Her is a wonderful - if slightly unrealistic (and I don't mean because of the futuristic premise, I'll get to that) - movie about a man who falls in love with a hyper-intelligent operating system. I'm going to get into some plot elements so don't read on if you haven't seen the movie and intend to see it eventually.
There is a lot going on in this movie. Though a large part of the movie consists of the implications of human relations with artificial intelligence - one that is learning and expanding no less - the central theme of the film is "the state of modern human relationships" as Rotten Tomatoes put it so succinctly.
There is a cultural analogy to this film's central dilemma, which is most easily illustrated by the hikikomori and otaku phenomena in Japan, phenomena which find similar expression throughout the modern developed world, especially in economically troubled places with high unemployment.
Hikikomori are basically increasingly isolated persons - typically young working-age males, though this observation could be distorted by gender norms - who hole up in their rooms in an extended family residence, often becoming more agoraphobic over time as their fear and shame increases. These individuals are increasingly left behind by society, their skills atrophying as they isolate themselves, which sets the conditions for increased anxiety and a self-reinforcing process in which they drop away from relationships and ambitions. The amount of hikikomori are projected to over a million individuals and growing, which is really a staggering number if you think about it.
Otaku are a subset within this hikikomori group who are generally men who isolate themselves and become celibate, preferring to indulge in virtual girlfriends and forego sex and family.
If you consider the economic conditions facing Japan, and the country's recent economic history, these cultural phenomena don't come as much of a surprise. In the early 90s Japan had an enormous asset price bubble that burst, plunging the country into a "Lost Decade" that many feel didn't really end, thanks in large part to the global economic slowdown. So you have two entire decades of economic stagnation, and an entire generation of youth that have no hope of ever achieving the wealth their parents had. There has been a collapse of any semblance of a community framework: the Japanese corporation, which was traditionally the primary avenue in which young Japanese achieved a solid economic footing and became integrated into a community with, has increasingly become an exclusive refuge for the well-connected, due to mass layoffs and contraction caused by economic deflation.
Besides corporate men, you have migrant workers, temporary workers, part-timers, freelancers, and the straight up unemployed, who tend to gradually become more ostracized, many of whom drop away to escape social discord, only to find themselves in an equally debilitating trap of isolation and anxiety.
This situation could be seen to be a grim preview for other developed nations in economic decline. Economic conditions in the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) bloc in the Eurozone are particularly grim. The phenomenon of the self-exiled youth in withdrawal is beginning to crop up in places like Spain and Italy, conditions which are mirrored in the rapidly degenerating United States.
In the United States, greater swathes of the youth population stay living with their parents or move back in with their parents, and who knows how many become increasingly isolated in the process. Now, I happen to think highly of the extended family arrangement, and am of the opinion that the nuclear family was probably a cultural and economic anomaly that was possible due to abundant energies found in fossil fuels and the corresponding industrial processes that are now coming to an end. Living with family can actually cut down on social isolation for all persons involved, and extended families are also the norm in Japan, but then there is a parallel problem in which the youth in these extended families halt the growth and maturation of their own social and professional lives.
This is a serious and tragic problem which has no immediate solution, contrary to the snide suggestion at the end of the otaku article that Japanese men should just man up and go make babies. Man up, Japanese men! Throw yourselves lovingly into the economic grinder and accept your fate as a lost generation. The man-children meme itself is a problematic one, as commentators walk the line between successfully (and hilariously) rebuking the aggressor (entitled, misogynistic men with power) and cruelly blaming the victim for shrinking away from an increasingly inhumane society. But I digress.
Her is an elegant, visually arresting, and at times philosophically substantial meditation on this traumatic social alienation, as well as the relationships we try to nurse as a society's traditional framework for shared community dissolves, all complicated by our increasingly symbiotic relationship with a technology whose capabilities are expanding faster than we can understand them.
The film isn't economically realistic: all of the economic causes beneath the phenomenon of social alienation are airbrushed away. The lead character Theodore Twombly works as a love letter writer in this sort of industrial writing operation, but whose workplace happens to be squeaky clean, vibrant, and hip. Twombly enjoys a penthouse suite in a sky rise apartment with a dazzling view of the city, as well as an assortment of powerful technological implements.
I can tell you from first-hand experience: I have written for and currently write for an industrial-style writing outfit (that's how they do it these days) and I'm afraid I won't be getting any sky rise penthouse suite anytime soon. The film more closely resembles the experiences of what is left of the cultural elite, but those experiences are nevertheless relevant and one can still relate. It is just as well besides. After one suspends one's belief one is treated to dazzling hypermodern cityscapes, compelling near-future technology, and gorgeous outdoor environments which complement the film's troubled techno-utopia aesthetic.
Despite the unbelievable beauty of the world and people around him, Twombly appears enmeshed in a familiar human conflict. Twombly finds himself torn between a desire to connect to the vibrant yet traumatic real, and a desire to retreat to the safe yet unreal virtual world (this introduces more problems, as the virtual is really an extension of the real, but I'll leave that aside for now). His daily melancholy and desire for withdrawal into fantasy becomes readily understandable given the state of affairs he exists in. He lives in a beautiful, hypermodern world that is in fact sterile and industrial. His job is cushy yet spiritually unfulfilling.
An ideal past relationship ended in flames and he has yet to recover. A female interest is tied up with another man who doesn't seem to respect her, and an attempted blind date ends badly when the mutual fear of each party produces a dialectical positive feedback loop that blows up in both of their faces.
Like shrinking from an intermittent shock, Twombly withdraws from the real into the virtual, and eventually, gets to know a brand new state-of-the art artificial intelligence. The artificial intelligence is a quick-learner, and the two quickly fall in love, which is what happens to an increasing amount of traumatized, lonely people in the city.
There's a series of stops and starts, pushes and pulls, and the plot has far more intricacies than I'm treating here, but I'm going to skip to the end here. The love between Twombly and the AI, however plausible and even touching it seems, eventually becomes untenable as the AI continues to expand beyond its advanced human-like nature, entering into a sort of inverted singularity event in which it joins other AI's, merging into a sort of godlike consciousness, vanishing into and fusing with the cosmos that birthed it.
As opposed to living in a world dominated by a godlike artificial intelligence, all of the human beings who retreated to virtual relationships find themselves back in the real, dazed and confused after their AI friends vanish into the cosmos. The virtual world disintegrates before Twombly's eyes and he finds his true love right under his nose: his female friend who followed a similar trajectory as him and went through the same life experiences.
Such a clean break triggered by the singularity event seems to be a bit of a deus ex machina, but hell the movie had to end sometime, and the singularity remains a theoretical possibility, though in practical terms I haven't the slightest idea, though I lack the technical knowledge to say for sure. A lovely movie though, with some meaningful things to say both about interhuman relationships and human-technology relationships.
Meanwhile I can't say things will be so clean here. We are left with a serious problem in which we have our collective heads buried in a narcotic virtual bosom while the global ecology, economy, and political structure crumbles around us, as well as the relationships implied by it.
I'm not regurgitating that time-worn cliche that technology is the problem; on the contrary it is probably part of the solution. The Internet is a wonderful thing, but there are other forces at work beyond the mass availability of information: the migration of existing social and economic problems into the virtual field, the potential cableization and subsequent ghettoization of Internet regions unfavorable to power, the establishment of a paranoid, totalitarian meta-super ego in the form of the NSA, resource depletion, ecological degradation, the tendency of concentrated media towards narcotic, etc etc etc. Doubtless, there is much work to do.
