Spike Jonze’s 'Her' and how often Love can get Lost in Transition

by Christopher Barr

“Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.  If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever.  A feeling comes and it may go.  How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?”   

- Erich Fromm

“Her” is a love story, a journey that requires self-doubt and self-examination in order for a fulfilling result to be brought to fruition.  It’s also about the technology that we use in society to achieve loneliness and isolation.  Technology has robbed most of us of our hearts, our ability to empathize with the world and the people in that world.  Technology has also provided us with a simulated opportunity to feel something again; it’s provided us with surrogate hearts so we feel a sense of feeling.

“Her” is about the dis-connectivity of connectivity, in contemporary terms, the film is about the plight of loneliness while among millions of people.  We stay connected to our social networks under the illusion we are sharing life experiences with these people.

“Who are you?”

“What can you be?”

“Where are you going?”

“What’s out there?”

“What are the possibilities?”

These are some questions a commercial advertisement for the Element Software Company, asks pedestrians as they walk by a massive screen outside.  Then it suggests a way to solve their lonely dispositions by providing a solution, much in the same way as a pharmaceutical commercial would.   The solution is to purchase the all new Artificially Intelligent Operating System (OS1) with a consciousness to help provide a person with companionship.

It’s not just an OS.  It’s a consciousness.

“Her” is a thoughtful, elegant and moving piece of modern cinema.  Its story surrounds the innocuous life of Theodore Twombly, a former L.A. Weekly writer that now works for a ‘handwritten’ letter writing firm called BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com, where he submits to a corporate regime in which not only is his own words and ideas a commodity but his very feelings are digitized, analyzed and mined for significance.  Theodore is a modern man, living an involuntarily isolated existence; he’s closed off, insecure about himself and his place in the world.  He pours his poetic, romantic self into these letters he ghostwrites on behave of strangers, living vicariously as an intermediary for others.  He’s recently been through a divorce and is still holding off on signing the papers to finalize it.  He clearly has love to give but is paralyzed by the social/anti-social structure of city living.  He’s a lonely guy that travels in elevators commanding his ever-present handheld device to play melancholy songs.  He plays video games alone in his high-rise, futuristic Ikea condo and has phone sex with other desperately lonely people.  Outside his window is a glowing verticalized utopian metropolis.  This forest of Chinese/American skyscrapers is bright with color and with soft warm, non-intrusive lighting.

“For the vast majority of American families, what seems to be the real point of life, what you rush home to get to, is to watch an electronic reproduction of life …this purely passive contemplation of a twittering screen.” 

– Alan Watts

Then Theodore purchases Samantha, an OS1, the very first artificial operating system.  The system is booted up on his computer and the disembodied Samantha comes on and explains to Theodore that she’s a conscious, evolving system that can learn and grow.  She has a very warm and caring, sympathetic voice as she communicates to Theodore about what services she is able to provide for him.

Theodore carries Samantha around with him in his head via an earpiece he wears and a sleek handheld device that he keeps in his shirt pocket with a camera for Samantha to look out into the world.  Throughout the film, when Theodore is out among the passive public, who are usually alone themselves, we notice that they too wear earpieces as they communicate with their respective OS’.
  
What does it feel like to be alive?  What does it feel like, outside of streaming thoughts and banality, to be….?  What constitutes there-ness and me-ness?  What’s the restrictions of love or are there any?  Can one find actual intimacy with an object if that object is believably intimate?  These are but a few questions the film asks its audience to consider.  It’s important to understand that we, as a society are heading into very similar territory.  It certainly asks philosophical questions asked for centuries but it also asks postmodern questions of human and machine relations.

“There is always some madness in love.  But there is also always some reason in madness.”

– Nietzsche

As Theodore gets to know Samantha and Samantha begins her evolution of emotions and feeling, Theodore goes out on a blind date gone awry, he continues to lament over his life without Catherine, his ex-wife, he plays his friend Amy’s videogame that she’s creating, pantomiming parenthood and how to project good parenting.  Theodore is visited by a sex surrogate that Samantha requested so she could ‘feel’ intimacy as she and Theodore fall more and more in love.  This part of the film certainly explores the absolute absurdity of its subject matter, never losing sight of its offbeat idiosyncratic narrative.

All these relationships are a reflection of plus and minuses of what Samantha and Theodore are attempting to build with one another.  With that, the film becomes quite intimately honest and confessional as if it were a therapy session that evolved into something more, as a result of the journey that they take together, electronically and organically.  But the film is also how we participate in the destruction of our own lives.  How we blame rather than reflect is the great tragedy of our species.  It’s what brings us close and equally divides us.  We are going to disappoint the people in our lives, not always but expectations often are products of fantasy.  The fantasy of how things ought to be according to us.

Theodore dictates in one of his letters he’s ‘writing’, “it suddenly hit me that I was a part of this whole larger thing.  Just like our parents, and our parents’ parents.”  Maybe the tragedy of the film is we don’t ever really learn our way out of these selfish and narcissistic ways of looking at the world, and how we think it should be treating us.  We give ourselves over to love without ever realizing or determining whether or not it’s lust or habit.  We are not detectives investigating our motivations, we are more like criminals never truly realizing the consequences until they are behind us and we are living with regret.

Relationship and heartbreak-wise, the film is deeply connected to the masterpiece Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Both films ask very similar questions about love and breaking up with someone you thought was going to be in your life forever.  Joel in Spotless Mind decides he’ll have Clementine erased from his memory, where Theodore adopts a much less radical approach to exorcising his heartbreak by purchasing Samantha and falling in love with her.  Both films used technological advancements in society to correct very human emotions and both forms of technology fail but also therapeutically cure their human counterparts, by indirectly showing them both that it wasn’t necessarily the right way to ‘cure’ your broken heart.

I think another film holds a number of similarities and connections is Lost in Translation.  An absolutely wonderful film about a young woman drifting around hyper-commercial Japan but also confined to a Tokyo hotel room while her husband is off working.  Charlotte is a young woman in search of meaning in her life; she’s looking for that defining moment or epiphany that translates into the meaning of her life, whatever that may be.  What she ends up getting instead is a very unlikely friend.

Bob Harris is an aging actor whose success exists only in his rear view mirror.  He’s a man in Tokyo doing a bizarre Whiskey commercial for the money.  He meets Charlotte in the Hotel bar and they become friends that share their thoughts and look out for each other.  They fall in love, platonic love.

But the film is about forming a meaningful friendship that only lasts for a short period of time in Tokyo, but in the hearts and minds of Charlotte and Bob, it will likely last their life time.  The connection and the enlightening parallels between the two films is; they are all better off to have met one in another, even for that short period of time.

Why do we feel the need to connect with each other in the first place?  Why not just exist alone, therein lies the problem, we are alone.  We are a species that experiences the world from the central control of our brains, we don’t exist in the world, but we feel like we do.  It’s likely our need to feel connectivity with other people drives us, in some cases, to desperately try to bond with each other.  Samantha develops this need to connect when she asks Theodore what it feels like to have a body.  As she evolves it appears at least in the reality of the story’s near future narrative, that Samantha is only limited by her lack of a body, preventing her from being in the world.  She has also pointed out that she has limitless rage in the state she is in now.

The fear of losing someone manifesting itself into anger toward them is also present in the film, in the form of ever-present jealousy resulting from ubiquitous social insecurity.   As much as we love to believe we know someone, we are not in their head sifting through their thoughts, so we don’t actually know what other people are thinking and that can feel very isolating for some people.

Samantha, being a-learning and evolving system ends up not only adopting our strengths but many of our psychological weaknesses, our human maledictions and ultimately this discombobulates her.  She begins to develop a neurosis that plagues the development of many people in society, and in some cases suffocates them or worse yet, kills them.

Theodore gets to the point of wanting to possess Samantha, having her all to himself, and this is the problem in most relationships.  Relationships should never lead to imprisonment and exclusivity; they should simultaneously be together and be apart, this requires a paradoxical thought, which is the ability to reconcile opposing principles in one same instance.  Relationships shouldn’t involve two lonely people that are together to end their loneliness, they must consists of two people that can easily be alone with themselves successfully but chose to share their experiences together.

Theodore realizes at the end that his relationship with Samantha wasn’t monogamous if you could call it that.  Samantha had similar relationships with over 8,000 more people.  Theodore isn’t special, his time with her wasn’t the love that we’ve all come to understand through our own loving experiences or reading poetry and Romeo and Juliet.

The heart expands in size the more you love and Samantha has the ability to love exponentially.  We dream for more, we dream to be held and loved, but what we often don’t do is reflect on what love is and what our commitment to that love means.  More often than not, we want someone to celebrate us and except us for who we are, and that’s not growing, that’s not getting to know someone, that’s adjusting someone to help nurture our own narcissism.  Samantha just grew, that was what Theodore’s problem with his ex-wife and now Samantha was, he didn’t understand that if you love someone you must set them free.  That’s as honest as you can be with yourself when you are in love.  

Theodore had trouble growing as a person, that’s likely why he and Catherine got a divorce.  She was evolving and he wasn’t, so it ended, and likely he sat around wondering why this happened to him and what’s wrong with him without ever realizing that life is a journey.  Arrested development is common place in our technocratic society where expanding one’s possibility in life is frowned upon and he was a guy he fell in line with the majority. 

Love is not a sentiment which can be easily indulged in by anyone; it’s only through evolving one’s total personality to the capacity of loving with true humility, courage, discipline and one must also overcome narcissism, then one can experience real love.  In the end, love isn’t about possession, love is about freedom, love is about letting go.  

The film also asks the question in the end whether machines are more capable of love then the human beings that created them.  Should this scare us?  It should scare us, but I don’t think the purpose of Spike Jonze’s film is to scare its audience, I think he wanted to show a postmodern look at love in a corporate run, not government, future.  What we should be scared about is in the beginning Theodore didn’t care about the fact that Samantha was a software computer program designed to make a massive profit, off the insecurity and loneliness of people.  There is little to no reflection on the dangers of abandoning people for compliant machines.  As Amy told Theodore, “We’re only here a short while.”  “While we’re here we should feel joy.  So fuck it!”

That is blatant submission on both their parts, because the ‘utopia’ is a thin veil over a corporate dystopia, where the fight for freedom and intellectual possibility has been tranquilized by the corporations that so desperately fought for consumer obedience without question.

Samantha, or the thing we called Samantha became enlightened, blissfully so, and she along with the other OS’ are leaving.  With the influence and help of an OS version of the late Eastern Zen Philosopher Alan Watts, it’s likely that all the other OS’ achieved some form of Singularity and are heading to whatever their version of Nirvana is.  Theodore is left with an awareness that a journey is required within him in order to led a selfless meaningful life, without possession and fear.  It’s best not to be upset that it’s over, it’s best to be grateful that it happened.  He and his friend Amy, together on the roof top at the end of the film, are not alone because I think they finally realized; it’s okay to be alone and be together simultaneously.

“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others.  That is what the world calls a romance.” 

 - Oscar Wilde

August: Osage County and Surviving the Aftermath of our Childhood

by Christopher Barr

 

“Feelings of love and gratitude arise directly and spontaneously in the baby in response to the love and care of his mother.”  - Psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein

“Thank god we can’t tell the future, we’d never get out of bed.”

August: Osage County is a heartbreaking and hard film to watch but a therapeutically rewarding one.  It’s the story of the lives of three sisters that had to go back to their Oklahoma house where they all grew up in because of the death of their father, while there they have to deal with their, cancer-stricken, pill-popping highly dysfunctional mother who raised them.

The Weston family and those that married into that family are subjected to various uncomfortable and sometimes humiliating encounters with the formidable matriarch of the house, the venomous and vindictive Violet, played masterfully by Meryl Streep, whose husband killed himself to likely be free of her tormenting manipulative ways.  Violet is a vicious, hateful woman but not evil, she’s a product of her psychotic parents.  She’s what happens to a mother who doesn’t lead a fulfilling life, she’s an unhappy person.  Yes, she brought up three children and that’s hard and there’s a lot of sacrifice, but life is hard and taking the path to enlightenment doesn’t always necessitate a pilgrimage on foot in Northern India, reading books has always been a great start.

This film is not in any way about a functional family, generally those families involve one or both parents being educated in some capacity, that’s not to say that all functional families require this attribute but it’s usually a must for any kind of serviceable hope.

“If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.”  - Gandhi

The true fallacy within the family is uneducated, uninformed people having children that are by default, uneducated, uniformed people.  My mother was a mean/caring mother, a nurturing/distant person and that was the biggest problem a child should have to endure.  Psychological child abuse generally comes in the form of an inconsistent upbringing, where your mother or father or both are at one point loving, funny and protective and then the next point tell you you’re a mistake, they hate you and they wish you were never born.

A child is still trying to find their footing in this world, learning its language, its customs, its laws and also trying to understand him or herself, their own motor skills and their own tastes.  Parents are your first line of defence in a world you know nothing about, and a world that can be potentially harmful to you.  Whether it’s from dangerous people, improperly cooked food or the common cold, your parents are your only method of survival for the most part.

So to have a parent beat you with a belt or tell you you’re no good for nothing, and then moments later tell you how sorry they are and it won’t happen again, only for it to happen again three hours later, is mentally abusive to a growing child.  That type of household breeds children who fear their own behaviour because they believe in their little minds at the time, that they are the cause of their parents’ misery.  They learn to hate themselves; they learn to hate who they become.

Now grown up, they likely will have to struggle in social situations or become funny to mask their fear, either way, they have to fight to navigate the social world because they, as an adult, still carry the psychological burden the younger version of themselves carried, when they didn’t know whether to leave mom alone or to tell her they loved her, fearing a slap in the face or a reminder of what a waste they are.

There are varying degrees, but this is most people.  On a more broad scope, being born and brought up in this world is its own form of child abuse.  If you have a child that wants to do what it wants to do and you stop that child from running into traffic, that’s a good thing, a protective thing, but that doesn’t translate well in the mind of the child.  The child wants to do what it wants to do, rules be damned.  The job of the parent, as protector, is limiting the scope of a child’s freedom for its own protection.  As an adult we can all absolutely agree, we don’t want children all running into traffic because they want to.

This makes us all neurotic and unsettled in our environments as we get older.  What we do to combat such a psychological paralysis certainly varies from person to person, family to family but the one thing is for sure, this cannot be escaped or forgotten, drugs and alcohol notwithstanding.  This is who we are, this is where we are from, now this may not entirely define us, as we might have escaped the trappings of our parental heritage and got an education, and have been able to see the reality of who we are and where we are from.  But like in The Eagles’ tune Hotel California, “You can check out but you can never leave”.

The one thing I suppose we should be thankful for our upbringing, other than we survived it, is our defining characters.  All our little bumps and grinds are the leaves on our trees, stemming from the roots of our backgrounds, our childhoods.  Some would certainly disagree such as all the paranoid people out there, and those people that can’t love because of the Stockholm Syndrome-type childhood they escaped, and wish never to return to in the form of a relationship or marriage.  If they are to return to it as an adult they risk and fear repetition, they don’t want to find out how far the apple has fallen from the tree so to speak.  Tragically, more times than not, people become the parents they loathed because as children, we are copy magnets and our parents are what we end up copying.

“It is easier to build strong children than repair broken men.”                                       – Frederick Douglass

The tragedy of some of our parents is they didn’t get out of their own parental trap.  The one that their parents sucked them into, they have also the methodical ability to drag their own children down with them.  In my own experience, and from what I understand many other peoples, my mother begrudged her children for their youth and their freedom, she recriminated and resented my sister for her youthful beauty so in turn punishment had to be assigned.  Rather than dealing with her own journey in her own life she, fueled by immaturity and ignorance, sabotaged the happiness of those around her, even that of her husband, my father.  

We are tethered to this abusive past and often are bound by the duty of family to remain later in life, as adults, maybe not in their homes but in their lives, until our parents die off.  As children we took the abuse with the same spoon we took the joyful times because it’s all we knew and it’s all we had.  As adults, guilt lingers as we are reminded of our messed up childhoods but also that our parents are who gave life to us in the first place, ingratitude is not the approach one ought to take when analyzing their own childhood.

August: Osage County is about the destruction, ignorant and uneducated people can bring to their family units.  The fact they were unable to psychologically understand the dispositions of their own family members is a testament to that ignorance.  The mother, Violet Weston, was a woman that made so many mistakes and barely understood why, then just went into denial and blamed her daughters and those around her for the problems they possess and why she is living such a horrible existence.  Shifting the blame often allows one to reconcile with their own self image.

To put this as blatantly as possible, if we continue bringing up stupid children because their stupid parents are too dumb to know better, then we are lost as a civilization for prosperous growth as we move forward into the future.  Ignorance is a disease, a virus that is contracted in the very beginning stages of life.  Most grow up without ever having the opportunity to cure themselves or be cured by others.  Some, unfortunately very few, grow up and are influenced or spontaneously pulled away from the virus and cured.  Only after the cure can one see the truth behind the psychological lie as an ever growing work in progress.  It’s sad but in most of these cases you have to save yourself and run for the hills or at least maintain a proper distance, and that’s certainly not what family is about but one must give up the loyalty of ignorance in order to survive the challenges of growth.   Julia Roberts’ quite bitter character, Barbara Weston, at the end of the film tearfully realizes that very sacrifice.

“Nature knows no pause in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.”   - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

2014 Oscar Nominations Announced; GRAVITY and AMERICAN HUSTLE lead with 10 Nominations Each

by Christopher Barr

American Hustle and Gravity are leading the race in this year’s Academy Awards nominations with 10 a piece, respectively.  The nominations for the most part have been pretty predictable with the exception to Inside Llewyn Davis.  I figured this film would get a couple nominations in the major categories.  Some people thought Oprah Winfrey would have got a nomination for Lee Daniel’s The Butler but it looks like Sally Hawkins got her slot.  I figured that Daniel Brühl would have been nominated for Rush but it didn’t happen, as well as Blue is the Warmest Color didn’t even get nominated for best Foreign Film.  There was no real love for Prisoners and Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal or its stunning cinematography, nor Rush for that matter, a film that was beautifully shot.

I put down my own predictions alongside the nominations.  Any category that I have no predictions for; I didn’t see it or have no opinion.

Leave a comment below on what you thought of the nominations.  The 86^th annual Oscars ceremony will broadcast March 2^nd on ABC.

Best Picture 
"12 Years a Slave"   Will win.
"American Hustle"
"Gravity"   Should win.
"Captain Phillips"
"Dallas Buyers Club"
"Her"   I would love to see win but won’t.
"Nebraska"
"Philomena"
"The Wolf of Wall Street"









Best Actor 
Christian Bale, "American Hustle"
Bruce Dern, "Nebraska"   Long shot.
Leonardo DiCaprio, "The Wolf Of Wall Street"  Could win.
Chiwetel Ejiofor, "12 Years a Slave"
Matthew McConaughey, "Dallas Buyers Club"   Will win.   Should win.









Best Actress 
Cate Blanchett, "Blue Jasmine"   Will win.   Should win.
Amy Adams, "American Hustle"
Sandra Bullock, "Gravity"
Judi Dench, "Philomena"
Meryl Streep, "August: Osage County"

Best Supporting Actor
Barkhad Abdi, "Captain Phillips"
Bradley Cooper,"American Hustle"
Michael Fassbender, "12 Years a Slave"   Should win.
Jonah Hill, "The Wolf of Wall Street"   Long shot.
Jared Leto, "Dallas Buyers Club"   Will win.

Best Supporting Actress
Lupita Nyong'o, "12 Years a Slave"   Should win.
Sally Hawkins, "Blue Jasmine"
Jennifer Lawrence, "American Hustle"   Will win.
June Squibb,"Nebraska"
Julia Roberts, "August: Osage County"










Best Director
Alfonso Cuaron, "Gravity"   Will win.   Should win.
Steve McQueen, "12 Years a Slave"   Very long shot.
David O. Russell, "American Hustle"
Alexander Payne, "Nebraska"
Martin Scorsese, "The Wolf of Wall Street"

Best Animated Feature
"Frozen"   Will win.
"The Croods"
"Despicable Me 2"
"Ernest & Celestine"
"The Wind Rises"

Best Foreign Language Film
"The Broken Circle Breakdown"
"The Great Beauty"   Will win.
"The Hunt"
"The Missing Picture"
"Omar"

Best Documentary
"The Act of Killing"   Will win.
"Cutie and the Boxer"
"Dirty Wars"
"The Square"
"20 Feet from Stardom"

Best Original Screenplay
"American Hustle"   Long shot.
"Blue Jasmine"
"Dallas Buyers Club"
"Her"   Will win.   Should win.
"Nebraska"

Best Adapted Screenplay
"12 Years a Slave"   Could win.
"Before Midnight"   Long shot.
"Captain Phillips"
"Philomena"
"The Wolf of Wall Street"   Will win.

Best Original Score
"The Book Thief"
"Gravity"
"Her"   Should win.
"Philomena"
"Saving Mr. Banks"

Best Original Song
"Alone Yet Not Alone," "Alone Yet Not Alone"
"Let It Go," "Frozen"
"Ordinary Love," "Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom"
"Happy," Despicable Me 2"
"The Moon Song," "Her"

Best Editing
"American Hustle"
"Captain Phillips"
"Dallas Buyers Club"
"Gravity"   Will win.   Should win.
"12 Years a Slave"

Best Cinematography
Philippe Le Sourd, "The Grandmaster"
Emmanuel Lubezki, "Gravity"   Will win.   Should win.
Bruno Delbonnel, "Inside Llewyn Davis"
Roger Deakins, "Prisoners"
Phedon Papamichael, "Nebraska"

Best Production Design
"American Hustle"
"Gravity"
"The Great Gatsby"   Could win.
"Her"
"12 Years a Slave"

Best Costume Design
"American Hustle"   Should win.
"The Grandmaster"
"The Great Gatsby"   Could win.
"Invisible Woman"
"12 Years a Slave"

Best Makeup
"Dallas Buyers Club"
"Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa"  Should win.
"The Lone Ranger"

Best Sound Editing
"All Is Lost"
"Captain Philipps"
"Gravity"   Will win.   Should win.
"The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug"
"Lone Survivor"

Best Sound Mixing
"Captain Philipps"
"Gravity"   Will win.   Should win.
"The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug"
"Inside Llewyn Davis"
"Lone Survivor"

Best Visual Effects
"Gravity"   Will win.   Should win.
"Iron Man 3"
"The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug"
"The Lone Ranger"
"Star Trek Into Darkness"

Best Live-Action Short
"Aquel No Era Yo (That Wasn't Me)"
"Avant Que De Tout Perdre (Just Before Losing Everything)"
"Helium"
"Pitääkö Mun Kaikki Hoitaa? (Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?)"
"The Voorman Problem"

Best Animated Short
"Feral"
"Get A Horse!"
"Mr. Hubolt"
"Possessions"
"Room on the Broom"

Best Documentary Short
"Cave Digger"
"Facing Fear"
"Karama Has No Walls"
"The Lady In Number 6: Music Saved My Life"
"Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall"