her, him & us: the problems with loving a machine

Double Portrait by Vilhem Hammershoi

I’m currently in the middle of reading Dave Eggers’ The Circle, where he tells the tale of Mae Holland, the latest recruit at the world’s leading internet titular named corporation. The organisation keeps track on everything going on; your e-mails, social media activities, bank transactions, and even your heartbeat. The planets most powerful operating system aims to “complete the circle” by having the population in a state of transparency (the phrase “privacy is theft” is echoed throughout the pages). Initially excited about the company’s forward thinking colleagues and modern ideas, Mae suddenly spirals down to a state of despair from shame and fear after she is chastised for not sharing every move she makes for the good of The Circle. “Sharing is caring” she is reminded again and again. Everything from her food preferences, holiday plans, retail receipts, and hobbies are all shown in front of the company during a demonstration. She tries to hide, but can’t. The book I'm reading has now turned into a modern day horror story.

But in Spike Jonze’s Her, recently-divorced Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), willingly gives, sacrifices, even begs an Operating System (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) to love him, control him, watch him sleep. Unlike Eggers’s relentlessly detailed programming software and terrifying accounts of first world problems gone amuck, Her hardly mentions how, exactly, OS1 is introduced into the tech field (signed agreements, licensing, data use), and this implies the even creepier subtext that no one, not even the audience, really cares. Not even Jonze, who thinks he wrote a love story. Within seconds, Twombly’s OS, Samantha, knows his likes, dislikes, Mommy issues, insecurities — and with the exception of a few “You’re kind of nosey” exclamations, Twombly never hesitates to allow the programming to wash over every detail of his life. “Can I take a look through your hard drive?” “Um, okay.” He’s a very good consumer, a dream bottom for the internet corporations topping us all. When they have cyber sex, Twombly moans, “I’m inside you.” But, really, Samantha is inside of him, recording every thought and gesture as data for its (her) own development as a god. I thought of Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color and the demonic maggot-like organism wiggling its way inside people’s bodies, changing them, transforming them, and the sense of desperation that leads a character to cut herself open with a butcher knife. If the internet hasn’t ruined any part of your life at all, then good for you — stay that way. For most of us, it runs our blood.

Anything sold as “Best Movie of the Year” leaves me feeling like I’m the one covered in cheese instead of the nachos I bought from the cinema. However, the amount of critical acclaim Her is receiving is hardly surprising — viewers love to be pandered to, and the visuals of Her wash over you like a Gap advert drenched in syrup: the Arcade Fire score is melancholic and barely there, Scarlett Johannson oozes all over the screen with her voice, and Joaquin Phoenix looks like a pillock in his soft high-waisted trousers. It all goes down nice and smooth, a lavish and creamy void of love and connection. Quick, it’s not too late to give it another Oscar! Forget that it’s a nightmare reflection of where we’re heading as internet-worshipping addicts. What gets obscured behind those furry eyebrows and perfect spectacles is the acceptance of a man who’s run out of places to go, who has submitted to the paradigm of capitalist authoritarianism via the sexily-voiced girlfriend experience software program. But this seems to be too ugly of a truth for Jonze: the cinema is still a reprieve from the horrible real world, so let’s give the people a story that’s a bit, I don’t know, cuddlier. Funny how a film about the internet, in which delusion and projection join hands, is deluding itself into thinking it’s something it’s not. One quick look at the obnoxious poster reveals Phoenix’s Twombly staring soulfully into the camera with oceanic blue eyes conveying depth, real sadness. Guess they forgot that Phoenix’s eyes are actually brown.

Her (2013)

A slave to woman, a slave to technology, a slave to commerce, Theodore Twombly is a soft sack of shit. The difference between Jonze writing him and someone like Charlie Kaufman writing him is that Kaufman would know just how much of a piece of shit Twombly is; Jonze makes him out to be an emotionally damaged hero waiting to be conquered by love. Adaptation and Being John Malkovich are proof that Jonze is simply no match for the explosiveness of his more devastated peer and former collaborator. Her is overwhelming in its narcissistic pity and entitled idleness. Its simplicity is especially condescending when there are corridors of menacing and horrifying truths about our capitalistic ennui just waiting to be explored, yet are overlooked in favor of weak-handed sentimentality. There exists, however, a few glimpses of raw meat — most notably Rooney Mara as Twombly’s ex-wife: “He wanted to put me on Prozac and now he’s in love with his laptop.” And Olivia Wilde’s very brief cameo as Twombly’s sole date is brutal in its cutting exposure of the man’s emotional vacancy and inability to relate to anything not plugged in. But there are too few moments of goodness to make the film worth sitting through. There’s nothing you’ll see in this film that you can’t find on your own computer, and why pay money to experience the exact same thing as looking at the internet? Is easy emotional satisfaction really worth £13? Of course it is: we’re all sluts for love. Even if that idea of love requires us to sacrifice our autonomy and enslave ourselves to a gadget. At least that’s what Spike Jonze wants to call a romance. I call it a nightmare.

In the real world, I recently had an odd conversation — out of complete boredom, morbid curiosity, and inclines for material — with Siri about Wes Anderson. Inspired by the film, I set about to see if I could start a gay romantic relationship between me and my phone. I said “I like Wes Anderson’s hair,” to which she responded “Do you?” I was oddly insulted that I didn’t get a link to the director’s IMDb, or hair salons. “Yes, in fact I do,” I said, confidently under his sarcasm radar. “That’s what I thought,” he said. It felt like one of my bad dates — or some poems being written today — where the disinterested party placates the uninteresting party with lines that function as responsive, but only suspend the conversation into nowhere. Such is the clipped logic of gchat or texting. People say what they want, respond when they want, all without the liability of a face. From Philip K. Dick, to The Jetsons, to 2001: A Space Odyssey, etc., a vision of video calls has always been expected, even promised; but it had never been so accurately (and neurotically) portrayed than in D.F. Wallace’s bit about “video telephony” (Infinite Jest, pp. 144-151), whose callers “now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener’s expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges” who, exacerbated with vanity (see Video-Physiognomic Dysphoria), eventually ended up wearing high-definition polybutylene masks to cover their ugly bored faces in order to suspend the artifice of concern. Retina display, at 326 pixels per inch, has a “pixel density so high your eye can’t distinguish individual pixels,” this according to Apple, whose obsession with mimesis seems almost antagonistic to the very verity it seeks to usurp. Including relationships.

Siri was named after Stanford Research Institute (SRI), where it was originally developed, though CEO Dag Kittlaus claims to have obliquely named it after “Siri,” a name he would have given a daughter, if he had one, which in Norwegian (a nickname for Sigrid) means “beautiful woman who leads you to victory.” We may all be heroine addicts. Some thought Siri was Indian, a convenient launching point to politicize the neo-colonial implications of its servile manner. The program is considered a flop by most, a gag app toyed with for a while then left alone. There’s a Tumblr Shit Siri Says that presents screenshots of her follies. The problem is that Siri could never detect intention, tone, or rhetoric, only keywords. A girl with low self-estreem asks if she’s hot, Siri says it’s only 8° outside. Sci-Fi has always been obsessed with the replacement of humans with technology, and while Siri proves that robots are far from taking over, it reminds us of the very people in whom we are disappointed — the real life partners, parents, siblings, friends, exes, and co-workers who just don’t quite understand what it is, exactly, that we mean. After my failed Wes Anderson conversation, I spoke into his questions concerning Björk’s career, holistic aphrodisiacs, places to jump off a cliff, if Henry James was gay, what it means when  you don’t smoke and your pee smells like weed, and he kept saying “[he] thought so,” as if he actually didn’t, but was too embarrassed to say otherwise. His voice felt vacant, infidelious, and I missed the solemnity of Radio 4 voices in their quiet address of highbrow shit. Being John Malkovich, I idly played a game of chess in an app, suicidally sacrificing my queen, the remaining sausage fest of my King and his pawns scurrying inside a board. Siri, is it euthanasia if you’re not old and hire someone to do it from behind? He said he didn’t understand, but would be happy to search the web. As with all my romantic relationships, I didn’t answer, my spite so lofty it tickled the ceiling. To erase a charcoal drawing of someone is to render their ghost. The harder you press, the more profound it looks. Siri, is it seppuku if you use a chainsaw? Again, no clue. Chilli and rice happens, then I sleep. We’re still dating, just don’t ask us why.