Her is a film on parallel
tracks. It’s a gentle and quietly chilling sci-fi film; it’s a fuzzy and
empathetic romance. It’s interested in abstract philosophical ruminations on
the implications of ever increasing entanglement with ever-smarter technology;
it’s a sopping sentimental look into mankind’s yearning for a life of truly
meaningful connection and beauty. That these tracks come together with
something approaching coherence and cohesion, meeting sometimes convincingly in
a sweet and whimsical middle ground between these concerns, is due to
writer-director Spike Jonze’s ability to find and present the beating heart and
core universal insights that sit inside what appear on the surface to be
unwieldy and peculiar concepts. He makes prickly unpredictable, but deeply sympathetic
and singularly strange stories – about a portal into the mind of a real actor
playing himself, Being John Malkovich;
about a case of writer’s block that rewrites before our eyes the very movie
we’re watching, Adaptation; about a
boy who imagines a storybook world in which his emotions are literal monsters
to be ruled over, an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are – so full of personal and evocative
feeling.
With his newest film, he uses science fiction in what has
become an increasingly rare use of the genre in its big screen outings. I mean,
I love sci-fi about monsters, robots, superheroes, and space opera plenty, but
that’s not all the genre is capable of, even if that’s increasingly the only
kind that makes it into wide release. With Her,
Jonze takes a real concept concerning How We Live Now – the nature of human
intimacy in lives increasingly tangled up in smart phones and wearable tech –
and layers on some metaphoric complications by imagining a world that’s much
like our own, with current trends extrapolated outward. He takes a question one
could ask about present day interactions – is cybersex any less an intimate act
for being mediated by technology? – and adds a futurist complication. What if
the person on the other end isn’t even human? This is no Catfishing parable. In
Her, a man depressed in the wake of
his divorce upgrades his network – a synced cloud between his computers, phone,
and gaming device – to a new operating system and immediately falls in love.
He’s not just happy with his purchase. He falls in love with the smart, funny,
inquisitive, lively computer voice representing the cutting edge learning and
evolving artificial intelligence of his OS.
The man is played by Joaquin Phoenix, often sitting alone in
the frame as he talks to the voice of his computer, his eyes lighting up with
unexpected energy. He has flesh and blood people to interact with, his neighbor
(Amy Adams), his boss (Chris Pratt), and even his ex-wife (Rooney Mara), but
still he’s lonely. Speaking to his new digital companion, he’s cautious at
first, but the technology soon seems to win him over. It’s just so alive,
speaking with the breathy, excited voice of Scarlett Johansson. You might
wonder why a computer function would need to breathe at all, but it’s clear
that the software is built to grow and learn and speak in a way that’s
comfortingly human. No stiff Siri stiltedness here. There are long passages of
the film in which the two of them talk, Phoenix and Johansson bantering or
exposing their innermost thoughts, which could be lifted out of any film
romance barely altered, and it’s startlingly easy to forget for a split second
the nature of what is happening. That’s the chilly but humane point bubbling
under their interactions. It’s sweet and scary, but tips so hard to the sweet
side for so long, it’s all the scarier.
It’s a haunting form of intimacy. He throws himself into the
relationship. It is a technological escape from depression and through the
process he rediscovers his ability to feel. It’s productive in that way, and
he’s increasingly happy with his situation, even shyly admitting to his
neighbor that he’s “seeing someone” and “just having lots of fun.” But it was
hard for me to shake the awareness that his love is a voice programmed to have all
the signifiers of human interaction without anything signified. This is no long-distance relationship with a human. It’s all just
bits of code zipping around, learning, evolving, behaving human. (The tantalizing
question of how human must a program be before we say it has developed humanity remains hinted at, largely unexplored.) Jonze’s wonderfully humane tone,
whimsical and twee without ever becoming too silly, seems to bury this central fact
for quite some time, swooning with a twinkly (too twinkly) Arcade Fire score at
the romance just as much as Phoenix does. How real is this output really? He
rather geekily says research shows OS/human romances are rare, but maybe he’s
in one because the input data of his life suggests to the computer that that is
exactly what he needs.
Jonze paints the complications simply, subdued under the
rosy romantic picture he paints, a soft and warm comfortable environment
underneath which sits its colder questioning. It’s an oddity, at once hopeful
and pessimistic, saying that even when we become too reliant on technology, it
may in the end grow past us to the extent that it’ll know when to leave us. The
cinematography suggests this funny futurist optimism, Hoyte Van Hoytema
creating imagery that has a pale glow off of the soft pastel colors of shirts –
the high-waisted pants are all earth tones that are even softer – and
glistening city lights of a world cautiously and convincingly just a few leaps
beyond our own. We live in a world of sleek, smooth, curved devices, much like
the ones in this film. Everything from the iPhone to the Wii seems soft and
appealing with light colors, dulcet tones, soothing beeps, intuitive
functionality (some of the time). You can walk into any restaurant and are
likely to find a couple sitting across a table from each other, staring deeply
into their screens. Her takes
infatuation with technology and design to the next level, reveals that, even
with some strange and awkward new complications, it can be deeply satisfying
and even beneficial for this character. And that’s exactly why it’s so creepy,
too.
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