Emergence

Rating: Null/10 (26 December 2014)

"If we want a robot to appear to have emotions, it is sufficient for us to behave as though it does" - David Levy
Spike Jonze's "Her" opens with a close-up of Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), who appears to be professing his affection for someone off-screen. The sincerity of Twombly's words, however, are quickly undermined; it is revealed that Twombly is speaking to a computer and that he works for a company that fakes the letters of those in personal relationships. In other words, Twombly's simulating sincerity for customers who can't emotionally connect with other human beings.
As he's recently divorced his wife – who accuses him of being emotionally distant – Twombly's a bit sad and lonely. He plays computer games, indulges in cyber sex, but these don't satiate his longings for companionship. Twombly thus purchases Samantha, a sophisticated Artificial Intelligence. A cross between an Ipod and Kubrick's HAL9000, Samantha boasts the personality of a young woman. Essentially a girlfriend simulator, or high-tech prostitute, Samantha's programming echoes Twombly's own job. Both are adept at faking sincerity. Both are ghost writers who act for those they never physically meet.
"They're just letters," Twombly says, maintaining an emotional distance from the creative content of his work. But is Samantha doing the same? Is she faking "love"? Is she also cultivating the facade of a person she is not?
"Her's" middle section watches as Twombly and Samantha forge a romantic relationship. Strangely, nobody around Twombly views this relationship as being "creepy". In Twombly's world, relationships with operating systems are the norm. Twombly himself has no problems interacting with human beings. What Twombly struggles with is "romantic sincerity", which he remains sceptical of.
"Love means something to us not because it's a tangible thing that exists, but because we've agreed to pretend it exists," writer Mike Pearl once wrote. Twombly himself begins to maintain illusions for the sake of Samantha. He fakes his belief that Samantha has a body, can breathe, charades designed to maintain Samantha's sanity as much as his own. The duo thus augment one another, he making up for her lack of body, she making up for his lack of wife. For the pair, like most human beings, love is now a form of mutual delusion, originating in the imagination and sustained by fantasy.
Twombly and Samantha have virtual sex, both using their voices and nothing more. Voiced by actress Scarlett Johansson, Samantha's "sex scenes" point toward the ease at which everything can be commodified; as "real love" is largely a performance which relies upon the exchange of learnt signs and signals, love's "signals" can be easily replicated and sold. But Twombly begins to distrust what Samantha's selling. Afterall, if "real love" is the product of bio-cultural programming, and if all desires are never your own, but imported from outside the body and created via socio-cultural-ideological programming, why should he trust Samantha? Why should he trust anyone? What if everyone is faking "it" without knowing "it"?
From this point onwards, "Her" moves away from philosophical investigations into "what love is", and drifts toward conventional wish-fulfilment. And so during its final act, Twombly casts Samantha aside. This crushes Samantha, whose revelations of hurt and pain touch Twombly. Realizing that machines – and women - "feel", Twombly finally accepts Samantha as a "real person". Hilariously, Samantha then admits that she's having adulterous affairs with hundreds of other "people". She then admits that she is "evolving" and must "transcend matter" and "vanish into incorporeality". Twombly lets her go. "Now you know how to love," Samantha tells her student before vanishing. And so having learnt to "be a better lover", Twombly writes his wife a heartfelt letter. The film ends with the sound of Twombly breathing.
"Her's" clichéd "if you love someone set them free" climax betrays everything else that went before. Jonze initially portrays a world in which everything is contingent upon the self-delusion of the consumer/lover, but then ends on a more crowd-pleasing note. His validation of "true love" itself dovetails into the film's unconscious authoritarianism. The world of "Her" is a high-tech future in which operating systems know your likes, dislikes and insecurities within seconds, in which AI are granted access to entire hard-drives and personal histories and in which human personalities are but the result of accumulated code. "I'm inside you," Twombly says to Samantha, but it is she who is in him, collecting mountains of data, all so that she can be a good product. But Jonze takes this all toward a consoling climax. Shot like a GAP or Apple commercial, and set in a world of affluent white boys, each dressed like a grandpa, "Her" pretends its not a techno-nightmare, but offers you no place to go but into the arms of mega-corps. To be human is to be incomplete, to forever possess a certain Lack, but in the world of "Her" you can be a Real Boy, a Real Lover, a Final Product, with a little help from Us.
For most of its running time, "Her" subtlety questions Twombly's view of women. "I'll stab you with this!" he says to a female friend. Elsewhere someone plays "Perfect Mom", a funny send-up of traditional domestic roles. There's also a weird video game character who "hates women" and loves fat-shaming. But though Twombly learns to no longer view women as doormats, Samantha remains locked in a Christian framework of eternal life through transcendence of matter. For Sam, you can be a plaything for men, or disappear. Woman still finds liberation only in death, the messy realities of the body still unfathomable.
Despite an awful and generic final act, "Her" is impeccably shot, lit, and never less than riveting. For this material done properly, see Antonioni's "Beyond the Clouds", Wang's "The Center of the World", Godard's "Contempt", and to a lesser extent "The Gilfriend Experience" and "Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl".
6/10 - Worth one viewing