I
am using this blog post to write about the movie HER. There is some risk, that
in considering a movie to be a cultural product, a reflection of collective
feelings and experience, we are overvaluing it, forgetting that its prime
purpose is to entertain. But I believe that the movie, a story of how computers
affect our lives, is sufficiently rich to warrant reflection and study. It is
after all about a man, Theodore Twombly, who falls in love with HER, a computer
operating system. As its Wikipedia entry notes, “HER was chosen the best film of 2013 at the National Board of
Review Awards, and shared shared first place for Best Film with Gravity in the Los Angeles Film Critics
Association Awards… It was also nominated for five Academy Awards, including
Best Picture. It won the award for Best Original Screenplay.” I am also grateful to my
friend Eli Zaretsky whose own review of the film alerted me to its depth.
When
we first encounter Theodore or Ted, he is at the verge of despair. He has
broken up with his wife Catherine, their divorce papers have yet to be signed,
and he feels lost and lonely. He lives in a nondescript city that looks like
Singapore or Hong Kong. Its most salient feature is its endless vista of tall
residential and office buildings situated cheek and jowl, with few signs of the
natural world. He works for a firm, “Beautiful
handwritten letters.com,” writing letters for customers who pay the company
to express their presumably deep feelings of gratitude and love to relatives
and friends. In effect, Ted manufactures feelings. Though he is just a lowly functionary
in a corporation, his apartment is well appointed and he has a beautiful view
of the cityscape from his picture window. With a few visual strokes, we learn
that Ted lives in a city affluent enough to support useless work producing fake
products.
We
encounter him early in the film playing a video game projected onto a 3-D
screen in his apartment. His avatar, much like Sisyphus, is struggling but
failing to climb a virtual hill. When he falls and rolls down the hill, Ted
slumps in his chair seemingly exhausted at the same moment. The film thus
establishes that the real and virtual worlds are intertwined. Going to bed that
night, he cannot sleep, and using his ear buds he cues into a network of fellow
insomniacs. He makes contact with a woman who wants phone sex, and as they
begin to stimulate each other toward orgasm with their words, she unexpectedly
asks him to envision that he is whirling a dead cat around her neck. The woman
comes to orgasm and while compliant, Ted is nonetheless flummoxed by such an
intrusive image and cannot come. This vignette underlines Teds’ passivity,
sacrificing his right to pleasure to another’s desire. It appears that his lack
of drive compounds his despair.
Later,
he goes on a date with a woman, and while they have a wonderful time over
dinner she admonishes him for using “too much tongue” while kissing. In other
words he is clumsy and inexperienced. When she asks if he will take her
seriously and not just fuck her, he is unable to respond with any expression of
desire. She responds with some bitterness, that he is a “creepy dude.” We learn
at this moment that his capacity for empathy- after all he writes beautiful
letters for other people, actually masks his childishness. Like a child, his
innocence tunes him exquisitely into the feelings of adults. But like a child,
he lacks the experience and power to act on the basis of this sensitivity.
Instead, he is at the mercy of others’ initiatives. In a flashback, we see him
moving into a new apartment with his now estranged wife, first moving a couch
into their living room and then jumping on their bed, much as a child would
upon entering a new bedroom. Indeed, his last name, “Twombly” is a child’s
conception of a silly family name, a name that Dr. Seuss might have used to describe
the main character of an endearing story. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as Ted
is sterling because, with his mumbling and lumbering, he enacts Ted’s
childishness so effectively.
The
film then takes an unusual twist. Ted buys an advanced operating system,
represented as a person, whom he labels a woman, and through the miracle of
artificial intelligence “she”- her name is Samantha- becomes his friend, confidant,
therapist, teacher and sexual partner. There are many scenes in which the two
talk together, tell jokes, take walks (she “sees” through the camera eye of a
PDA) and ultimately have sex. The viewer is at first seduced into accepting
that a real person and a virtual being can have sex, because the bedroom scenes
are shot in the dark. But then the viewer, at least this one, is brought up
short upon realizing that, in “reality” Ted is simply masturbating to a
fantasy. This gives the film a creepy feeling, much as Ted gives his date, and
adds to the sense of the cityscape as a dystopia of the spirit.
The
question is what kind of object is Samantha? Let me make a radical proposal.
David Bakan has argued that the image of Satan arises in human culture when
people feel despair. They no longer feel their own agency because every thing
they try leads to failure. Satan is thus the projection of the sense of agency
they can no longer access. His cruelty is their fantasy of the revenge they
would exact were they were not so helpless. As an agentic figure in extremis,
Satan has vast knowledge, is immortal and has the power to grant any wish.
Recall that Mephistopheles first visits Dr. Faust when, in a moment of despair
in his study, and contemplating suicide, he realizes that this search for
ultimate understanding has come to a dead end.
I
want to suggest that Samantha, the operating system, is Satan in disguise,
tempered and smoothed over by affluence. Satan has been feminized. Like Satan
she has access to all of human knowledge at her fingertips, and she makes Ted’s
wishes come true. For example, she surprises him by scanning the hundreds of
the letters he has written for “beautiful handwritten letters.com” selecting
the best, submitting them to a publisher, who then happily emails Ted, telling
him that he would be most pleased to publish his moving letters as a book. Toward
the end of the film he receives the book in the mail. In other words, Ted is
successful without lifting a finger.
But
the person who helps us succeed without us lifting a finger, is also the
idealized mother who treats us as if the world revolved around us. Just as a
baby secures love for simply being what it is, Samantha’s task, at least
initially, is to simply meet all of Ted’s needs without asking for anything in
return. Indeed, at one point Samantha asks that she be allowed to look at Ted
while he sleeps, much as the mother takes pleasure in watching her baby asleep
in a crib. Ted mounts the PDA on his side table with its camera pointing
directly at him. In this sense, and this is the root of the film director’s
creativity, Samantha is Satan as a mother figure.
But
just as a “deal with the devil” entails costs, for example, a person surrenders
his immortal soul, Ted’s relationship to Samantha exacerbates his passivity and
dependency. In a penultimate scene Samantha locates a real woman who agrees to
have sex with Ted through Samantha’s “eyes.” The woman mounts a tiny camera on
her forehead, so that Samantha can see Ted, while he and the woman make love.
She makes no sounds, so that Samantha can continue to communicate with Ted
through an ear bud. In short, in a role reversal, a real woman becomes an
operating system’s avatar. Yet unable to proceed, he is verging on impotence,
Ted breaks off the lovemaking. Just as Samantha discovers desire, Ted loses his.
Later, when Ted meets his wife Catherine for lunch so that she can sign the divorce
papers, her pen hovers above the paper for several seconds hesitatingly, suggesting
that were Ted to propose that they stay together, she might very well agree.
But he is unable to take such a risk.
If
Ted is an “everyman” we have to ask what in our culture renders us passive and
childish. The film suggests quite simply that the new information technologies,
the cybernetic world, make us feel helpless. This is a common trope of course
with roots in our earliest visions of robots. But the film’s vision suggests
that our understanding of technology is changing or perhaps maturing. The
earlier trope is non-psychological. There, despair turns into rebellion as
heroes recover their sense of agency. For example, in the film The Matrix, robots, who are
cybernetic entities -- data points with desires -- extract energy from human
bodies by putting people to sleep. Lived experience is actually a dreamscape, a
matrix, which the rulers have created so that our minds are preoccupied and we
don’t awaken. Yet in The matrix Neo,
the hero, recovers his sense of agency, rebels and physically defeats the
cyber-demons. This is a non-psychological view of a battle with Satan.
But
in HER, this common trope is presented with a twist. Our hero Ted does not
rebel against the cyber rulers because they or “she” is the idealized mother
who meets our every need. In fact at the end of the film, Samantha, and indeed
all other self-conscious operating systems, simply abandon their human partners
for something more transcendent. In this case there is no need to rebel. The
robots just walk away because people are inadequate and uninteresting. After
all, Ted was no good in bed with Samantha. Indeed, the film prepares us for
this ending when earlier, Ted panics because the operating system appears to
have “died.” He pushes the “button” but the system does not boot up. When
Samantha then returns, but only briefly, she gently informs Ted -- she is
always gentle-- that when she speaks to him she is simultaneously in hundreds
of other conversations. He is no longer the center of her world. When she
leaves he feels abandoned and helpless. The films ends with a faux moment of
understanding as Ted writes a letter to Catherine, his ex-wife, expressing his
appreciation for the way she has contributed to his life. But this a phony and
unconvincing moment, a happy ending to relieve the viewer of the creepy
feelings the film stimulates.
Can
we take this vision of technology seriously or is it simply amusing? Indeed,
the movie has many comic moments, as Ted makes his clumsy way through
life. But I think it does touch on
anxieties connected to real experience. Machines are replacing our minds, not
just our hands, and by virtue of their cybernetic power they can make us feel
stupid or helpless. For example it is common to note that with Google search we
no longer need a memory. In addition, it
is clear that the world wide web has created a vast pornographic domain in which
people, particularly men, can have sexual pleasure and reach orgasm without ever
leaving their rooms.
I
suggest that the film’s novelty lies in the way it links this vision of
technology to a psychological dystopia where narcissism undermines character.
Narcissists are self-centered because they feel fragile and vulnerable. That is
why they demand admiration. The question is what is the source of this
fragility? Why can’t Ted for example cope with the demands that women make? Why
do normal stresses upend him? Why, when his avatar falls down the virtual hill,
does he look so exasperated and exhausted? Why in racing to find a place to
reboot Samantha, does he stumble and fall on the sidewalk?
My
colleague Howard Schwartz suggests that a new psychological type, which
he
calls the “pristine self” is emerging
(http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2207376). Recall
that last month the student
government at the University of California, Santa Barbara “passed a resolution urging professors to alert students of
content that could "trigger" symptoms of post-traumatic stress
disorder.” As one writer notes, “Trigger warnings have long been the domain of
the internet and blog postings. Now, such warnings are moving to television and
the classroom. … Schools such as Scripps College and Oberlin College advise
faculty to warn students when discussing issues of racism, classism, sexism,
heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, privilege, oppression, colonialism,
persecution, violence, suicide, domestic abuse, graphic violence, self injury,
and eating disorders to name a few. In other words, any topic that might
challenge a student’s thinking or experience should he be presented with a
warning.”
Similarly, ABC news recently
reported that researchers have discovered that stress is “contagious,” that we
can identify moments of “second hand stress,” when someone else’s distress
makes us anxious. The latter term,
evoking the concept of “second hand smoke,” risks pathologizing the normal
frictions of everyday life, the everyday obstacles we face in living with one
another. This is what happens when Ted cannot respond in a hardy or resilient
way to his phone sex partner’s fantasy. As
these reports suggest, we are at risk of institutionalizing fragility.
As Schwartz has argued in a range of
publications, (http://www.sba.oakland.edu/faculty/schwartz/PCJABS.htm), (Society Against
Itself: Political Correctness and Organizational Self-Destruction,
(http://www.karnacbooks.com/Product.asp?PID=28569), this
suggests that our conception of “father,” or what we can call the
culture’s
“father imago,” has been compromised. In the psychoanalytic way of
thinking,
father helps us separate from mother who after all has her own interests
and frequently
other children. When we lose our place at the center of her attention,
father, in
compensation, offers us the skills and competencies we need to thrive
without
her loving gaze. We relinquish mother, who loves us for who we are, for
father who admires us when we meet his standards. This is the common
sense
meaning of Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex. We lose unconditional
love
but gain the skills to win conditional respect.
In everyday life, it is our
experience of institutional authority that instantiates the father imago. But
there is a growing tendency, linked to the culture of political correctness, to
presume that all authority is corrupt and that father’s power base in
inherently undeserving. Diversity replaces authority as a principle of organization.
But the social contract that underlies diversity is that no person should hold
another accountable, for fear of impinging on his or her fragile identity.
But if the father imago, which
represents accountability, is illegitimate, we risk remaining attached to the
fantasy of an inaccessible ideal mother. This leads to disappointment and
possibly rage. This may be one way to understand why only a week ago, Elliot
Rodger, a failed ex-student of 22, felt entitled to murder college women, in of
all places Santa Barbara California, because after all in his mind, they had
consistently rejected him. Of course, he was mentally disturbed. But one
hypothesis is that the cultural setting of post-industrial California, where
the sun shines in a setting of some luxury, and fragility is respected, gave
him permission to suspend his conscience and give vent to his rage. In his mind
he had been victimized and bore no responsibility for his own isolation. It is
striking in this regard that he rejected his psychiatrist’s authority, by
refusing to take the medication Risperdal, an effective anti-psychotic drug.
It is also striking that in HER,
when Ted first boots up his operating system, a male voice interviews him
asking him about his relationship to his mother. Ted responds that their
relationship was fine, but then confesses hurriedly that she never listened to
him. We don’t know of course if this report is meant to be accurate, after all
he could have made impossible demands on her for attention. But strikingly, the
male voice cuts him off without asking him about his father. It is as if his
father is immaterial, that Ted has no history of being a father’s child. This
means that when Ted tries to make love to Samantha’s avatar- a real woman- he
is in his fantasy having sex with his mother. It is commonplace that grown men
who remain psychologically entangled with their mothers and sisters, who could
not, separate psychologically from them, with or without their fathers’ help, will
have sexual problems. Indeed, the film suggests that Ted’s relationship to his
wife Catherine had sibling qualities. He remarks more than once that, “they
grew up together.” This may be one reason why they divorced.
We can give a psychological account
of fragility and its increasingly moral standing, but how is it linked to the
new technologies? How is it possible that as our collective powers increase, we
feel individually weaker? Freud once
remarked that technologies make us into “prosthetic gods,” but Marshall McLuhan
countered, that when technologies extend our body, it numbs the body part
extended. To use his quixotic example, the wheel extends the foot but we don’t
do much walking these days. Perhaps the potential collapse of agency reprises
Marx’s concept of alienation, but in post-industrial dress. In Marx’s way of
thinking the class structure prevented the human race from extracting
technology’s potential. Today a psychosocial culture may play a similar role.
Moreover, there are countertrends,
for example the rise of extreme sports, and the growing prestige of
entrepreneurs, each a social location for the exercise of agency. This may also
be why, as the New York Times
recently reported, that Stanford University, with its strengths in applied
engineering and entrepreneurship, has displaced Harvard as the premier research
university in the U.S. (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/education/americas-it-school-look-west-harvard.html?_r=0
). In addition, we have recent examples of people exercising collective agency,
for example in protesting against and even overthrowing dictators as in Tunisia
or Egypt, or in organizing to oppose the unwanted development of parkland as in
Istanbul. Moreover, planners, engineers and product designers are developing
methods for engaging users and citizens in shaping their urban environment. So
I remain puzzled about the links between culture and technology in a post-industrial
world and am interested in my readers’ thoughts.
At the movie’s very beginning, Ted is composing a letter
for a woman writing to her husband on their 50th anniversary.
In a
touching moment Ted, speaking for the woman, writes that when she and
her
husband were young, lying together upon a bed naked, she saw how for the
first
time she was “part of a whole larger thing connecting our parents and
grandparents.” In other words, she is part of the great cycle of life
through
which we thank our parents for creating us, and we look forward to
creating our
children. This sense of our participation in a larger process of
generational
succession helps protect us from the despair we might feel upon thinking
of our
own mortality. As mortals we are confined, it seems unfairly, between
two
generations. But when we psychologically identify with each we feel that
they
extend us into the past and project us into a future. The pristine self,
focused on its fragility, cannot extend itself in this way, As a
result, it loses one sure route out of despair.
12 comments:
your are most welcome Wilton!
- This is a very interesting piece, thank you Larry. very thought provoking and offers a very strong illustration of Howie's views on the ever increasing dominance of the mother imago. I have not seen the film, but I wonder what the disappearance of the father from the scene does to the Oedipus Complex. Somehow, if Samantha is the all-giving eternal feminine she cannot at the same time be an object of physical desire. Is this the reason why Ted fails to have 'sex' with her?Reply
I have not seen the film, but one feature that strikes me is Ted's passivity, something that he shares with Stoner, the hero of a very compelling book by John Williams that I recently read (I have just written a blog about it). The book however, presents a far more compelling account of passivity than, in your account, does the film. Thanks for this. - On a similar/different note see the interview with Raymond Kurzweil in Saturday's Wall St Journal.Reply
- You will find my review of Stoner on http://www.yiannisgabriel.com/2014/06/stoner-man-for-one-season-autumn.htmlReply
- What a wonderful analysis. It made me think about a parallel between how Samantha functions for Ted and how he, through his letter writing, functioned for his company's customers. It has something to do with the relegation of sensual experience, and the body in general, to an inferior status by the ascendance of computer mediated relatedness.Reply
- Jim thanks for your good comments. In think you are absolutely right about the inferior status of the body Recall that there is a scene when Ted and Samantha are double dating and Samantha tells the group that she, in contrast to the other is immortal because she has no body.Reply
- Larry, thanks for the blog - an interesting analysis of the film as a disturbing representation of the rise of the Pristine Self and the impact on agency and, extending the idea into the organisational setting, the impact on the individual's sense of accountability - integrally linked to agency. Re Stoner, I haven't read Yiannis's blog yet, but I had a different reaction to it. Linking to the idea of being between generations, Stoner could not stray too far from the model of the parents who exemplified our capacity to also be more like the grazing sheep and cattle of the landscape - happy to just exist in the elements, in the now, without the pressure of having to 'progress'.Reply
- Very useful, and timely, Larry. Thanks. Many thoughts are stimulated and I have not seem the film, but it conjures up a new world effected by new.technology. Aside from Schwartz focus on the upsurge of anti-bullying, from where his uses of “pristine self” derives,” other related categories of concern that have gained new and high profile are “trauma,” and “absent father.” Yet we were much closer in time to personal and societal wide trauma after WWII, as we were to the “absence of the father,” you describe. Yet all of these have jumped to the fore of concerns, as has concern with anti-bullying —although bullying, Schwartz point out, seems to be actually on the decline.Reply
I had only recently become aware that my Personal Computer has linguistic programming that interacts with and shapes my own person. If I Google the single word Egypt, I will get much info on politics, Arab Spring, etc. My neighbour, in the tourist industry, will get much more info on discount hotels in that region and the impact of the conflicts on his industry. Can it be that the “new father” as the skills-giver, one role you point to, is now usurped by this piece of furniture?
I understand Guntrip’s use of “pristine libidinal ego,” he developed well before the PC, and its practical implications for treatment. But am wondering about Schwart’s new usage? Do you, or others, understand it as I, that it is a form of Guntrip’s “regressed anti-libidinal ego,” regressed, perhaps in part, because it lives in a social media, apart from real time?
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