Francisc Nona

I’m not sure if you’re going to see this, since it’s been some time from the date you posted your article, but I’ve just watched Her and have my thoughts about the film myself. I don’t think the love between Theodore and Samantha is an obsessive one. Or if it is, it is by no means any different from the obsessiveness of any love affair. The film is multidimensional, so it’s hard to put a categorical stamp on it. At one level, it makes a statement about a long-lasting question: whether technology can provide what we, through our mere human condition, cannot provide. For that, of course, it taps into something even more complex and more inviting of criticism: whether technology can give us affect. Truth is, it can. And one doesn’t need to watch Her to see this. Just think about the affective implications of our use of telephones, or do go further back in the hierarchy of technologies, our relationships to knife and fork, to clothes, to fire. All these things come packaged with affect. Now, to pose the problem of an operation system capable of delivering pure human interaction means, among other things, to transfer human attributes to a machine. And that, again, is not new. At the end of the day, every piece of technology is designed to do what we can’t. And that’s where Her places the strongest stress. Let us not forget that Theodore can’t find social satisfaction in any of the women he’s met. Samantha, however, gives him precisely that.
What I found most fascinating in the film is the idea of technological dysfunction; or rather: misfunction. That’s the moment when Theodore loses connection with the OS. Jonze was quite clever here to pin a moment of tension at the centre of a narrative that had been (up to that moment) so hedonistic it could have killed the story.
There’s a lot to be said about this film, but this is a mere comment, so I’ll stop.

I quite enjoyed your article. I recommend a New Zealand author, graphic artist and academic, Dylan Horrocks, who has been writing about world building. He has an article entitled “The Perfect Planet” (available online if you Google search it), in which he speaks of a lot of technical stuff related to the building of a fictional world, but also about the centrality of world-building not only in fantasy, but in literature at large. Of course, he talks about Middle Earth (he’s a Kiwi, after all). But there are some very interesting things in his article about the narrative value of panels in comics books.
Once again, good job with this article.

I see some of the comments to your post address the issue of Murakami’s style, and I think they are right to point out the simplicity of his writing. It struck me too to go for pages on end without as much as a jolt of adrenaline, and to discover, when moments of tension did occur, that they were resolved in a tone of light humour. I can see, however, that it’s precisely this aspect that makes him intriguing. I was reading the other day something about Zadie Smith’s critique of literary artifice, and I think Murakami would fit just well in that category of artifice-less authors(funny to write about this on a website called The Artifice!). The abrupt endings of his novels and short stories are also prone to make him, if not likable, at least intriguing. Sometimes, I have to agree, irritatingly so.
Thanks for the background you provided in this article. I didn’t know most of the stuff. Thumbs up!