The Six Million Dollar Prostitute
Article by Robert Carnevale
One of my favorite science fiction films of all-time is Blade Runner 2049. It does just about everything right and surpasses the original by a mile and a half. My opinion about the sequel's superiority stems from the fact that I feel the first Blade Runner is a boring film that's aged poorly on a technical level. It has thought-provoking moments, but they're interspersed far too thinly between bland, self-indulgent storytelling beats. Ridley Scott (director of the first film) feels the almost three-hour-long Denis Villeneuve-helmed sequel is too long compared to his two-hour original. I disagree. I'll take the sequel's three-hour slow-burn, documentary-style special effects showcase any day of the week over the older film's two hours of sleep-inducing plotting.
But I digress. I don't just love Blade Runner 2049 because it's pretty and takes its time to let the beauty soak in. Nor do I love the movie because it does that fun little sci-fi naming convention where you tack a year number onto the end to make the title sound futuristic. The thing I love most—the thing that sticks in my mind after watching and rewatching the film—is the sex scene. Because what other intellectual property on planet Earth can convince Warner Bros. to provide hundreds of millions of dollars to fund, among other things, a scene depicting a horny AI "wife" and a prostitute combining powers to fuck an android? Absolutely incredible! On both a visual and conceptual level, this scene is something you won't see in any other film. And how did Villeneuve get away with making it? The same way he always does. He dresses up every movie he spearheads in a thin layer of arthouse pretentiousness that he uses as a guise to seduce producers into giving him ungodly sums of money. The studio thinks it's funding a genius. And it is—just not the sort of genius who's guaranteed to earn back monetary investments. Villeneuve makes movies for a niche market despite his ability to secure mainstream-blockbuster budgets. Every time he crafts something, he risks his career. He risks becoming known as "the man who loses money for his producers." And he refuses to let that stop him.
That's how we, the grateful audience, end up with an undoubtedly insanely expensive scene in which Ryan Gosling has sex with a hologram and a prostitute at the same time. The amount of fine-tuning that went into getting the bodies to overlap and weave in and out of each other—can you imagine how much that sequence cost? Probably more money than most companies make in a year. Yet the imagination that sequence displays, and the technical mastery employed to convey said imagination… it almost makes the cost entirely worth it, even when you consider how much good that same money could have done funding an end to world hunger or something with actual practical benefits. And that… that's the mark of good art.
Robert Carnevale is the author of Cold War 2395, a gripping military sci-fi adventure that will have you on the edge of your seat!
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