“Luv is loyalty personified”:
The actress remarks that Luv, her character, doesn’t have to be somebody’s girlfriend or mother and she doesn’t have to look sexy. Maybe, but she puts a lot of effort into the latter. And, is she a strong independent woman? Not really. She is a kind of robot Girl Friday. She works for the top man, Niander Wallace.
” … executing violent orders with the sort of calm efficiency you’d expect from a bio-engineered humanoid designed for subservience … “ [my emphasis]
This Is the Actress Behind Blade Runner’s Terrifyingly Calm Villain, Luv
As I argued before, Rachael, an earlier female replicant from the original Blade Runner movie, left workplace employment by a powerful man, Tyrell, and became effectively a wife to the cop Deckard. In the latest movie we learn she had a daughter.
This new fembot or female replicant, Luv, doesn’t leave the corporation to follow K or “Joe”, the male protagonist. Instead she becomes the corporation’s most ruthless employee, and in the process she dies.
I am sure this movie and its meaning will be debated as heavily as the original. But, in my opinion, both the original and this new sequel can be read in a very non-feminist way.
[A point I forgot to make above was that it is mentioned that Wallace named Luv. And that he must have seen her as special. Naming is traditionally seen as a sign of authority. So Adam named Eve. There is an echo of this in the way wives typically receive their husbands’ surnames.]
Julian O'Dea 
Posted by RichardP on November 19, 2017 at 8:41 am
This is sort of tongue-in-cheek, but sort of not.
“Naming is traditionally seen as a sign of authority. So Adam named Eve.”
I’ve always had a problem with the lack of logic behind this. I’ve heard it from a number of sources over the years. Who else was gonna name Eve??? They were the only two around.
Of course, she needed a unique name, because God named both of them Adam, and how else was she going to know that she should respond rather than the other Adam? ” Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.” Genesis 5:2 (kjv) Adam fixed that confusion for the benefit of both of them.
And then there is this one: “And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Genesis 2:23 (kjv) Like, Adam looked in a dictionary (or Googled the term) and saw that “Woman” was a term (created by whom?) that defined someone who is taken out of man? Like, there were enough of those “someones” taken out of man that “they” devised a term for the process???
Odd usage of language, trying to reduce some awsome happenings down into words that the common folk would understand, but that make the scientist or informed man scratch his head. Like, yeah – Adam naming Eve was a sign of authority – cause he got to do it and all those other folks didn’t get to.
Posted by Julian O'Dea on November 19, 2017 at 8:47 pm
Sorry. I don’t understand your point. Yes, it’s just a story – but a revelatory one. Adam gave her the names Woman and Eve. God could have done it. Or the Bible could say “they were called Adam and Eve”. But naming the woman was left to the man.
As for naming as authority, as I recall Adam also named the animals in accordance with his dominion. (In Catholic belief, one has a guardian angel – whom we should not name because he is not under one’s authority.)
Paul had no doubt about the point that “the woman was made for the man, not the man for the woman.” The first man naming the first woman is consistent with that. Eve was a gift and Adam’s natural instinct was to name her.
In common parlance, who gets to use an epithet about whom is important. The Left’s obsession with naming language is not completely silly. It is remarkable how few times men are actually called men these days. It is guys or dudes or bros. A feminist complained recently that men sometimes call women females. I pointed out that feminists make a fetish of calling men males.
Ultimately the current bad relations between men and women are due to women’s unwillingness to accept the principle present in scripture. When they do, peace reigns. When they don’t, women resent their place as women and we get absurdities like the use of “womyn”.
In terms of the new Blade Runner movie, the actress who plays Luv says that she doesn’t have to be a wife or a girlfriend. But she remains beholden to a powerful man, as women in the workforce ultimately are in most cases. There is a strong suggestion that Luv (an Evelike name!) is desperately trying to keep favour with Wallace by dedicated service, which is very typically feminine. Just about the first thing a female does if she really likes you is to try to make herself useful.
The holographic girlfriend of the main male character is called Joi. She is, to use a term used in the Blade Runner world, a pleasure model. Names often mean a lot. I suppose writers are sensitive to such things.