[film club] AI Girlfriends and Blade Runner 2049

The latest installment of HOUDINI's [film club] -- And1 presents us with a final thinkpiece in their series on male loneliness, porn, and AI viewed through the lens of modern Hollywood movies. Today's target is the sequel to the cyberpunk classic, "Blade Runner."

Series Recap

I'm doing a series of posts about male loneliness, porn, and AI using Hollywood movies from the past 20 years as a framing device. I started with 2007's Lars and the Real Girl, then Don Jon from 2013, then I talked about Her, which also came out in 2013. Now I'm wrapping up the series with 2017's Blade Runner 2049, which was the movie I really wanted to talk about in the first place.

Same caveat here as with the first three reviews: I'm not talking about the intended plot of the movie so much as I'm talking about what these movies tell us about the state of the culture.

My previous reviews have been scene-by-scene plot synopses and that approach just was not working for Blade Runner 2049. The first draft was way longer than any of my previous write ups, which were already too long, and there were just so many superfluous details in there that nobody could possibly have given two shits about. So instead what I'm going to do is a very tight outline of the movie's plot, followed by a profile of Ryan Gosling's character, and at least one anatomy of a scene, maybe more.

I do genuinely have a lot to say about this movie, but the only way I'm going to write anything remotely readable is by changing things up.

A Briefing on Blade Runner (1982)

Because Blade Runner 2049 is, of course, a sequel to 1982's Blade Runner I have to talk about the original. I'm going to try to keep it tight because while Blade Runner is an excellent movie it doesn't really have anything relevant to say about the topic at hand. I initially thought there might have been something to say about Darryl Hannah's character but I did a rewatch last night and there was nothing there.

The original Blade Runner is based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, was directed by Ridley Scott and starred Harrison Ford, Sean Young, Rutger Hauer, and Darryl Hannah. It's set in the dystopian Los Angeles (is there any other kind?) of 2019 and set the blueprint for the cyberpunk aesthetic. The movie still looks great 40+ years later. It was a flop when it came out but eventually people came around. It was a cult movie for a long time and now it's just taken for granted as one of the best science fiction movies of all time. There have been several different cuts of the film. Generally speaking you want to watch a version without narration but honestly they're all pretty good.

The backstory here is that in the near future the Tyrell Corporation has created androids, called replicants, that are so similar to human beings that they are virtually indistinguishable. An environmental calamity has rendered Earth more or less unlivable. Replicants are mostly used for slave labor to build off world colonies for settlers. Replicants are stronger, smarter, faster and tougher than human beings so as a failsafe to prevent rebellions replicants are created with a life span of four years. The failsafe isn't safe enough because there have been several uprisings by replicants, causing their presence on Earth to be banned. Any fugitive replicants found on Earth are hunted and killed by police officers called "blade runners."

The movie starts with four fugitive replicants escaping to Los Angeles. A former blade runner named Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, is called out of retirement to track the replicants down. Deckard starts his search by talking to the head of the Tyrell Corporation, who has him administer a test on his secretary Rachael, played by Sean Young, to determine if she's a replicant or not.

After administering the test Deckard determines that Rachael is a replicant but doesn't know it. Tyrell tells Deckard that she's a new kind of replicant who has artificial memories implanted so that she doesn't know the truth. Rachael follows Deckard home and tries to convince him that she's a real person but he tells her she's not. She leaves Deckard's apartment in tears. Afterwards Deckard finds out that Rachael has gone AWOL too and is assigned to kill her as well.

Deckard tracks down two of the replicants. He kills one of them but the other one gets the drop on him but at the last moment Rachael comes out of nowhere to save him. They go back to Deckard's apartment and Deckard tells Rachael that he won't kill her because he owes her one but that somebody else will track her down. Rachael goes to leave but Deckard traps her in a corner and coerces her into making out with him, which is why I don't review movies from 1982. Deckard eventually lets her leave and tracks down the other two replicants. He kills one of them, but the ringleader, named Roy Batty and played by Rutger Hauer, beats the everloving shit out of him, even though Batty's four years are up and his body is shutting down on him.

Deckard tries to escape from Batty, but can't make a jump during a rooftop chase and winds up hanging from the ledge of a building. Batty clears the jump with ease and even though he has every reason to want to kill Deckard he decides to save his life instead, proving that he's more human than human. Roy Batty delivers what may be the best movie soliloquy of all time and then dies. Deckard goes back to his apartment, finds Rachael waiting for him, and they both make a break for it and get the fuck out of LA. The End.

Blade Runner is an amazing movie and there's a lot to say about it, but very little is pertinent to what I'm talking about. I will mention that, in the movie, they explain that the replicant played by Darryl Hannah was designed as a pleasure model. Another of the replicants (played by Joanna Cassidy) was a combat model but winds up working as an exotic dancer while she's in hiding on Earth, which is a plot detail I will mostly attribute to Hollywood being run by pigs. One final detail I'll mention is that in the film, the replicants, especially the female replicants, are filmed in such a way that on occasion their eyes appear to be glowing (it's a stylistic choice, not a plot point). In 2026, it kind of puts to mind when you can see the ring light reflected in an OnlyFans model's eyes, but maybe that's just me.

Blade Runner 2049

So with that out of the way let's get to the main event. Blade Runner 2049 is a science fiction movie directed by Denis Villeneuve and starring Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana De Armas, Sylvia Hoeks, Robin Wright, Mackenzie Davis, Dave "the Animal" Bautista, and everyone's favorite, Jared Leto. The movie cost $185 million to make, earned $277 million, but it needed to earn $400 million to break even even though it was partially funded by a fat tax rebate from the Hungarian government, so who even knows what's going on there. Overall, the movie got a favorable response from moviegoers and critics, but I've never heard anybody claim that it's better than the original.

The movie opens up 30 years after the original. After a period of open warfare the production of replicants was banned outright. The Tyrell Corporation went out of business and the company's assets were bought up on the cheap by the Wallace Corporation, which is run by Niander Wallace, played by Jared Leto (shout out Ghost Stories For The End of the World). The Wallace Corporation is the savior of mankind because their advances in synthetic farming have saved Earth from famine. They also figured out a way to manufacture new models of replicants that are totally subservient to mankind. The Wallace models are legal but the Tyrell models are still hunted and killed by blade runners. Also none of the various models of replicants die after 4 years any more.

A Brief Synopsis of 2049

I'm going to provide the tightest recap of the movie's main plot that I'm able to because it's mostly not germane to the points I'm trying to make:

Our protagonist is K, played by Ryan Gosling, who is a replicant that works for the LAPD as a blade runner. 30 years after the events of the first movie he discovers that Deckard and Rachael had a child, which should have been impossible because replicants are unable to biologically reproduce. K's superior officer Lt. Joshi, played by Robin Wright, orders him to destroy all the evidence of the child's birth, including killing the child.

During the course of his mission K encounters two factions: the Replicant Freedom Movement, which believes that the child is a messiah figure that will lead the revolution that will free replicants from human oppression, and the Wallace Corporation, which wants to figure out the secret of Rachael's fertility to breed an army of slave replicants to colonize the universe. K finds evidence to suggest that he's the son of Rachael and Deckard and tracks down his father, who is living in the ruins of Las Vegas, but is crushed to discover that Rachael and Deckard actually had a daughter.

The Wallace Corporation kidnaps Deckard and tries to force him to reveal the location of his daughter, but he doesn't know where she is. K saves Deckard from the clutches of the Wallace Corporation, helps him fake his own death (again), and then sacrifices his life to reunite Deckard and his daughter for the first time since childbirth. The End.

Comparing Two Worlds

The Los Angeles of 2049 is a much bleaker place than the LA of 2019, which was already a pretty pessimistic vision of the future. In the original Blade Runner, LA was a bustling metropolis: with flying cars, billboards the size of skyscrapers, and overcrowding to the point that Deckard could barely walk down the street without pushing people out of the way. The centerpiece of the city was the Tyrell Corporation headquarters, an impossibly large golden ziggurat that was lit up like the sun.

In comparison, the LA of 2049 looks like a ghost town. The Tyrell Corporation headquarters still exists but all the lights are turned out. In fact, outside of some perfunctory ads in the heart of the city (and I'll definitely circle back on this), the city is mostly dark. I think in the movie universe LA is still supposed to be overpopulated, but there are only a few scenes with more than a handful of people in them, and when we do see large crowds of people they're prostitutes, orphans, and garbage pickers.

I mentioned earlier that in Blade Runner 2049 replicants no longer have a four year life span, and there are things that I like and things that I don't like about that change. On the one hand, I think that plot point was a potent metaphor for life in the underclass. Replicants are mass produced by a huge corporation to perform brutal, dangerous slave labor and it doesn't matter how they feel about it because 48 months after their creation they're already dead.

That's one of the things that gave the character of Roy Batty his juice. He's essentially a Terminator a la Arnold Schwarzenegger, designed to be the perfect killing machine, and he basically says, "fuck that, I want to read poetry and fall in love and live as long as I possibly can on my own terms." Dig your own ditches, fight your own wars.

You always hear the question, "what fictional bad guy was completely justified?" and the answer to that question is Roy Batty, except he's so correct that he doesn't even count as a bad guy.

With all of that said, the movie gets a lot of mileage out of their portrayal of brainwashed, subservient replicants. Since allowing replicants to have free will in the first movie backfired so spectacularly, Wallace replicants are relentlessly conditioned to see themselves as inferior to human beings, even though they're the same or better than the Tyrell models. They undergo frequent baseline exams, which are sort of like reverse captcha tests to ensure that replicants don't see themselves as human. They're forced to repeat nonsensical mantras, asked degrading and dehumanizing questions and are subjected to insults and unpleasant stimuli designed to provoke a (human) response of anger or indignation, and if they flunk the test they're executed. They're conditioned to hide their feelings, to show no emotions upon penalty of death.

Analyzing K's Behavior

If K has any qualms about hunting down and killing his fellow replicants for a living, he doesn't show it. Of course if he did, he'd be killed, too. It's public knowledge that K is a replicant and he gets treated like shit everywhere he goes. His coworkers and neighbors randomly insult him and curse at him for no other reason than because he's a replicant and he just absorbs it. I didn't realize until I started writing this review how many movies Ryan Gosling makes where he plays a stoic, inexpressive character. Which kind of suggests that he's not a good actor, but at least in this movie he does a pretty good job of playing a character that possesses a full range of human emotions but actively suppresses them every moment of the day, even when he's alone. And that probably takes some chops.

K has a kind of semi flirtatious D/S relationship with his boss at the LAPD, Lt. Joshi. It's nothing too overt, but Joshi dresses in all black, leather boots, blonde hair slicked back. She treats him like an object and gives him trivial orders knowing that he has to obey them. K refers to her as "madam" and is visibly pleased when she praises him. I guess maybe it's more overt than I realized. There's nothing explicitly sexual between them but they both seem like they're enjoying themselves. Besides those overtones or maybe in addition to them Joshi looks about twenty years older than K, and of course because replicants don't have mothers that adds a whole different dimension to whatever their deal is.

K's life is completely empty outside of work. When he's not on duty he goes back home to his shithole tenement apartment that he shares with his holographic AI girlfriend Joi, played by Ana de Armas. Before Joi's character is introduced we see ads for her as a product with the slogan "Everything you want to see. Everything you want to hear." Joi is in many ways the opposite of Samantha from Her. Joi's small talk with K when he gets home from work sounds rehearsed and shopworn. You can easily manage them having the same conversation day after day, repeating a loop with slight variations. Very artificial.

Joi also has a holographic body, and her outfits shift as she engages with K. She's dressed like a 1950s housewife when she serves him dinner, a college student when she asks him to read to her, club clothes when she asks him to dance. Initially, Joi is only available on the home console in K's apartment, but K buys a mobile upgrade that allows K to take Joi with him when he leaves the house. When K installs the upgrade, we see that the Joi software includes a character creation screen just like a video game that lets you alter Joi's appearance.

Comparing AI Girlfriends

I want to take a second here to compare and contrast Samantha from Her and Joi from Blade Runner 2049, specifically the different takes on what kind of man would want an AI girlfriend.

This is a jaundiced take, but the message you can take away from Her is that buying an AI girlfriend is a narcissist's delight, even if she doesn't have a physical presence. Blade Runner 2049's position is that an AI girlfriend would only appeal to someone who was pretty dehumanized, who didn't feel worthy of genuine human love and affection. This is a key difference. During a scene in 2049, Joi tells K how happy she is when he's around, but K becomes visibly uncomfortable and tells her that she doesn't have to say things like that. Compare that to Theodore and Samantha, where her praising and nurturing him is the whole basis of their relationship.

Along the same lines, Ryan Gosling's character in Blade Runner 2049 is a complete inversion of his character in Lars and the Real Girl. Lars copes with his grief regarding his mother's death by entering into an imaginary relationship with a sex doll, and with the help of his community, which loves him and cares for him, he works his way through his delusion and kindles a relationship with an actual woman. In Blade Runner 2049, K is so traumatized by his societal rejection that he shuns human contact and assuages his loneliness by entering a pantomime relationship with an AI hologram.

This brings us to a question that I personally find a little bit tedious but it has to be addressed: How real is Joi in comparison to K?

I'm starting from the position that replicants are just as real as human beings in any way that matters, which is the whole point of the first Blade Runner movie. The viewpoint of the movie is that Joi is at least partially real, which I'm calling foul on just from the standpoint that it's a question that you can't hedge your bets on. I'm aware that there may be at least a little latent sexism on my part when I say this, but I don't think that Joi is real, even by movie logic. My objections to Joi being real are the same as my objections to Samantha from Her being real: there's no externality. Both characters don't exist in any context outside of Adam's rib. Joi in particular has no physical or emotional needs. She can't offer any actual human companionship, just the illusion of companionship.

There's a scene where K and Joi are pantomiming an embrace and Joi freezes in the middle of the moment when K gets a call from work, just as if he was watching a porno clip on his phone. I also think that what makes Blade Runner 2049 bleaker than any of the other movies I've reviewed is that it doesn't suggest any alternatives to Joi. In Lars and the Real Girl there was Kelli Garner, in Don Jon there was Julianne Moore, in Her there was Amy Adams. In Blade Runner 2049, if an AI Ana de Armas isn't good enough for you, then you can die alone.

A Sidebar on AI Sex Surrogates

I mentioned in my review of Her that I was going to talk about the ménage à trois scene that Blade Runner 2049 lifted whole cloth from the earlier movie. The set up of the two scenes are the same (the AI love interest of the main character sets up a tryst between the protagonist and a flesh and blood woman as a way of consummating their relationship) but the conclusions of the scenes are different in a crazy way.

In Her, Theodore can't go through with it because he's in love with Samantha and he would prefer a platonic love with Samantha than intercourse with the surrogate. Compare that to the Blade Runner 2049 scene where K actually fucks the prostitute. My contention is that if you were to ask K what happened that night he would tell you that he had sex with Joi. Joi was more real to him than the actual woman that he slept with and, to my mind, that may be the most dystopian part of the whole movie.

The Virtually-Erogenous Bridge

Now I want to talk about the bridge scene, which is really what inspired this whole series of articles. If you have a Roku device in your house and you let that device go to screensaver one of the images you will see in the Roku City scroll is a giant hand reaching out languidly from a billboard. Like all the images in Roku City it was lifted from a movie, in this case Blade Runner 2049.

Near the end of the movie, when K is at his lowest point, he's walking across a bridge all alone at night. Off the side of the bridge an enormous figure emerges from the darkness. It's a naked woman, 100 feet tall if she's an inch, with pink skin, a blue anime wig, and jet black eyes with no pupils. She reaches out with her finger to point at K and pulls her face closer to look at him.

K recognizes the figure as Joi, the love of his life. Joi doesn't recognize him at all. Joi says to him, "You look lonely. I can fix that." She strikes a couple of pornographic poses and then returns to a billboard in the distance advertising the Joi AI software, on sale now.

When I first noticed the Blade Runner 2049 tribute in the Roku City screensaver I thought it was odd considering that the movie was kind of a bust, sort of a niche reference. With that said, to the extent that anyone remembers Blade Runner 2049 that is hands down the image that everyone remembers. The actual release movie poster was some generic trash, nothing special, but if you Google "blade runner 2049 poster" or "blade runner 2049 art" that is the image that pops up again and again:

And listen, I am not stupid. I completely understand why a beautiful naked anime girl the size of the US Bank Tower captured the imagination of so many people. But as provocative as it is, it's also a really ambiguous image. Like it's sexual imagery but it's also kind of frightening, at least to me. She's staring at K with those black soulless eyes, and she's so much bigger than him. It's scary.

Obviously the go-to frame-of-reference is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (and when I just now Googled it I realize that the posture of Joi's wrist resembles Adam reaching out to God and not the other way around), but to me it also puts to mind Samara from The Ring crawling out of the TV set and into the real world. It's a visual image that provokes a response. And that response is going to be different from person to person.

If you showed that image to Lars from Lars and the Real Girl, he would probably see the divine feminine, the mother that he never got to meet because she died during childbirth, because ultimately he was pure of heart. If you showed that same image to Don Jon he would probably get his dick out to pay tribute to the goddess he spent his whole life praying to manifesting herself before him. As far as K goes, in the context of the movie he was seeing Helen of Troy pushing him forward, but also probably a broken promise, a dream that never came true.

K was a lonely, desperate, alienated guy who went looking for answers to his problems in the marketplace and came up short. Or maybe not, what do I know? It's just a dumb Hollywood movie.

Author's Note

I still have plenty more to say but I'm also consciously trying to hit my main points and get out. Other things I wanted to talk about that I'm not going to include in the article are Jared Leto's character, especially his scene with Harrison Ford at the end of the movie, the similarities between K and Travis Bickle, and whether or not the movie is sexist (yes and no). If anybody wants to talk about those topics or anything else in the comments I'm up for it. I'll probably do a wrap-up post with a brief summary of how I felt before writing these posts and how I feel now. If I do I'll either post it tomorrow or Saturday. Thank you to anyone who read this series, apologies for blowing my deadline at the end. Hope you liked it.

Editor's Note

This article was originally published on r/TrueAnon and has been republished with the permission of its author. We have lightly edited it here for clarity and readibility. All movie stills are courtesy of SceneStill.com.