Persistence and Hope in Science Fiction Films Pt. 7 (Her)

Spike Jonze’s Her is all about people. It is about their feelings, relationships, and what it is that makes love, love.  It is set in the future but uses that notoriously negative conceit as a tool to unburden its self of the mundane things that often make life difficult and get in the way of people worrying about their relationships.

It takes place in a near future that only has middle class first-world imperfections like loneliness, ennui, and job-dissatisfaction. It wears its optimism so obtrusively that when the plot’s main motivator is introduced, a self-aware life-assist operating system that integrates seamlessly with both humans and its network; there is no one in the film who worries about privacy or the pervasiveness of technology. The world within Her is so ideal it is not only post-strife it is post-luddite, a world of uniform early adopters. It very closely resembles the promotional films presented by G.E. and Monsanto at world’s fairs from the 1950s through the 1960s. “The World of Tomorrow!”

The film is delicately handled by its director, and one can perhaps forgive its unquestioning optimism thanks to its rich character portraits and its inversion of technophobia, suggesting our creations might just break our hearts instead of wiping us out. But its unflinching techno boosterism makes it feel like a cell phone commercial at times and its resolute blindness to whole swathes of the human condition in favor of middle class navel gazing makes it hard to ride all the way through without squirming at least once or twice.