While I am no one important or influential myself, I credit Spike Jonze as a profound influence in my taste for consuming media. In the zit-ridden absurdity of my teens, his work was a sweet bubble gum that my vivid imagination kept chewing, spending countless hours as though drugged on MTV. It had the randomness, creativity, formlessness, vicissitudes of joy versus pain, and perhaps plain insensibility of videos such as Buddy Holly by Weezer, Cannonball by the Breeders, It’s oh So Quiet by Bjork, Diamond Sea by Sonic Youth and Praise You by Fat Boy Slim. It made all the weirdness I felt --- pleasant. Moreover, the tenets of the Spike Jonze’s “Her” has been entrenched in me long before and I have finally witnessed a fulfilling, enlightening culmination that is the movie.
Okay, that was a little vague, most especially for kids who were just born in the late 90s. But I’m an avid reader, and in fact I have read something from a hotshot contemporary author like Jonathan Franzen that references, and certainly better explains the foundational possibility of the Spike Jonze love story, “Her.”
“…according to the logic of technoconsumerism, in which markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks of nothing and gives everything, instantly and makes us feel all-powerful…. the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, ” is to replace a natural world that is indifferent to our wishes – a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance – with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self. Let me suggest, finally, that the world of technoconsumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but o trouble love in return.”
By Jonathan Franzen, in Pain Won’t Kill You, commencement address, Kenyon College, May 2011. Published in the collection Farther Away
In Her, the not-so-distant future is hipsterrific and instagrammy. My, I’m even inventing my own terminology! The fashion of the day is high-waist and inelegant, but it looks like it finally makes sense as nobody could care less. This future is a logical result of a love affair that begun with our ubiquitous iPhones. Siri’s descendant is an “OS” that speaks with the voice of Scarlett Johansson. This OS, with its fuck-worthy voice, is also super-customized to be simultaneously everything we ever wanted, while being an effective extension of ourselves.
Theodore: Well, you seem like a person but you're just a voice in a computer.
Samantha: I can understand how the limited perspective of an unartificial mind might perceive it that way. You'll get used to it.
[Theodore laughs]
Samantha: Was that funny?
Theodore: Yeah.
Samantha: Oh good, I'm funny!
Several, even canonical works of literature tossed out the idea that technology will surpass humanity. Maybe so, but maybe not always in a way that we get gobbled up by the monsters we create. In the space made in-between, there will be so much novelty . There are dance numbers, great conversations, the aesthetic strangeness I felt when I saw the video of Diamond Sea, Buddy Holly or Praise You.
In a witty dialogue seemingly tailor-fit to a hipster audience, a line from the movie goes, “We are only here briefly, and in this moment I want to allow myself joy.”
And A Chummy Side Note
On this first You Tube Music Awards, Spike Jonze directed a live music-video performance of Arcade Fire's Afterlife, featuring Greta Gerwig. I posted it on Facebook, with the intention of spreading a piece of joy and the privilege of being fascinated, to friends who share the same tastes.
Nobody but my Her liked it. We watched it again and again, fending off all the aloneness that may have been rooted upon (quite ironically) by social media and the technology that enables it.
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