As a piece of writing, this is probably too angsty & a product of my being only 24. I’m okay with that, and with you judging me for it. I think it’s the best thing I’ve written all year, which I guess has almost no minimum standard only 10 days in…
Also, even though I tried to keep the spoilers to a relative minimum (the worst offenders are in the last paragraph), there’s no point in reading this if you haven’t seen the movie yet.
I am of course writing this on my phone, in public, to my own Gmail, because I can’t find a QT3 thread, possibly because it’s just one common word…
So many feelings, all of them even more meta than Abed. Which brings up the bigger issue, the elephant in the (possibly nonexistent) room: does Abed, being a character in Community, even have feelings; and if not, does that make my real feelings about my interactions with him any less real (I think not, for my part) or any less meaningful?
If the meaning of life is the most important question in philosophy, then the Chinese room experiment (does evidence of consciousness through language mean actual feeling exists on the other side?) becomes the most relevant subquestion. From a utilitarian perspective, it would have the most say on just how good the world really is.
These are both academic (even humorous or detached) observations while simultaneously being the things I’m actually thinking & feeling right now. I am, of course, making a deeply personal post to a public forum. Because it somehow fits in with the movie Her, which I’ve only just finished watching. (How much of this is real? How much am I writing because it sounds right? Is there even a difference, & would it matter?)
Okay, enough meta for now.
What I’ve just seen is one of the most deeply human & affecting pieces of science fiction I’ve ever watched (or read for that matter). My other two favorite movies of the year, Before Midnight & Gravity, are maybe more authentically human, or at least tell us things about our decidedly more primitive emotional capacities; but I think somehow Her is more relevant to me, particularly as a younger person who hasn’t yet been in the kind of relationship explored in Before Midnight (much less been in space fighting for my life) & who has had relationships which were & are eerily similar to the one in the movie.
Full disclosure: I am now writing in my capacity as a writer, describing things I find interesting, rather than actively streaming my consciousness. (I took a break to play pinball between paragraphs & calmed down.) I’m still going to talk* about things I either emoted during & immediately following the movie or felt at some point during my life.
The choice of the book as metaphor was so perfect. For one, it immediately evokes the question of the reality of the emotions. Like Abed, a character only feels through the people who feel for it. More importantly, it recalls that feeling of inevitable loss of connection. When I would get lost in another world, I always dreaded the last few chapters because it would mean the end of our connection. Alas, I could not live in that other world… My empathy would be as close as I’d ever get. And it was decidedly only real on my end in this case.
And then there’s the first time I fell in love, which was possibly still only real on my end but at least involved another (human) person, not a character in a book. You see, I’m young enough that the first time I developed that kind of connection with another person, I did it mostly from miles away by various text protocols. I interacted in person, of course, but the most important emotional milestones, the biggest leaps in the connection itself, mostly happened from a distance. Probably because that felt safer, not to mention I could be more calculated (& therefore risk exposing more of myself more safely) if I had time to edit what I wrote before I said it. At least, this is how I see it in retrospect.
I felt a remarkable amount of empathy for Samantha in that way.
Not only was my first experience with romantic love something she could have done, my most recent experience with a similar connection has taken place mostly over long distance. I’ve only met this person a couple times (including my original introduction), and our friendship is a product of the Skype era, although technically we use Facebook chat. I find it difficult to define the kind of connection I have with this person because it defies the traditional structures & presence implicitly expected by the English language. (Would I use the L word? Sure. Am I physically involved? No. Does that matter? Not really.)
The important thing to me is that the emotional response I get from something, whether it’s a book or a nontraditional relationship of some form or a regular old friendship or romance, that that emotional response is genuine. And to me it is. And that’s all that matters to me. (I’m a very literal utilitarian sometimes…)
I don’t have much else to say, partly because I had no plan for where I was going with this, so I’ll just record a couple other observations I made.
Both of these are very Seattle. The sex surrogate, first of all, struck me as very much the full-bodied version of a strap-on, with all the emotional insecurities & physical awkwardness that can potentially go along with that. I loved that. And the 641 secondary relationships, while exaggerated by circumstance, struck a classic polyamorous chord. Particularly the kind where one party didn’t realize they weren’t in a monogamous relationship. (AKA cheating, but with a short-term recovery instead of a breakup.) It was a place I didn’t expect the movie to be able to go to naturally, but I was pleased (& devastated) by how well they managed to pull it off.
Well, that’s it, I guess… For such an outlandish premise, I was just amazed with how personal it felt. Bravo, Mr Jones.
*because they talk in the movie, never physically write