In defense of ‘you’topia: ‘Her’ reinvents loneliness, self-centeredness

It’s not a story about love. It’s a story about loneliness. 

An inability to distinguish between the two implies a lack of acquaintance with either one.

The film “Her” is a modern day “Pygmalion” — a story in which isolation begets self-centeredness, and the subsequent loneliness results in the projection of love onto something else. We’re social creatures by nature, but we’ve done everything in our power to substitute human interaction superficially. Thus, our own self-absorption becomes slightly more bearable.

On the surface,  “Her” seems like a paranoid Luddite’s “1984,” a sort of Orwellian horror story to which our tech-dependent world is headed. At times, it’s reminiscent of a sci-fi novel: crowds bustling through the streets with everyone talking, but never to each other. They’re talking into headsets while looking straight ahead, the devices detecting their voices from a comfortable distance. They’re commanding their operating systems to read emails or check the news. Or, in Theodore Twombly’s (Joaquin Phoenix) case, they’re falling in love. 

This is the part where you prepare for the tragedy, the punchline you’ve already heard from your grandparents and numerous op-eds: technology is eroding your soul. That, or it’s inhibiting you from experiencing the natural world and establishing meaningful relationships with real people. But really, we’re just too afraid to admit that this conflict between wanting to be alone and not wanting to be alone is just part of the human condition, and that it’s going to be this way whether we have smartphones or not. It’s a paradox we’re all familiar with.

Humans are supposed to have souls and emotions and a kind of self-awareness that can’t be experienced by machines, right? Calling it a soul — literally or poetically — is sensible because it makes us unique and abstract. It makes us something that can’t be fully understood or recreated.

This is why the fear of being nothing more than a complex piece of biological machinery fuels public outrage over subjects such as cloning and euthanasia. It’s uncomfortable to think of your human experience as the relationship between external stimuli and brain activity. Or to think of your emotions and your personality — that which you use to identify yourself — as a formula created by millions of years of evolution, genetic inheritance from your parents and the production of chemicals in your brain.

It’s a lot less romantic to think of “the mad ones” — those like Dean Moriarty, Jack Kerouac’s eccentric friend in “On the Road” — as vessels with just way too much dopamine. 

This is uncomfortable because we’re supposed to be specially-designed miracle beings. The eternal pushback against technological advancement is always derived from a fear that one day we’ll create machines that are too much like us. Or one day we’ll understand ourselves too well. This is what motivates the ever-echoing pop cultural representation of humans as fundamentally distinct from robots, which is made quite explicit in “Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi,” where Obi-Wan warns Luke that Darth Vader is “more machine than man.” Perhaps this is exactly what you would expect to come out of the frantic coping mechanism of postmodernism, which is grounded in unending skepticism.

And this internal tug-of-war has only gotten more tense, with the prospect of humans loving machines accepted only as a metaphor from Spike Jonze’s crazy imagination. But the point is that it’s not the machine. It’s not smartphones or laptops or social networking sites that are isolating us against our will while still vaguely satisfying the need for social interaction. These are just the tools used to cater to a condition that has always existed. It’s just another way of reinventing loneliness.

Write Natalie at natalie.russell8@gmail.com.