Blade Runner 2049 or Do Androids Dream of Gender Equality?
Just a heads up, this is a long one, turns out I have opinions-a-plenty about this one. Blade Runner 2049 did a slightly better job of representing women than its predecessor, although in the original none of the female characters are human women and the only way that any of them make it out alive is in the arms of Harrison Ford. There are twice as many named female characters in this film as compared to the original, but that’s going by the credits, I’m pretty sure one is only called “Madam” on screen and I don’t know if we ever hear the replicant prostitute’s name aloud. Also, all the women have basically a terrible time, so there’s that.
*Blade Runner 2049 spoilers follow*
Let’s start with the sole female survivor from the first film, Rachel (Sean Young in flashbacks to the original, Loren Peta as a stand in). In her first appearance she is absent from any portrayal of herself as a character - she is an anonymous skeleton, dug up in a box and examined as evidence. Later, she appears as a ghost, another replicant designed to trick Deckard (Harrison Ford) into thinking Rachel has returned. However, the imposter is a pale imitation, easily seen through and she is discarded. Rachel does not inhabit this film, she haunts it, and all of her spectres are filed or thrown away. Perhaps as the sole female replicant to possess reproductive capabilities, she was too powerful to be allowed to live. The whole purpose of having synthetic women as sexual partners is that they are disposable and guilt-free, but the possibility of conception leads to consequences. Furthermore, the ability to create life is a uniquely female power that has been stolen and commercialised by men in this universe. If Rachel can create life herself, she renders her own creator useless. Therefore she must not simply be killed but destroyed, she is erased from this story altogether.
Another woman denied control of her own story is Joi (Ana de Armas). Joi is the holographic girlfriend of K (Ryan Gosling), a replicant. She is an artificial man’s projection of what he imagines a woman to be like, without any kind of tangible body to call her own. The extent to which she even exists as any kind of character is therefore debatable. It would be different if she was an artificial intelligence, a truly sentient and unique personality, however it is strongly suggested that she’s simply a program. Adverts for Joi litter the cityscape, proclaiming that she can be, “whatever you want”. What K seems to want is a 1950s housewife to bring him burgers, as this is how we are introduced to Joi. Every action she takes is to serve K; from insisting to go on the lam with him even though she could cease to exist, just to the police can’t extract any data from her, to hiring a prostitute to overlay herself onto so that K can pretend to have sex with her. I had so many problems with this. Firstly, this implies that women are so homogenous that you can pick any two and layer them on top of each other, it’ll be fine because apparently they’re all the exact same size and shape. It’s as though there’s just one paper doll template for all women in this world - which as these two have actually been manufactured, there might be, but there’s a huge variation in the physiology of the male replicants that we see. Additionally, Joi dismisses the prostitute, Mariette (Mackenzie Davis), by saying, “I’m done with you”, seemingly trying to emphasise that Joi is using Mariette. A woman taking advantage of a woman isn’t any better than a man doing so - is it possible for women just not to be exploited at all?
In addition to Mariette, whose name I’m not sure we even hear during the film, there are two other named female replicants; Freysa (Hiam Abbass) and Luv (Sylvia Hocks). Luv has vastly more screen time and is portrayed as capable in a variety of ways - she hosts a business meeting, flies an aircraft, pries open enormous metal doors with her bare hands and fights excellently in hand-to-hand combat. However, personality-wise, she is lacking. She seems to act as as proxy to her creator Wallace (Jared Leto). She parrots his beliefs, or one half of them anyway, as Wallace switches regularly between referring to replicants as “slaves” and “angels”, his motivations are hard to follow. She believes in replicant superiority, but other than that, she comes across as a process - a means to an end, action without any personal drive or thought behind it. The canonical excuse that replicants have been programmed to obey, and so she cannot deviate from her course to explore her character, doesn’t hold up, as K is allowed plenty of room to soul search and follow his own agenda. Furthermore, if she is made to blindly follow Wallace, why does she always look so uncomfortable when being scrutinised by him? We see her visibly flinch from his sensor bots. She is allowed only enough independence from her rail-road destiny to remind us that she is a subjugated female.
Freysa is the other prominent replicant female. She is the leader of the replicant resistance, she looks middle-aged, appears to have a spider-web network of connections and agents and therefore presumably plenty of power. Freysa seems amazing, but we see her for all of five minutes so I can’t really make much more of a judgement than that.
One final, unnamed replicant female exists in Blade Runner 2049, and she has possibly the worst deal out of everyone. We witness her birth, a private and vulnerable moment, followed by the rest of her very short life. She is squeezed, undignified and naked, from a plastic packet onto the floor, where she lies shivering and struggling for breath. There she is touched up by Wallace, who proceeds to literally wash his hands of her whilst studying her from every angle using a multitude of drones. Next, he caresses her belly, describing her womb absolutely disgustingly as, “that barren pasture, empty and salted”, before slicing her open and then, like the rotten cherry on the worst cake of all time, kissing her. I think we all get that he built an empire on literally objectifying women and subjecting them to slavery, did we need this violent reminder?
Blade Runner 2049 breaks away from the original by introducing a human woman, Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright), however I’m fairly certain that she’s only referred to as “Madam” in the film. Despite being human, she - like K - is robbed of a name for no real reason. She cannot simply exist as a police chief, we have to be constantly reminded, through language, that she’s a woman, despite the visual fact of her being a woman doing a pretty good job of that anyway. Is this in search of a pat on the back for having two middle-aged female characters? Whilst that is a positive, I would also like female characters to have a name and the military rank they have presumably worked hard to earn. On top of this, her death felt completely pointless. “Do what you’ve got to do” have to be the most passive last words ever. Given the little we know about Joshi - that she has a military career and huge power within the police - it makes no sense for her not to put up a fight.
So, we’ve had holograms, replicants and humans, but there is a third category of women in this film. Dr. Ana Stelline (Carla Juri) is the daughter of a replicant mother and human father, so we are unsure of her exact biological make up. What we do know, however, is that she’s basically the replicant messiah, so it’s laudable to see a woman occupy that position. However, you guessed it, everything else in her life is pretty terrible. She has a broken immune system and so lives alone in a sparse, hermetically sealed bubble, where she makes the happy memories for replicants that she never had herself. Carla seems to be a good person - she wants to give replicants a better life, even if only in their minds.
If everyone in Blade Runner 2049 is having an awful time, not just the women, then at least we can say it’s a fairly egalitarian experience. However, K has a good job and his dream girlfriend, yes he loses both of those but Joi and his boss actually die so I think it’s safe to say they have the worse end of that. People have to actually shout abuse at K, which I believe only happens twice, to remind us that he’s a second class citizen, otherwise he seems to be living a fairly normal life. Before we meet Deckard, his ex-colleague Gaff (Edward James Olmos) makes it clear that his main aim in life is to be left alone, which he achieves for most of the film, living seemingly comfortably in an abandoned but nevertheless somewhat luxurious Las Vegas casino. he does endure undeniable physical and emotional hardships after being captured, he’s taunted with the spectre of his dead love and almost drowns, but the film ends with him being reunited with his daughter and the prospect of rebuilding a family.
Overall, Blade Runner 2049 is better than the original as far as the representation of women goes, if only because there are more of them and they don’t all die. However, they are still having pretty much the worst time and are undeniably subject to the whims of men - they are girlfriends, prostitutes, slaves. Those who exist independently from men, such as Joshi, don’t make it out alive. Freysa is the exception to this, but we see so little of her and know hardly anything about her; she possesses power but is not allowed the screen time to display it. Ana is the real tragedy of this film, as she is the embodiment of hope for an emancipating revolution, but is doomed to live the rest of her life trapped and isolated. No woman is allowed to truly be free.
And now for some asides:
Rachel has the most amazing and recognisable silhouette, it’s a brilliant piece of design that I didn’t fully appreciate in the original.
The costume detail was amazing - K had salt lines on his trousers after he came out of the sea. Touches like that are what made this film so gorgeous to look at.
Booze is not for doggos, harrison Ford.