Moving “Past Matter”: Challenges of Intimacy and Freedom in Spike Jonze’s her

• Autor(a) principal: Bergen, Hilary
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.25770/artc.11637
• topic: ESSAY

Spike Jonze’s her (2014) is a film that perfectly illustrates the crumblingborders between personhood and technology and echoes speculative realism’s callto “unshackle” objects from the “gaze of humans” (Bryant 19). My paper exploresthe ways in which the film’s central relationship, between a man and his O.S.,questions our nostalgic privileging of corporeality and offers an alternativefreedom — and perhaps even spirituality — in the boundlessness of technology.With help from the work of object-oriented ontologists Jane Bennett, TimothyMorton and Levi Bryant, I argue that herreveals that an awareness of the limits of consciousness, rather than ourcynical nostalgia for intimacy, is the inevitably human disease that plaguesus.