Last fall, while attending an academic conference in Northern Virginia, a friend and I skipped the afternoon sessions to visit the National Gallery of Art. We looked at some Poussin—we had recently read T.J. Clark’s The Sight of Death—and lingered in front of Matisse’s La Coiffure. I tried to feel something looking at Rothkos in ambient lighting. Walking by Twombly’s Untitled (Bolsena), my friend told me he finds the work freeing. Such innocence in its childlikeness! I looked and saw literal childlikeness—I could imagine a child having drawn it—so I peered and tried to get a mental foothold, as if looking at it just right could crack open the work for me.
My friend is a painter, and I knew that looking at art with someone who understands the technical aspects of the craft would be illuminating. My favorite works were those that allowed us to have sustained conversations about it, verbal volleys of questions and answers: Was the seat in La Coiffure big enough to support the woman’s butt? Why is the mirror so understated? She’s seated at an angle, isn’t she? He asked questions about light—where was it coming from, was there more than one source, how was it creating shadows like that—and I was delighted to have “learned” “the light question,” carrying it from painting to painting to notice new details.
I wasn’t used to vocalizing my approach to paintings. What struck me was just how question-driven my art appreciation is. I wanted to know what the artist was trying to do. Maybe I treat artworks like philosophy, something that will reward good questions with insight. I approach paintings as if noticing isn’t enough, as if delight has to be intellectually grounded for it to be real. What counted was the right question.
I also approach films this way. A Serious Man (2009) repeats the question from The Book of Job: what answers do we find compelling in the midst of suffering? Arrival (2016) asks about language and time, yes, but also about knowledge and responsibility. A Hidden Life (2019) asks what it means to form our own judgments. Blade Runner (1982) asks whether Deckard is a replicant (and what rides on it), and The Matrix (1999) asks us whether we would take the red pill or the blue pill, whether we care about what’s real and what choices we have.
A part of me knew that much of what made Blade Runner interesting was the ambiguity—but the lesser part of me still wanted to know, dammit, whether Deckard is a replicant. And what was so interesting—and challenging—about Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) was that it sidestepped the Deckard Question while repeatedly teasing the issue. I felt as if the movie was addressing me.
K (Ryan Gosling) is a replicant blade runner who suspects he was born, not made, of Deckard (Harrison Ford) and Rachael (Sean Young); this would make him something of a miracle, since replicants aren’t believed to be capable of procreation. When K meets Deckard for the first time, he accurately identifies a line Deckard quotes from Treasure Island—not unlike little, eager me hoping I’m informed enough to catch references, too. When confronted with violence, K says, “I just have some questions.” “What questions?” Deckard barks, but K’s not quite ready to ask and he runs away. I, too, would not have been ready to ask the main question.
When a conversation went like:
K: [looking at Deckard’s dog] “Is it real?”
D: “I don’t know, ask him.”
I groaned. Did Deckard really not know? Did he care? The movie set itself up for the Deckard Question over and over again:
D: What do you want, Joe?
K: I wanna ask you some questions.
D: Like what?
K: Like what was her name, the mother of your child? What was she like? [pause] You two live here together?
D: Too many questions. I had your job. I was good at it.
K: It was simpler then.
D: Why are you making it complicated?
K: Why don’t you just answer the question?
D: What question?
K: [slamming cup] I didn’t figure you as one for bullshit.
I felt as if K was me, interrogating Deckard about the truth of his being. Of course, K was there to establish the truth of his own being. But the fact that it very well might have been my own self there with Deckard, and the fact that the film takes the question elsewhere, made me feel not only seen, but also scolded. It knew what I was thinking, what I wanted—and the continual circling around it, while ultimately refusing to approach it, made me feel taunted.
“I didn’t want our child found,” Deckard says at one point. “Taken apart. Dissected.” Isn’t that precisely what we had done with Blade Runner, looking for clues, taking details apart one by one to see what it told us about Deckard? Isn’t this what I’m doing with this very scene? Just like Billy Collins’ students in “Introduction to Poetry,” I wanted to “tie the [work] to a chair with rope/ and torture a confession out of it,” “beating it with a hose / to find out what it really means.”
When K is in Las Vegas with Deckard, the sand storm washes everything in deep orange. We’re looking at everything in sepia, but more saturated, more chaotic. It feels less trustworthy, perhaps because it is warm and dream-like. Soon after I saw the movie for the first time, San Francisco turned the same color during an especially bad fire season.
Over and over again, Blade Runner 2049 presented parallels to Blade Runner: We see Joi in the rain like we see Roy in the rain; just as the soundtrack hides Roy’s wailing at Pris’s death, the sound cuts out when Luv kills Madame; the music that plays when Roy dies returns when K dies in the snow. But I didn’t see what nugget of insight I was meant to glean from these reiterations. Just notice and enjoy it, the movie seemed to be telling me. Isn’t the thrill of recognition enough?
When K visits Dr. Ana Stelline (Carla Juri), a scientist who creates memories to implant in replicants in order to ‘stabilize’ them, he asks her whether she ever uses authentic memories. Though she reminds him that it’s illegal to use real memories, upon observing K’s vivid memory from the orphanage, Ana gets emotional and confirms someone lived the memory. It had happened. It was a real memory, and K had it. Stunned, K says, “I know it’s real.” Face in hands, voice shaky, he says it again before screaming and kicking.
We hear something very similar from Deckard when he’s face to face with Niander Wallace (Jared Leto). Wallace, the god-complexed head of the replicant-manufacturing Wallace Corporation, brings up the Deckard Question again as if he’ll settle it: he suggests Deckard is a replicant who was designed to fall in love with Rachael. What he thought was love was a precise mathematical plan. Coming in and out of the shadow cast by moving lights, Deckard responds: “I know what’s real.” He is teary.
Such confident possessions of knowledge of the real from both protagonists—but, of course, both K and Deckard are wrong. K mistakes having something real with being something real. In stating that Rachael’s eyes were green, Deckard claims he can know what’s real when what’s known doesn’t accord with what everyone else knows. I got the distinct sense that knowledge no longer means much in Blade Runner 2049, or at least that the kinds of “knowledge” that mean the most to us will be mistaken (perhaps willfully so), messy, or so personal as to be irretrievable for others. What is real is messy, Ana had said. I felt the film saying: you can have what’s real, but you may not know it, at least not in the conventional sense.
Typical neo-noir features—moody cityscape, ever-present rain, neon signs fuzzy with the Tyndall effect, ubiquitous shadows, a mystery at the heart of the plot, the search for meaning, the eventual twist—are of course all present in Blade Runner 2049. But the movie did more: it exported the uncertainty outside. I didn’t just observe moodiness, but embodied it. I felt anxious: did I have the ‘right’ approach, or not? Was I ‘getting’ it? The foreboding sense of doom wasn’t about the characters, but about my understanding of the movie. I felt the shifting ground beneath me as the project I set out for myself—settle the Deckard Question—crumbled. When I felt taunted, or lost, the movie asked what more do you want?, stunning me with the immensity of solar power plants in gloomy California, the desolation of an orange sand storm, the magnificence of the way water casts ripples on the wall.
In the final scene, K brings Deckard to meet his daughter:
K: All the best memories are hers.
D: [pause] Why? Who am I to you?
K: [Smiling] Go meet your daughter.
I immediately thought of two other men who asked the same question, the son of man and the Son of God. David asks God, wonderstruck and grateful, “What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” (Psalm 8:4) A thousand years later, Matthew, Mark, and Luke each recount Jesus asking his disciples “Who do you say I am?” He wants to know what those closest to him—and not the masses—say about him. When Peter answers to his liking, that he is the Son of the living God, Jesus says what Peter knows is divinely revealed to him (Matthew 16:16).
These allusions—if they are allusions—make sense to me. Deckard is expressing incredulity at such care (towards both K and me), and the movie is suggesting for the last time that any true thing I might come to believe won’t be won by hard-earned effort, but freely given. Instead of pining to be special—like K wanting to be a real boy, Joi (Ana de Armas) wanting to be a real girl, Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) wanting to be the best, the replicant rebel saying they all wish they were the miracle—I could simply accept what I was given. The original and the sequel were full of such gracious giving: Roy saves Deckard, the rebels safeguard Ana, and K brings Deckard to Ana.
Blade Runner 2049 gently pried away my questions and showed me there is another way to watch movies. But it wasn’t until The Matrix Resurrections (2021) that I realized not all question-setting-aside is satisfactory.
The Matrix (1999) is the quintessential ‘philosophical movie,’ a dramatization of external world skepticism. I have colleagues who refuse to teach it in their Philosophy and Film classes, saying it’d be cliche. Overdone or not, I was captivated when I first saw it during finals week in college (and struggled to remain convinced that exams were ‘real’). Going in, I knew the red pill/blue pill scene was significant, and watching Neo (Keanu Reeves) take the red pill, I relished the elevation of truth. It mattered to know what was real, and it felt empowering to be shown that we had a choice. “Remember,” Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) says, “all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.” Gosh, what a line!
I adored how The Matrix Reloaded (2003) then asked just what it means to take the red pill.
The Architect (Helmut Bakaitis) reveals that Neo’s choice to pursue the truth was a preordained path to deal with “an unbalanced equation” that structures the matrix. The awakening itself becomes another puzzle to address. Earlier, the Oracle (Gloria Foster) had told Neo “You’ve already made the choice. You’re here to try to understand why you made it.” She’s sitting on a bench, facing half a dozen crows, and the candy she eats looks like a red pill. Having confirmed The Oracle is a program, Neo asks why she is helping humans, and she responds that “We’re all here to do what we’re all here to do.” In Matrix Revolutions (2003), Neo eventually ends the war between humans and machines by sacrificing himself, the truth born out of the red pill culminating in the acknowledgement that the more you know, the more you’re responsible. At the end of the trilogy, the questions about whether we’d take the red pill, and what that would mean, transmute beautifully into two final questions: Do you understand your own choices? Now that you know, what will you do?
An unexpected continuation of the Matrix franchise, The Matrix Resurrections was disorienting because it undermined the scheme that drove the original trilogy’s increasingly sophisticated commentary on what it means to pursue the truth. The questions that came to define the original film–Would you take the red pill? What does it mean to take the red pill?– were shown to be inconsequential, if not naïve.
Early on in Resurrections, echoing the famous pill-choosing scene from the Matrix, Bugs (Jessica Henwick) gives the spiel about the red and blue pills and offers them to Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II):
M: “You call this a choice?”
B: “Oh honestly, when somebody offered me these things, I went off on binary conceptions of the world and said that there was no way I was swallowing some symbolic reduction of my life. And the woman with the pills laughed cause I was missing the point.”
M: “What point?”
B: “The choice is an illusion. You already know what you have to do.”
Noted gender commentary aside, what followed was a frantic mental maneuvering to reorient myself—what is up with the pills at all if they weren’t supposed to stand for the choices we make, whether preordained or not? Morpheus still takes the red pill. We see Neo in a different matrix in The Resurrections taking daily blue pills; a scene where he dumps them out in the sink forms a moment of rebellion. And he does take a red pill when both are offered later on.
Of course, I understand why the franchise—or Lana Wachowski—would want to disassociate from the ways the red pill discourse developed an online life of its own. But in taking back—or correcting—the significance of the pills, the movie changed what the trilogy had been about. The imperfect freedom with which we may choose the grimy and depressing real world, or the juicy steak in a simulation, is reduced to an illusion with no further possibility for understanding. Or was it all ironic? This new attitude towards the pills made me uncertain about how I was meant to approach not only the Resurrections, but also the earlier trilogy. I could forgive, and even welcome, complications to a central conceit. But The Resurrections disavowed the entire premise of the conceit while also insisting on the value of responsibility and self-understanding. Its conclusion didn’t seem earned.
In the first third of Resurrections, I felt the movie continuing to wink at me, but for what, I wasn’t sure. As critics noted, the movie was highly self-aware, and fans theorize that the metafictional parts convey the pressures Wachowski felt around creating a sequel she didn’t plan to, and responding to the cultural significance the franchise took on. I confess that I found those self-referential moments fun—such an interesting blending of reality and fiction, not the least because my research focus is philosophy of fiction—but the film’s self-awareness didn’t make me rethink my approach to the film like Blade Runner 2049’s had.
The Matrix Resurrections made me feel undermined in a way that didn’t give me a way forward. Maybe that’s because I resisted the alternative—I just couldn’t bring myself to care about the love story between Neo and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss). “They don’t want this sentimentality,” says The Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris), the designer of the new matrix in The Matrix Resurrections, anticipating my reaction.
In showing my questions to be moot, Blade Runner 2049 made interesting claims about our desire for knowledge and the messiness of what is real. In contrast, The Matrix Resurrections took away the central questions in exchange for a romance I couldn’t get excited about. It made me nostalgic for the ‘wrong’ thing, the certainty that I knew what the larger story was about. The ‘final say’ of the franchise only made me feel guilty for wanting a sense of understanding without showing me how the guilt or the desire might be productively addressed.
Once, I was talking to a celebrated short story writer about an adaptation of one of his stories.
There are, of course, routine divergences between the source story and the adaptation, but one particular change felt so deliberate that I asked him: why did the film change how the daughter dies? The answer surprised me. He told me that the sequence of events that feels acceptable to short story readers wasn’t going to fly with people who watch movies; they were going to point out the daughter’s death as a plot hole. So, to get ahead of such reactions, the film changed the details. Listening to this, I rolled my eyes—there is no shortage of YouTube bros pointing out plot holes for any given movie—but once I thought more about this, I felt implicated. Don’t I, too, approach movies as if they are puzzles to fit together?
I eventually realized that what I find satisfying is the cessation of questioning, and not the offer of an answer. Often, questions stop because one doesn’t need to ask any more: one has the answer. But at other times, questions stop because one faces something that isn’t meant to be approached through questions.
Back in the National Gallery of Art, one of the last paintings we looked at was Pollock’s Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist). I thought Pollock was a little gimmicky up to that point, but sitting down in front of the wall-sized canvas, I was transfixed. In the endless sea of black, white, silver, orange, and teal drips, there was no beginning or end, no edge that I could grab to begin to make sense of the work. It was freeing to be confronted with colors and lines that couldn’t be understood, not because there was something ineffable, but because there was nothing to understand—and not because I’d all of a sudden become comfortable not knowing, but because it was possible to be confronted with beautiful things that quieted the inquiring part of the mind.
I bought a postcard of the painting at the gift shop, and it sits in my office, looking a little silly in its 4 x 6 form. But each time I look at it, I’m reminded of what it gave me: a glimpse of another way to look at art, and hence, another way to look at anything. For such an outsized reminder, I’m content to have settled for a postcard.
