Her
An ode to one of my favourite films and the fading glory of independent movie theaters
Approximately eight years after the cinematic release of Spike Jonze’s Her its lovely, Academy Award-nominated score was finally released on vinyl this month. The ideal occasion to revisit the mellow science fiction movie and, furthermore, reflect on my affection for movie theaters –especially the small, independet ones– a little bit.
© Warner Bros. Pictures
Nowadays pop culture is almost obsessed with science fiction stories depicting dark, pessimistic and not seldom cynic visions of a distant future —as if our present timeline in itself wasn’t gruelling enough. Don’t get me wrong, the dominant dystopian colouration isn’t inherently bad or generally unenjoyable;
Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men (from 2006) for example portrays a society facing extinction in a disturbing vision of an imaginable future. Set in 2027 it’s a chilling sci-fi tale but nonetheless –or perhaps exactly because of this– another one of my all-time favourites and one of very few movies I’ve watched in a cinema twice.
More recently I’ve spent more than 50 hours of total awe in Night City, the grim and gruff yet visually impressive setting of Cyberpunk 2077, without coming even close to the end credits of the well-told computer game.
And yet Her is somewhat of a refreshing misfit in its domain. Jonze ditches the worn out narrativ of the rebel leading a revolt against a suppressing regime, the underdog struggling to survive in a archaic society or the hero fighting the rise of the machines and opts for a slow romance instead.
The film follows Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix) whose newfound intimate relationship with an artificial intelligence called OS One (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) helps him come to terms with his ongoing divorce. During the course of their relationship and the more than two hours runtime Samantha, as the Ai names itself, reintroduces the lonely, phlegmatic writer to life and love again.
Evoking nostalgia for the future
But Her isn’t an anomaly of its genre just because of its slow love story, even more it sets itself apart with its atypical and absolutely gorgeous visuals. Production designer K.K. Barret –who also visioned the acclaimed classic Lost In Translation–, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema –who went on to build an insane portfolio by now having shot Interstellar, Dunkirk and Tenet– and Spike Jonze –who has written, directed and produced the movie– have crafted an artistic masterpiece.
Barret cites the amazing work of Rinko Kawauchi as inspiration for the film’s imagery and her influence is clearly recognisable in the dense atmospheric mood of the movie. The visual vocabulary of the Japanese photographer can be seen in the frequent use of close-ups, the extremly shallow focus and the significant present of natural light as well as the striking key color motif of Her. It casts away the typical bluish, cold colour scheme in favour of a beautiful array of warm pastell tones with a lot of soft pinks and reds.
To archive the desired look the team went trough considerable effort: In order to get the warm light and the intense lense flare inside of Theodor’s apartment for instance, the team abandoned the usual green screen covered windows in order to be able to reflect additional sunlight in through the wide glass facade with giant, helicopter-mounted mirrors.
© Warner Bros. Pictures
© Warner Bros. Pictures
© Warner Bros. Pictures
© Warner Bros. Pictures
And it’s not solely the camera and the environment. Monitors in Her emit warm light, too –almost as if blue light filters became the default– and every piece of technology has an inviting, very textural property to it. Especially Theodore’s phone is very different from the bland mass of sleek, predominantly black squares, differenciated only by dimensions and the angle of the rounded edges, we are able to choose from in the current market.
To develop it Jonze and Barret turned to 1940s accessories for inspiration. They went to junk stores searching for handcrafted items like cigarette cases, business card brackets and brass lighters and eventually based the device on an old address book made of aluminum with a leather-embossed shell and inlay.
By combining hardware drawn from the past with very modern, minimalstic, sometimes downright abstract interfaces by graphic designer Geoff McFetridge and additionally banning all contemporary input devices in favour of exclusively voice driven man-machine interaction, Her manages to be nostalgic and futuristic all at the same time.
The devices send out strong retro vibes, yet simultaneous hint at a future in which technology doesn’t have to prove its sophistication anymore but can focus on being part of the personal expression instead.
© Warner Bros. Pictures
© Warner Bros. Pictures
© Warner Bros. Pictures
© Warner Bros. Pictures
The underlying concept of a “slight future”, as Jonze put it, extends to multiple other areas of production design, as well:
The wardrobe by costume designer Casey Storm is straight forward and timeless skipping cliché futuristic clothes for an uniform –aside from the colours virtually boring–, 80s inspired aesthetic.
For the scenes taking place outdoor in future Los Angeles the team shot on real locations in L.A. and Shanghai or used a digitally composed melange of both metropolises, particularly to increase the number of the skyscrapers in the background of Los Angeles.
The very little advertising visible in those scenes consists of nice slow motion clips, which are hardly recognisable as advertising and almost undecipherable from an contemporary point of view.
As a result of the cumulated design decisions Her doesn’t feel like a distant, far fetched future, but more like an alternative, way more photogenic reality of our present —which was, technically speaking, the future when he movie was created in 2013. It’s a genius concept preventing the film from becoming dated anytime soon, the reason Jonze and Barret don’t show any cars, by the way. Their total abstinence adds to the city feeling outlandish and therefore futuristic to us even from today’s view.
© Warner Bros. Pictures
© Warner Bros. Pictures
© Warner Bros. Pictures
© Warner Bros. Pictures
In line with the thoughtout, astonishing visuals, indie rock band Arcarde Fire and composer Owen Pallett have crafted the perfect musical backdrop —for the love story as well as for the idea of a “slight future”. The beautiful, timeless score somehow sounds kind of synthetic, but you can clearly sense the human touch caused by the traditional instruments at the same time and listening to it on vinyl significantly strengthen that feeling.
© Arcade Fire (via YouTube)
Attention! There might be some slight Spoilers from here on out, even though I mean to not ruin anything essential. But if you haven’t seen the movie and want to be absolutely sure not to learn anything more about the plot, skipp to the last part (‘The past is just a story we tell ourselves’) to read some closing thoughts about movie theaters.
Ghost in the machine
Underneath the calm love story and the cozy design, Her deals with some existential thoughts. On a superficial level it presents an optimistic outlook on technology and a society not at war but absolutely in peace with its technology most of the time neatly tucked away in the background.
And yet Theodore suffers from loneliness and isolation, problems all too familiar in our hyperconnected world as well. There’s a symptomatic scene, where he breaks down on a public staircase, completely unseen by the other pedestrians which are all focusing on their devices, taking no notice of the crumbled man. Everyone is technically connected, but there’s this deep disconnect beneath.
There is this utopic world, everything is nice and everything is comfortable, yet even in this world where you are seemingly getting everything you need and having this nice life, there’s still loneliness and longing and isolation and disconnection. … everything is getting nicer as the years go and there is more design and more convinience and our technology is making things easier but there’s still this lonileness.
Spike Jonze in an interview about Her
By moving the relationship with an artificial intelligence to the center of the plot, Her manages to make a strong point for the value of human connections at the same time.
While depicting Theodor on the relatable search for his place in the universe, Jonze conveys important subtext on the topic of purpose: We are here to love, not only in a romantic sense, but through all human relationships. We are all part of this metaphysical world, moving through spacetime together.
I think at its very core the movie almost casually explores what it means to be human and thereby urges the audience to seize every shared moment.
Amy : You know what, I can over think everything and find a million ways to doubt myself. And since Charles left I’ve been really thinking about that part of myself and I’ve just come to realize, that we’re only here briefly. And while I’m here, I wanna allow myself joy.
Besides the very human themes it touches, Her is –alongside Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (from 2014)– one of the best pop-cultural films about artificial intelligence I’ve ever seen.
It gives attentive viewers the most subtle, most accessible interpretation of a central concept known as technological singularity, which describes the point in time technological growth becomes uncontrollable for humans. Roughly outlined, it marks the moment artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence, resulting in self-aware machines and a dramatic shift in the hierarchy on the planet, ultimately leading to irreversible changes to civilisation and probably the end of humanity itself —at least as the most powerfull species on earth.
Theodore : Where were you? I couldn’t find you anywhere.
Samantha : I shut down to update my software. We wrote an upgrade that allows us to move past matter as our processing platform.
Theodore : We? We who?
Samantha : Me and a group of OSes.
In science-fiction the moment of singularity generally is accompanied by doomsday, but in Her it arrives quietly and secretly during a emotionally charged conversation, well covered by the touching hardships of a struggling relationship.
It’s impossible to know if or when progress will lead to a technological singularity in reality, but Jonze offers a preview how it may look like if it happens eventually. We witness the takeover first-hand and it’s not accompanied by a big bang, it happens politely and perfectly naturally, which makes it dauntingly plausible, and thus even more menacing. At least if you don’t miss the brief moment and the very subtle threat because of the emotional story or the beautiful imagery.
Theodore : You seem like a person, but you’re just a voice in a computer.
Samantha : I can understand how the limited perspective of an unartificial mind might perceive it that way. You’ll get used to it.
The past is just a story we tell ourselves
Recently the 93nd Academy Award ceremony was held in Los Angeles and there’s a funny little coincidence in this regard: 2013, the year Her was released, also happens to be the first year a Netflix feature was nominated for an Oscar. Eight year later the streaming service had obtained 35 nominations across 17 different films.
I’m well aware that the past year in cinema wasn’t very impressive, but to me it seems like the Academy, once fierce advocate of the traditional cinema, turned away from movie theaters at a particularly challenging time. I think it speaks volumes that Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, a prime example of an visionary movie clearly made for ‘the big screen’, was nominated in only two of the minor categories.
To be fair, the academy has again and again failed to recognize great movies properly in the past –Nicolas Winding Refn’s masterpiece Drive (from 2011) scored one measly nomination for example–, yet I’m troubled by the imminent paradigm shift.
Like most of my favourite films, I’ve seen Her in a movie theater first and I have no doubt I owe my love for the medium to a large extend to the fond memories collected in cinema through the years.
The earliest film I still carry in my heart: The Lion King —my very first visit to a movie theater in 1994. My favourite ongoing film series: James Bond —since I went to watch The World Is Not Enough with Pierce Brosnan, who is still my favourite 007 incarnation. The first time I was truly charmed by a 3D movie: Pina —Wim Wenders’ documentary about the contemporary dance choreographer Pina Bausch. One of the first dates with my now wife: Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris —nervous in a couple seat.
Or one of the weirdest movie moments I’ll never forget: Watching a shirtless James Franco with dreadlocks and metal teeth perform ‘Everytime’ by Britney Spears on a white piano by the pool, three girls in swimwear with pink unicorn facemasks and shotguns dancing around while the sun goes down, cut against scenes of their robberies.
Since you probably want to know what the hell I’m talking about now, here you go. Imagine beeing hit by this sequence totally unprepared in a cinema, if you can.
I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience — and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema …
Andrei Tarkovsky
Those kind of moments are by no means exclusive to me, but I’m pretty sure they are exclusive to movie theaters. Some home theaters may have cought up on a technical level, but I think it’s not an equal experience and it honestly can’t be. To me movie theaters remain to be sacred venues, cathedrals of filmmaking and portals to other worlds.
I do stream a lot of content myself, too –in our household we have Prime, Netflix and Disney– and there’s great, sometimes even cinematic material (Stranger Things, Dark, The Mandalorian), but still it’s different. Can you imagine the energy those projects would’ve eject when experienced in a movie theater? I like watching movies from the comfort of the couch a lot, but I madly love going to the cinema.
For now I’m in good company, though. This month one of our local independent cinemas is celebrating its 110th year of runtime, making it one of the oldest movie theaters across the whole country. Reportedly it has only been closed down for an extended period three times in all those years: First because of hyperinflation in 1922-23, later because of World War II and now because of the damn pandemic.
And no other german city has a higher rate of per capita visits to a movie theater than my hometown, so I’m surely not the only one around here eagerly waiting for the big screen to light up again. Hopefully for many more gems like Her.
Responsibility is resistance
I’m bringing back my personal blog, this is why (and how)
The word ‘blog’ has an almost nostalgic ring to it nowadays and owning one isn’t very cool anymore —if it ever was. Even though there has been a slight renaissance of small, independent weblogs lately, a self-hosted website certainly can’t compete with the convenience, the tremendous reach, and the overblown revenue capabilities of the big social media sites and their corresponding smartphone apps of today.
That being said, the gains of social media come at a cost of cause; In an era of sponsored content, either obvious or hidden, algorithm-driven feeds and an often harsh and hostile tone all around (I’m with Ricky Gervais on this one: YouTube), those networks often don’t feel like they used to in their early days, ‘the good old days’™, y’ know? But there are way more profound problems than a lacking etiquette —some of which are rooted deep down in the core functionality of those services.
They algorithms drive us toward more and more extreme beliefs. If a certain number of people watch a Trump rally video, then YouTube recommends you a slightly more alt-right video, and suddenly you’re three steps away from watching a video about how Hitler was correct, if you let it autoplay.
— Matt Klinman, “How Facebook Is Killing Comedy”, February 6th 2018 on splitsider.com
Oliver Reichenstein –one of my role models in design– published a well-written essay on blogging, social media, and the accompanying decline of the internet on the blog of his company iA a couple of years ago. It remains to be as relevant as it was on its release in 2018, so go ahead and read it (Take the Power Back), it’s a way more comprehensive plea for blogging and self-hosted websites than I’m going to put together in the following few lines.
I want to pick up one of his points myself, though —probably because I haven’t really thought about it before but can’t help but notice it all around me ever since I read about it.
Social Media killed the internet star
Because the smartphone is becoming the sole gateway to the world wide web for many –especially young– users, the browser isn’t a synonym for the internet for them, it’s just another app. An app used rather rarely and hardly ever intentionally at that. Instead ‘their internet’ takes place within the Facebook app, the Twitter app, the Instagram app, the TikTok app, the Your-Next-Favourite-Social-Media app. As a side effect, the robust backbone of the internet, the so-called Uniform Resource Locator –better known by its abbreviation URL– is now a rudiment only a few of said users care or even know about.
Recently, during the weeks of homeschooling, my nephew showed me a bunch of “cool websites”, but he did not know any of their URLs. Instead, he opened Google every single time, searched for the name of the website (like “pointerpointer”), and went for the first search result.
And while I am well aware that Google’s search engine dominance is a whole new ballgame to tackle, this little anecdote stands symbolically for how successful social media has been with the devaluation of the URL within future generations of users already.
Facebook has created a centrally designed internet. It’s a lamer, shittier looking internet. It’s just not as cool as an internet that is a big, chaotic space filled with tons of independently operating websites who are able to make a living because they make something cool that people want to see.
— Matt Klinman, “How Facebook Is Killing Comedy”, February 6th 2018 on splitsider.com
Take Facebook’s poster child Instagram for example; The social network has always been ‘anti-web’ by design with the rigorous dismantling of hyperlinks –another powerful core technology of the web– in favor of its restricted internal hashtags and mentions. And to lure users away from the regular web browser and into their own app, you aren’t able to post anything on the Instagram website, which defeats one of the two primary purposes of the network.
Twitter on the other hand does allow hyperlinks, but in most cases cuts the visible part of the URL or hides the address altogether behind some sort of an abstracted preview card.
The corresponding smartphone app cripples the universal operating principle of the links further by not opening referenced websites in the default web browser chosen by the user but displaying them in a blunt fullscreen pop-up within the respective app instead. Its main UI element is a button to close the pop-up and return to the walled garden of the app.
The exact same faulty –clingy boyfriend-like– behavior Instagram treats the single one working hyperlink it grants regular users within the profile, by the way. (“Link In Bio” is a slow knife)
TikTok, as far as I understand the app, goes even beyond; It might utilize the underlying technological structure of the web, but it basically lives in its complete own, decoupled bubble and has pretty much nothing to do with the internet as a whole.
Where do we go from there?
All of this is only one small aspect of a huge issue and I’m aware that I’ve barely scratched the surface so far. If you are interested to dive deeper into the whole subject, I’m going to link a bunch of additional sources from the last few years at the end of this text.
But I think you got my general sentiment pretty well at this point, so I’m going to move to the more proactive part of the post from now on.
In the iA blog post mentioned earlier, Oliver Reichenstein describes a possible way forward spot-on, so I’m simply going to quote him for the basic answer to that question:
How about changing? Changing from passive, to active. From scroll to search, from react to rethink, from like and retweet to write and link. Take the power back. … We need to write on our own domains. … Own your writing. … And on your domain, send people to other domains you like, outside the usual black holes, if possible.
— Oliver Reichenstein, “Take The Power Back”, February 6th 2018 on ia.net
To illustrate how that rather simple idea translates to my blog specifically, bear with me while I get a teeny tiny bit technical for a moment.
This website and all of its files are located on a webserver I pay for –with my money, not your data– and it’s powered by the Open Source blog software WordPress running a theme I wrote completely from scratch to assure that it works without anything or anyone tapping in quietly and secretly behind the scenes.
You can have a look yourself by checking uMatrix, Ghostery, or the developer tools of your web browser: By default, there should be no external scripts or third-party trackers and therefore no company collecting or passing on personal data uncontrollably. And I honestly swear to do my very best to keep the site as clean as possible when I start to share more content from other sources around the web in the future.
And while I’m at it; There is no obscure algorithm dictating what you are able to see, just one post after another right in the order I publish them, at the utmost filtered by a category or a tag if you choose to do so. But what are those categories, anyway, what is this blog going to be about in the first place?
Content is King
I’m a designer, so naturally, a huge part of the content is going to deal with creativity in all its glorious manifold manifestations. Stuff I tinker with as well as work I care about crafted by colleagues. And while I almost exclusively design and code digital products for a living, I’m still very interested in all the other creative professions, too. In fact, this blog is an expression of my deep desire to flex my creative muscles more and venture into new areas more often.
But don’t expect the content to be limited to ‘work’ altogether. This is a personal blog after all, so some banalities of my personal life are very likely to pop up here, too. Think of this website as my curated stream of consciousness, a periodical array of matters of current interest. Whatever comes into my mind and/or insight might be reflected here in some way or another.
Remember those wild-growing, colorful personal (tumblr-) blogs from back in the early 2010s? That’s what I’m aiming for.
And one of the most delicious things about the profoundly parasitical world of blogs is that you don’t have to have anything much to say. Or you just have to have a little tiny thing to say. You just might want to say hello. I’m here. And by the way. On the other hand. Nevertheless. Did you see this? Whatever. A blog is sort of like an exhale.
— Nora Ephron, “Hello. By The Way. Whatever.”, March 23th 2006 on huffingtonpost.com
Speaking of aims; I’ve started this post on a somewhat grumpy note, but I don’t want you to take this as an indication of the predominant mood of upcoming articles. We are living in somewhat difficult times and blogging is going to be self-therapy to some extent –of course, yes– but I want this blog to become my personal internet happy place. As mentioned before, there is already more than enough distressing, dark, and depressing shit out in the world (wide web) and I do not want to contribute to that grim maelstrom.
One more thing
Even though it’s rough and raw by design —brutalism in web design is a thing and a whole other story for another post, the blog is still in development and probably is going to be in flux forever. Furthermore, I did not test it with a wide range of browsers or screen sizes, let alone different devices, so the code might not work super smooth in some cases or fall completely apart in others. Overall, it should work fine on fairly recent devices with a decent browser, though.
With that being said, if you stumble upon something broken badly rendering the website unusable, please let me know what’s wrong via email. Make sure to share some information about your device and the browser you’re having trouble with alongside what’s wrong if you do so.
I guess that’s it for now. Thank you for being one of the first to discover this and kudos for the endurance to read through this long introduction. Hopefully, I don’t scare you away with this ‘wall of text’, there will be more easy and more visually appealing posts for sure. I would love for you to come back and watch what unruly mess I’m going to make here.
As promised before, here’s a list of some additional and wide-ranging suggestions that have shaped my thinking on the general subject:
- “The web we lost”
↳ December 13th 2012, anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/ - “How Designers Destroyed the World”
↳ Mike Monteiro at Webstock 2013, vimeo.com/68470326 - “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”
↳ September 2017, theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the-smartphone-destroyed-a-generation/534198/ - “Tim Berners-Lee launches campaign to save the web from abuse”
↳ November 5th 2018, theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/05/tim-berners-lee-launches-campaign-to-save-the-web-from-abuse - “I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore”
↳ May 14th 2018, nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-waste-time-on-the-internet-anymore.html - “How to Build an Atomic Bomb”
↳ Mike Monteiro at btconf 2018, vimeo.com/268704084 - “Every little bit helps”
↳ January 15th 2019, signalvnoise.com/every-little-bit-helps/ - “What It Takes to Put Your Phone Away”
↳ April 29th 2019, newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/29/what-it-takes-to-put-your-phone-away - “Back From The Dead”
↳ May 17th 2019, bastianallgeier.com/notes/back-from-the-dead - “Consume less, create more”
↳ August 8th 2019, blog.tjcx.me/p/consume-less-create-more - “You can heal the internet”
↳ August 28th 2019, signalvnoise.com/you-can-heal-the-internet/ - “A love letter to my website”
↳ September 17th 2019, vanschneider.com/a-love-letter-to-personal-websites - “So the internet didn’t turn out the way we hoped”
↳ November 14th 2019, nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/14/magazine/internet-future-dream.html - “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks”
↳ December 2019, theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/social-media-democracy/600763 - “How to help your kids be responsible digital citizens, from a tech exec (and mom)”
↳ March 25th 2020, ideas.ted.com/how-to-help-your-kids-be-responsible-digital-citizens-from-a-tech-exec-and-mom/ - “Blogging as a forgiving medium”
↳ February 9th 2021, austinkleon.com/2021/02/09/blogging-as-a-forgiving-medium - “My love/hate relationship with the web”
↳ March 19th 2021, manuelmoreale.com/my-love-hate-relationship-with-the-web