by Wanda Waterman

Volume 22 Issue 21 2014-05-23

Film: Her

Director: Spike Jonze

“Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
– Genesis 2:7, NIV

“So the bodhisattva saves all beings, not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the act of not being able to stop changing.”
– Alan Watts

Theodore Twombly, clutching a pole on the metro, asks his smartphone for a melancholy song. A drearily awful song begins to play. He asks for a different melancholy song. This one he likes. He then asks for his emails, and the smartphone reads them off to him. He “nexts” them along until he hears an offer to view nude photos of a pregnant starlet. Perking up, he opens the phone and stares longingly at the beautiful photos of a woman as self-possessed and undulating as a lioness.

Theodore longs for life—his urge is toward the organic, the beautiful, the authentic, the creative, all the qualities that are compromised in his otherwise fully amenable world, a posh near-future Los Angeles where all human needs are met quickly and virtually by accommodating software. (Read the rest here.)