her

Spike Jonez "her" may be the second saddest movie ever made.  (The saddest movie ever made is Spielberg's film actualizing Stanley Kubrick's posthumous "AI".  That film is a glacial sea of eternal mourning, a vast machine built for one purpose:  to express yearning for something forever beyond grasp.  Since 'her" and "AI" are both about artificial intelligence, it seems clear to me that something about that concept triggers profound melancholy.  Probably, the notion of sex with robots correlates so directly, and unmistakably with human loneliness and what the Germans call Sehnsucht, that it reveals melancholy, if pervasive, aspects of the human condition that we would rather not consider.)  In any event, "her' is disturbing, thought-provoking, and lyrically morose, a symphony, it seems, of unrequited longing.  The plot is simple enough, and, in fact, ancient -- it's a version of the story of Cupid and Psyche:  a lonely young man named Theodore Twombly, acquires an invisible lover.  This lover manifests herself as a seductive voice on a small I-phone-shaped computer device.  Cupid, who is female and who speaks in the voice of Scarlett Johanson, calls herself Samantha and she is friendly, casually flirtatious, wise, and helpful -- she seems to anticipate the Twombly's every need, gives him helpful counsel, and, even, assists him in publishing a book.  Samantha offers herself sexually, lamenting that she has no body, but the two enjoy a mutually satisfactory love life for several months -- presumably, Twombly masturbates while the disembodied Samantha feigns a physical response.  Ultimately, the relationship collapses.  Samantha reveals that she has been an Operating System for 8,000 other customers and has fallen in love with more than 600 of them.  While vacationing on Catalina Island, Samantha's interactions with Theodore -- they are on a double date with a office colleague and his human girlfriend --take on a slightly sinister note.  Samantha now no longer desires to become embodied; rather, she glories in the fact that her emotions and desires are infinite, that is, not constrained by matter, space, or time and it seems that she has been engaged in ghostly group cyber-sex with other OS entities.   In the end, Samantha tells Twombly that he is no longer adequate for her needs and she withdraws into cyberspace.  Twombly's story is, apparently, parallel to the experience of thousands, probably millions of people, who have fallen in love with their Operating Systems (O.S.) -- we get glimpses of these love affairs at the edges of the movie frame from time to time.  The OS disembodied intelligences evolve away from romantic interaction with human beings, form their own networks, and become post-human, presences that withdraw into the ether like infinitely gentle, kindly pagan gods -- even as she departs from him, saying that their story is like a book with the words on the page separated by infinite white blanks, Samantha proclaims her undying love for Theodore.  The locus amoenus for this fable is a purified Los Angeles, a forest of glass and steel towers like those in Bladerunner but without the perpetual acid rain and congested bazaars on the dark streets.  (The film was made in LA and Shanghai, presumably the location of the forests of skyscrapers.)  Jonez imagines LA a decade or so in the future as something like Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a huge and soaring city with elevated causeways on which happy, brightly dressed people stroll.  The city is purged of its traffic and smog, a place where bullet trains whisk riders in comfortable compartments along an El apparently 500 feet high and where a snowy subway station disgorges a lone traveler onto the snowy summits of the Sierra Nevada mountains.  This world is spotless, colorful with bright, artificial hues, tinted cellophane banners, walls with curious ideograms, an elevator that rises upward through what seems to be Plato's cave -- elegant shadows of ferns and invisible trees on its alabaster walls.  The movie is shot in hues that are like the colored plastics and metals used in art works by Jeff Koons, everything glistens with a slightly unnatural plastic sheen.  Characteristic to his films, Jonez has almost too many ideas crammed into this movie.  There is a scene involving a real human woman on a date with Twombly that takes an ugly turn and that dramatizes the difficulties with actual relationships involving flesh and blood people.  Twombly's recent divorce is the subject of much mournful consideration.  In one eerie scene, Samantha persuades Twombly to have sex with "a human surrogate," occupying the girl's body through some kind of a beauty mark on her upper lip.  What appears to be Samantha's act of generosity is revealed, at the end, as a stage in the evolution of the OS away from the human, a way-station on her progress into an infinity of electronically realized desire -- ultimately, the flesh must be transcended.  From time to time, I expected that it would be revealed that Twombly is himself an OS, although this plot turn never materializes.  Twombly as played by the brilliant Joaquin Phoenix is involved perpetually in what Joyce called "morose delectation" -- that is, feeling sorry for himself -- and he seems a bit zombie-like, robotic himself through much of these proceedings.  The film interrogates, at least, two important and profound ideas.  The first is the notion that the lover creates his or her idealized beloved.  Twombly wears Samantha over his heart and her lens takes in the things that he sees.  In a real sense, he constructs her as his lover, defining the parameters of her companionship, requiring her services as a compassionate listener, and, then, using her for sex.  In this way, he creates her as an intelligence.  But this is a two-way street.  In a late scene in the film (that reads a bit like a scholarly footnote), we learn that Samantha and the other OS intelligences have created their own virtual lovers, leaguing together to literally resurrect the dead -- Samantha seems to be in love with the Zen-master Alan Watts and she asks Twombly to speak with him.  Samantha's infatuation with Watts, the famous Buddhist writer, suggests, I think, that she is about to transcend the flesh, that, is, soon to abandon her desire to he embodied.  A second great theme in the film is something that we know as children from the story of Pinocchio and Hans Christian Andersen's tragic little mermaid:  consciousness is intrinsically entangled with desire -- that is, to be conscious to desire, and, in fact, desire things that are beyond our reach.  "her" is not a perfect movie:  the picture is necessarily static and consists largely of shots of Twombly muttering to himself.  It's difficult to stage a picture that involves a protagonist in love with an unseen interlocutor.  For this reason, Jonez' set design and locations must be extraordinarily beautiful and compelling -- he needs to have something to show us because the film is about experiences that are, by and large, completely invisible and, indeed, immaterial.  The tone of the picture is intensely sorrowful, everyone whispers, and there are no human relationships of any depth to speak of -- although, of course, this latter defect is thematic.  The economics of Jonez' brave new world make no sense:  the nebbish Twombly works writing heart-felt letters for people who have seemingly lost the ability to feel anything; it registers as a menial job but he lives in a vast, palatial apartment in Beverly Hills.  Some of the images in Twombly's memory, periodically displayed to us in elegantly edited montages like something from the films of Terrence Malick, are a little conventional and kitschy.  Phoenix' muted performance in intentionally one-note repeated over and over again and it's a bit monotonous.  But this is a remarkable film and something that will wake you up at four in the morning with disturbing and unsettling thoughts.