Taki's Mag

When writer-director Spike Jonze won a Best Screenplay Golden Globe this week for Her, his little science-fiction fable about Joaquin Phoenix falling in love with his Siri-like smartphone (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), he apologized for his acceptance speech by noting, “I’m bad at English. And it’s the only language I know.”

That’s overstating his weaknesses as a verbalist, but Her doesn’t shake the assumption that the first two films Jonze directed, Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, were largely the accomplishment of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Her, an occasionally comic love story about a virtual girlfriend who turns out to be as high maintenance as most real ones, isn’t a bad movie.

But critics’ rapturous response says more about how adroitly Jonze pushed their class marker buttons. For example, the normally intelligent Christopher Orr burbled in The Atlantic:

Why Her Is the Best Film of the Year: Thoughtful, elegant, and moving, Spike Jonze’s film about a man in love with his operating system is a work of sincere and forceful humanism.

One reason Her is so much less popular with viewers than with reviewers is because it is set in a future Los Angeles depicted as a serene, benevolent utopia stripped of everything that English majors have traditionally found tawdry about the real LA: swimming pools, movie stars, and fancy cars. Granted, those are the only things that the rest of the world likes about LA, but tasteful writers have always been irritated that Los Angeles was the Dream Destination of the Uncouth.

Thus, critic Liam Lacey explains in the Toronto Globe and Mail:

Some things about this Los Angeles of the future are much better that [sic] today: Density has replaced sprawl, so everyone lives in high-rises looking out over other high-rises (many of the exteriors were shot in Shanghai), to the thrum of a trancey aural wash of Arcade Fire music. They walk on elevated walkways and ride a subway system and work in rooms in velvety pastels. Poverty and cars seem relics of the past. In Theodore’s underpopulated workplace, everyone is polite and supportive.

This sounds like Toronto’s high-rise suburb of Mississauga. And it looks even worse because Shanghai is blanketed in the kind of smog that hasn’t been seen in Los Angeles in this century.

But downtown living is the kind of thing that literate people enjoy these days. (Recall the surprise success of the 2009 romance 500 Days of Summer with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as an aspiring architect wooing Zooey Deschanel in a gentrifying downtown LA.) Hence, Her looks like it was inspired by a Matthew Yglesias e-book about how we should all live in Blade Runner-sized apartment towers and take magnetic levitation trolleys to work.

Phoenix’s gentle, mustachioed protagonist has the Victorian-sounding name of Theodore Twombly, which sounds like the name of an artisanal pickle company in the hipster part of Brooklyn. In this new, improved Los Angeles, men wear high-waisted wool trousers that Theodore Roosevelt might have thought too retro. It’s all very reminiscent of the second Portlandia theme song about how The Dream of the 1890s is alive in Portland, as if President McKinley had never been assassinated and thus the 20th century had never happened.

Theo has what ought to sound like a crummy job, a futuristic version of Gordon-Levitt’s emasculating position as a greeting-card writer. Theo sits at an open desk at BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com and composes intimate letters for rich people to send each other on their 50th wedding anniversaries. Keyboards no longer exist, so the ghostwriters dictate all their correspondence in hushed, considerate tones. (In fact, everyone in the entire movie speaks only in their indoor voices.)

But in Her, the lighting, score, and acting are refined and upbeat. Accordingly, it seems (at least while you are watching) as if Theo must have a wonderful job. The office is decorated, literally, with rose-colored glasses. (Large panes of pink-tinted Plexiglas were used to filter out all the depressing blue light.) With his pants hitched up to his armpits, Chris Pratt (the enormous first baseman from Moneyball) plays Theo’s receptionist and/or boss. Whoever he is, he caringly affirms and validates the uniqueness of the emotional insights Theo handcrafts into his bogus letters.

The only thing wrong with Theo’s life is that he has to go home alone to his gigantic, nicely decorated Beverly Hills apartment. His wife—another writer, but from a more rigorously ambitious family—has left him.

Jonze cast Rooney Mara, an offspring of two NFL team-owning dynasties (Art Rooney’s Steelers and Wellington Mara’s Giants), to play the role presumably inspired by Jonze’s ex-wife Sofia Coppola. The daughter of The Godfather auteur separated from Spike in 2003 after making her smash directorial debut with Lost in Translation, starring Scarlett Johansson as the unhappy wife of Giovanni Ribisi’s trend-chasing photographer, a role long rumored to be unkindly modeled upon Jonze.

Still, Theo seems to enjoy having a deep relationship with himself and little interest in anybody or anything other than his own emotions. Thus, he’s the perfect customer for a new AI smartphone operating system that lures him into dependency.

Besides making obscure gestures toward Jonze’s failed marriage, Her seems to ask the broader question: What if the writers of Los Angeles ever win? What if LA were finally reorganized to suit the cultured tastes of its tiny minority of thoughtful and sensitive wordsmiths? What if everybody in Los Angeles stopped aspiring to stardom, mansions in the canyons, and German convertibles, and woke up to the manifest superiority of rail transport, dense walkability, and endlessly analyzed relationships?

The background is that Los Angeles is home to a surprising number of writers. And they probably drive nicer cars on average than authors anywhere else in the world. After all, about 10% of movie industry expenses go to screenwriters (much of it for work that never emerges from development hell), which by the paltry standards of scribblers is a huge sum. LA is thus full of unknown Barton Finks driving E-Class Mercedes whose half-dozen screenplays have been paid for but never produced.

But screenwriters don’t drive cars as nice as the people for whom they write. And those boors exercise enormous power over the artists’ fates.

Over the generations, this state of affairs has generated numerous novels and countless screenplays lambasting stars as egomaniacal airheads, moguls as megalomaniacal vulgarians, and ordinary Angelenos as starstruck halfwits. No city in history has been more thoroughly and expertly mocked. The talents who have gleefully joined in include Evelyn Waugh, Billy Wilder, Steve Martin, and Larry David.

If the writers someday win, however, instead of Angelenos using future advances in artificial intelligence and robotics to create lascivious sexbots who look like Scarlett Johansson, we’ll restrict ourselves to designing operating system avatars that sound like Scarlett Johansson.

They’ll infatuate their owners solely by the power of the spoken word—lots and lots of spoken words, like in one of those French movies where a couple philosophizes about their relationship for two hours. In this better tomorrow, entire movies will be made in which we will never see Scarlett Johansson, we will just hear her as we watch Joaquin Phoenix’s face react to the miracle of her emerging cybernetic selfhood.

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Personally, I think Scarlett Johansson should be seen but not heard.

Admittedly, her voice acting has much improved since she became a star at 18 in Lost in Translation, but her Her role was actually created by the plainer-looking English actress Samantha Morton. At the last moment, with the film of Phoenix’s reaction shots already in the can, Johansson was brought in to redub the soundtrack to the timings laid down by Morton. (Whether Johansson’s casting is a private joke Jonze aimed at his ex-wife is not for me to say.)

And I have the nagging suspicion that Her is not really the profound relationship movie that critics unanimously think it is. Perhaps instead it’s more an intentionally dweeby satire on its niche audience, an expensive prank on the Stuff White People Like crowd.

Nobody else seems to suspect that, but Her is a lot funnier when you assume it’s a hoax, a more artful put-on than, say, Phoenix’s phony 2010 movie I’m Still Here about his claiming to retire from acting to become a rapper.

After all, Spike himself is not always possessed of the delicate sensibilities displayed in Her. He started out videoing his fellow skateboarders and BMX bikers, then broke through with the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage MTV video parodying Starsky and Hutch. Jonze is one of the three creators of the long-running Jackass series of gonzo stunts and low-class pranks. Is Her a high-class prank?

Her derives from Jonze’s 2010 short I’m Here about a sad robot who wears high-water pants. The depressed automaton has to take the bus to his bad job reshelving library books because robots aren’t allowed to drive in Los Angeles. One day at the bus stop he sees a sexy girl robot behind the wheel of a forbidden car. “You aren’t allowed to drive. You know what happens when you drive,” an angry old lady human shouts at her. Our boy robot hero falls in love with the rebellious robotrix, but her constant auto accidents require so much maintenance from him that he winds up a disembodied head.

Viewed from a structuralist standpoint, Her just flips a few switches from I’m Here: The hero is happy taking mass transit in LA to his lovely literary job, and it’s his girlfriend who is disembodied.

Sure, deep down Spike, who loves crashes, explosions, and ruses, probably feels that being an incorporeal public transportation user in LA is a dismal way to go through life.

But Jonze takes pride in his ability to manipulate his audience’s emotions. Thus, Her and I’m Here hearken back to Spike’s seminal 2002 IKEA commercial Lamp in which a battered old desk lamp is replaced by a gleaming new one. The sad-looking piece of junk is put out on the curb, where we can just tell the poor thing feels lonely and rejected because of its defeated, hunched-over posture, the moody lighting, and the melancholic music. Then a Swedish man walks up and says to the camera, “Many of you feel bad for this lamp. That is because you crazy! It has no feelings, and the new one is much better.”

Her is like a two-hour version of that IKEA spot about how directors can screw with audiences’ emotions, just with the explanatory punch line left off.

If Spike has indeed intended to pull a fast one on the critics, he’s succeeded, winning 93% positive reviews from Rotten Tomatoes while also alienating the masses: Her earned only $5 million in its first weekend of national release. But Her was produced by Megan Ellison, the daughter of the world’s fifth richest man, so the lack of excitement among the paying public is hardly a major concern during awards season.

 

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