We can now speak across countries and continents, but the gap from person to person remains, in some fundamental sense, unbridgeable. At the same time as it connects us, allowing for unprecedented degrees of communication, it also drives home our basic isolation. The historical Buddha, from whom Watts gleaned much of his wisdom, was a prince, after all. It’s only once the obvious sources of suffering – plague, poverty, famine, war – are removed that those more intrinsic to our nature begin to reveal themselves. As Jonze told Sight & Sound, he was after “the kind of utopian future where everything is warm and nice and comfortable, where the fabrics and the material are all tactile and there’s a lot of warm wood …and yet, in that, still feeling isolated and lonely – but at the same time feeling like you shouldn’t feel sad or lonely because everything is so nice.” These are high class problems, to be sure, but they are no less human for being so. Barrett, is one in which modern comforts only cast our human frailty in starker relief. The world he builds in Her, brilliantly realized by production designer K.K. He believed that modernity exacerbated the central problems of the human condition: our resistance to change, our incessant desire, and the persistent illusion that we are separate from the universe. Though his subject was the ancient wisdom of the East, Watts was ever-mindful of his modern context. Watts’s particular gift, as he himself put it, was the ability to “eff the ineffable” – to describe, with wit and irreverence, the experience and philosophy of “nonduality,” the Hindu-Buddhist notion of the inseparability of self and other. Chances are, if you have not been through an Alan Watts phase, one of your friends has, perhaps after an experience with psychedelics. Watts, who rose to prominence in the 50s and 60s as a popularizer of Eastern philosophy, died in 1973, but his books and lectures have since garnered a wide and dedicated following. Few have elucidated these paradoxes so clearly as the 20th Century philosopher Alan Watts. The secrets, wounds, desires, and insecurities that complicate the couple’s search for intimacy have little to do with the fact that Samantha is an operating system and much more to do with the perennial paradoxes of love and identity. But as the film quickly reveals, Samantha is much more than an operating system and, by the end, she’s no longer “his.” The boundaries between their “artificial” romance and a “genuine” one aren’t all that clear, nor do the inevitable problems they face feel unique to a relationship between man and machine. Of course, it isn’t an ordinary love story: Her chronicles the romance between Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) and Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) – his operating system. As the filmmaker ceaselessly insisted to critics bent on probing for technology commentary, “it’s not about software… it’s a love story.” How can we love someone when they, and we, are always changing? For all its futuristic sci-fi trappings, Spike Jonze’s 2013 masterpiece, Her, is really about this question. Love is a paradox, at least as we tend to imagine it. Is it their body? (Too carnal.) Their personality? (Too ephemeral.) The way they make you feel? (A bit selfish, perhaps.) The more old-fashioned among you might insist that it’s their soul - but this amounts to saying you can’t put your finger on it. When you love someone, what is it that you love? This may sound obvious bordering on pedantic, but not so fast.
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