ColumnFrom “Blue is the Warmest Color” to “Nymphomaniac,” recent films have been deeply steeped in themes of love and sex. “Her” by Spike Jonze is a visually stunning meditation on those subjects, filmed in a hazy near-future Los Angeles. I was struck by the slightly out-of-focus cinematography, perhaps a metaphor for the blurred lines of our love lives.
Here’s what I didn’t like: there’s some inherent sexism in this film. Of course, I can’t blame the movie for coming from a male point of view – after all, it’s written and directed by a white, straight male, and the privilege of Theodore Twombly, the protagonist (played by Joaquin Phoenix) shines through in every scene. Even though Theodore is otherwise inoffensive – he’s kind of sweet, goofy, and twee – he reminds me of men who complain of being cast into the “friend zone.” He doesn’t understand women, and he’s frustrated and angry about it. He’s also lonely and mid-divorce.
The film attempts to make a statement about the world as a gender-neutral space, where love is just love. I don’t think I need to say “spoiler-alert” – but a movie in which the female lead does not have a body is saying something about the value of women’s bodies in our culture. (Also, there are oddly no black or brown people in Jonze’s vision of the future in Southern California, something that made me very uncomfortable.)
Note that many (mostly male) writers have lavished praise on the film, calling it one of the most romantic movies in years, suggesting that it’s almost transcendental. But let’s be real – the conceit is that women – real women – are messy and terrifying. What guy wouldn’t want a bespoke operating system for a girlfriend?
Samantha (played by the throaty Scarlett Johansson) is a program gone conscious, a lovely, sexy ghost in a machine. We can’t accuse the film of objectifying her body, as she doesn’t have one. Yet I came away feeling like Samantha was the object, and Theodore the subject. This film would have looked and felt very different, even with the same characters, had it been written by a woman.
Theodore’s job is composing “hand-written” love letters for strangers; a tacit acknowledgement by Jonze that the future is not so bright. Theodore is a latter-day Cyrano for the alienated masses. Even though people can buy and date their OS in the new world, they long for deeper intimacy – yet they have to hire someone to express their emotions.
In one scene Theodore is on the subway with Samantha in his pocket (her voice is transmitted through something that looks like a cell phone). On the packed train, everyone talks into one of these phones, ignoring all the humans they can see, smell and touch. (Honestly, I experienced that very scenario yesterday at my local coffee shop – so this is our now, not just our future.)
Here’s what “Her” gets right: it beautifully illustrates the ways in which love requires vulnerability – reminding us that it can make you feel like a mental patient. Amy (played by Amy Adams) is poignant on this: She says: “Falling in love is a crazy thing to do. It’s like a socially acceptable form of insanity.”
When Theodore boots up Samantha and she comes to life, he has at first simply bought an operating system – he’s not looking for a sex robot or even a friend, he is just swept up by a slick advertising campaign that looks like something Apple might produce twenty years from now. But within moments, he’s smitten by Samantha’s naturalness. He tells her that he feels weird talking to her, but he wastes no time thinking about why he might not want to “get to know” his computer. It’s just easy and organic, just like sliding your fingers over the screen of your iPhone.
That Samantha names herself is supposed to suggest that she’s not every man’s fantasy of a pliable, perfect woman built from his image (or his rib, if you want to get biblical). Spike Jonze is telling us that Samantha isn’t just smart – she’s uppity and has autonomous inklings. But that didn’t read for me – it felt more like some projection of Theo’s – perhaps he’d been trained along the way to throw a few bones to the women in his life – to let them at least think they were in control of something.
It’s only when Samantha begins experiencing the world that Theodore feels threatened. He is only happy when he’s showing her the world – taking her to the beach, to the mall. When she begins to grow beyond (and without) him, he loses his way. There’s another compelling scene toward the end of the movie in which Theo cannot reach Samantha – she is off-line. Up until that moment, she has been always available. Theodore goes into a complete panic – he repeatedly taps his phone in a desperate attempt to connect, and runs from his office, tripping and falling on the way to the subway. Haven’t we all been there? That sense of terror when the beloved seems to be slipping away, when they can’t be reached in the ways they’ve always been reached. This is the kind of panic that would have led us to drive by our high school crush’s house over and over again, and today, makes us stare at our phones, trying to will our love’s next text message to appear, even when we’re sitting across from our friends.
Back here in the non-celluloid world, the Museum of Sex and Sparks and Honey recently put on a panel called “The Future of Relationships,” and if their predictions are correct, our reality-based love lives are looking a bit grim. From robot sex to marrying avatars and Sex With (Google) Glass, we’re moving as far as we can from human-to-human contact, and it’s by design — it’s not just about convenience.
Your relationships are supposed to be your mirror, but today we can so easily isolate ourselves from them that we never have to face who we really are. After all, isn’t that what love really is? Your best life-partners know everything about you and love you anyway — your flaws make them love you more. Even in the smallest ways, we are already hiding: we send texts instead of calling, we IM instead of walking down the hall. Relationships, always messy and terrifying, are easier and easier to fake these days, and you can avoid real ones and still tell yourself you have “friends” – because you have them on Facebook.
We can construct our identities online so we don’t have to really be ourselves or face our ugly, dark shadows. We photoshop our pictures, refine our copy until it’s pitch-perfect, paint the loveliest versions of ourselves. Even the earliest incarnations of AIM allowed us to play with this pretense – when not confronted with a living, breathing human, we can take the time to craft ourselves. We can offer the ideal (typed) retort, Google an answer to a confusing question, and create an award-winning performance. The idiosyncrasies and insecurities of one-to-one human interaction are muted when we text, when we IM, when we email. We are crafting ourselves, letter by letter, 1 by 0.
Both “Her” and the Museum of Sex panel have alarming implications, and if we don’t pay attention to them, my fear is that we’ll all forget how to love, and simply, how to be human. People like Ray Kurzweil may long for the singularity, but I hope that we pause and take a breath before we go there. For all the ways in which our technology connects us to information, it also shelters us from our own vulnerability – because we can pretend that we’re never alone. That is a dangerous precipice, and we’re all hanging from it, Instagraming the view.
Got a question for Stefanie? Email stefanie at ecosalon dot com and she’ll answer it in the next Sexual Healing column.
Keep in touch with Stefanie on Twitter: @ecosexuality
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