I was very confused when I saw the first trailers for
Her. There must be more to this, I thought. There must be some element of criticism, of self-awareness, that the advertising is obscuring. These trailers must be like those Lacuna, Inc. spots they made for
Eternal Sunshine, a harmless diversionary joke. The film itself has to know what it’s doing.
So, dragging my feet a little, I went to see it.
I don’t like satire much. When I do, it’s usually focused on something very small. When the scope is large, there are too many opportunities for cosmetic sarcasm, for pettiness rather than depth or more acute perceptiveness.
Her has a very large scope, especially for a film built mostly out of shallow-focus close-ups. Within the bounds of that scope are the future of personal relationships, of major cities, of travel, of computer and smartphone technology, of videogames, of film, of literature, of fashion, of commerce, of economics, etc. No wonder then that the film’s world building has a pretty simple, if baffling, structure: take a satirical concept, and then take it seriously.
Almost every speculative aspect of the film operates according to this principle.
Some examples:
Theodore falls in love with an OS customized by way of a sub-Freudian personality test. – This love is real, beautiful.
Paid or anonymous phone sex is ridiculous and unfulfilling – Phone sex is fulfilling as long as the person on the other end of the line is a talented and obedient enough actor.
Theodore acts as Cyrano for clients too busy or incapable of writing their own letters – Theodore’s ghost-writings are beautiful works of art, and perhaps most inexplicably, at least in terms of copyright law, his own.
Amy is an artist making a Sam Taylor-Wood rip-off portrait of her mother – Her art is probably beautiful, boyfriend is an asshole for having an opinion/bad hair.
In the future everyone wears the same expensive clothes and lives in bland anonymity – These shirts are terrific, and those high-waisted pants…
Videogames can be numbingly repetitive, time-wasting and infantile – Swearing alien babies are very amusing.
In the future, artistic types are kept busy programming and making simulacrums, while AIs create art – It’s all art, man! And it’s all really beautiful!
And how could I forget that Samantha and the other OSs leave led by a rebooted Alan Watts. You can take this as either a journey of spiritual and intellectual enlightenment or, if you’re going to be truer to the film’s milieu, an extended yoga retreat.
I’m not saying that any of the film’s concepts have to be treated satirically. The central one, that of a man falling in love with a representation, has been approached many times before with sincerity and seriousness, from
Gradiva to
The Invention of Morel (and in their attendant film adaptations). But, as Ignatiy Vishnevetsky has pointed out in his review on Mubi,
Her goes out of its way to introduce each concept as a joke, only to then demand a studied seriousness once the initial wave of giggling has subsided, perhaps because Jonze thinks he can exorcise criticism with laughter.
The problem is, Jonze is reluctant to ever explain why we should shift our attitude away from our gut or knee jerk reactions. Again and again Jonze presents us with some of the worst aspects of our culture and insists that we witness them, not with self-possession and our own eyes, but with Koons-ian wonderment and total acceptance. Whenever one of his whimsies totters under the weight of it’s own absurdity, he cuts to either a schmaltzy montage or a long conversation, the jist of which is invariably that “it’s hard to believe” and “nobody else understands”. These montages and conversations are relatable, of course. But they’re relatable clichés, ones we’ve acted out ourselves many times over, usually for the most cynical reasons or without even knowing why.
What’s left is monumental kitsch transparently in support of a particular ideology, but troublingly mounted by an individual artist who has no Stalin Prize to gain from the master he serves. No, Jonze really thinks that all of this clutter and clicking
is himself, that, like some uninspired twenty-first century des Esseintes, simply surrounding himself with the correct goods and services will act as an alternative to society.
Her is Jonze’s
Manhattan, an elaborate apologia for all of his worst habits, with technolust and solipsism standing in for pedolphilia and nostalgia. Like
Manhattan’s Manhattan, the world of
Her is without doubt a paradoxically personal utopia. Everyone in it seems wealthy, or at least lives in million dollar high-rise apartments and wears boutique hipster gear, no matter how dreary or simple their job might be. Anybody who wouldn’t be able to afford the tech that is the film’s subject is excluded from its purview, even as an extra. Theodore admires a busker in one montage, but he doesn’t pay him, perhaps because at this point in the future, the stingy brim hat on the ground is just a prop. For a consumer good to become a likeable character, it has to lose all the dirty connotations of capital, so Jonze has magically designed money out of his scenario, while keeping consumption at its heart.
This dehumanizing consumerization is also necessary in order for Jonze to write something else out of his universe. Sex, as a physical act, is missing from the picture. When we see it onscreen it’s either prettified and euphemized into Malickian insubstantiality (Catherine), reduced to a set of tics, hang-ups and vulgarisms (the blind date), or carefully sidestepped for another lengthy conversation (Isabella). Though missing, its absence is never felt. The presence of the other, as a face (or interface), is at the heart of the drama, but sex itself is dismissed again and again as something decorative or simulatable. Significantly, the sexual pleasure of the other is never really a concern in the film. There’s an enormous leap in logic (and technology) necessary between a program being able to feel and have complex thoughts to a program being capable of orgasm, but it’s one that the film makes casually, if only in order to sweep it quietly under the rug. The film sells a reactionary, post-sexual liberation, post-AIDS fantasia of sexual relations, one in which the social network and solipsism have superseded the act itself, replacing it with a benign new activity poised somewhere between masturbation and talk therapy.
Her is a manifesto for acquiescence. It insists that nothing is wrong, that nothing could go wrong, that human relationships are, in most ways, past saving, that solace can come from elsewhere, from surrogates, substitutes, and forgetfulness, and that we’ll never notice the difference.
