Early in Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), a naked woman drops from a plastic sac onto the floor of an enormous room in the headquarters of the Wallace Corporation. She is a replicant who has just been made. Niander Wallace, who is blind and sees through small floating drones, walks up to her, runs his fingers over her body and stops at her womb: it is barren, like all the others. He kisses her, and then cuts her belly open with a scalpel while his assistant Luv looks on. Wallace is the industrialist who saved the Earth from an ecological and food collapse with synthetic agriculture. With his fortune he bought the remains of the Tyrell Corporation, the company that made replicants in Ridley Scott’s 1982 film, and created a new generation designed to obey. He lives in that vast headquarters and speaks like a prophet. His obsession is to overcome the limit that stops him growing: he can only make a limited number of replicants, and humanity needs many more to colonize other planets. If replicants could reproduce, the workforce would be unlimited. When he learns that a replicant, Rachael, had a child, he sets Luv to find it. Killing a product that does not perform, in the language of a creator, is the logic Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld called institutional anomie.
// The theoryWhen the market devours everything
In Crime and the American Dream (1994), Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld developed the theory of institutional anomie. Building on Merton, they explained the United States’ high crime rates by an imbalance between institutions: the economy dominates family, education and politics, and imposes its logic on them. That dominance shows in three ways: the other institutions are devalued, they accommodate to economic demands and they are penetrated by market values. When that happens, economic success is pursued by any means, because nothing else restrains that pursuit.
Life as a product
Wallace’s world is institutional anomie carried into science fiction. No family, no visible state, no education, no ethics remain to limit the market: everything depends on the corporations that make food and workers. Wallace is the pure expression of that logic. For him, life is a product, and reproduction a production problem. Killing a replicant that is no use is a quality-control decision. Messner and Rosenfeld spoke of a society in which the economy penetrates every institution; Wallace wants it to penetrate birth as well.
// The subjectAn industrial god
Jared Leto plays Wallace as a messianic visionary. He speaks of angels, creation and destiny, and considers himself heir to an almost divine project. But his religious language conceals a strictly economic reasoning: he needs more workers and cannot make them at the rate he needs. His blindness is an obvious metaphor: he sees the world through machines, without any contact with people, and is incapable of seeing in a replicant anything but a defective product.
In the same scene, standing over the dead body, he explains his problem to Luv in the tone of a sermon:
The line captures the theory in a single breath: the problem is not that a woman has just been killed, but that the supply cannot keep up with demand. Later, when Deckard is brought to him, Wallace offers him a new Rachael, identical to the one he loved, as a bargaining chip: “An angel. Made again, for you.” Deckard rejects her, and Wallace has Luv shoot her in the head. A person reproduced to order and discarded when the deal falls through: in Wallace’s world, even love is merchandise.
Niander Wallace
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// The crackThe theory was designed for societies, not tyrants
Institutional anomie is a macrosocial theory: it explains the crime rates of whole societies, not an individual’s decisions. Wallace is a character, not a society, and applying the theory to him requires reading him as a symbol of the system rather than as a person.
Moreover, Messner and Rosenfeld studied ordinary crime in a democracy with weakened institutions, not a dystopian world in which a corporation has replaced the state. In Wallace’s world, killing replicants is not even a crime, because replicants have no rights. The theory needs a legal order that the world of Blade Runner has almost lost.
Decommodifying
Messner and Rosenfeld proposed as a response strengthening non-economic institutions: family policies, quality public education and a welfare state that protects people from total dependence on the market. Comparative research partly supports their idea: countries with greater social protection tend to have fewer homicides. The world of Blade Runner is the opposite: nothing cannot be bought, not even a soul.
Three key ideas
- Messner and Rosenfeld’s institutional anomie (1994) explains crime by the economy’s dominance over family, education and politics, which adopt its values.
- Niander Wallace, owner of replicant manufacturing, wants them able to reproduce to have unlimited labor, and kills a sterile replicant like a defective product.
- The crack: it is a theory of societies, not individuals, and in Wallace’s world replicants do not even have rights to violate.
Sources · further reading
- Messner, S. F. and Rosenfeld, R. (1994). Crime and the American Dream. Wadsworth.
- Messner, S. F. and Rosenfeld, R. (1997). “Political Restraint of the Market and Levels of Criminal Homicide”. Social Forces, 75(4), 1393-1416.
- Merton, R. K. (1938). “Social Structure and Anomie”. American Sociological Review, 3(5), 672-682.
- Dick, P. K. (1968). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Doubleday.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Niander Wallace?
Niander Wallace is a villain from Blade Runner, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He stroked the face of the replicant who had just been born, told her she was beautiful and cut open her womb.
Why does Niander Wallace become a villain?
Institutional anomie describes societies in which the economy devours everything else. Niander Wallace takes that logic all the way to birth: he wants replicants able to give birth to a workforce.
Which criminological theory explains Niander Wallace?
Niander Wallace's case is analysed through Institutional anomie. Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld’s institutional anomie theory (1994) holds that crime grows in societies where the economy dominates the other institutions, family, education, politics, and imposes its values on them: competition, profit and success at any price. Niander Wallace, of Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), is the industrialist who, after solving a food crisis with his synthetic farming, bought the old Tyrell Corporation and manufactures a new generation of obedient replicants. His ambition is for replicants to be able to reproduce, so as to have an infinite workforce with which to conquer other worlds.
