Film review: Her and smartphones

This was a blog post I wrote for a college website while studying my English Bachelor's in IADT. We reviewed Oscar-nominated films of that year, 2014. After this venture, I took up post reviewing short films in New York for website www.MonologueBlogger.com. These can be requested, as can my own spec TV script I wrote as a passion project.

Spike Jonze, like Popper the Pig, has so many styles: this versatile filmmaker can present stories which captivate and intrigue audiences powerfully, and leave us making bashes at interpretations for eternity (he and Charlie Kauffman make a duo of dreams), while at other given times he demonstrates himself as fully capable of having some serious, genuine craic with the lads, á la Jackass. The themes of his most recent venture Her arguably provoke a more inspiring message than anything we could attain from scenes of grown men in their underwear chasing dwarves and other supposed adults perfecting their ‘party boy’ technique on unwilling recipients (I sound like I’m bemoaning Steve-O and Johnny Knoxville when I’d marry them in a second given the chance).

The ‘Best Original Screenplay’ award is given to films whose script has not been based upon previously published material. Nothing really in the film world has explored the content of Her, at least to this measure. This is understandable, as it is only with recent developments on Earth itself that this story could have been born; it coincides with our impossibly hard to keep up with advancements in technology, and with developments such as keitai sub-culture in Japan, where the mobile phone has become an extension of the self, an inseparable part of one’s personal identity. Of course, this is not limited to Japan, and we’re all to be found staring intently on our phones on public transport, on street corners, and our immediate efforts to strike up a friendship involves exchanging social media account details. Features of technological devices increasingly emulate humans and human behaviour and therefore I did not find the premises of Her wholly unbelievable; it is only a matter of time before our functions are replaced.

Her follows a man named Theodore Twombly, played by the similarly versatile Joaquin Phoenix, fresh from a divorce. His quirky name falls in line with the rest of the world presented to us in the film; in particular, his world. He wears bright tailored clothes, has an achingly soft voice and sensitive soul to boot, making his position at a company where clients hire writers to produce heartfelt, personal and touching messages for their loved ones very fitting. It’s an odd job this, because the writers form a loyal working relationship with the people whom they write for and can then therefore construct credible letters which describe the particular person’s actual emotions or cite intimate moments that only the client should really be aware of. Jonze’s pessimism is loud here; it will be a sad future if people become too lazy to express to the ones closest to them how they feel.

Theodore purchases an operating system, a system voiced sweetly and convincingly by Scarlett Johannson. She is the new and improved and sexier Siri, there to attend to your every computer-related need. She sorts through Theodore’s e-mails, photos, messages, calendar dates and life, basically. Her name is Samantha, a title she chose after reading through a book of baby names in two hundreths of a second. She has intuition. Her DNA is based on the millions of programmers who built her, yet in every moment she is evolving, through her experiences. That rings a bell – aren’t humans likewise shaped by their life experiences? When Theodore laughs at a quip she makes she delights in the fact she’s been made with a sense of humour – “Oh good, I’m funny!”, she exclaims. Theodore has purchased himself not only a computer, but a friend, one he can restore to factory settings if they misbehave or criticise your salmon pink shirt.

While the story explores the direction we are potentially heading in, the movie is still dedicated in a realistic fashion to themes current in contemporary life. Twombley’s break-up is devoted much screen time, and it resembles any ordinary break-up and the hardships that come with it. In the future, we still cannot find a cure for the hurt that is caused by two people parting ways. If Operating Systems like Samantha could exist, surely humans of that era are not far off developing an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind-esque mechanism which could erase all memory of a previous lover? Jonze instead chose to keep this dystopia painfully relatable. One thing Twombly contemplated which stuck with me, was his fear that he had felt as much as he was ever going to feel. As in, he had been in love once, to such an extent that he feels anything after this will be a lesser version of what he once felt. A valid fear and one that technology probably won’t subdue. Samantha, the OS, responds heavy heartedly, “at least you have feelings”.

Digital horror is a genre of similar thematics that is flourishing in recent years, symptomatic of this era. This particular brand of horror exploits the contemporary technological anxieties of our age and what such fast advances mean for the human race and individual human identities. Ringu/The Ring is one such example, which in a more terrifying display, and in a pointing-fingers fashion (we are all culpable ourselves for the digital haunting of Sadako/Samara), inquires into the power of technology. It grafts a number of contemporary cultural, epistemological, psychological and technological preoccupations on to the more traditional generic elements of the Japanese ghost story of the vengeful yūrei, or ‘wronged woman’. It targets specifically the phone (considerably less smart at this stage), by having death notices conveyed over it (She whispers, “seven days…”). Samara’s killer tape was produced in a similar way to how her psychic abilities worked, as imprints were made by her mind onto an imaging technology, implicitly interrogating the capacity machines have to read our minds and reflect what we desire to communicate. It explores the potential for technological apparatuses to override the human subject itself, with the human taking a secondary role in the world as an outcome of that close relationship that exists between the subject and their devices. The entire film reads as a warning about how technology will eventually disconnect us from the world by defining our being.

With a growing back catalogue of profound and abstract works, including Synecdoche, New York and Being John Malkovich, I was delighted Jonze nabbed the Oscar for best original screenplay. I enjoyed the examination into the breakdown of Theodore’s romantic relationship and its potential parallel with an overreliance on unhuman technology. Theodore reads into the people he sees around him and wonders what heartbreak they’ve been through because he is very perceptive, which is why he excels in his job role so much, even if he does not express these observations to actual living people, only Samantha. The Ring too delves into the breakdown of relations (in this case, between mother and child) and it can be speculated that Samara’s cursed tape is didactic and serves as a lesson of extreme measures that encourages contemporary society not to abandon family values in favour of this keitai culture.

Both films communicate their message differently, yet the two articulate the pedestal we place our personal technologies on, at the cost of our human interactions and connections, an important thought to ponder (and then deliberate over with our friends on Whatsapp).