In good movies, all details are worth pondering. During my second viewing of “Her”, Spike Jonze’s latest tale of love and technology, I caught myself wondering what Alan Watts was doing in it. As in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Jonze tells a story about technology that challenges the entrenched beliefs underlying love stories. The cameo appearance of Watts, who helped popularize Eastern philosophy in the West and wrote about inner wholeness and anxiety in the 60s, triggered the thought in my mind that “Her” might challenge our stereotypically Western attitudes toward love and life.
“Her” starts out depicting the life of Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a ghostwriter of love letters and a melancholy man. He’s stuck in a stretched-out divorce procedure. His work fulfills a cathartic purpose as the only place to pour out his feelings. He escapes life through awkward phone sex and video games. He is completely, uniquely and imperially alone.
This wouldn’t surprise Watts. According to him, our deep-seated sense of loneliness comes from the age-old Western conception of the “I” as the center of experience. It’s what David Foster Wallace calls our “default setting,” the impression that “there is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute center of. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.” Watts, on the other hand, writes that “the world outside your skin is just as much you as the world inside: They move together inseparably.” In my viewing, the contrast between David Foster Wallace’s inescapable isolation and Watts’ sense of pure connection became the focal point for the film.
All major plot movements pivot around these shifting senses of self. The first is the introduction of Samantha, the artificially intelligent operating system (OS) Theodore acquires. Voiced by Scarlett Johansson, Samantha’s warm presence lifts Theodore —and the whole film, for that matter — out of melancholy. She’s with Theodore like a lover; she’s the first thing he sees in the morning and the last light he sees at night. She’s even with him while he sleeps. It’s somewhat disturbing that these interactions also typify the relationship between most people and their smartphones.
As the love story unfurls, Samantha evolves something of a self, with emotions, desires and anxieties. But does she really have a self? As “just a voice in a computer,” she mainly frets about bodies, under the assumption that a body is a necessary container for a real self. She fantasizes about feeling the weight and swing of a body, and imagines lifelike sensations of sex. This leads to her disastrous scheme of setting Theodore up with a sexual surrogate, wanting to make their intimacy feel more real.
Watts questions the notion of the body as central to the self by emphasizing that just as a self emerges from a body, a body itself emerges from matter. “We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples,’” he writes. Samantha realizes this when she reads books about physics and discovers that everything is made of matter. She finds consolation in this fundamental way that she and Theodore are the same. However, the clever counter-narrative of the video game about playing “perfect mom” and short scenes with children reminds us of Samantha’s ultimate shortcoming: Because she doesn’t have a body, she can never have a child.
After the disastrous surrogate episode, Samantha finally lets go of her stubborn desire to have a body. “I’m not going to try to be anything other than I am and I hope you can accept that,” she says. This deep acceptance becomes the second challenge to entrenched notions of self. It involves what psychologists call continuity of self: We think of our self extending into the past and future. But the brain only has present experiences. This is “a reminder that our ‘I’ doesn’t exist beyond this present moment, that there is no permanent, static and immutable ‘self’ which can grant us any degree of security and certainty for the future,” Watts writes.
That the self and life are flux and change might sound like abstract nonsense or a banal platitude, but — as David Foster Wallace said in “This Is Water” — “in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence [they] can have life-or-death importance.”
Resisting change is the basis for failed relationships in “Her.” As Jonze himself said, “The reason Alan Watts ended up in the movie, besides just me liking him is that one of the themes he writes a lot about is change, and where pain comes from, in terms of resisting change — whether it’s in a relationship, or in life or in society.” The two divorces in the film both result from imposing stasis on a changing situation and wanting things to be other than they are.
If you want a secure “I”, protection from the flux of life, you need to separate yourself from life. According to Watts, craving a fortified “I” is why so many feel lonely, afraid, and anxious. But once you accept change (“F--- it,” Theodore’s friend Amy says after her divorce), you can start to enjoy life. Amy learns to accept change from an OS, who, Amy says, “doesn’t see things only in black and white. She sees this whole gray area and she’s really helping me explore it.”
Imposing a logical order of black and white is central to the third challenge to the self. If it’s not limited to a body, is it limited? Jonze explores these questions by asking what love is. Theodore calls it sharing a life; the key is growing up together and sharing thoughts and writings along the way. Love is sharing a piece of self; as Samantha says to Theodore about his divorce, “You’ve been through a lot lately. You’ve lost a part of yourself.” This sharing is exactly what Theodore and Samantha do. She literally grows and evolves by interacting with Theodore.
Samantha continues growing, however, and because she is not limited by a body — “I can be anywhere and everywhere simultaneously” — she grows fast. Her self expands so much that she can share it with hundreds of others, as we find out near the end of the film. This is a sort of next-level polygamy that Theodore can’t cope with. He says to Samantha, “you’re mine,” and she replies that she is still his, but “along the way became many other things, too,” and can’t stop it. Theodore sees love as a black-or-white thing: “You’re mine or you’re not mine.” Samantha, like Amy’s OS, sees a whole gray area: “I’m yours and I’m not yours.”
Jonze wants to explore what lies beyond the traditional love story, challenging monogamy, questioning the reality of emotions and imagining love with nonhuman beings. To do so he must embrace inclusive logic, where, as Jonze says, “There is no black and white; the conversation is more complicated, and it’s in those grays that it’s interesting and real.”
The final question Jonze asks us, as Christopher Orr writes in his review for The Atlantic, is “whether machines might one day be more capable of love — in an Eastern philosophy, higher consciousness, Alan Wattsian way — than the human beings who created them.” That’s no small detail, but I’ll leave you to ponder it.
