‘She’s not There’—Shallow Focus on Privacy, Surveillance, and Emerging Techno-Mediated Modes of Being in Spike Jonze’s Her

Abstract

As tomorrow’s Bluetooth device moves from innovation to necessity, the ever-eliding line of human/machine intimacy and the attendant loss of privacy continues to grow more intriguing and threatening. Ethical notions of artificial intelligence (AI) and cybernetic threats to the human indwelling of being have been a topic of mythic, literary, and filmic inquiry from ancient global creation myths to tomorrow’s multiplex film. Hollywood has expressed AI anxiety regarding the disappearing dividing line between human and machine and sinister hegemonic monitoring from Clarke‘s & Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to Ex Machina (Garland 2015). Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) explores this anxiety by presenting its hero “falling in love” with his new operating system. Along the way, an analysis has ensued regarding the Snowden document dump revealing the massive bulk collection of US citizen phone records, Obama’s resulting USA Freedom Act and subsequent attempts by the CIA and FBI to undermine that protection. This chapter consults the so-called Turing Test, Asimov’s “The Three Laws of Robotics,” and current privacy concerns in order to analyze how the stylized contrast of deep and shallow focus illustrated in Jonze’s Her speaks to issues of identity and surveillance. The chapter concludes seeking to recover and define what it means to be human according to Her.