every day from birth there are a million pressures that subtly influence our desire. how is this any different from joi? you might say ours is not created by anyone person but an entire world. but joi was as well. yes she has a maker, but that maker was confined in their decisions by a world of pressure. at the end of the day,a ll our desires are built by an entire world that we have very little say in.
Neat visual style, this video.
I found you in my recommendations after watching Hello Future Me and man i'm so glad it did! I've been very picky of which video essayists to listen to bc some just spout nothing of concrete substance but this is quality cntent. thank you!
Probably the best video I’ve seen this year
Wait did you use the font Agency FB to write agency? Niiice
I find it fascinating that the artificial human (Kay/Joe) has a relationship with the one character that is MORE artificial than himself (Joi), but their relationship ends up being one of the most genuinely human parts of the film. BR2049 is brilliant.
Was pretty interesting to hear you talk through a perspective on the film and it’s characters and messaging that starts off contradictory to what I got out of it but repeatedly circles to the points I saw too.
Importantly despite it feeling like that to me it never came off like falling into the same trap so many film videos do on here of simply explaining the premise and themes of a story, instead you repeated them by going through the reactive journey probably intended by the film as an art piece and you emphasised why it matters to you personally on an emotional and political level and that’s really cool to me!
This is really interesting in the context of disability studies (something I know very little about but have been researching recently). There is an idea in enlightenment discourse to imagine the self as an autonomous, individualised being. Think of the State of Nature or Rawls' Original Position. In order to imagine a perfect world, we need to understand ourselves as individuals, seperate from one another. But the interdependence necessitated by some forms of disability makes clear that this doesnt always work. Not to say that only disability allows for this analysis, but that it is a clear example of such interdependence and the way it is treated in wider society. For example, this is why carers in movies (and in real life) are feminised, degraded and kept at low wages. Because the idea of someone depending on you challenges the idea of the individualised self and anything aberrant is always treated with disgust.
EDIT: I removed the insinutation that disability is the only way interdepence can manifest in society.
Pfft - disabled or not, we're all interdependent. Even the idealized Robinson Crusoe is going to have a grossly impoverished mental life with lifetime solitary confinement, and just about no one is a Robinson Crusoe anyway. Disability doesn't put us in some thoroughly distinct category that way - it just underlines the failure of that individualistic ideal more forcefully. Putting it this way invites a hope that enough compensation for our handicaps could restore the viability of that liberal individualistic conception. We're not exceptions - we're _clearer examples_ of the interdependence of the human condition than the fully abled. It's just that the specifics of our greater dependence are not standardized.
@@jeffengel2607 That's what I was trying to say. I didn't disagree with this video and say "Only disabled people aren't autonomous individuals". I only meant that disability studies allows for a greater understanding of the necessity of this interdependence.
@@comiclover99 Okay. I was just pointing up how you put it may have steered thinking away from what you may have meant. My response was intended as friendly massaging rather than particular disagreement.
@@jeffengel2607 Im sorry if I was too confrontational myself. It was the pffft at the beginning that annoyed me because it was so instantly dismissive. But I see that we actually agree on this. I'm going to edit my original comment to make sure its more clear about what I meant. Thank you!
@@comiclover99 Ah, sorry about that. I was pffting an idea you brought up, not one you were advocating.
Totally agree! The brilliance of Blade Runner 2049 is that while Joi is probably the character with the least agency, she is by far the most human. thanks especially to Ana de Armas amazing performance!
This is some of the smartest, most useful content on BreadTube. Thank you, Innuendo Studios. 🙌
short but sweet, and very insightful.
i think you’re right about the relatability of characters with little to no agency. i tend to relate to them more bc i too, have little agency in my life and in this society. i wish i couldn’t notice it, because i hate that it’s true. but i do, and it makes me bitter.
loved the video mate, keep up the good work :)
Sexualizing the female form in film is not empowering, it's objectifying. You dont really hear that enough. Glorifying the horrors of violence is another thing film media does.
We hear that all the time. It's nothing novel in our circles.
edit: Not discrediting what you're saying, this just isn't a radical idea.
In my experience, I usually see people label what is objectifying and what is empowering largely on the person doing it. Usually, if a woman or transgender person is sexualizing the female form, it’s considered feminist and empowering and sometimes sometimes body positive. If it’s a man-particularly a cisgender, heterosexual man-then it’s objectifying, dehumanizing, and sometimes fetishistic.
@Supreme Snek Shut up.
@@Idontknow-sb7wb It only looks that way if you don't understand what objectification actually is.
Jamien I’m genuinely listening to you if you’d like to explain to me the difference. Personally, I think it’s based mostly on intent, but then again it’s hard to say. You could argue that even the sleaziest of pornos are a celebration of the female figure in the same way that “The Birth of Venus” is.
Yes, thank you that video was so great
I really enjoyed this. I really liked talking about empathy for characters who are just swept up in stories. I liked the focus on women and oppression. Great work
I didn't have to feel sad at the supermarket at 10am but I did, amazing video as always
There's quite a good horror/speculative series from the 60s but too many feature women who passively adore the main character. One of them is even a mannequin. Quite funny but annoying too
Like with everything, I think it's a balance. I think being told you're trapped in a system you can't possibly change over and over robs you of agency just as much as being told to fix yourself in a system that exists to break you.The fantasy subgenre Grimdark is characterised by characters' internal conflicts being driven entirely by external forces, and the genre offers some incredibly deft commentary on how systems and institutions are self-perpetuating once built, creating incentive structures for the actors in them to maintain the status quo whenever someone seeks to destabilize it. But personally I find this outlook on the world incredibly disheartening. Not because it is entirely wrong, but because we need more narratives that offer solutions to systemic problems, and we need those alternate futures to be hopeful so we can engage with them meaningfully.
I've never seen the topics of the agency of characters and ours under capitalism be connected this way. Brilliant video.
I absolutely love this video. I've watched several times and try to memorize it.
Loved the video!
I remember her as one of my favorite characters in the movie and the hologram threesome sex scene was great. That said, I agree on your observation that the story suffers from being primarily driven by men.
I feel that agency in capitalism is summed up in the job description phrasing: "...and any other duties as assigned".
God I miss you videos, yet another masterpiece
I really wish you would've included a spoiler warning for Blade Runner 2049.
Algorithm
Algorithm
So to break the chain slightly: does anyone have any suspicions about whether long comment threads, or many top-level comments is most impactful?
Algorithm
@@emdivine I did a lil' research just now and it seems that "how many comments are at least moderately rated" (however high that is) and the length of the comment chain are the important factors. The algorithm has to think we're engaged in a conversation about the video
Algorthudmgokmbv
Take my world jumble, machine overlords!
Thank you for taking the time to help .
So happy to see you put out a new video my dude, missed your dry wit and intelligent content, ta very much :)
You do a much better job than I when relating this concept that capitalism DOESN'T have consent in the traditional agency sense, only coercion.
What a brilliant piece... I'll need to think about this.
WOW... Talk about food for thought.
HE'S BACK!
Mr. Innuendo :) I'm very glad to see you back online.
This made me get damn near close to crying. Thanks for this, Ian
this title....
Click Bain't
I actually would like to say that's one of the things I liked so much about Ex Machina, in that it inverted that trope and flipped it on its head. Through the entirety of the movie you are following the story of the programmer, who believes - like you believe the entire movie - that he has agency and choice, and then at the end you find the only person who had any agency through the entire movie (spoiler heh!) was the robot - the object through the entire movie that everyone acted upon... who was just manipulating everyone the whole time.
How is this sooo good? Holy hell! Great work! 😍
I'd call this your best video to date
The right to die on one's own terms should be a universal human right.
The fact that it isn't shows how desperate our obsessed controlling class is about dictating every aspect of our lives.
@@AtariEric Yeah, just look at the abortion debate in religion-governed countries like the US. But weirdly enough the federal constitutional court in super rigid Germany has just overturned the ban on assisted suicide. It now gives people the right to use commercial services in the country where they previously had to ask their families to assist with their deaths, or travel to Switzerland.
2nd3rd1st I think assisted suicide is a better example for this than is abortion. I’m 100% pro-choice, but arguing that fetuses have a say in being aborted is unjustified (if that is what you meant to imply). I’m pro-choice for the woman, not the baby: it seems like common sense that the fetus would inherently have no choice.
It’s possible you just worded your response poorly, which is understandable.
Blade runner 2049 was great. Looking forward to Dune.
I still wish they’d try to make Dune into a game of thrones style miniseries, rather than a movie
@@jbarbeau92 en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Herbert%27s_Dune
Thank you for this small video-essay! I am writing a novel where the main character (female) has some agency but often has to deal with forces way bigger than her which affect her life. So, I was really unsure is it a good choice to limit her agency in that way and your work made me look at it from another angle
You really put it together there.
The porn industry has ruined the word “joi” for me...
In-universe there will undoubtedly be JOI apps for Joi to interface with.
...I'll show myself out.
how? ou can just now. or you are denying your agency?
?
@@crispybutters I must have had a stroke writing this. how? you can just not watch porn. or are you denying your agency
Awww man I was hoping for a final endnote in the Alt-Right playbook. The last, biggest and most important thread you left hanging was that of pyramid vs line. Do we still get a video that will get into the philosophy of hierarchy? Because right now that whole series you've been leading to why the underlying equalizing philosophy of 'the left' is better than the underlying hierarchical philosophy of 'the right' and then it just stops :(
You pointing out that they exist just isn't enough, lots of right-wing philosophers will proudly display it them self. The real meat, where you almost entered into, is WHY one is better than the other. That is the real discussion.
Wow under a video under 20 minutes? I didn't think it was possible
Holy cow this is amazing. Thank you.
“As an elder millennial, with no money in a broken democracy with a pitiless economy on a dying rock in space”
Alright pal, you are getting a little close to 🏠. Knock it off.
It's the best time for the most people in history and capitalism is the reason.
Adam Lindell see, people like you are why we can’t have discourse. I didn’t even comment on capitalism. You make it about something it’s not.
Capitalism and socialism are not mutually exclusive LOOK AT SOME OTHER COUNTRIES.
Joe Average I appreciate you taking the time to verbally acknowledge that this dude is a chud. He was quite chuddy in all ways, and I completely agree with your analysis.
::tips hat:: Pleasant ‘Morrow, good sir!
@@AdamLindell It's gonna be the worst time in recent history for most people and capitalism is the reason.