Consequences Are Closer Than They Appear: How Her & Nebraska Predict The Future
This past New Year's Eve I did something a little bit different. My girlfriend and I decided to make it a double feature and travelled into Toronto to see two movies. No more heavy drinking and dancing during a New Year's night on the town. We're mature adults now and save our heavy drinking and dancing for the privacy of our own home.
We started our day by watching Her, the near-future, nearly sci-fi film by Spike Jonze, in a downtown Toronto multiplex. Joaquin Phoenix is incredible playing the lead, an extremely sensitive man who writes voice-to-text personal letters for loved ones. Really love grandma, but don't know how to express it? Phoenix's character of Theodore Twombly (Kurt Vonnegut would be proud) can help you out. Mr. Twombly, who is used to talking to computers – whether it's “writing” letters at work, enduring the profanity-laced tirade of a cute little video game character at home, or playing along with the most perverse sexual fantasies of chat room participants – falls in love with the operating system of his computer. Scarlett Johansson plays the female operating system who is way sexier than HAL and intelligent enough to name herself Samantha. She's like the inverse male fantasy to Lars' unreal girl. Instead of having a female body without the mind, Samantha is the mind without the body. I'm not convinced the fantasy of Samantha is any less perverse. Also, Her, with its own soft charm, raises some profound questions about where our new forms of communication are taking us. Theodore spends much of his day in a comfortable cocoon consisting of talking to a computer at work, talking back to his video game console at home and talking to his “girlfriend” (operating system) wherever he may be. He is often uncomfortable speaking the old-fashioned way (you know, in person), as evidenced by a disastrous blind date. Today so many people not only meet on the Internet, they also try to maintain long-term relationships by email, text, phone, Facebook, FaceTime, but not truly face-to-face. With new technology, the world is getting smaller, but so too are people's worlds. It is much more convenient to avoid human interaction in favour of constant electronic communication.
Woody, the elderly protagonist of Nebraska played brilliantly by Bruce Dern, has no time for interactions of any kind, human or otherwise. The majority of his life has been spent thinking about his next drink and not much has changed in his old age. My girlfriend and I had the pleasure of watching this masterpiece at the Kingsway Theatre in Etobicoke. Much like Woody, the Kingsway is from a different era and is hopelessly stuck in its ways. I worry about both of their futures. Plain and simple, the Kingsway opened way back in 1939 and has just one screen. Plain and simple, Alexander Payne's black and white road trip from Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska with a lengthy stopover in the fictional small town of Hawthorne, Nebraska follows Woody Grant and his one last chance to hit it big. Woody thinks he has won a million dollars courtesy of a direct mail scam letter, the type of correspondence that us modern day skeptics would throw out in a millisecond. Unlike Theodore Twombly, Woody's future is certain. He has squandered what little money he had and he will die broke, unable to leave his family any sort of inheritance. This weighs on his mind as he travels with his least successful son David, played flawlessly by Will Forte, on the road to his jackpot. Family is another big difference between the modern Her and the traditional Nebraska. Other than his computerized companions, Mr. Twombly only has a few friends and co-workers with whom to converse. Woody, meanwhile, has a feisty wife, played with piss and vinegar by June Squibb, and two sons more than willing to give him advice that he doesn't care to hear. He also has a large extended family who don't give two shits about him, but circle him like vultures when they hear about his big win. It's interesting to see the utter lack of communication between all the men in the family while they watch a football game on that most archaic of devices, the television set.
I guess our communication skills have been suffering for a long time now. Still, I'm cheering for Woody and the Kingsway to hang in there and keep it real. Theodore Twombly knows how hard that can be.
