A Requiem for the Body or How We’ll Stop Worrying and Love AI

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Alessandra Calanchi

Abstract

In Blade Runner 2049 (2017) Denis Villeneuve, a film director who has always been interested in identity and relational dynamics, addresses a crucial issue in contemporary debate, that is, the man-machine relationship in post-human society. By creating a respectful virtual dialogue with Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982), of which it is the sequel, and by implicitly collecting not only the legacy of Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (1968), but the atmospheres and the problems expressed by his various predecessors (from Metropolis, Fritz Lang 1927, up to Ex Machina, Alex Garland 2014), this film creates a shadow game in which the human being is (re)considered no longer in relationship to one, but to several types of "creature". Frankenstein and Jekyll had already challenged the concept of "individual", and Deckard had posed the existential drama of his own fragile identity; nonetheless, in this film the human (or presumed such) being must confront him/herself not only with androids or replicants, but also and above all with creatures that are, in fact, simple holographic softwares. The stakes are very high: our future as human beings in a world that will be increasingly inhabited by impalpable presences whose intelligence could – and will – go far beyond ours. The problematization of the concept of motherhood, the creation of extra-world colonies, the grafting of memories are all issues that today, differently from the 1980s, we feel as much closer to reality than to fiction. The aim of my paper is therefore to interpret the film in light of the ethical, scientific, and human disorientation that affects not only the spectator, but the citizen of our millennium as the planet slips towards an irreversible environmental and social crisis.

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How to Cite
Calanchi, Alessandra. 2021. “A Requiem for the Body or How We’ll Stop Worrying and Love AI”. AMERICANA E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 17 (1). https://iskolakultura.hu/index.php/americanaejournal/article/view/45457.
Section
Essays
Author Biography

Alessandra Calanchi

Alessandra Calanchi is professor of Anglo-American Literature and Culture at the University of Urbino Carlo Bo (Italy). She has published books, ranging from Dismissing the Body. Strange Cases of Fictional Invisibility (1999) to American Movies Mon Amour (2019), and several essays dealing with Jewish-American literature, crime fiction, and soundscape studies. She has delivered papers in national and international conferences and co-directs two book-series (Rewind, Aras Edizioni, and Soundscapes, Galaad Edizioni). She is also a translator and the director of a Summer School in Cultural Studies. Recently she co-authored  “An Eco-Critical Cultural Approach to Mars Colonization” (Forum for World Literatures Studies, June 2017) and is the author of “Eco-men from the Outer Space? Mars and Utopian Masculinities in the fin-de-siècle” (in R. Cenamor, ed., Ecomasculinities in Real and Fictional North America: The Flourishing of New Men, Lexington Books 2019). E-mail: alessandra.calanchi@uniurb.it