His Girl Everyday

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.