Blade Runner 2049 (2017) — IV: In Service of Humanity
*SPOILERS*
K’s journey after discovering soul crushing humility is beautiful and tragic. He’d learned that Joi felt real feelings. That he felt them too. That it was love. The real thing. Not like the misspelled pollution that Wallace gave to his angel. Not like the one that killed the real thing.
The Desert of the Real
K knew that a child was born of two replicants. An existential miracle. Proof of divinity concerning itself with replicant affairs, of a place for replicants in cosmic design. And after seeing the object of his love destroyed by the angel of a despotic god he finds out that he is not the miracle. He is just another angel of the same god. It’s a Biblical tragedy. Or as definitely smart guy Jordan Peterson might put it, it’s the hEiGhT oF tRaGeDy.
So K has to grapple with a devastating existential state. Having gone from being an nonimportant slave that hunted the liberated, to being aware of his humanity through a mutual love and believing in his cosmic import, to losing that love and realizing that he’s just another manufactured consciousness. He sees the advertisement of Joi and feels something other than grief again. He remembers what Freysa told him. He remembers his real, undeniably human experiences. And realizes that it’s okay if you’re not the center of the cosmos; it’s okay if you’re not a miracle; it’s okay if you’re not Christ on Earth. Being human is enough. And being more human than human. Well that might mean more.
Virtual Redemption
So K does the most human thing possible. He decides to act selflessly. Eyes misty, angry at this injustice that feels woven into the fabric of the universe, with the detached apathy of a replicant accustomed to burying it, disabused of the notion of heaven on Earth, he thinks on his love for Joi. About how real she was. And about how ruthlessly she was taken. Only to find the single thing that animated him all along wasn’t true. And in a way that only Villeneuve can communicate, in the wake of this composite trauma, he finds peace. Equanimous, as Christ must have felt on his way to trial with Pontius Pilate, he decides to stop thinking of himself; to do something for someone else. Dead clear, he knows who needs to win. It’s not him.
So he takes on Luv. She’s shaken but manages to stab him. “I’m the best angel,” brainwashed, pity. He should be dead, but three beats later, he comes back. He holds her synthetic skull below water, screaming guttural, of a passion lupine. And she’s dead. Killed in a literal rising tide, one that can’t be held by a broom. He just killed god’s best. He keeps Deckard alive, the father. And takes him to his daughter. The actual miracle child; the gentle, quiet Dr. Stelline. “Of the Stars.” (Calling it: foreshadowing that maybe Tyrell had less to do with her than cosmic divinity). Between Roy and K, Deckard has now twice met replicants that could have killed him, and when time came, chose not to. He wants to know, “Why’d you do it?” He asks twice; uncharacteristically pushy.
K just looks at the snow falling. You get the sense it’s something he’s always loved.
More Real Than Real
I’d like to think he’s got a memory we haven’t been shown. He got one of Dr. Stelline’s actual memories from the orphanage either as part of the long plot to liberate her or more likely because she couldn’t help herself. But he also got one that she really loved. Not a birthday but the snow right outside her building as she imagined it being. Or maybe as she remembered it, perhaps one of the few beautiful things form her vita doloris in the orphanage. He looks down at that same snow, infused with a new significance. Deckard goes inside.
K lays down on the steps leading up to the building. And stares up at the heavens at which the miracle child once screamed, now gray. Stares through the snow, as it travels gently to find a place on his face. Acceptance. He knows what he is. He knows it was worth it. No heavy handed imagery. No lazy plug-and-chug Hollywood symbolism. After a deeply personal discovery of love and selfhood and futility he realized the same thing that Christ must have known all along — service of humanity and sacrifice for it is a path to self actualization. His purpose was grace. So he gave everything for something bigger than him. He breathes his last as his death affirms to no one other than himself:
Human is a choice.
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Blade Runner 2049 Essay —
I: Dreaming in Refracted Light
IV: In Service of Humanity
Blade Runner Essay —
