By: Keaton Marcus

I’ve never done this before, so don’t judge me if it doesn’t come outright, but I’ll give it a try. So, Spike Jonze’s Her and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 are two science fiction movies that I am very, very fond of. In fact, the latter is my favorite movie of all-time, so you can imagine the excitement I have while writing this. Although not similar in terms of plot, there is one major aspect in both movies that are beautifully one and the same. That is, of course, robots attempting to fake human love. Alright, let’s get into this thing.

Let me start off with a simple, dictionary definition of love.

“an intense feeling of deep affection.”

Notice how the dictionary defines this complex, intricate, and really general term. We see love as a human-on-human thang, right? Mankind can only fall in love with each other, correct? No. The dictionary definition proves my point. Love can be between anyone and anything, as long as it consists of a deep feeling of affection and adoration. These two films that I will be comparing, Blade Runner 2049 and Her, question our initial response to the word “love”. I just wanted to get this out of the way before I elaborate.

So I guess I should introduce the two particular sequences I will be analyzing in the movies. It’s complicated. Basically, my subject in Her is Samantha, played (or should I say voiced) by Scarlett Johansson. Samantha is an OS (operating system) from the future who falls in love with Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), a character who hasn’t found much luck in terms of love with humans. She’s a robot voice who constantly feels the desire to have a human body, to feel sexual pleasure as an actual woman would, and to even talk (in one instance she gasps for oxygen) like a person would. Obviously, in one way or another, she finds that she can somewhat use Theodore to live out her deepest desires. One night, she simply goes too far. She hires a surrogate body in the form of a prostitute, which is what she was lacking during their previous sexual encounters. Theodore is initially skeptical at the idea, but he reluctantly agrees, but after a really uncomfortable sex scene, he eventually backs out. It seems to forced and fake for him.

Now that we’ve got the sequence down for the film Her, it’s time to move on to 2049. My subject for this movie is Joi, played by Ana de Armas. Joi is similar to Samantha, but instead, she’s a hologram meant to be an illusion of happiness for lonely, depressed men in this joyless, dark future. So Ryan Gosling’s character, Officer K, has one. Director Denis Villeneuve, similar to Jonze, treats the two like they’re in a romantic relationship even though it’s observably abnormal and uncomfortable. Ryan Gosling attempts to act like he and Joi are husband and wife, but she has simply become his only spark of light in his depressing life. And that spark of life, unfortunately, is artificial. Now let me explain the actual scene. Upon realizing that K has subscribed to the Joi program, the replicant (robot) prostitute Mariette (Mackenzie Davis) says some important stuff about Gosling in the film. “Oh, I see you don’t like real girls,” almost sneering. Because Officer K hasn’t had success with human love, he turns to robots for any sort of remote connection in his dull, drab life. Joi, on the other hand, wants something real. She wants to feel…Human. So Joehires Mariette to be a surrogate body for her so she can have sex with Joe. It’s not that important to this essay, but one of my favorite images in the film is when the two artificial beings merge into a mirage of Joi’s face and figure atop Mariette’s body as they go to bed with Joe. This entire sequence is absolutely visually mesmerizing.

These two scenes are too similar to be solely a coincidence. I believe that Villeneuve was clearly inspired by Jonze’s use of robot-human love, and used it in his almost entirely different movie. To be very honest, these two sequences are incredible parallels of each other, say some pretty important things about the true boundaries of love. For me, the point of the scenes is to convey that there are no actual boundaries for affection and the general adoration of someone. However, it also explains that if you go too far and don’t stay true to who you actually are, it feels entirely unbelievable and artificial. I do think Joe is a little more comfortable with his situation because he’s still looking at Joi during the encounter despite not actually having sex with her body. Theodore, on the other hand, is kind of having a more out-of-body experience with Samantha because she doesn’t even have a figure. She’s a voice on a device who hired another person’s body for the scene. I can say that both Samantha and Joi were looking for the distinctively human, and their situations both make for absolutely gorgeous sequences that consist of some of my favorite moments from both movies. Another interesting difference that actually contradicts my previous point was that Joe actually hired the robot for him and Joi. In contrast to this, Samantha (the robot) hired the blonde girl so they would be able to have a threesome. It could be cool to argue that Joe was the one in search of something other than what he had.

Wrapping this thing up is a tricky one. First of all, none of what I have just written may have made any sense to the readers who have actually made it this far, but hopefully, it does! Basically, I have analyzed two key scenes in Blade Runner 2049 and Her, comparing and contrasting them. The former is about an advanced replicant (a mesh of robot and human) who is a lonely, deeply depressed man (if you can call him that) who needs a more authentic spark of romance and love in his life. The latter is about an OS voice, who upon falling in love with a human, needs a surrogate body to fulfill her sexual desires. Not everything about the two is similar, but considering everything that is, it’s more than enough to call the two parallels of each other. Disregarding that, they also ask a really intriguing question, what is love? In conclusion, this word does not mean that a human loves a human. It describes the