Her

Some days I try to be novel. Some days I try to live according to novels. This strange friction between living out a novel and living a life of novelty possesses the writer and non-writer alike.

I can only speak as a writer and I know that my life awkwardly exists between my clumsy attempts at creativity and reproducing the stylistics of my friends and the authors I have canonized.

It is a glory that’s wholly unattainable by me – a glory that I will nonetheless attempt to reach to my peril. But, I know this. I know this instinctively. Whoever you worship you become a slave to. And I am constantly trying to earn myself a seat at the table of the gods. It’s a fear. A fear that paralyzes me completely.

I spin words and images of my lovers to appease my anxious heart. I can control the ideas better than the people. And I like it that way. However, it makes me bound by my own book. A leather bound edition written in my language and formulaic understanding of the world. It leaves little room for sympathy and for people to be themselves.

That’s reality. Reality is dealing with what’s human.

And here’s my transition into Spike Jonze’s recent film “Her.” The film is about a man (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with an operating system programmed to behave similarly as a human being. In the film, Phoenix – who writes letters as a surrogate for other people as a profession – is reeling from his break-up with his wife who he shut out because he couldn’t deal with her emotional reality.

His operating system (Scarlett Johnansen) is able to serve as his emotional rebound after falling out of love with his wife. The rebound is especially successful for him because it is an ideal. She isn’t real. She is a projection of his needs and wants and is programmed to meet him according to the script he’s written about himself.

The thing that trips up Phoenix is that he is so busy writing the stories of love that keep people together that he feels a sort of power. He feels that he should be able to create love based on how he imagines it. In a sense, he feels like he can manufacture love according to his imagination. And that’s a big struggle for writers. Love becomes something we imagine in our heads based on what we’ve read or something as simple as intuition. And that doesn’t work in the REAL world.

Near the end of the film, Phoenix and his operating system decide to go separate ways as she says, “I’m ready to not be a part of your book anymore.” I think that’s a very interesting statement in analyzing his character and mine.

We need to let others write our book with us. We need to relinquish the pen from time-to-time. We need to stop dominating the narrative. Then maybe we can love people and not let them becomes gods.