In spite of its modest box office success upon release, Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982) has become a model of the dystopian genre and has had a lasting influence on science-fiction film such as Gattaca (Andrew Niccol 1997) and television series like Altered Carbon (Netflix, 2018–20). The two main aspects of Blade Runner that later works revisit are the treatment of the posthuman and of the city, which updated Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) through a neo-noir lens. The theme of the posthuman and the aesthetics of the city were deeply intermeshed, with foggy, rainy and shadow-ridden Los Angeles constituting a backdrop that mirrored the troubling of identity brought on by the questioning of the border between humans and Replicants. When it was announced that Denis Villeneuve was to helm Blade Runner’s long-awaited sequel, whose screenplay Harrison Ford himself had described as ‘the best thing [he had] ever read’, the question fans of the film raised was how Villeneuve and his cast and crew were going to engage with the pre-existing material. Their tactic was to consider the sequel as a means to update and expand the original, by exploring the world beyond LA, updating the technology and adding AIs to the posthuman equation. This chapter proposes to examine more precisely the relationship between posthuman subjectivity and cinematic space, and thus between Blade Runner 2049’s (2017) ethics and aesthetics.

Cinematic space will be considered as a combination of diegetic space and audiovisual space, so that we will engage as much with the topography of the story world as with the surface of the screen. The 1982 film was anchored in a defamiliarised, ‘liminal’ space’ (Brookner 13) that referred to real, though rearranged settings, but two different spaces appear in the sequel: the unmediated diegetic space explored by K (Ryan Gosling) and other protagonists, and space as it is processed by digital devices. The relations to these spatial categories influence the integration of characters in the diegesis and their relation to reality in general. We argue that BR 2049 expands the scope of (post)human subjectivity by broadening the spatial configurations and ultimately grounding the debate concerning subjectivity (and thus the possibility of digital subjectivity) in a tension between the condition of inhabiting physical and/or virtual space.