The burden of being

It is undoubtedly the most bizarre but perhaps also the most painful sex scene I’ve ever seen in a Hollywood movie. Agent K (Ryan Gosling) goes home to his apartment where Joi (Ana de Armas), the sentient program that is projected as a hologram who seems to function as the brooding cop’s emotional anchor, is waiting with a surprise. She has rented Mariette (Mackenzie Davis), the orange-haired prostitute Agent K is strangely fond of, to serve as her physical surrogate in their first attempt to make love. Joi instructs Mariette to replicate whatever she sees she is doing to her lover. The visual effect of this peculiar coupling is quite beautiful, if not strikingly erotic. It is a threesome that’s not, depending on one’s appreciation of Joi’s existence, with the overlapping images of two women expressing their sexual desires on a single man creating a spectacle out of the complexities of love and loving in a world where the very concept of being is frighteningly fluid.

Set more than a couple of decades after the troublingly dystopian version of overpopulated and glaringly wasted California that Ridley Scott envisioned in Blade Runner (1982), the visionary director’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Denis Villaneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 emphasizes even more than Scott’s film how the planet has become desolate at the hands of its viciously dominant species. The world is blanketed by a sea of deadened reds and desolate browns. Los Angeles, first shown in the film from an aerial view that shows its corners teeming with buildings that are presumably peopled by all sorts of survivors and slaves, is a literal melting pot where the dynamics of a society defined by differences proves to be the very seed of strife and conflict.

Agent K (Ryan Gosling) forms deep emotions towards Joi (Ana de Armas), his personal sentient program.

• Villaneuve’s film is ponderous but direct.

Unlike Scott’s film whose many versions obfuscate its thrillingly opaque intentions, it doesn’t go around in circles and riddles to present its interests, which is the fragile social order that has been threatened by the slow but sure shift in power by an enslaved class of people that is coming to terms with its existence. In a way, the film’s methods are more confrontational, utilizing what essentially is a plot supported by a brash utility of twists and red herrings to push a concept that is relevant in this present age where art has become a window to contemplate modern society’s burgeoning moral issues. Agent K’s story isn’t far from Pinocchio’s, except that unlike the puppet who wanted to become a real boy, the cop has lived what seems to be a life of stubborn contentment, knowing fully well that his programmed role in that ordered society is to terminate fellow replicants. It is only when he becomes aware that he may have a more special role to play in the struggle of his kind that he becomes obsessed with unearthing the history of both himself and his fellow replicants.

• Blade Runner 2049 dwells on the aches of existence.

Its very obvious but most clever design is meant to hinge the proof of existence on the capability to love. The first time we see Agent K, he dutifully murders a replicant who has peacefully retired to be a weevil farmer. When he gets home, he immediately showers, perhaps to remove the awful stench of his awful business. Then he flirts with Joi, gives her an anniversary gift. It all seems funny at first since those scenes, without any context, feel like an exaggeration of our own fetishizing of technology, but as Agent K and Joi’s relationship becomes more defined, it becomes the very core of the blade runner’s humanity, and the same can also be said for Joi despite the fact that she is both synthetic and without a physical vessel. They are both capable of truly loving, of pursuing something bigger than what they have been programmed to do all for the sake of love. They are capable of sacrifice.

This brings me back to the bizarre but lovely sex scene right in the middle of Villaneuve’s dense but surprisingly straightforward cyberpunk caper. It is bizarre because it seems like it is fueled by fetishistic desire. It is lovely because it features all the lowlifes in that chaotic world, proving in private that despite the unbearable burden of their being, they are capable of the one thing that the rest of humanity in its crazed effort to maintain social order or to maximize efficiency and profit has forgotten, and that is to love.