System Malfunction: Spike Jonze's Her

Many thanks to my friend and fellow cinephile-in-arms Carson Lund for helping me edit this piece.

Her is so obsessed with trying to tell a story about “how we live now” that any of its profound ideas seem quite self-evident. By playing the romance between Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix, introverted to the point of limitation^[i]) and his new operating system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson^[ii]), as a serious relationship, Jonze certainly asks us to explore radical territory by thinking about our new(-ish) relationship to technology. However, it becomes quite apparent that despite this bold premise, it’s more of a sleek surface to create an allegory of loneliness. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with such a choice, except Jonze emphasizes his narrative through utter banality, a conventional romance about letting go of the past. Despite the uniqueness of the central relationship, Jonze is complacent in simply following through the various conventions of meet cute scenes, vulnerable people talking about their vulnerability, and various day trips that play to broad gestures of emotions. These sequences rely on montages that could come out of his 90s music videos—pleasantly shot in mutedly light colors for pleasant compositions, but rarely perceptive ones—pandering to a little more than a cinematic equivalent of BuzzFeed. It’s an emotional simulacrum without depth. 

The Master: Notes on an Ideological Reading of a Pop-Freudian America

The Master

Written and Directed By: Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Jesse Plemons, Ambyr Childers, Christopher Evan Welch, Amy Ferguson, and Laura Dern

Director of Photography: Mihai Malaimare Jr., Editors: Leslie Jones and Peter McNulty, Production Designer: David Crank and Jack Fish, Original Music: Jonny Greenwood

Some mild spoilers follow, but I left it pretty opaque.

            The key to unlocking The Master, an intensely psychological portraiture of one of the darker sides of Americana, may be in Joaquin Phoenix’s right eye. As the misguided and confused Freddy Quell, Phoenix’s eye remains barely open, an opaque darkness coming through, but no sense of light. And then, compelled by the film’s titular character, it quivers and moves. Perhaps there is something in there. Until it regresses back onto itself, as beast, like the rest of Quell, which cannot be controlled.

            If Paul Thomas Anderson could have any dead soul watch his latest film, it should certainly be the Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs. No one knew the power of the close-up in the way Balázs describes on his writings on film and specifically microphysiognomy as he called it. So much has been made in cinephile circles about the use of 65mm cameras to shoot The Master, a format usually reserved for large epics across oceans and deserts. Anderson’s film features the occasional shot of those, but what becomes clear very soon is that he wants to use the format for the close-up, to capture every detail on the faces of his characters. The most mild gesture, one surely missed by 35mm and certainly digital, is often the essential stroke in unlocking the movements of this grand film that refuses any sort of simplistic categorization.

            What separates The Master from Anderson’s previous film, There Will Be Blood, is his decision to move into the cerebral. There Will Be Blood is a film essentially about the structures of institutions—business, both capital and religion—that opens itself to expressive images that made this connection clear. But film as a medium, based in its spatial existence, can only peer so far into human consciousness. This is perhaps why Anderson has created two such enigmatic characters that seem to be both signifier and signified—they act as emblems, sometimes too obvious, for their greater movements in the post-war American landscape, but they also become characters fighting toward own volition, attempting to redefine themselves as greater movements.