Where are the Chinese child slaves?

Rating: 7/10 (23 March 2014)

The first thing that struck me about this film was that all of the characters are immature narcissists. The men are petty, castrated obsessional neurotics incapable of action and commitment and the women are frigid, castrating hysterics equally incapable of action and commitment. They deserve each other. Everyone is constantly apologizing to each other. Everyone is rich. Nothing is real.
I kept wondering when Jonze was going to show us the factory in China where the artificial world of Theodore and Amy is produced. He never does. The closest he gets is showing us the futuristic L.A. skyline. We never see a single poor person. This leads me to think that Jonze himself does not fully understand the scope of his own film. The wimpiness and emotional immaturity of every single human character in this film is a direct result of their double alienation from the truth.
How is this alienation double? To answer this question we must ask another question: why does Theodore suffer so much? We never find out. The superficial explanation would be that he is unlucky in love. But his poor luck in love has to be seen as a consequence of his suffering and not its cause. Theodore is a masochist. He does not have the courage to find a good woman, one who realizes that freedom and flight are not the same thing. He does not have the courage to find a woman who will not make him suffer. He picks narcissistic women who will abandon him as they pursue some vain avatar of self-realization. Some version of this is true of every other emotionally stunted character in the movie. Now, why is this the case? Well, to put things bluntly, this is the case because the true (Oedipal) conflicts responsible for their masochistic behavior remain buried in their unconscious. Jonze goes nowhere near them. None of them have parents or children. None of them have pasts. Theodore and Amy are locked vaults. They can talk and cry and emote all they want. They never come anywhere near the truth. And this is precisely why they suffer. It has nothing to do with their sterile love stories, which ultimately are just screens.
HER made me uncomfortable. "Am I like this?" I kept wondering. "Is my own love story this futile and sterile?" It wasn't until I left the theater and returned to my concrete life that I was able to answer this question. NO. Unlike these characters, I want to know the truth. Not a single one of the human characters gives a damn about knowledge or reality. None of them question the world they live in. All they care about is their feelings. They are not just complicit in the fraudulent ideology of the totalitarian world they live in, they are active participants in its elaboration. Theodore fabricates emotions and Amy is working on a snarky video game designed to destroy a mother's confidence in her femininity. In other words, they are literal propagandists for a bankrupt moral order. They hide this disturbing fact from themselves by maintaining an "ironic distance" from their dishonesty. No wonder they're alienated and unhappy.
Either Spike Jonze is a master of subtle understatement or he is a dupe of his own story. Every character is white or Asian (super-white). Every character is rich. Every character has a "creative" job. Does Jonze realize that he is leaving out 99% of humanity here? I'm not sure he does. He does not make even the barest of gestures in their direction. Now, this is not a criticism of Jonze as such. He can make a movie about whomever he wants. What I am saying is that Theodore's alienation from the true nature of his own emotional conflicts is nothing but an analog for his alienation from the conflicts inherent to capitalism. In both cases these foreclosed, invisible conflicts generate the secondary "sentimental" conflicts that seem so real to these decadent characters. In reality their romantic woes are nothing but epiphenomena. These characters are as remote from the true nature of their emotional suffering as they are from the Chinese child slaves who build their gadgets. The floating world in which Theodore and Amy live is a tiny artificial bubble maintained by a huge network of production and exchange. One cannot live in a bubble of any sort and expect to have an authentic experience of life. The (real) emotional suffering of these characters can only be understood as a blind unconscious response to the structural misery and suffering of an (economically and emotionally) corrupt world, a misery and suffering that they refuse to see because they actively participate in its propagation. Jonze's film is an unwitting meta-statement on the radicality of this split that increasingly dominates our lives. The irony here is that Jonze himself is, by all appearances, unaware that this is the true thesis of his film. HER is a devastating critique of hypermodern ideology and he may not even realize it.
Until Theodore and Amy begin to dare to find out the ugly truth about themselves as well as the world they live in, they will remain in their sterile universe of video games and childish emotions.
www.timothylachin.com