http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2017/10/14/the-poetry-of-blade-runner-2049
By PRISCILLA PAGE
...K realizes that his memory of a wooden horse didnt belong to him after all. It means he is not Rachaels child, that hes not a miracle, not special after all, but it no longer matters. The moment K thinks he
is more and wants to be more, he becomes more. His perception is reality. It
reprograms him.
...Discussing Ks digital companion Joi (Ana de Armas), [screenwriter Michael] Green said, since we are defined by what we love, what [K] loved needed a story as well. To the world, K is just a skinjob. To Joi, hes a poem. She calls his DNA the alphabet of you. She tells him, I always knew you were special. If replicants are considered a secondary species, these digital women are tertiary, even more reviled. The sex worker Mariette (Mackenzie Davis) tells her, Ive been inside you. Not so much there as you think.
Mariettes comment reflects the disdain this world has for A.I. like Joi, but
it also reveals that, like K, Joi believes she is more
Hiring Mariette so she can be intimate with K is her idea. I want to be real for you, she tells him. He responds: You are real for me. And she risks everything for K when she asks him to delete her from his apartment console so no one can use her memories to find him. She will only exist on the emanator, and if something happens to it, K explains, she will be gone. Yes, like a real girl, she responds.
Jois death is a kind of Rorschach or a Voight-Kampff for the audience, testing whether we respond as if shes a being with feelings, whether we empathize, grieve. Like Deckards dog kōan, if Joi perceives that she is a real girl, that she has a self, that she loves K, if her suffering and her wonder and her love feel real to her, then she is a real being with consciousness, as real as a replicant, a dog, or a human...
Shes not the same.
"I know whats real," [Deckard] tells Wallace. She was special, remarkable, irreplaceable because Deckard loved her. K experiences the same disconnect in the scene that follows: he meets a giant advertisement for another Joi. She looks like his Joi, calls him a nice Joe as Joi once did, but its not the same for him, either. In this moment, maybe K questions whether his Joi ever really loved him at all. But maybe it doesnt matter, because the love he felt for her was real. This Joi is not the same as his Joi. Its the moment K decides to pursue Deckard - not to follow Freysas orders to kill him, but to help Deckard meet his daughter...
Do you dream about being interlinked? the post-traumatic baseline test asks K. The question essentially asks whether K dreams of being, whether he dreams of being connected to others...
