Here's the trailer for the current Spike Jonze movie, Her, set in the near-future. It zeros in on the developing love between the main character, Theodore Twomby (played by Joachim Phoenix), and his computer's operating system, voiced to alluring effect by Scarlet Johansson - her part replacing that of Samantha Morton in the original shoot. It was Morton who played the Pre-Cog, Agatha, in another near-future film, Minority Report, a human with the gift of foresight kept in a condition of physical stasis, so her uncluttered mind is available for incoming signals.In both films, the disembodied female intelligence serves as a kind of omniscient other to the needs of the male leads, who in the latter film pursues about-to-be criminals, and in the former, a meaningful resolution to heartbreak. It is, in that sense, a modern revisiting of what in the early Gnostic tradition was known as Sofia, a feminization of the formless absolute that encompassed all the contradictions in the world of form. She is best represented in the extended verse scripture, The Thunder, Perfect Mind, from the Nag Hammadi gospels.
In Her, the vulnerable and withdrawn figure of Theodore serves as the kind of modern everyman the wired-up and connected urban professional is becoming. Desirous of deep relationship, but hurt by, and wary of, the limitations of corporeal attachment, he swoons in the embrace of a feminine voice that so mirrors his needs he loses sight of the designed reality it has been constructed to serve.
As I suggested here, the otherness of robotic mirroring teaches us much about the nature of human affection, and what is actually occurring when love surfaces as an experience of heightened life. It also shows us that however much our technological capabilities advance, our fundamental needs remain the same.
pic: here
