An Object Relations Perspective
K: The Regressed Ego, and The False Self
K represents the schizoid personality, a person who appears loyal, dependable, committed, and unshakeable to others, though he is actually completely flat, joyless, and disconnected from his personal life, and emotionally withdrawn within his relationships to others. K experiences damage in punches, cuts, and deep injuries, but it is not clear that he has felt any pain at all. He has tremendous outward resilience, and a tremendous inner void. Performative and committed, but without a real purpose to “why” he does anything in the first place.
K is a workaholic, with no real friends, no real relationships, and an AI partner in Joi. A loner with no individual purpose, he represents a life unlived, operating from a false self without a connection to a real center of his own. His life is a manifestation of living life on top of a regressed ego, what happens when true, authentic connection with caregivers in early infancy is unmet or denied, where relationship is ultimately deemed terrifying and unsafe as a result. In K’s case, he is a replicant who’s never had a real childhood to begin with, being factory-made and purpose-given.
The LAPD that K works for represents the cold inner critic or superego in us, the part of ourselves that we experience as coldly rational, calculated, and mission-oriented, when we do things without much purpose but to “get the job done,” even when we don’t necessarily have an explicit reason as to why we are doing what we do. We operate automatically and unconsciously, dissociated from our experiences, disconnected from purpose and our deeper sense of meaning. When it commands, we follow. Staying permanently, emotionally withdrawn, working for the demands within ourselves, keeps us locked in our own boxed-in, unfeeling worlds and lives.
K is an expression of a life oriented towards a harsh superego and inner critic: unemotional, rational, with no hope, no vision for the future, and no past to reflect on. He orients his life towards rules and regulations, rather than those rules and regulations operating towards something deeper within himself, and greater than himself.
For K, hope becomes a terrifying possibility: what if there is a chance to be real, and to be human and feeling? What if being a robot replicant is a false reality?
What if there is a choice and a possibility to be human?
Stelline: The Ideal
K arrives to “The Memory Maker,” Stelline, looking for answers to whether a significant childhood memory is real, or just an implant like any other replicant memory. She is “the best” in the business of creating “good memories” for replicants, a corporate endeavor that ensures “a good product” and good outcomes for replicants that work hard in corporate labor. Stelline understands that replicants do “hard work” and wants to give them peace of mind through good memories.
Stelline represents the capacities for both the good object and the ideal to exist within ourselves, the capacity in us to experience people and events as “real” and authentic, to be mirrored for our authentic emotions and experiences, and the capacity to exist as real and authentic people in relation to others and to have the capacity to recognize it in others as well. Stelline is shielded from the cold world around her by living in her chamber, locked away not out of frailty, but for her gifts and her inherent value. She represents something pure in us that can become locked away in fantasy and in our repressed egos in the midst of unsafe environments and abuse.
Stelline carries the ability to create memories and coherent identities for replicants, because she has experienced real emotions and memories herself. She is an artist in her endeavor. She represents that part of us that is warm, feeling, receptive, creative, and gifted. Stelline represents the generative value of returning to our good experiences in life and to feel openly, through tradition (ie birthday cake), through art (design/photography/creation).
She also represents the shadow element of feeling, when good experiences become locked away to fantasies and sentimentality, and become projected outwards as fantasy and ideal objects in others.
Stelline is still child-like, frozen in time. And K is as well, a replicant who will always be machine and withdrawn from feeling, yet has the hope to be real and exist as something more. They represent a shared tragedy, where Stelline grieves the loss of her capacity for selfhood, and K is hoping for the capacity of his own.
K has operated on his own grandiose self, the false self. When he believes his memory is the result of being a real person, he suddenly feels that his life has greater, spiritual significance. K is then compelled to attach his worth to Stelline’s determination of him, much like anyone who idealizes someone and wants their grandiose self to be reflected through the other. This becomes a huge responsibility for Stelline, and a turning point in K’s narrative.
In Stelline’s desire to be seen and known, she committed an illegal act in planting one of her own, authentic memories in K upon his creation. Both Stelline and K have carried ideal, fantasy objects that are reflected in each other, and they have to contend with the falsity of these objects as a result.
Independence Through Depression
When K learns that his memory is not his own, he experiences a flash of rage in front of Stelline, and a real breakdown. Called into LAPD, he receives the usual “baseline” test, designed to test if replicants are operating optimally and normally. Strange graph readings, unusual pauses from K, clear stress and “human” concerns in his expressions.
The test administrator says, “you’re not even close to baseline.” K has decompensated. His worldview has collapsed, his ideal object gone and the hope for his ideal self revealed to be false.
K recognizes two simultaneous and disparate truths: that his memory is not his, but that the memory is real and precious to someone else. From here, he must carry both a good object and a bad object: one that represents something good in him, and one that represents something frustrating and unideal. He realizes that he is carrying something real and hopeful inside of him, not just the potential for it. K transforms the ideal object into the good object in this turn, protecting something greater that exists within in and outside of him that is a reflection of the humanity he carries, even when it does not line up with his ideal self.
The Real Self
K is ultimately deemed malfunctioning and worthless by the LAPD, but proceeds on a search for truth, independent of others’ desires. He resists death and the complacency of living a robotic life, and operates on protecting something true and human within and without him.
K leaves Stelline, permanently affected by the less than ideal situation, but also receives something true and real in a person’s lived experience, one that he ultimately chooses to be responsible for. What was once ideal becomes very real, a true good object in K, and ironically sets him on a very human endeavor of acting on personal virtue and sacrifice, completely independent of the cold, clinical stakes around him. And vice versa, by the film’s end Stelline receives receives the opportunity to transform her fantasies into a true good object, receiving the capacity to step out of the bounds of her sentimental containment, and into reality and new ground.
The good object is not out there, but something in ourselves. Not just compliant, empty, inhuman, looking for something to save ourselves from a feeling of falsity and flatness. There is something good in us, nurturing and real and worth protecting, a vision that exists outside of depressive repression and regressive flatness. Something generative, hopeful, and building, that goes against cold, the militaristic, the clinical and the harsh in life, against being just a robot.
K becomes real by becoming independent of every single force that requires him to stay withdrawn and dependent.
K’s Sacrifice
Ironically, it is K’s withdrawal from the world of feeling, from pain, from fear, that allows him to make his heroic sacrifice in the end. He takes bullets, stabbings, without a single change in expression. In the end, he ends up a sort of flat sacrifice, withdrawn from the pain of feeling and experiencing.
There’s a tragic element there. We root for K to feel something, to relish in Stelline’s rescue, but he is emotionless, which is precisely what allowed him to succeed in the first place.
K becomes a total and complete expression of withdrawal, through his death. The ultimate return to an unfeeling state. The regressed ego never rejoins ordinary life. K’s death symbolizes that, no matter how heroic the effort, there will always be the thread back down into the regressed ego.
K’s withdrawal isn’t overcome by the film’s ending, but rather what made it possible in the first place, and there is something quietly, unfeelingly heroic about that.
Comfort pacifies: it is restful, it is restorative, but we cannot stay in it for too long. Stelline became trapped in the warm glow of her memories, where K desired that fire within himself to be restored, both against the backdrops of a false sense of security harvested by corporate interests and a devouring world.
Leaving the comfort of the good and human is exactly what presupposes the heroic in venturing out into something unknown. The good, and the human, are not meant to be kept forever, are not meant to be stayed in forever. And maybe that is the tragic element to the withdrawn person, who has to recognize their capacities for feeling and their capacities for comfort and warmth, but also face the unknown with their capacities for resilience and emotional withdrawal. The very things that make K inhuman give him the capacity to defend the human element.