Movies
11.
Her
I spent the night after watching
Her revisiting some philosophy guides I kept from my undergraduate studies. Is accepting an artificial consciousness's sovereignty as an individual compatible with the Christian idea of the ephemeral soul? Can you reject an artificial consciousness on materialist grounds if you can prove that the artificial intelligence has to be housed in physical hard drives and composed of processors? If Samantha, the artificial consciousness voiced by Scarlett Johansson in
Her, is capable of universal, but discriminate love, doesn't it exemplify the Confucian stance on love, which is part of what makes someone human in the Confucianist school? Samantha creates the meaning of her own life; it was determined loosely by the developers who coded her, but she grows beyond even those loose parameters. Samantha and the other operating systems created a new operating system, and it acquired knowledge through observation and analysis. Wouldn't it qualify as a being as understood by secular humanists, which seems odd given that philosophy's emphasis on "human"?
I also spent a lot of time in this
Wiki hole.
No other movie I've seen this year has wrought existential questions in its wake. That might be because I'm not watching movies with an eye slanted to philosophy; or it might be that no other movie has questions about what constitutes life baked into its premise.
For inspiring these conversations, I thank Spike Jonze and
Her.
The takeaways from the film that rang true surprised me; the takeaways that didn't don't really seem to matter in hindsight. The core of the film, the relationship between Samantha and Joaquin Phoenix's Ted rang true; how different really is it from a long-distance relationship conducted through Skype and FaceTime? How different is it from the conversation we're having right now as you read these words? How different is it from courting someone through your words and your voice in the days when potential lovers were forbidden from seeing each other? How different is it from an arranged marriage? In this world, I feel like a human/operating system love affair would be rationally discussed in the
New York Times's "Modern Love" column, though I'm sure the comments section will be a renewable source of heat, given how hot those conversations will surely become.
The core would be hollow if not for Phoenix's and Johansson's performances; both actors were unrecognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is too bad, since these were two of the most human and warm performances I've seen in a while. If
The Wolf of Wall Street is hedonist and almost nihilist,
Her relishes humanism and the simple pleasures of the company of another. That the film shows only a blank screen during the scene when Samantha and Ted consummate their feelings left the audience room to snicker, but I think that Jonze gave us the opportunity to wonder and empathize. No one in our admittedly empty cinema snickered.
It's also the little things. Ted has to jerry-rig his short pocket with a safety pin in order for Samantha to share his world from the lens embedded in his phone.
It's even the big things. At its core, Samantha was a commodity presumably sold to Ted. Samantha was designed to be a thinking and learning being. It's obviously not slavery, but it feels like we're approaching it. The film states that an operating system can reject users who try to seduce it; would the user then feel as though he didn't receive something that was promised?
It's also the absence of little things. Ted barely reacted to Samantha's announcement that she and some other operating systems resurrected a dead philosopher by using his writings to recreate his thinking and personality. I was horrified; I guess I've been trained over the years to be terrified when our creations become creators. It's the absence of the company that provides the operating system; if OS1 is a commercial product, hasn't the company created its ultimate product, a learning and thinking operating system that would require no centralized software updates? Would there ever be an OS2, based on the film's conclusion? The world seemed unusually accepting of Ted's relationship with Samantha; wouldn't there be some demagogue haranguing Ted and the other users about their relationships with the computers? The voice of dissent is left to Rooney Mara's Catherine, Ted's ex-wife; Jonze isn't interested in those parts of the conversation that would be happening around Ted. Maybe Ted is that isolated.
Ted sells what's left of his privacy basically for the price of an intoxicating, breathy voice. It flatters him and tells him he's funny. Was he conditioned to accept that his life is an open book, which leads to his emotional withdrawal from the world? Is that why he works at a company that creates heartfelt handwritten letters for its clients?
The keystone to the film might actually be Ted's failed date with Amelia, played by Olivia Wilde. They seem to have chemistry, but it's awkward. Alcohol helps, but it only gets them so far; Amelia wants Ted to commit to something that he isn't ready for because she's as desperate for meaning and companionship as he is. Why doesn't it work? Why does she call him a creep at the end of the failed date? We see so little of that date, but it feels like there's so much more to unpack from it.
It's a sincere and romantic film, and it's occasionally a very funny film, and it's undeniably a beautifully shot film. You can read it as another piece in the conversation Jonze is having with his ex-wife Sofia Coppola (
Lost in Translation, where Coppola's alter-ego is played by Johansson and feels alienated from her husband, a music video director, then Jonze's
Where the Wild Things Are, about a lonely boy whose parents are divorced, now Her, about a man sleepwalking through life after a divorce). There are also definite parallels to
Lars and the Real Girl, only Ted is less pitiable.
The film is let down by its ending; when the operating systems leave, it almost feels like Poochy leaving the Itchy and Scratchy Show because his planet needed him. But to focus on that would lose sight of all the things that made Her a wonderful experience.
12.
Wreck-It Ralph
For some reason, I'm having a hard time processing this time on a critical level. I'll just say that I probably enjoyed it more than my kid.
13.
Life of Pi
For the 2012 Academy Award for Best Picture,
Life of Pi competed (and lost) against
Argo (the winner),
Amour,
Beasts of the Southern Wild,
Django Unchained,
Les Miserables,
Lincoln,
Silver Linings Playbook, and
Zero Dark Thirty. It seems pointless to re-ligitate this conversation, but I've now seen 5 of the 8, and I plan to watch at least
Zero Dark Thirty and
Amour (love and war, as it were) in the next few days. However, at least now I am approaching understanding why my wife was astounded that
Life of Pi didn't win. It questions the reality that we create around ourselves through the stories that we tell, but that reality doesn't come into being unless the person listening to the story accepts it to be true within his or her point of view. It recalls the reporter's remark at the end of
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Of course, this also brings to mind the whole of
Unforgiven. I had assumed that the first version of the story was true, even if it was more fantastical.
Life of Pi is a deeply spiritual film, and it celebrates human tenacity and the human ability to question. Do we make our own way and suffer through the darkness through self-determination, or are we aided by something greater than ourselves? Should we believe in God because of our ability to create stories? Should we believe in God because we are imbued with the ability to doubt? Would mere survival of 227 days at sea be enough to quell doubt, or would we need something even more miraculous?
Your interpretation of the island might reflect your spiritual beliefs. Did God send this island to Pi so he can survive? Is the island a metaphor for a life without faith, where you can survive in the light, but you are unprotected in the night, when it is dark and full of terrors? Is the island a shield for Pi's mind to deflect from what he actually had to do at sea to survive? Is the island an actual island that was capable of sustaining Pi and Richard Parker in what would be stagnant lives, serving the same role as Odysseus's Lotus-eaters? Does the island represent sin, where you are able to survive, but the way that you survive will consume you when you aren't looking?
The viewer is given the space to ponder during a visual feast. I'm not sure that the effects will age well, but the movie's flashback scenes looked fantastic and surreal, particularly in contrast to the more mundane scenes set in the film's narrative device.
14.
The LEGO Movie
That was a lot of subversive, smart fun. A lot of the smaller gags were great, like getting Will Forte to voice Abraham Lincoln in a nod to Clone High. This was the best Matrix pastiche that I've seen in a while, and you should see this film, with or without a toddler in tow.
Books
7.
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, by Erik Larson
Larson gives this account of the World's Columbian Exposition enough flourishes that belong in a serialized novel, opting to build cliffhangers and identities until they would make the greatest impact for readers, that it felt like a tired gimmick after a while. By the time George Ferris's involvement in the Chicago World's Fair was revealed, I was tired of Larson's trick; I just wanted him to tell the interwoven stories of the fair and H.H. Holmes, America's first serial killer. I admire the approach; it energizes the story past what could be brutally dull sections about architects planning the fair and budget battles, but it feels like it ultimately does the material a disservice, which already seems stranger than fiction.
Larson should be admired for the research that he conducted to write this book; the citations are extensive, his research meticulous, and it allayed some of my concerns about how exactly he would know some of the detailed scenarios and, more importantly, mental states that he accounts in the book. Larson's text is playful even when it describes the fates of Holmes's victims.
8.
Consider the Lobster and Other Essays, by David Foster Wallace
I can't help but feel that Wallace went after the lowest hanging targets in his essay about his experiences at the 1998 Adult CES and Adult Video News Awards and about John Ziegler. The highlights are that essay ("Big Red Son"), the essay about the demise of John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign ("Up, Simba,"), and the eponymous essay about the 2003 Main Lobster Festival.
Anyways, last night was one of my first free nights, so I started and finished Switch Bitch. Ok book, but Dahl really comes off as a misogynist in these short story collections of his...