This post necessarily contains spoilers for Blade Runner 2049. If you haven’t seen Blade Runner 2049, I suggest not reading this and just going and watching Blade Runner 2049.
…so. I really like Blade Runner 2049. Like I really like it.
I learned something wild about it yesterday. I’m going to take a minute to talk through the context, but if you just want to know what I learned, skip to “Dropping In” below.
My favorite scene in BR2049 is the “baseline test” scene. Ryan Gosling’s character K (“KD6-3.7”), fresh back in from dispassionately murdering a man at the behest of the state, takes what the movie calls a “post-traumatic baseline test”. The test is a Voight-Kampf test being performed in reverse.
“Blade Runner” / The Voight-Kampf test
The Voight-Kampf test in the Blade Runner movies is a little different from in the book. In the book (“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep”— I haven’t read it, I’ve only had this explained to me)— in the book, the point of the Voight-Kampf test is that it does not work. The test is pseudoscience and the creepy questions are testing to see if you have the same value system as the parent culture. PKD is not interested in what it means to be human. He is interested in “what does it mean for a human to decide that another person is not a human?”. PKD believes everyone is human and dehumanization is active work performed by the dehumanizer. In his book if you cannot give the correct answers to the Voight-Kampf questions, if you do not convince the tester that you feel the correct way about turtles, the culture literally dehumanizes you and you can be executed as a replicant.
The first movie is not interested in the same things PKD is interested in. The second movie is very, very interested in these things, but it’s still in the first movie’s continuity, so the Voight-Kampf still follows the first movie’s rules.
You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It’s crawling toward you. You reach down and you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
In the movies, the Voight-Kampf test “works”, but it’s based on different principles. In the movies the questions and answers do not matter; turtles do not matter. What matters is that the process of being asked the questions is unsettling and produces emotional responses. The questions no longer have cultural content (the questions are actually the same, but the culture in the movie is different), they’re just creepy. The testee is monitored during question and answer and a computer tracks whether things like their pupil and throat movements match human regular. Someone aware of neuroatypicality will immediately identify the unfairness of assuming everyone has identical emotional responses or identical somatic responses to emotion, but the first movie (which, in my opinion, is simply not as good) hasn’t thought very hard about that. The first movie does think the test is unfair, but for a different reason; the movie concludes the reason the test successfully identifies replicants is not because replicants are inhuman, or even because they are neuroatypical, but because they are children. Replicants are born in adult bodies and only accumulate two to four years of memories before getting “retired”; the “incorrect” responses are in fact simply a child’s responses. The movie posits a replicant with implanted adult memories would pass a Voight-Kampff test. Fine, whatever.
“Blade Runner 2049” / The baseline test
In Blade Runner 2049 the Voight-Kampf test is no longer used, for two reasons. First off, it is no longer needed, since replicants can be identified by barcodes in their corneas. Second off it would no longer work. Replicants now have implanted fake memories equivalent to their apparent age at birth, which under the movie rules mean a 2049 replicant that takes a Voight-Kampf test would pass it. The culture has become crueler and no longer feels it needs to work as hard to dehumanize someone. It no longer bothers with the arbitrary neurotribal metrics. It simply declares a group of people inhuman by circumstance of birth.
The “baseline”, like the Voight-Kampf, consists of being asked a series of uncomfortable questions. Like the Voight-Kampf, somatic responses determine your score. Unlike the Voight-Kampf, there is a “baseline”, a pre-memorized text the replicant has been assigned to keep in mind during the test. The replicant’s job during the test is to ignore the qu
