Her (Spike Jonze,
2013)
PSA: Plentiful Spoilers Ahead
What I liked about it:
·
God help me I never say his name right, but
Joaquin Phoenix is damn good at what he does
·
Wardrobe—how do high-waisted pants and peach
button-downs say so much?
·
AGENCY
·
The video games are all pretty much just super
·
Music does some really interesting things, in
terms of both structure and plot
·
I can’t tell if I’m mad that my Bodies Onscreen
seminar is still ahead of me this Spring, or thrilled that I have such a
perfect film to be thinking about in that seminar all semester.
·
There’s a lot to say about women in this film
·
Theodore’s job at
beautifulhandwrittenletters.com is never explained. He is a writer of heartfelt letters for
other people, a sort of surrogate who speaks more movingly than you to the people you
love. We never know anything about the job, really, except that it exists and
he’s good at it. It's strange, and strangely analogous to the work of operating systems in the film--being very good at simulating emotions and thought, perhaps to the point of actually feeling those emotions and thinking those thoughts
·
I love Creation stories
·
Like most good films, it could be read as
reflecting on the nature of cinema
I’m sure “agency” is going to be a
buzzword for people who write about this
film, so I need to be very clear about what I mean when I
say: this movie is a terrific and fascinating example of agency. There is a trend in filmic scholarship away
from auteurism and intent as well as singular hermeneutic readings and toward
cinematic autonomy and the creation of an independent film world, or even film
mind. This film mind is capable of thinking about itself, about its characters,
about everything in its diegesis. (Forgive me, film people—musicology is always
just a little bit behind your theorizing.
For now.) In terms of sound, Ben
Winters has said this autonomy means music doesn’t necessarily narrate on a
level other than the diegesis of the characters, but if that characters
themselves are controlling their world, their diegesis, that it’s
possible for them to control the music, as well, even some instances of what has been labeled underscoring, or extra-diegetic music.
It’s super fun to think about this issue then, in a film
world in which agency is a central theme, issue, topic, etc. In
fact, before the OS (Operating System) Samantha ever shows up in the film, protagonist Theodore Twombly demonstrates his (or his non-sentient computer’s) control over the
diegesis. In an elevator, he instructs
the computer to “play a melancholy song.” Though he is using earbuds, the song
takes over the filmic soundscape, illustrating perfectly Theodore’s moodiness.
He abruptly says, “play a different melancholy song,” and the computer obeys,
again shifting and controlling the soundscape of the film. This could by certain theorizing be read as
metadiegesis, or simply the diegesis of being inside one’s head, but as the
song continues, its use shifts to what we would traditionally term
underscoring. Theodore, through his computer, has a certain amount of control
over what we the audience hear, a point which is accentuated not only by seeing
and hearing him tell his computer to play music, but seeing and hearing it
twice.
It is important to note that this display of power is
impossible without his computer, even the “low-grade” voice-recognition
software he used before Samantha. The film universe is already saturated with technology. When Samantha enters the picture, this power
grows. Samantha engages in a common trope: as she becomes more complex, she
becomes interested in and moved by art, particularly music, to the point of
composing herself. As Theodore lounges
comfortably on the beach with Samantha, a Satie-like piano song plays, and
when Theodore asks what it is Samantha reveals that she has been composing.
She says she was trying to capture the experience of being on the beach with
him. Later, Samantha composes another song intended to be a picture of the two
of them, since she has no body and therefore cannot be imaged (a fascinating
idea I’ll return to in a minute). A third composition is a collaboration between
Samantha and Theodore. I am having an argument about who wrote the song,
Theodore or Samantha, because it’s a bit vague in the presentation. My reading is that she was playing him a
wordless song she’d written and then he himself played it later. With this reading, Samantha is incapable of
producing actual acoustic sounds, so for Theodore to create a non-digital
version of the song was another way of bringing their relationship into his own
world. The alternate reading (and one I'm thinking now might be right) is that Theodore wrote
the song, given that we’d seen him noodling on the ukulele earlier in the film,
and asked Samantha to put words to it.
In either interpretation, the point is that they are collaborating on
something that has a life both outside and inside the earbud, and it is a
unique function of music that such a collaboration could occur. This question is asked at many points during
the film, but for me it was particularly poignant here: is Samantha, and are the
products of her mind, still virtual?
It is necessary, I suppose, to at least consider a reading
of all of this virtualness and realness as a contemplation on cinema itself. A
movie, after all, is itself a type of virtual world, whose physicality exists
primarily in the way it is transmitted to us, in the hardware of recording and
playback technology, in traces of light and sound. Like Samantha, this film,
any film, is not a person. Her does
not present to us persons with social security numbers. And yet is it any less real? Samantha does not exist in the physical
diegesis of Theodore, but she is still a presence in his world. Film, once it is created, has the capacity to
do things its creators didn’t anticipate, to have conversations with humans and
with other films. They can have a very
real and physical impact on us without having certain types of corporeality
themselves.
One final thought: that Samantha desired to make a picture
of the two of them with music is a fascinating idea. It is not without
precedent, of course: the history of Western music contains many attempts to
evoke images or ideas with music. In some ways, though, this isn’t like that:
she is actually making a picture, not just trying to call an image to mind.
It’s more like she’s taking/making an ultrasound, a picture out of sound waves,
literally turning something you hear into something you see. The comparison to ultrasound is also apt
because it is such a personal experience, using sound to see beyond the
boundaries of a person’s flesh, actually viewing, being deep inside of them. This extraordinarily personal technology, which some might term invasive, involves an openness that ultimately is the key to Theodore's enlightenment. It
wouldn’t be hard to make this into a sexual and/or Freudian metaphor, but I
want to stop here and think about it some more. I also need to sort out how this is not just any ultrasound, but a musical ultrasound. There's got to be something there, yes?
Kate
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