The Heart of an Android: The Internal Theme of Blade Runner 2049

           I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Blade Runner since I saw it last. I want to see it, three maybe four more times before it leaves theater. This kind of movie that leaves me thinking through all it has to say about the world doesn’t come around very often. While thinking through this film on one of my drives home from work, I think I found something really special buried within the hard outer shell of Blade Runner 2049.

Much like the original Blade Runner, this film deals with the question, “what does it mean to be human?” There’s a lot of different ways this movie attempts to answer this question. Maybe it’s the concept of having a soul, or maybe it’s the ability to have offspring. Maybe that is what the film is trying to get at, that in order to be human we procreate, or have a soul. But while that maybe this film’s answer to its own question, it doesn’t satisfy my desire for a deeper answer to such a profound question.

Before I go on, I implore you to go watch this movie, then come back and read what I have to say. There are spoilers aplenty ahead.

So here it is, here is the answer Blade Runner 2049 gives to its big and overbearing question.

Love.

That’s right, and not just any love, sacrificial love.

Cheesy, yes. But don’t click out of the article yet, hear me out. I think there’s a compelling case here that I’m going to attempt to lay out for you.

The movie operates around three key relationships, or lack thereof: K and Joi, K and Deckard, and Deckard and his daughter.

One of the aspects of this film that I found most compelling was K and Joi’s relationship. Joi is essentially a holographic girlfriend. Much like K and the rest of the replicant’s we aren’t necessarily sure how she works. We know she’s a projector, but there’s some degree of facial, expression mapping. She scrolls through dresses and gauges K’s reaction accordingly. All the way through her arc I remember thinking to myself how interesting this dynamic of the degrees of artificiality is. But after getting home and thinking through it some more, the more I realize that that relationship is really messed up. Essentially the slave has a slave.

But then we get this beautiful moment, when K downloads her into the emanator and takes her outside for the first time. K walks out onto the roof while it’s pouring rain, and Joi follows suit. As the rain falls through her holographic image, she pauses, and watches her hand and she adjusts to the rain, and essentially mapping it to her skin. This moment is key, Joi is essentially adjusting to her new reality. Who she is has inherently changed and the movie takes time to show this. We’ll come back to this later.

Then we get this key moment when Luv steps on the imitator and essentially kills Joi. The music swells and she says “I love y….” And dies. I find people’s reaction to this fascinating. Most people I talked too, didn’t feel much at all. Even me, only felt a tinge of sadness during this moment. None of the audience views this relationship as having real love. Even K, in the back of his mind, knows it too. Yet he desperately wants it to be true.

One of the questions of the movie is K trying to figure out what it really means to be human. I believe he is trying to answer that question through Joi. Everything around him is making him aware he’s not human. His boss, his coworkers, his housemates. Once he gets home, it’s his opportunity to play house essentially. He comes home to something he can control, to some sense of what he feels like is normal. That’s essentially K and Joi’s relationship.

This brings us to the next key moment of the film, when K believes that he is the kid he’s been looking for. Think about how world crushing that would be. To believe that you were essentially a robot your entire existence, and then suddenly be told that you were human? You had a mother and father? Think about how soul crushing that would be.

And again, the movie pauses and gives us a moment to reflect on this. K stands out in the snow, holds out his hand, and watches the snowflakes softly land on his hand. A callback to Joi’s moment earlier in the film, this is K adjusting to his new reality. This reality that he believes makes him human.

Then we get K and Deckard’s relationship. Here I think is where he learns what it truly means to be human. At this point, K still believes he is Deckard’s son, so he confronts him about leaving. He’s hostile about it, as anyone would be. Deckard finally breaks and says to K, “Sometimes to love someone, you have to be a stranger.”

In order for his child to have a life, Deckard had to give up his relationship with his child. To protect his child, he couldn’t ever speak to her. He couldn’t watch her grow up. His child would never know who he was, and he did that out of love. He sacrificed whatever desire he had at being a father, for the life of his child.

The end of the film, K takes Deckard to see his daughter. They both exit his vehicle and walk to the steps, covered in snow. Deckard asks if he’s alright, K nods, and Deckard leaves him to go inside.

Once again, the movie pauses. K slowly sits on the steps holds his hand out and watches the snowflakes land on his hand. Here I think he realizes what true love really is. He sacrificed his life for Deckard and his daughter. All he wanted all along was to be loved. Every billboard we see of Joi tells us two things, “Everything you want to see and hear.” Throughout the film, she tells him how happy she is with him and that she loves him. He longs for it, even if he knows that relationship isn’t real.

K’s new reality is that he now knows that true love means sacrifice.

Finally Deckard walks into the building, only to find his daughter holding out her hand in the middle of a snowstorm. The movie gives us a close up shot of her hand before she turns to him and gives the last line of film.

“Isn’t it beautiful?”