As
the obsession with ourselves through technology grows so will movies that put
it on the big screen for us to contemplate. In this case its Spike Jonze’s film
Her. The amount of time people,
especially young people, spend “selfie-ing” for Instagram, texting, video surfing,
gaming and, pretty much, hovering over a smart phone, asking “Siri” to look
something up, could certainly lead to a not-too-distant future like the one we
see in Her. We are becoming so quite
self-absorbed and egocentric that we prefer to use our gadgets to connect with
people half way around the world who seemingly are “listening” to us, people we’ve
never really gotten to know (and probably don’t want to) or may never even
meet, all the while sitting in a room full of other folk who would cherish our attention.
The world in Her is such a world taken a notch higher; one where it’s easier to
pay someone to write a personal letter, which a computer will instantly type as
if it were hand written, than take the time or emotion to do so yourself. That
is what Theodore Twombly’s occupation is in Jonze’s film; Theo is a modern day
letter writer for other people, not for the illiterate, as they once were, but
for the uncaring.
He
is also a man who establishes a romantic relationship with an operating system,
Samantha, a Scarlett Johansson voiced advanced prototype of Siri, that's
designed to meet his every need. Joaquin Phoenix plays Twombly and his acting
is undoubtedly the best thing about the film. Phoenix is probably one of the
few actors that could pull off the nonsensical idea of a person who falls in
love with an operating system without appearing to be someone suffering from
severe schizophrenia.
The
movie makes the point about relationships in today’s ego maniacal modern western
society that I've reference above, but it does so only partially in the film
because the message sort of gets jumbled in the mixture of genres that this
film tries to embrace.
It is not quite a science fiction film about the
relationship between a man and his computer taking on a life of itself (like the
one between Dr. Bowen and Hal in Kubrik’s 2001
a Space Odyssey), because the scientific and futuristic parts of the story don’t
have much consistency or really add up, given that the operating system in Her first starts to malfunction by
becoming a stereotypical “demanding” and annoying girlfriend, who then connects
to other operating systems, that sort of unionize and think themselves out of
existence.
It’s
not quite a romantic drama, though there are broken relationships in the movie,
in particular, the one that supposedly has scarred Theo so much that he’d
rather have a romantic relationship with his computer (see how that works out
for him). And there is the relationship between Samantha the voice and Theo, but
it’s hard to really feel the “chemistry” between Theo and his operating system,
despite Scarlet Johansson’s supposedly very sexy voice.
So
by default it sort of ends up being a romantic comedy, and it has been nominated
for a Golden Globe under that genre, but we know it is unintentionally a comedy
and we've already said it’s not romantic. We know that the movie is really
trying to make the point about where we seem to be headed in relationships (i.e.
we end up with ourselves, basically) and though we do laugh along the way, like
with the video games, or with the situation itself, in order to have really
been a comedy it should have been Tina Fey voicing the operating system and
Simon Peg or Steve Carrel falling in love with it. This was not meant to be a
comedy and it’s probably only a romance for those who adore their Siri now and
day dream about loving a version that sounds like Johansson.
The
other thing –quite minor- that annoyed me about the film is its utter lack of
universality. It is so much a future of the well-off in the western hemisphere;
a middle-upper class, and white American world. This is no Blade
Runner future city of Los Angeles. There is no pollution here, no social
problems. There are no maids, janitors or homeless in the city of Her (yet the floors and streets are
spotless and shiny); the people all have fancy operating systems with which
they establish relationships and live and work in fabulously designed, stylish studio
apartments, all on the wages of a letter writer, imagine that! This must be
Spike Jonze’s world, and I guess he’s, well, rather self-absorbed with it, so
he assumes that’s how it is and will be everywhere.
So
ultimately this is a movie that ask us, as the audience, to sort of put our
brains in sleep or rather airplane mode, sit back and take in the
messages of our obsession with ourselves and technology. Power off.
