Best-of lists can be dreary things, but recently I saw an online poll that didn't restrict itself to "Name your favourite films". It asked supplementary questions, aimed at building a conversation about movies and contemporary life. Among these: what was the most striking or emblematic image you saw in a film last year?
Even this question is reductive in its own way - it is hardly possible to "rank" all the memorable moments from films I watched in 2014. However, one that has stayed with me is from Spike Jonze's futuristic Her. The scene has two people in an intimate situation (watch it out of context with the sound turned off and you think you know what is going on), but unable to interact at a human level because a machine is directing what they do.
That makes Her sound like a horror film, and indeed the opening title appears in a serrated font, in a neon white against a black background, with a creepy soundtrack. It is tempting to see the "her" of the title - a conscious, intelligent Operating System called Samantha, with whom a man named Theodore develops a deep emotional bond - as a predatory ghost in the computer. But the film is not so easily classified. If it's a bone-chilling romance between a man and a machine, it is also a comment on how human relationships, and attitudes to relationships, are changing in an increasingly tech-dependent world.
In the bleak scene I'm talking about, Theodore agrees to an arrangement where a real-world woman fills in as the operating system's "body" so that he and Samantha can make physical love. If this strange menage-a-trois is to work, it is important that Theodore doesn't address the human woman, Isabella, as she really is; she must remain a passive medium. He temporarily forgets this though. When Isabella arrives at his door, he reflexively starts talking to her, introducing himself, and the look she gives him is that of a deer caught in a firestorm. For a few seconds - before he remembers to give Isabella the apparatus that will enable Samantha to "plug in" - here are two flesh-and-blood people who have no idea how to deal with each other directly because there isn't a machine between them, shepherding the encounter. This is "awkward" taken to a whole new dimension.
Her is set in 2025. It's puzzling to find a film set in the very near future; that isn't how science-fiction usually works. But part of the point is that technology is now altering our lives and behaviour more rapidly than ever before. A couple of decades ago, artificial intelligence was still a distant, theoretical enough concept for us to feel we couldn't seriously be affected by it on a daily basis. Today things are different - smart devices and Apps have anthropomorphised "personalities", including human names and voices - and one is aware that a lot more may happen in 10 years.
Watching the threesome scene in this film, I thought of human-facilitator-human relationships of the present day: about the gap between chatty, over-familiar interactions on a social-media page (between people who might not know each other in the "real" world) and the more tentative conversations that occur if those same people run into each other offline - naked, so to speak, without their devices. And moving much further back in time: what must it have been like for the first generation of people, more than 150 years ago, who used telephones? How did they feel when they encountered a disembodied voice through a machine (with the technology of the time possibly adding echoes, crackle or time lags, making voices sound ghostly and distant), and what effect did it have on their real-world perceptions of people?
It is always easy to play prophet of doom, to make noises about how technology is building cocoons for us, disconnecting us from each other. So perhaps, having mentioned that chilling Her scene, I should also note some of its more uncomplicatedly human moments. Such as a scene on a beach where groups of people are lazing about, chatting, sun-bathing, their gadgets ignored. Or blink-and-miss moments like the one where Theodore, walking down a road, sneezes and a woman nearby says a quick "Bless you" - and it comes as a surprise, a pleasant one, that in a world where people are always talking to their operating systems, it is still possible to notice each other and engage in old-world displays of etiquette.
Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
