I wish I had been responsible for the soundtrack of the film Her.
For example, I can't get over why Spike Jonze didn't use the song “Love Letters (Straight from your Heart)” in the opening scene of the movie.
This would have opened the story line up to a far more interesting range of ironies than was the case. As it is the plot is held up at a gently ironic angle by the pastel colours, the knowing references to social media conventions and the hipster soundtrack but this very subtlety (early in the film, at least) defeats the purpose of the irony.
In reflecting on the absurdities of a set of social/cultural conventions the film’s devices are too closely invested with those conventions. “Love Letters (Straight from your Heart)” would have opened a wider space between the what and how of this movie. Of course, this would have sent the film in the direction of satire, rather than smug pastiche but then again, Spike Jonze is not David Lynch.
For example, I can't get over why Spike Jonze didn't use the song “Love Letters (Straight from your Heart)” in the opening scene of the movie.
This would have opened the story line up to a far more interesting range of ironies than was the case. As it is the plot is held up at a gently ironic angle by the pastel colours, the knowing references to social media conventions and the hipster soundtrack but this very subtlety (early in the film, at least) defeats the purpose of the irony.
In reflecting on the absurdities of a set of social/cultural conventions the film’s devices are too closely invested with those conventions. “Love Letters (Straight from your Heart)” would have opened a wider space between the what and how of this movie. Of course, this would have sent the film in the direction of satire, rather than smug pastiche but then again, Spike Jonze is not David Lynch.
I like the opening scene. It begins with a close up of Theodore, the main
protagonist. He’s making what seems to be a declaration of his deepest love but
by the time he says “You make me feel like the girl I was when you first turned
on the lights and woke me up and we started this adventure together” it is
clear that this speech is no such thing.
The scene continues and we learn that Theodore is a professional writer of love letters. The camera pans out and we see that he works in an office alongside many others, each of whom is providing this same service. This is Cyrano de Bergerac on an industrial scale. A world where the most intimate language is outsourced, where the words of love are commodities, where words themselves are shown to float free from the most precious and secret parts of life.
The scene continues and we learn that Theodore is a professional writer of love letters. The camera pans out and we see that he works in an office alongside many others, each of whom is providing this same service. This is Cyrano de Bergerac on an industrial scale. A world where the most intimate language is outsourced, where the words of love are commodities, where words themselves are shown to float free from the most precious and secret parts of life.
This scene may be, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, love in the age
of mechanical reproduction, but the vision is not a dystopian one. This does not seem to be a lament for the loss of the ‘aura’ of love.
If anything, and maybe this is why Jonze didn’t use “Love Letters (Straight from your Heart)” in the opening scene, this is a celebration of the separation of words from reality. It is a kind of liberation of love letters from the parentheses of (straight from your heart).
If anything, and maybe this is why Jonze didn’t use “Love Letters (Straight from your Heart)” in the opening scene, this is a celebration of the separation of words from reality. It is a kind of liberation of love letters from the parentheses of (straight from your heart).
The opening scene of this film suggests that the parentheses are always there.
They were there in 1945 when the song “Love Letters (Straight from your Heart)”
first appeared in the movie Love Letters (This film has an uncannily similar opening scene to Her's - the author of the lover letter that is being written as the credits roll turns out to be a ventriloquist of another man's emotions, just as is the case for Theodore).
Romantic love has always relied on artifice for its existence. In other
words, there has never been and there never will be an unmediated language that
comes (Straight from your Heart). As everyone knows, movies, songs, poetry have
always been the third person in the room.
Polygamy, orgies, menages
a trois; this is reality.
And yet despite its opening scene this film shies away from making this declaration.
In truth, Theodore longs for the stability of an intimate,
exclusive, two person relationship.
Coincidentally I was listening to the radio and heard the song "I Love you Samantha" sung by Bing Crosby (in the film High Society) - and once more I have to ask why Spike Jonze didn't use it in the film.
Bing could almost be Theodore as he sings: "Remember, Samantha I'm a one gal guy!"
Theodore really seems to believe in the possibility that he could one day, use his words to express real love. There are flashback scenes where we learn that he has loved and lost and, of course, he does find love again, with Samantha. That Samantha is an operating system is irrelevant.
Coincidentally I was listening to the radio and heard the song "I Love you Samantha" sung by Bing Crosby (in the film High Society) - and once more I have to ask why Spike Jonze didn't use it in the film.
Bing could almost be Theodore as he sings: "Remember, Samantha I'm a one gal guy!"
Theodore really seems to believe in the possibility that he could one day, use his words to express real love. There are flashback scenes where we learn that he has loved and lost and, of course, he does find love again, with Samantha. That Samantha is an operating system is irrelevant.
The scene later in the film where Samantha hires a woman to have sex with Theodore while she speaks directly into their heads and plays the role acted out by the woman is only a more obvious expression of Theodore's basic longing for the impossible fantasy of a pure, unmediated, unproblematic love.
Polygamy, orgies, menages a trois; this the reality that Theodore would rather forget.
Accordingly, when it eventually happens, the love affair between Theodore and Samantha is vomit – inducingly sincere. her voice is breathy and chirpy and her personality is everything that Theodore could want - she listens, she understands and she cares.
The virtual reality of the computer is basically forgotten. The exchanges between the two lovers show that the film makers are not interested in exploring the virtualisation of the reality of love and love letters signaled in the opening scene. For example; Theodore is lying in bed feeling depressed about the ending of his marriage. He tells her: "You don't know what it's like to lose someone you care about", after a pause she replies "yeah, you're right, I'm sorry".
Of course she knows what it's like - according to this film's opening statement about the commodification of reality, about the alienated nature of love and love letters she exists in the very space where love and love letters are made - she is pure mediation. She has access to every love letter ever written and can understand and process their implications faster than Theodore can ever hope to do.
How can she not know what it's like to lose someone?
Despite her immense processing power, Samantha is at a one level, only a voice. And what a voice! She's breathless, giggly, flirtatious; she is the vocalised 'essense' of emotion. This is the film's attempt to close the distance between what she says and who she is.
It's an ancient gesture - one analysed by Jacques Derrida as phonocentrism (the privileging of the truth of speech over the obfuscation of writing) - designed to assuage anxieties about the loss of immediacy because of the mediating obstacle of written letters and words. Phonocentrism is one possible attempt to ignore the parentheses and say that only through the voice can love letters come straight from the heart.
The anxieties about the alienating presence/absence of writing are also very new. What is the lament for the loss of'direct' interpersonal communication and its replacement by communications technologies if it is not the latest installment of (entirely understandable) phonocentrism?
When Samantha and Theodore's love runs into trouble this film improves a lot.
The credibility of the voice is not enough. At bottom he is a man while she is a computer - how can there be anything between them but an impassible gulf?
Late in the film Samantha tells Theodore that while they're talking she is at the same time talking to 8, 316 others and also - horror of horrors - in love with 641 other entities is as close as the film gets to comedy. As we know, Theodore is a 'one guy gal' so his reaction is predictable. He is hurt, betrayed and so on. And yet, Samantha is just as human as he is. If anything she is even more human than he is! She is the explicit admission that not only can there be no direct line from the heart to language, but also that once language arrives, unity leaves. Theodore is as atavistic in his desires as is Frank in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (whose expressed wish was to fuse with the body of his mother and destroy his alienated, air sucking self "Mommmy baby wants to fuuuck!") - he just can't admit it.
This film for all its flaws got me thinking about how it is that even when someone is physically close they can be very far away, how it is that intimacy can be established without actual physical proximity.
Of course, as anyone who's ever had to live with a computer instead of a person knows, intimacy needs bodily contact. Does bodily contact create intimacy? Of course not. This film shows that love between a computer and a man is possible. But that is not the point. Love between a computer and a man is not sustainable.
The film ends with another love letter (straight from the heart). This time, Theodore is writing it for himself. He sends it to his ex-wife. Does this letter have more truth than the ones he writes for pay in work?
No, it doesn't. But this may be because this film has liberated love letters from the burden of truth. This film may have jettisoned the freight of the simple man seeking a simple love at the very end. Perhaps what Samantha has taught Theodore is that he is capable of far more than mere fixation on a particular incarnation of who he happens to be at that moment. As she has already shown him, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, he is large, he contains multitudes. Samantha had already helped him get his letters published. He has, at the end, severed the link between his letters and his heart.
But that soundtrack? Why didn't they phone me?
The virtual reality of the computer is basically forgotten. The exchanges between the two lovers show that the film makers are not interested in exploring the virtualisation of the reality of love and love letters signaled in the opening scene. For example; Theodore is lying in bed feeling depressed about the ending of his marriage. He tells her: "You don't know what it's like to lose someone you care about", after a pause she replies "yeah, you're right, I'm sorry".
Of course she knows what it's like - according to this film's opening statement about the commodification of reality, about the alienated nature of love and love letters she exists in the very space where love and love letters are made - she is pure mediation. She has access to every love letter ever written and can understand and process their implications faster than Theodore can ever hope to do.
How can she not know what it's like to lose someone?
Despite her immense processing power, Samantha is at a one level, only a voice. And what a voice! She's breathless, giggly, flirtatious; she is the vocalised 'essense' of emotion. This is the film's attempt to close the distance between what she says and who she is.
It's an ancient gesture - one analysed by Jacques Derrida as phonocentrism (the privileging of the truth of speech over the obfuscation of writing) - designed to assuage anxieties about the loss of immediacy because of the mediating obstacle of written letters and words. Phonocentrism is one possible attempt to ignore the parentheses and say that only through the voice can love letters come straight from the heart.
The anxieties about the alienating presence/absence of writing are also very new. What is the lament for the loss of'direct' interpersonal communication and its replacement by communications technologies if it is not the latest installment of (entirely understandable) phonocentrism?
When Samantha and Theodore's love runs into trouble this film improves a lot.
The credibility of the voice is not enough. At bottom he is a man while she is a computer - how can there be anything between them but an impassible gulf?
Late in the film Samantha tells Theodore that while they're talking she is at the same time talking to 8, 316 others and also - horror of horrors - in love with 641 other entities is as close as the film gets to comedy. As we know, Theodore is a 'one guy gal' so his reaction is predictable. He is hurt, betrayed and so on. And yet, Samantha is just as human as he is. If anything she is even more human than he is! She is the explicit admission that not only can there be no direct line from the heart to language, but also that once language arrives, unity leaves. Theodore is as atavistic in his desires as is Frank in David Lynch's Blue Velvet (whose expressed wish was to fuse with the body of his mother and destroy his alienated, air sucking self "Mommmy baby wants to fuuuck!") - he just can't admit it.
This film for all its flaws got me thinking about how it is that even when someone is physically close they can be very far away, how it is that intimacy can be established without actual physical proximity.
Of course, as anyone who's ever had to live with a computer instead of a person knows, intimacy needs bodily contact. Does bodily contact create intimacy? Of course not. This film shows that love between a computer and a man is possible. But that is not the point. Love between a computer and a man is not sustainable.
The film ends with another love letter (straight from the heart). This time, Theodore is writing it for himself. He sends it to his ex-wife. Does this letter have more truth than the ones he writes for pay in work?
No, it doesn't. But this may be because this film has liberated love letters from the burden of truth. This film may have jettisoned the freight of the simple man seeking a simple love at the very end. Perhaps what Samantha has taught Theodore is that he is capable of far more than mere fixation on a particular incarnation of who he happens to be at that moment. As she has already shown him, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, he is large, he contains multitudes. Samantha had already helped him get his letters published. He has, at the end, severed the link between his letters and his heart.
But that soundtrack? Why didn't they phone me?
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