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At about the two-hour mark of Blade Runner 2049, I felt a familiar sinking feeling. This was going to be a "chosen one" narrative, wasn't it?

The pieces were perfectly set up. Our hero, the replicant police officer K ( Ryan Gosling), was going to learn that he was the secret child of the first Blade Runner's hero, Rick Deckard ( Harrison Ford), and his replicant lover Rachael ( Sean Young). His mere existence - confirmation of the idea that replicants could reproduce on their own and not rely on humans to create them - could "break the world," according to his former boss, played by Robin Wright.

You could almost see the dominoes waiting to fall. K would come to embrace his destiny as the leader of the replicants, casting off his overly obedient programming and joining the revolution. The other characters (especially Papa Deckard) would fall in line behind him. Society would quake, but not crumble, because there was too little space left in the movie (yes, too little space in a movie that's two hours and 45 minutes long) to really justify war.

What most got under my skin about this was that it was boring. Hadn't I seen a million stories just like this, where our seemingly randomly selected protagonist secretly had a massive, world-shaping destiny? It's a well fiction turns to over and over again, in its many forms, seemingly because nobody ever gets sick of it. I had been enjoying the movie a lot up until that point. Why was this chosen one stuff coming in to muck it up?

And then Blade Runner 2049 surprised me and became one of my favorite movies of the year. Major spoilers follow, of course.

From Star Wars to Harry Potter, the chosen one story is everywhere

I should state upfront that the chosen one story isn't inherently a bad thing. Lots of stories I've loved have been built around the tale of a young person who gets swept up into a massive conflict and realizes they have some sort of mystical destiny that will change everything.

From Luke Skywalker to Harry Potter, these heroes endure because we all want to believe we might have some secret destiny we haven't figured out yet. When we're kids, we think such a destiny might land upon our heads; when we're adults, it's fun to remember being kids through these sorts of tales. That's why they tend to work for all ages.

Yet as a very close cousin of Joseph Campbell's famed "monomyth," the chosen one story has been beaten to death in the 40 years since landed on the scene. Now, it becomes harder and harder to take yet another story where some backwater local discovers his or herhidden power thanks to the timely intervention of a more knowledgeable passerby. It's not hard to think, I know the world doesn't work this way, when consuming a story like this, which starts to gnaw away at your suspension of disbelief.

The most resonant chosen one narratives in recent years, then, have tended to be those that play up a chosen hero who is accidentally chosen, or becomes a hero through their own moral grit and determination. Take The Hunger Games'Katniss, for instance. Her heroism happens both accidentally (when her younger sister is chosen by a lottery for the titular games) and via a choice she makes (to take her sister's place). She doesn't become a chosen one because it was her destiny; she becomes a chosen one because her morality makes her a beacon of hope for millions, and she's simply in the right place at the right time to display that morality.

This squares more with what we know of reality. It's hard to assign any one person too much agency over the often broken systems that govern our world, but occasionally, the right person will rise up, grab the spotlight, and show us a new way of being, in both minor and major fashion. These "characters" might be heroes or villains, but we're far more likely to run into a real-world Katniss than a Harry Potter.

But there's still something so potent about the "prince in hiding" motif, about the idea that any of us could be extraordinary if we just understood the truths of our heritage. It's a seductive, kind of dangerous idea because it suggests the best way to do good is to sit back and wait for someone to show you how to, not to do your best in the moment. Luke Skywalker (or his modern iteration, Rey) whines away his life on a desert planet, only to find the right droids and begin a massive adventure across the galaxy with him at the center.

The chosen one narrative, then, is all about considering the primacy of the self, trying to find a way to fit yourself at the center of the tale, rather than realizing that certain things are out of your control. (Katniss eventually realizes this too, though it's probably notable that both the book and movies where that happens are less popular than her earlier chapters.) That's what makes what happens to K in Blade Runner so heartening. In a simple phrase, this movie blows the chosen one narrative wide open.

Sometimes, a character's destiny might be putting one piece of the puzzle in place

The scene that makes Blade Runner 2049 go from good to great is one where K learns from members of the replicant resistance that he is not the son of Deckard and Rachael, because Deckard and Rachael had a daughter. (The baby was hidden from authorities via records that showed two children - one male and one female - with identical DNA being born and then the girl dying. The ruse fooled even K, who assumed he was that baby boy.)

No, the reason K is able to recall, vividly, a moment when some boys at an orphanage chased him down and made him hide his beloved wooden horse toy (Deckard's gift to his daughter he would never meet) is because the memory has been planted there by the woman who actually lived that moment - Dr. Ana Stelline ( Carla Juri), who is Deckard and Rachael's daughter but has no idea of this and now works as the world's best memory fabricator.

We don't know if she planted that memory in only K's brain or in the brains of hundreds of replicants, hoping one of them would follow this message in a bottle. Maybe others did. But K is the one who has both the intellect and the ability to follow the clues all the way to the point where he realizes how insignificant in the grand scheme of things he truly is.

To put it in biblical terms, Stelline is Jesus, which makes K John the Baptist, the guy who figures out the main character's secret destiny and then dies alone. (At least he doesn't get his head chopped off.)

And the moment where K realizes the truth is exciting even beyond the ways in which it subverts a dusty trope. It pulls the story's many threads together in an effortless fashion that might have seemed impossible to do before entering the scene, and it more than justifies all of the attention the film spent prior to that point on Stelline, who was given an oddly elaborate setup for a character meant simply to help K find his way on the next step of his journey to find Deckard.

But it also shifts the story from a chosen one narrative, with K at its center, to the story of how K realizes that what's really important isn't his continued survival but that Stelline gets to meet her father, finally, so that the future of the replicant race will have hope. Blade Runner 2049 ends before we can see if Stelline figures out any of this, but we presume Deckard will tell her, thus kicking off whatever happens next in this universe. (I really don't need another movie, but if Hollywood must make one, let it wait another 30-odd years.)

This means that K becomes cannon fodder, the guy who keeps Deckard from falling into the wrong hands, where he will be tortured and used as a pawn, but also the guy whose fate ultimately doesn't matter in the face of this massive, world-spanning conspiracy. (This is a pretty classic film noir detective character type.)

And once this realization happens, director Denis Villeneuve shoots Gosling very differently. He's less in control of his environment now, more like a dark force that jets in from just offscreen. The precise frames that surrounded his character early in the film start to become ragged, more chaotic, until he's having one final fight in a vehicle slowly sinking beneath the waves of what seems to be the Pacific Ocean, heightened by climate change.

Villeneuve takes his time with this fight - between K and his fellow replicant Luv ( Sylvia Hoeks) - showing each and every moment of horror and violence that punctuates the battle. It's dark and gruesome and a little hard to watch, especially when K has to hold Luv beneath the waves for a long, agonizing period, drowning her. Her eyes finally float open, glassy, and K, who began the movie killing his own kind at the behest of the human power structure, ends it killing his own kind so that others of his kind might live.

It could be perhaps too neat of an inversion, but it works thanks to the performances (especially Ford, who has nothing to play but, "I am drowning and handcuffed, so I can't go anywhere," and somehow makes a meal of it) and thanks to the notion that this is one last chosen one myth being exploded. It doesn't really matter whether K or Luv lives in particular. They are, instead, representatives for their ideals, and it does matter which of those ideals wins out. The political has been made very, very personal.

K sustains a wound that gradually saps his life over this portion of the movie, but that only increases the sense that the film has done something special with him. As he lies dying on the steps of Stelline's laboratory, Deckard going in to meet his daughter at long last, it feels like Blade Runner 2049 has managed, in a roundabout way, to accomplish much what its parent film did: tell a story about a man who cares only for himself, and eventually ends up learning just how much everything else matters too.

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The best thing about Blade Runner 2049 is what it isn't

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The long-awaited sequel takes a hammer to a tired storytelling trope.

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*Originally published on March 1, 2022.
Since the start of the pandemic, a very niche genre of photography has grown in popularity. Called "liminal spaces," it's largely made up of images of empty, eerie hallways, dark stairways, old arcades and dead malls.

Online interest in this specific genre surged early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Google searches for the words "liminal," "liminality" and "liminal spaces" began climbing in March of 2020, when the pandemic first hit North America.

The liminal space Reddit has roughly 400,000 members. The Liminal Space Bot Twitter account sends regular images to more than 800,000 followers. And liminal space photo compilations on Youtube have racked up millions of views.

Until recently, the word liminal was mostly confined to academia. Its roots are in Latin, from "līmen," meaning "threshold" or "doorstep." In anthropology, it's used to describe the middle part of a ritual or rite of passage.

British anthropologist Victor Turner's 1964 paper Betwixt and Between describes the liminal phase of ritual as a departure from the ordinary rules of time, space and social hierarchy, where participants can experiment with their identity.

The word has gone on to mean a time or place of transition, usually with eerie or surreal connotations.

The genre of liminal photography portrays an empty transition place between one stage and the next, an in-between period that is typically marked by uncertainty. They aren't comforting images - often they depict a place that might have been busy once, but now is empty.

Aiden Tait, a PhD student in American literature at Dalhousie University, describes it as "the feeling you get when you're in a space between the no longer and the not yet."

A sense of eeriness

There aren't hard and fast rules for the perfect liminal space image, but they typically depict:

A transition space, like a hallway or pathway.

A sense of eeriness or uneasiness.

A feeling of awe or wonder.

An element of nostalgia, particularly for the late 1980s or early '90s.

One frequently shared liminal space photo on Reddit is called The Backrooms, an image with yellow wallpaper and carpet, odd corners in all directions and a dingy-looking outlet on the wall. It is not clear where the entrance or exit to a hallway may be.

Nobody knows where The Backrooms came from - it was posted on a website by an anonymous user. But it is considered a textbook liminal space photograph.

Some images in this vein aren't photographs at all, but digital artworks that use a computer-aided design program, like the rendered image below.

Becoming a fixture

One photographer who posts to r/liminalspace is Liam Kimmons, a 26-year-old film student who lives in Newmarket, Ont. He takes trips out at night, hunting for a perfect liminal moment.

"A lot of times when I was taking these images, I was treating it like there was this thing way out in the distance, and you can barely see it. You can barely make it out, but you know it's there, and you know the impression of what it was supposed to be or how it related to the rest of the world," Kimmons said.

"Sometimes, I would just sit there without any movement, allowing it to be dark for a bit until the light came back on. And I think there's something about that idea of almost pretending as if you are meant to be in that space, pretending as if you have become a fixture in the space."

Kimmons says he appreciates that the community around liminal space could see the beauty in seemingly random things that are a part of our daily lives.

Abandonment tropes

Sabina Magliocco, a folklorist and professor of sociological anthropology at the University of British Columbia, says that the pandemic has transformed society, and that what we're collectively living through is very liminal.

"It feels betwixt and between. It feels like many of us are cut off from our everyday normal life, cut off from the kinds of interactions that we used to have," said Magliocco.

She says interest in liminal space may reflect more than just the pandemic, but help us confront our own mortality.

"One of the tropes that we see is the trope of abandonment, the trope of something being desolate ... something that once was filled with life and is now empty," she said.

"It is in a sense, a nod to our own mortality. At one point we will not be here anymore. The body that houses us, that holds our soul, our consciousness, will be simply an abandoned, empty husk."

Guests in this episode:
Liam Kimmons is a film student and photographer in Newmarket, Ont.
Sabina Magliocco is a folklorist and professor of sociological anthropology at the University of British Columbia.
is a PhD student in American literature at Dalhousie University.
Stuart Poyntz is a youth media researcher and professor of communications at Simon Fraser University.

*This episode was produced by Matthew Lazin-Ryder

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'Liminal space' photography captures the eerieness and isolation of pandemic life | CBC Radio

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Early in the pandemic, an online community of photographers, artists and editors started creating and sharing pictures of what they described as "liminal spaces": empty, dark hallways, old arcades and decrepit stairways, which echoed a sense of timelessness and eeriness that resonated in today's world.

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Explore the night from tokyo to osaka, taking cyberpunk picture, night photography in japan. using Canon 5D mark II, Adobe Lightroom & creativity