a third new reflection - 'her'

The other evening I watched Spike Jones’ ‘Her’, starring Joaquin Phoenix, in arguably his best performance to date.  Phoenix plays a man, who in the not too far off future, suffers a painful divorce and subsequently falls in love with his operating system (computer). 

It is an interesting movie in the way it examines the human need for physical relationships, or otherwise, and in doing so raises the question of how legitimate feelings for a non-physical thing or being really are.

They are, of course, perhaps just as real and just as legit. 

As the plot of ‘Her’ slowly builds, and Phoenix’s character (Theodore) finds his AI soul-mate, he is frequently confronted by friends and colleagues alike, when he tells them ‘Samantha’ (voiced by Scarlet Johannson) is an operating system, because of the fact that she has no physical form.  For these people, since they cannot see or touch Samantha, she does not truly exist, is make believe, cannot be a pleasure-giver, or a genuine comfort.  Phoenix, meanwhile, expertly displays the agony of someone whose feelings, feelings that run to the core of his being, feelings that define him in a major way, feelings that legitimise him as a member of society that, after all, values togetherness, are tacitly derided.  He is humiliated.

We humans, for all our splendid inventions, for all our prowess, too often show a jaw-dropping lack of emotional intelligence, and subject even those closest to us to humiliation.  It is worth remembering that we do not know what is good for other people, what they should do, when they should do it.  Wisdom is knowing we know nothing.   

Another interesting aspect to the movie ‘Her’ is the power Phoenix’s love interest, Samantha, generates over him – because she is incorporeal she can be, as Phoenix says half-way through the film, ‘so many things’. 

Away from the silver screen, a friend, who we’ll call Tim, went through an elongated divorce a few years ago.  It was not his decision to call time on his marriage.  In the aftermath he found it very difficult to ‘move on’, precisely because his ex-wife became a very powerful, incorporeal presence in his head, rooted in his heart (the ‘tight connection’ that Dylan so wonderfully wrote about).

Tim created a ‘Samantha’ for himself in the image and sense memory of his ex-wife as an entirely legitimate survival mechanism, and one which, though this ex-wife had long since gone loco, brought him some degree of contentment, in part alleviating his grief at losing the person with whom he thought he was going to go together with through life.  As a friend, I found it hard at times to understand why he could not simply move on, and I was perhaps too crass to realise the value of Tim’s Samantha in keeping his hope alive, and in legitimising him as a human being, a member of society.  Somebody with genuine emotional components, someone of ‘value’.

Physical relationships are important to our emotional well-being; touch, in particular, is a wonderful, sensual communication of some of the deeper feelings we harbour and hold dear.  And yet, physical relationships are not perhaps integral, or the be all, end all: it is possible to be touched by the non-physical – music, words, our thoughts and memories, our dreams, our hopes for a better future out of the wreck of the past.