Reflections on "Her"

I just saw Spike Jonze's new movie "Her" today.  Aside from the normally/tangentially altered mental state in which most movies render me (walking back from the darkness into the light, pondering how two hours of alternative reality/fantisization have shaped my thoughts about the "real" world), it seemed worthwhile to deliver a short set of comments on this movie, if only because it raised some considerations on the nature of love that I found formative to a broader discussion.  Additionally, I have meant to advance some comments on love and sex on here for quite some time, and this seems like an appropriate moment to start!

Without giving away too much of the plot line, the movie concerns a romantic relationship between a lonely, introverted writer (a paid author of heartfelt, emotionally sensitive, (computer-aided) hand written letters for busy people too occupied to hand write anniversary letters or condolensces to their loved ones, no less), on the verge of a finalized divorce, and his fully interactive, experientially-evolving computer operating system.  This peculiar scenario is, apparently, a commonplace in the futuristic world characterized by Jonze, where video game characters engage in full verbal interaction not only with human players but with other multi-media equipment!  The movie raises a number of important questions regarding the potentiality for a romantic encounter between a human being and his/her computer.  Notably, there is a highly relevant encounter between Joachin Phoenix's lead character, Theodore, and his impending ex-wife, Catherine, played by Rooney Mara, in which Catherine, upon learning of Theodore's relationship with his operating system, castigates him for having escaped from the inconvenience of dealing with the emotional volatility of other living human beings by hooking up with his laptop!  I want to deal with issues of emotional insensitivity in some post on this blog in the future, but, for the moment, another tangential concern grabs me.  Namely, can love survive permanent disembodiment?  Expressed in slightly different terms, is it possible or in any way desirable to dichotomize romantic love and physical sexuality?

The issue here stands out for me in a particular conversation between Theodore and Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johannson), his girlfriend/operating system, concerning Theodore's intention to personally meet with Catherine to sign their divorce papers.  Samantha expresses concerns (and overt jealousy) to Theodore about meeting with Catherine in person, when he could get his divorce papers signed some other way, given the fact that Catherine has an actual human body and is beautiful.  In a very minimalist sense, there is a certain Pinocchio-like tendency going on here (i.e. Samantha wishing she could have a human body and exist as more than an intellectually evolving product of human programming).  Beyond this level, there is the whole issue that Theodore can engage in actual physical sexuality with Catherine, but not with Samantha (something Samantha attempts to redress later in the movie).  Definitively, a problem exists here in Samantha's incapacity to engage in a physical way with Theodore. 

The issue here stands out in my mind for a number of reasons.  As a matter of experience, I had this epiphany once on a day trip to Boston, wandering the streets of the Back Bay, that the particular way in which I approached women tended to dichotomize romantic love from physical sexuality, and that I always tended to prioritize the former at the expense of the latter.  It is an epiphany of which I'm still (poorly) sorting out the implications, but the point here, in relation to "Her," is that the idea of loving a disembodied entity in a committed way demands an exaggerated sense of attachment to something transcending the body.  To me, this necessarily implies a belief that there is more to a human being than the physical architecture of human anatomy and, more precisely, that there is something about a human being that is eternal, defying mortality and transcending the infinitely expansive boundaries of the universe.  There are multiple terminologies and concepts that we could apply in naming or describing what it is that we mean by the transcendence of the physical.  One concept that could apply here is mind.  Another is the soul.  Either one of these terms could imply, in some way, disembodiment, characterized by the capacity of the mind or of the soul to depart from the body and, in some immaterial sense (that is, non-material/non-physical, not irrelevant), continue to exist.  In this conceptualization, my understanding of romantic love is effectively tied into the existence of mind or of souls - the idea that the thing we fall in love with is a disembodied thing, that which is eternal to the other, to the object of our love.  Thus, the act of falling in love is an act of faith (an essentially religious act - not the acceptance of "God" per se, but the acceptance of something spiritual, belonging to the same genus of immaterial personality).  We cannot know that the other has a mind or a soul (because such things cannot be seen or verified by physical examination in the same way that we can say that someone has a brain/an organ), but we believe that they do and it confronts us as something innately beautiful and perfect and uncontrollably desirable, beyond the physical desirability of the body.  Ideally, these two motivations (romantic love and sexual desire) co-mingle.  They can and readily do, however, hold the potentiality to get disarticulated so that the motivations run off in a tangential divergence such that romantic love decays into neurotic obsession.

Not being, in any way, shape, or form, adequately versed to play around with Freudian psychoanalytic theorizations on obsessional neuroses (especially my own!), I have another obvious philosophical pathway to explore here.  Specifically, if romantic love is an act of religious faith, then I can apply Marx's commentary from the introduction to the "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" (i.e. "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul in souless conditions.  It is the opium of the people." See Marx, "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 3, at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm).  There are obvious reasons to seek to apply a broader interpretation of this principle beyond the Marxist-Leninist militant atheistic bastardization of it (insofar as militant atheism is, in the same vein, a kind of religion!).  Religious beliefs are not empty or devoid of meaning in the lives of human beings - they shape the way we respond to the world and, most emphatically, to the people around us to such a degree that it might be completely impossible to escape from religion.  Religion grounds human beings in faith-based knowledges that there is something transcending the human condition (or, alternately, if you are a militant atheist, the faith that there is absolutely nothing transcending the human condition, even if you cannot prove it!).  Romantic love is a piece contributing to and/or constituting this certainty, on faith, that there is something that transcends the monotony of a human existence without meaning.  At least in certain respects, it is an answer to negative nihilism and, perhaps, to Camus' absurdism (but read Camus' chapter on "Absurd Man" and its section on "Don Juanism," although they speak more succinctly to polygamy than to monogamous romantic love.  See Albert Camus (1955), "The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays," trans. Justin O'Brien, at: http://sharepoint.mvla.net/teachers/HectorP/SoPol/Documents/The%20Stranger/Camus%20Myth%20of%20Sisyphus%20and%20other%20readings.pdf).  In broader terms, romantic love responds to the quandries of existentialism but, perhaps, only in a superficial way, because, in the end, like all religion, romantic love consigns man to adoration of a mythical (and, perhaps, perpetually unattainable) transcendent image.

There are two points to be made from here.  First, in regard to the dramatization in "Her," Theordore's romantic love of Samantha is as legitimate as any other conception of romantic love - what he loves is a transcendent thing - a love object in whose existence Theodore believes, even if this love object is a free floating entity in cyberspace.  That said, numerous conversations in "Her" tend to reinforce the notion that a permanent dichotomization between romantic love and physical sexuality is untenable.  The initial "sexual" encounter between Theodore and Samantha, for example, utilizes bodily references that make no sense whatsoever if you are dealing with an innately disembodied thing!  And my second point is a corollary from this reflection.  If romantic love is, itself, shaped by physical sexual considerations and its imageries are shaped from the potentialities for physical contact, then it makes no sense to conceptualize romantic love in permanent dichotomization from sexuality.  Conversely, is meaningful physical sexuality possible in permanent dichotomization from romantic love?  I choose to leave this question, intimately linked with the idea of "hook up culture," open for the moment!