@mcc Just finished reading your #BladeRunner2049 post that (I think?) you (or someone else) linked a few days ago:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250112150526/https://cohost.org/mcc/post/178201-the-baseline-scene
>The point of the baseline test is not to fail inhumans. The culture has already decided that K is subhuman. The baseline is *testing to see if someone marked as inhuman is becoming human*.
Outstanding analysis :D It gave me a new appreciation for Blade Runner 2049 that I didn't have before.
andi on cohost · The "baseline" scene was actually written by Ryan GoslingThis 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.
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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 is a fictional test that distinguishes baseline humans from synthetic "replicants". It is a little different in the Blade Runner movies than it is in the book. In the book ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", by Phillip K. Dick— 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 questions and instead listen for any words or phrases from the baseline text. The questioner says, "What's it like to hold the hand of someone you love? Interlinked". K must reply "Interlinked" and not respond in any other way. The point of the baseline test is not to fail inhumans. The culture has already decided that K is subhuman. The baseline is testing to see if someone marked as inhuman is becoming human. The baseline text, like the questions, has heavy emotional content. The environment of the baseline test is designed to maximize stress; alone in a cold white cell, the interrogator harshly barking the questions, the testee unsettled by the alien noises and unblinking eye of the monitoring equipment. It would be nearly impossible to be in that environment and not have an emotional response. But the culture has decided that replicants do not have emotional responses. The state wants dispassionate murderers for its executioners, the economy demands uncomplaining workers. The perceived emotional shortcomings of the replicants have become part of their assigned social function. So a replicant which responds to circumstances like a human is declared defective and destroyed. The culture does not even think of it as a punishment. A part is malfunctioning and it gets replaced.
The culture first stereotypes a minority, and then demands the minority perform that stereotype or else be met with violence.
"PALE FIRE" / WITHIN CELLS INTERLINKED
I really like this scene, as cinema. Everything about it works. In general I tend to like what my wife Christine calls "the Saying Shit portion of the movie", in whatever movie, the point where someone is suddenly seriously intoning portentous free-verse poetry you can't understand. There are some movies where the movie's plot is not ultimately able to deliver on the portentious poetry meaning anything (see 23:36-23:56 here [https://youtu.be/tT3n2us08vc?t=1416]) but which I like anyway just because the saying-shit portion is in the moment so convincing. The baseline scene is the perfect "saying shit" scene. When it first starts you have no idea what is happening. The editing and sound are maximally disorienting; all you know is suddenly Ryan Gosling is saying terrifying poetry over shots of the LAPD headquarters. You find out why only after he's finished, and the movie takes a couple more hours to completely sketch out the full horror of what is being done to K here.
What I didn't find out until earlier this year was that K's baseline text is literal poetry. It's Vladimir Nabokov.
> I can't tell you how
> I knew - but I did know that I had crossed
> The border. Everything I loved was lost
> But no aorta could report regret.
> A sun of rubber was convulsed and set;
> And blood-black nothingness began to spin
> A system of cells interlinked within
> Cells interlinked within cells interlinked
> within one stem. And dreadfully distinct
> Against the dark, a tall white fountain played.
That's from "Pale Fire" (another book I've had described to me but not read). The last five lines are K's baseline. "Pale Fire", like BR2049, is a story about a man who comes to the false conclusion that he is the protagonist of someone else's story. It's about something which is real and something which is merely interpreted, reflected ("The moon's an arrant thief / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun"). It's obviously relevant to BR2049's narrative, so if (as was the case for me) you've heard of Pale Fire but failed to identify the poem, then it feels pretty obvious why in a later scene at home the filmmakers briefly reveal K to actually own and be working through a copy of Pale Fire, apparently without a lot of success. (His hologram girlfriend doesn't seem to like it, anyway.) On my first watch I thought this was a cute if slightly forced reference; now, knowing the poem's source, this detail becomes not just natural but wrenching. K is a person marked as subhuman who struggles with a desire to be free he is not even allowed to acknowledge. He has been assigned this text that he has to perform noncomprehension of. But he wants to know what it means. He is working through Pale Fire because at some level he is trying to understand the context of this thing that has enslaved him.
"DROPPING IN"
Anyway, here's the wild part. That scene was actually written by Ryan Gosling. And the baseline test wasn't created for the movie. It's a thing from the real world.
Here's what I learned yesterday:
I was trying to find the text of the baseline scene. There's a video on YouTube but I was looking for a transcription. Instead I found this much, much longer "full text" [https://www.reddit.com/r/bladerunner/comments/76hea1/full_text_for_the_baseline_test/] on Reddit, along with a comment [https://www.reddit.com/r/bladerunner/comments/76hea1/comment/doe2ge5/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3] where the poster explains they transcribed it from the BR2049 art book [https://www.amazon.ca/Art-Soul-Blade-Runner-2049/dp/B075WXGWHL]. They go on to explain:
> Ryan Gosling actually wrote this when trying to understand his character, and used a technique called "dropping in" to analyze writing from Nabokov's Pale Fire. He approached Villeneuve about it and he added it to the film
What's this?
There's a blog post here by screenwriter Jon James Miller [https://iheartingrid.wordpress.com/2018/12/29/dropping-in-an-actors-truth-as-poetry/] that explains the concept:
> Dropping-in is a technique Tina [Packer] and Kristin Linklater developed together in the early 1970s to create a spontaneous, emotional connection to words for Shakespearean actors. In fact, “dropping in” is integral to actor training at Shakespeare & Co. (the company the Linklater’s founded) a way to start living the word and using it to create the experience of the thing the word represents.
>
> The process of dropping-in involves a teacher and student, the former asking questions and the latter repeating the word in the text (in bold below). The process gives each operative word depth and dimension and allows it to come into the body. Apparently, it can also release strong emotions. Once an emotional connection is made with individual words, then phrases or sentences can be strung together and “dropped-in.” Here’s an example from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with the sentence:
>
> “May All To Athens Back Again Repair”
>
> May
>
> Do you like the month of May? May.
>
> Do you hate the month of May? May.
>
> Do you say “May I?” May.
>
> Say “all the days of May?” (three times fast)
A longer description is in this account by Shakespeare & Co student Catherine Bryne [https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2397&context=etd] (search for "Our first session of scene work"), but that's the basic idea. This is literally the baseline test.
The baseline test is an actor's exercise.
My read of the Shakespeare & Co process is it's about exploring the emotional space around a word (to mangle a Tina Packer quote from the Bryne account, "revealing the multiplicity of meanings"). An actor should ideally understand the emotional content of everything they say, and since each word receives its own emphasis we might as well take that down to the level of a particular word. Packer wants an actor to fully, intuitively understand the implications of every word they speak. So the questions in her process force the actor to consider each word from a variety of angles. The actor isn't meant to answer the questions; it isn't a test. They're only meant to internalize each question. They're meant to fully experience the emotional content that the question charges the word with. The benefit of this, I imagine, is they make explicit to themselves their own emotional associations around the word and therefore probably those of the audience, and if the "Dropping In" is being performed in preparation for a particular role I assume they're trying to experience the questions "from the perspective of" the character and therefore understand their character's relationship to each word.
The baseline test adapts this process for evil ends. The questions push the replicant toward giving the text emotional associations. But they cannot let those emotional associations be felt. The text has to remain empty syllables, or the testee dies. The testee is being taught to suppress the exact feelings "Dropping In" was designed to tease out. "Dropping In" as practiced by the Shakespeare & Co is an intensely physical process, as described by Bryne, with all participants close and touching, eye contact being maintained; Byrne describes a feeling of intense bonding with her partner in the exercise, that the combination of intimate physical contact and emotional release unlocked strong maternal feelings in her. This element too is present in the "baseline" version, but turned sinister, all physical elements used to isolate K; the framing brings K closer to no one but establishes the interrogator as distant and K as subservient. K keeps eye contact with a lens.
The correspondence is so exact that if we assume Blade Runner to be set in "our" future— or the future of the 1980s at least— it's reasonable to imagine the baseline test is not just based on "Dropping In" from a screenwriting perspective but literally, in-narrative. Shakespeare & Co was founded in 1978, which is before the Blade Runner series' timeline diverges from ours. Shakespeare & Co has intentionally never set down the technique of "Dropping In" in writing, it's only taught person to person, so it wouldn't have been lost in the 2022 digital crash. It might as well be the case someone at the Wallace Corporation (co-opting everything without thought to context in the way tech does) literally learned about "Dropping In" and adapted it to design the baseline test.
Looking between this page scanned from the artbook [https://i.redd.it/tucgsm4s8jrz.jpg] and this (good) interview with Denis Villeneuve [https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/denis-villeneuve-interview-blade-runner-2049-marketing-and-design/] it appears how this scene got in the film is the very earliest script drafts had a more sedate inspection scene where an unseen man simply interviews K and asks him to read the Pale Fire poem without emotionally responding to it. The most romantic possible way of imagining how this became the final scene would be if Ryan Gosling actually spontaneously attempted "Dropping In" on the Pale Fire poem as a way of preparing for this scene, and in the process realized how similar "Dropping In" was to the Voight-Kampf, but I can't find anyone telling this version of the story who can trace it to a specific source that worked on the movie. Villeneuve's interview says only that Gosling brought the "Dropping In" idea to him during the brainstorming phase that followed the initial script distribution and that when filming started they shot both the version from the script and Gosling's concept and decided Gosling's was better. The artbook does confirm though that Gosling did write the script for the "Dropping In" version of the scene, which as originally filmed was 7 minutes long (!)— obviously impractically long, but the editor says he loved it because he had so much material to work with he could actually edit for rhythm when cutting down to what was eventually refilmed as the brutal 40-second take in the final movie.
One final angle we can look at this from. The baseline test was derived from an actors' exercise as part of the movie production. We could imagine the baseline test was derived from the same actor's exercise in the story continuity. But there's a reading in which the baseline test is being used as an actor's exercise in the movie, by K. The formal reason for the baseline test is to detect and purge emotion in replicants. But the replicants know that, which means from a "a system is what it does" perspective what they're really being tested on, and expected to refine over time, is skill in acting. When K fails his second baseline test toward the end of the movie it's explicit that his boss must pull strings to prevent him being immediately executed, but she does do it, implying when push comes to shove the system is less interested in whether replicants experience emotionlessness than whether they can show acceptance of the assigned role (subservient to the privileged group, unsympathetic to their own group) by way of performance. At this point the text, subtext, and metatext all converge.
I really like Blade Runner 2049.
