Pinocchio Boys & The Women That Make Them Real: Blade Runner 2049
One of the strangest, sexiest scenes in 2017 cinema came halfway through Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049.
“Officer K” (Ryan Gosling) is a police officer in mid-century Los Angeles with a specialised remit: a Replicant who hunts down other, outlawed, models. It’s drudging, vaguely traitorous work.
Relaxation comes in the form of his favourite domestic appliance, Joi, a holographic sexpot played by Ana de Armas, who pouts her lips and listens to his problems. As a special treat, she invites a prostitute into the flat, a body to give her man something to touch. She locks her image onto the real woman’s body, so K can actually “have sex with” “her”. As K indulges in his fantasy, the two bodies flicker in and out of eachother like a the liminal gap between television channels.
Alexa, define “Projection”.
The scene is a perfect visual metaphor for how romance works most of the time — one partner layers their fantasy onto the other, so that they end up dating a picture, or version, of the person, in place of the person themselves. K’s amorous treat is also an image of replacement (replication?) ; the flesh and bones escort made near-obsolete by the high-resolution, on-demand girlfriend, able to provide Johns with the ego strokes and intimate connection, without the expense of an hourly rate.
The 1982 and 2017 Blade Runners unsettle norms of what is real and what is not. 2049 introduces Joi as an idealized lover and companion. K returns to his flat, weary after a scrap with Dave Bautista, hangs up his coat, and we catch her domestic chatter off-screen, as she frets about dinner and enquires after his day, a picture of suburban American housewifery. She steps into the frame, a picture of Audrey Hepburn chic, out of place in the nuclear snow of Greater Los Angeles. K, who owns a vinyl player, seems to have a fondness for post-war Americana. Whatever mood he’s in, Joi has the look, shifting costume and hairstyle like a videogame avatar. Whatever K wants, she gives.
She is not, in order words, a complex character, and inspired opinion pieces on the film’s ‘women problem’. In The Guardian, Anna Smith laid it out:
While I was transfixed by the film’s visual prowess, score, fascinating plot and fidelity to the original, I was troubled by the character of Joi (Ana de Armas) in particular. An operating system who is bought by K to act as a doting, doe-eyed housewife, she appears to him in hologram form as and when he dictates, wearing and saying whatever she thinks suits his mood.
Quoting from the NY Post article “You’ll love the new Blade Runner — unless you’re a woman”, Smith calls Joi “a sci-fi fanboy’s wet dream” and asks:
How are we supposed to admire a hero whose key relationship is with a woman of his own creation who will submit to his every demand and can be switched on and off as he pleases?
Maybe… we’re not? At least not fully?
In the NY Post piece, Sara Stewart writes:
I’d like to think this follow-up to Ridley Scott’s 1982 “Blade Runner,” whose rainy noir aesthetic informed just about every sci-fi flick that came afterward, is a cautionary tale about a society that views women as disposable and/or as outright slaves. But seeing as it’s mostly about Ryan Gosling’s Officer K, a “blade runner” tasked with executing older-model replicants, pondering his own existence, I think I’d be wrong.
The assumption here is that the two things (gender commodification / K’s existentialism) are separate, but we can read the first as feeding into the second. Joi is an essential cheerleader for the story that K comes to believe about himself.
There’s been a break in established patterns. A replicant has had a child. Expectations of the future, and is in service to who, become disrupted.
K’s job is to track down this grown-up offspring and restore balance. The dead mother turns out to be the child of Rachel and Dekker, the lovers who ran off together at the end of the original. K has taken Dekker’s place as a Blade Runner — could he be his son too? Could he be the miracle? The impossible profanity?
Bit by bit, he starts to think so. The film invites us in on the mystery, clues and tricks. There’s a dream about his childhood K can’t shake. And Hollywood franchise culture, where sons take the place of fathers (Creed, Independence Day: Resurgence) has us primed to draw blood connections: why can’t Gosling be Ford’s son? And in K’s ear leans Joi, encouraging him, daring him to believe in his own special destiny. Maybe he’s meant for more. Maybe he can be a real boy.
Very late in the game, K learns the truth from Replicant revolutionaries — yes, there was a child. A girl.
Cue flash of subtle devastation. Battered and bruised, emotionally reeling, K is accosted on a city walkway by a towering hologram of his beloved Joi who is — it’s obvious now — just another feminized digital service. The kaiju nude leans over to flirt with this stranger — this potential customer — text promising “everything you want to hear”. What he wanted to hear was that he, and he alone, was the special one.
In the same way that in 1982 Harrison Ford’s sardonic melancholy and Rutger Hauer’s primal survival instinct gave them a vivid personality the human characters lacked, K’s disappointment with ordinariness makes him sympathetic. How human is it to give in to your own hype and assume your own cosmic importance? And how human is it to want a beautiful lover who will confirm all this for us?
More human than human.
The story of men making women and then falling for them is an old one. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the ancient poet tells the story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who rejected the women of his city, shaped a statue of a hot AF lover in his workshop, and immediately became infatuated with it. A horny Pygmalian prayed to Venus to give his ‘ivory maid’ life and his desires were granted: ‘his Image feature / Was straight transformed into a living creature’.
The line continues through Stepford Wives and Weird Science, coming under scrutiny in more modern, self-aware work like Ruby Sparks, written and starring The Big Sick’s Zoe Kazan. Blade Runner 2049 is a modified version of the same story (Joi is made but also bought) in a near-future neon. Pinocchio boys and the fairy-godmother who will fuck them and make them real.
As a note on gender relations in the dreamworlds of electronic capitalism, K’s fall for, and turn from, Joi make sense. Joi is the dream girl for the beta male consumer, the waifu gentlemen and lonely message boarders.
Remember that in Stepford Wives the men learned their wives had been killed and replaced by animatronic dolls and didn’t care because now they had a bit of peace at home.
Women lose, but so do the men. The tragedy is that a person who falls in love with a fake thing becomes a fake thing themselves. Growth requires the possibility of our lover disagreeing with us.
A 1604 commentary on the Pygmalion story outlines an ethical warning:
Pygmalion in love with his own handiwork is to be compared with those who, too much in love with their own good works, trust in themselves, wherein no life is to be found, until they emerge from themselves, and turn toward the true Venus, which is to be explained as true love of God and of one’s neighbour, through which the virtues become alive and fruitful.
Girlfriends made to order only trap us in ourselves.
By the end of 2049, K gets his redemption, not possible until the shattering of illusions. He sacrifices himself so Deckard, who may as well be a stranger, can live and reunite with his daughter.
A dying K lies in the white and the toxic snow comes down softly upon him.
A Christmas miracle?
