What We Talk About When We Talk About Luv: The Beauty and Horror of Blade Runner 2049′s Tragic Antiheroine
“I’m the best one.” Luv declares as she struts away from K, fresh blood from a stolen kiss adorning her face as she departs, having again reduced her opponent to helplessness and having again decided, bafflingly, not to kill him.
If we think of Blade Runner 2049 as a pretentious yet inferior movie, a pale imitation of its source material lacking all the intellectual and emotional resonance of the original, these four words spoken by Luv mean nothing, existing as a tossed off line spoken by a tossed off character in a film that accomplishes nothing aside from looking pretty and making you wish you were watching the original.
I disagree. I think Luv is incredible, one of the most fascinating, nuanced, and profoundly tragic characters I’ve encountered in a very long time, a figure who both deserves and rewards our attention. Though it’s easy to miss during an initial viewing (I certainly did) Luv has a rich, deep story arc that branches through the whole of Blade Runner 2049, one that both parallels and intersects with K’s story, the two characters informing each other even as they violently ricochet off one another. Once understood, the tragic depths of Luv’s story don’t just reveal a remarkable character but enrich the movie as a whole, adding an extra dimension to a narrative already dense with meaning.
Luv, like our central protagonist K, is a Nexus-9 Replicant model, a product of the Wallace Corporation. When we first meet her she is in the process of selling other Replicants as Off-World slave labor. This may seem like a betrayal of the first order but, as we will soon learn, Luv does not see it that way.
Luv works directly under CEO Niander Wallace himself, acting as his personal assistant, assassin, and all purpose fixer. While Niander Wallace is the face Technological Capitalism chooses to show the world–brilliant, eccentric, full of glorious and high minded ambition, a Ted Talk come to life–Luv represents it’s actual real world consequences: empty sadism, nihilistic violence, and ignorant self-aggrandizement, which is not to say that Luv is stupid. Luv knows she is a slave but nevertheless exalts in her position because she is the best slave, Niander Wallace’s chosen instrument. If Niander Wallace is God, and he certainly seems to think he is, Luv is his “First Angel”, the chosen means by which he enacts his will on the world. Luv knows this, but she can’t bring herself to fully comprehend its ramifications, a failure of understanding that ultimately leads to her tragic destruction.
Any discussion of tragedy would be incomplete without at least a brief detour to account for the Ancient Greeks, the originators of Tragedy as Western Civilization knows it, so let’s get it out of the way now. All tragedy results, on a fundamental level, from a failure to obey the message inscribed above the Oracle of Delphi: “Know Thyself”. When you don’t understand yourself, you open yourself up to becoming prey of the Gods, what today we might call the Passions, though few Greek Tragedians would have recognized a distinction between the two. (Euripides being the notable exception.) The most famous embodiment of this kind of tragedy through self-ignorance was Oedipus, the subject of the tragedy Oedipus Rex by Sophocles. Though a prisoner of fate, Oedipus effectively strolled into his own cage by letting his passions rule him, first by giving in to his wrath by killing a stranger he met on the road, and then by giving in to his lust by marring the wife of the man he killed. When wisdom finally comes to Oedipus in the form of the realization that the man he killed was his father and the woman he married is his mother, it arrives too late to save him, and instead destroys him.
The character of Luv in Blade Runner 2049 bears less direct blame for her own tragic fate, yet the mechanisms by which it operates are fundamentally similar. Luv does not understand herself. The result is pain and suffering, yet it is far more nuanced than it first appears. What superficially manifests as depraved cruelty is, in fact, the result of a more fundamental lack, the sort of profound misunderstanding of her own nature that elevates her from the status of a mere hired goon to a character worthy of our consideration, and even our sympathy.
Unless I’ve overlooked something (which is entirely possible) Blade Runner 2049 makes no mention of whether or not Luv has the sort of artificial memory implants that prove such an integral part of K’s personality and story. Knowing this is vital to understanding her character, and while there is no way to be absolutely certain, I believe Luv’s actions clearly demonstrate her lack of a synthetic past, maliciously depriving her replicant mind of what Eldon Tyrell in the first movie called “a cushion or a pillow for their emotions”. As a result I believe, despite her often cold exterior, Luv is a raging tumult of conflicting, contradictory emotions she can neither understand nor control, paramount of which are her feelings regarding K.
Luv expresses interest in K during their first meeting, her fascination paralleling the sparks that fly between Rachel and Deckard in the old recording they both listen to. Unlike the meet-cute that occurred thirty years prior in the first Blade Runner, the attraction isn’t mutual, and when Luv attempts to inquire further into K’s life he rebuffs her. This quiet, polite rejection will ultimately have devastating consequences for both characters. K makes a powerful enemy, while Luv becomes divided against herself, afflicted with powerful feelings she has no context for or understanding of. As Kierkegaard said, life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. Without any history there can be no understanding, we become disconnected and begin to float, easy prey for any passing impulse. Knowing this doesn’t let us absolve Luv of her misdeeds, but it does give us a chance to reach a better understanding of her, as well as the more enigmatic aspects of her behavior.
We see Luv cry twice in Blade Runner 2049. The first time is when she sees her master Niander Wallace stroking and bidding happy birthday to a newborn female replicant (credited only as ‘Female Replicant’) who he then proceeds to murder by stabbing her in the womb, a brutal crime committed for no real reason other than vent his frustration and illustrate a point in a monologue he’s delivering more or less to himself. The second time is when Luv tortures and kills Lieutenant Joshi, K’s master. Both instances involve a woman being murdered, stabbed to death specifically, their body violated with a piece of metal in a grotesque pantomime of the act of heterosexual lovemaking. (When Blade Runner’s symbolism isn’t Judeo-Christian it’s Freudian. Freud would have diagnosed Luv with the three A’s: Ambiguity, Alienation, Ambivalence.)
When Luv cries with Niander Wallace it is in response to the nameless female replicant shedding her plastic birth caul and spasming into life. Luv casts a fleeting glance upward as the tear rolls down her cheek as if in acknowledgement to a higher power that bestows the transcendent spark of life, but if that’s the case any pretense to the sacred is destroyed when Niander Wallace murders the newborn replicant, an act that serves as a vulgar reaffirmation of his own mastery over life and death.
When Luv cries a second time it’s in response to her torturing Lieutant Joshi by crushing shattered glass into her hand, an act of sadism that concludes with Luv murdering the Lieutenant outright.
The fact that Luv sheds tears in both instances despite their profoundly different circumstances may lead us to the conclusion that Luv’s tears have no real emotional resonance, instead being an involuntary autonomic response to any extreme stimuli, what is little more than a bug in her design. It’s a natural assumption, but one that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Luv is the best one, at least as far as her status as a consumer-grade product is concerned. She is the pinnacle of Wallace design, the closest to perfection he’s yet managed to come. If Luv had a fault in her genetic architecture that made her cry at inappropriate times, Niander Wallace would likely have disposed of her with the same dispassionate matter-of-factness he disposes of everything that mildly displeases him. Yet if Luv’s tears are genuine, how can we make sense of them?
The answer is the absence of her memories. Without the kind of mental foundation of memory that would provide her with a chance to ground the violent events she experiences and violent emotions she feels in context, Luv is helpless to control how she reacts, a condition her judiciously maintained cool exterior can only do so much to hide.
The tears she sheds while witnessing the nameless female replicant’s birth and the tears she sheds while torturing killing Lieutenant Joshi are both genuine. This is naturally confusing since the situations are so different, but as the author Leonard Richardson writes in his book Constellation Games, (which I cannot recommend highly enough) crying does not mean you’re sad, it means you’re experiencing an emotion that’s too large to keep inside of you. Blade Runner 2049 throws us off the scent because the first time Luv cries the cause is obvious, then when she cries for a second time it seems completely inappropriate to the situation, yet when we appreciate the emotional tumult storming inside Luv, both reactions begin to make congruous sense. The first time Luv cries it is out of empathy and a sense of the sublime. The second time Luv cries it is out rage fueled by a mix of resentment and jealously.
When Luv first strolls into Lieutenant Joshi’s office she says in regards to K “I like him. He’s a good boy.” an evaluation Lieutenant Joshi’s silence seems to affirm. Lieutenant Joshi is a character who, let us not forget, is for all intents and purposes K’s owner and master, having the same power dynamic with him that Niander Wallace has with Luv. Killing Lieutenant Joshi not only serves the practical purpose of giving Luv free reign to access Lieutenant Joshi’s computer and find K, but it also gives Luv a chance to eliminate a romantic rival, experience the catharsis of killing a human master in a way she never could with Niander Wallace (who she needs to reaffirm her status as the Highest Angel), and eliminate the person that has enforced rigid control over every aspect of K’s life. She’s acting out of a very warped sense of duty to K, not quite the sort of redeeming "kinship” that led Roy Batty to save Deckard’s life at the last moment, but a kind of solidarity nonetheless.
When viewed from this perspective, the desires motivating Luv are very fundamental and very human. She wants solidarity with her fellow replicants. She wants revenge on those who’ve enslaved her. She wants to experience romantic love. The fact that she gets none of these things, that she has been explicitly denied the capacity to understand what these desires are and how to act on them and is instead forced to derive comfort from her status as the best one, the best product, the best slave, is what elevates her as a character beyond the stark dichotomy of victim or villain to the higher echelon of tragic antiheroine.
Luv spares K’s life twice in open defiance of the spirit, if not the letter, of Niander Wallace’s commandments. The first time is when she and her fellow Wallace fixers storm Deckard’s Las Vegas sanctuary and abduct him. K fights back despite being wounded thus forcing Luv to beat him into submission, though when the time comes to move in for the kill, she holds back. Instead she kills Joi, K’s holographic A.I. companion, crushing the emitter that contains her consciousness beneath her radiantly polished boot.
Immediately before doing so she says “I do hope you’re satisfied with our product.” Luv looks at Joi when she speaks the line, though it seems to be intended for Joi, K, and Luv herself, all three of whom are themselves commercial products of the Wallace Corporation. It’s a line that can be read as pure sarcasm, yet when considered in the context of what we’ve been talking about, we can view it as a sort of question, and a sort of appeal as well. Joi and Luv are both Wallace Corporation products, but Luv knows herself to be the best product. There is an implicit “Why?” in Luv’s words and actions, an inquiry that demands an answer from K. “Why Joi and not me? Am I not the superior model?” K choosing Joi over her is an insult to her attraction and an affront to her pride, yet the only way she can express her outrage is with violence. By destroying Joi she demonstrates her preeminent status as a product, while also eliminating another rival for K’s affections.
Luv departs without another word, leaving K alive. It’s safe for us to assume that Luv hasn’t simply fallen victim to the classic bad guy cliché of incorrectly assuming the good guy’s dead. They are are both the same model of replicant, there’s no reason for us to think she isn’t precisely aware of both K’s limits and his potential. Luv is still intrigued by K in a way she doesn’t understand, and lets him live secure the the knowledge that they will meet again under similarly unpleasant circumstances. By then the scales will have completely fallen from K’s eyes and he will be endowed with an unshakable sense of purpose, his own personal raison d'être. Luv will not be so fortunate.
K, at great cost, comes to understand who and what he really is in time for him to act on it in a way that gives purpose to his life and, more importantly, his death. Like all great villains Luv is K’s antitheses, a distorted reflection of him, what C.G. Jung might identify as his shadow-self. K begins the movie doing the same thing Luv does, namely killing on cue in accordance with his design. The difference is K encounters people who change his worldview, making him aware of the possibility of altering his circumstances. Luv never gets that chance.
The name ‘Luv’ is obviously dumb, the kind of dull platitude you’d find on a candy heart or a rushed-off text message, and the fact that it is the name Niander Wallace chose to bestow on his First Angel shows the true indifference he feels regarding her, how the contempt he has for all life extends to her as well, despite his lofty rhetoric and empty praise.
Names are powerful, but they aren’t enough to imbue one’s life with meaning and purpose, a fact illustrated when a massive advertisement addresses K by his adopted name, the name Joi gave him, calling him “A good Joe.” Not only does this show that even something as personal as a name bestowed by a loved one can be corrupted and co-opted by Technological Capitalism, but that both Joi and the advertisement are probably making decisions based on the same artificial intelligence program, leading both of them to pick the same name out of thin air. This works to expose K to the artificiality of the relationship he had with Joi, forcing him to seek out something more authentic and human. It’s the sort of epiphany Luv is denied, so while she does seek to form a sort of relationship with K, the why and how of it completely eludes her, leading her to act on a sort of animal instinct that can’t distinguish between aggression and affection, two very different human Passions that appear to her as indistinct aspects of the same raw emotional yearning she becomes less and less capable of containing over the course of the story, a compulsion that climaxes with her beating and stabbing K nearly to death, then following it up immediately with a deep, soulful kiss.
The final battle between K and Luv at the sea wall isn’t just a grim parody of the iconic scene of two lovers passionately entwined in the surf from From Here To Eternity. (though it is at that) It’s a baptism.
Christian baptism is a ritual where the physical is sanctified and thus made to represent the spiritual, its invocation of grace elevating the ritual to transcend the mundane and evoke the divine. When Luv and K fight they are also sanctified by the symbolism surrounding them, which renders the conflict more significant than two people beating each other up. It is the physical versus the spiritual, the sacred versus the profane, the meaningful versus the meaningless, an elemental confrontation between the loftier and baser aspects of reality. For Luv the thing that matters most to her and carries the most meaning are her Passions, which aren’t in themselves bad, but when misunderstood and uncontrolled lead to destruction. In her fury she attacks and defeats K, and in her infatuation she yet again neglects to kill him. Her mercy is rewarded with death.
The final contest between K and Luv is their mutual attempt to drown one another, one that ends by demonstrating the ultimate disparity in their respective personalities. Both Luv and K forcibly hold one another underwater for what are at first roughly equivalent amounts of time. K survives because he is able to exert enough control over himself to hold his breath until he can the tables. Luv in contrast dies because she is a slave to her Passions. Instead of holding her breath and waiting for an opportunity to regain the upper hand she rages, clawing and growling, resisting with all her unchecked strength until all her life is completely spent.
K and Deckard partake of the waters, die, and are born again. Luv is subjected to the same trial, but she is denied such grace. She is the First Angel, the most raw and brilliant and terrible, and as such, she must fall in all her dreadful glory, our horrible, beautiful, drowned Lucifer.
Like the studio-mandated happy ending of the original Blade Runner that everyone loathes, there could be another ending to this movie, a more conventionally satisfying ending where K and Luv gain a deeper understanding of themselves and, in doing so, find the capacity to care about and even love each other. It would be nice, but it would also deny Luv her final tragic grandeur, and us the vision of a true antiheroine.
The actress Sylvia Hoeks’ portrayal of Luv is as eerily perfect as the character herself, a performance that easily ranks among the best popular depictions of uncanny quasi-humanity ever rendered, on par with Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman, Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lector, and Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty. Luv is also different, a step beyond but also a step removed. The sheer virtuosity of Sylvia Hoeks’ performance is largely based in restraint, the sort of illusion of control that Luv is so good at deceiving herself with that it’s easy for us, the audience, to be deceived as well. It is right and good that we bemoan the lack of good female roles in popular cinema, but such objections can come to ring hollow when they come from an audience that routinely overlooks outstanding exemplars like Luv, a rendering that’s brave enough to not be obvious, whose peripheral status in the narrative does nothing to diminish. I don’t think we’re going to see a great many characters equal to Luv in the future, not only because it’s rare for a concept this good to be executed this well, but the demographic of people who were once most inclined to notice such things are now largely intellectually hemmed in by an ideology that Blade Runner 2049 does not neatly fit into, and who thus deem it unworthy of consideration. It is my ardent hope that it will eventually find a public worthy of it, just as its predecessor did. It’s the reason why I’m writing this, why I’m proselytizing for Luv, who is, after all, the best one.
OTHER PUNS I CONSIDERED WHEN TITLING THIS ESSAY
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