Double shot of identity fiction
Apr. 3rd, 2020 02:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwexI recently saw Her and I want to talk about it and Altered Carbon at the same time because there are interesting similarities. I'm going to avoid spoilers here but feel free to comment as you like.
In "Her", writer/director Spike Jonze gives us an interesting premise: what if you had an AI (they call it an operating system) that was theoretically designed to meet your every (personal) need. Wouldn't it be better if it was intelligent to understand your needs better? And if it was intelligent, what might happen?
I shied away from this film for a while because I was afraid that it was going to go in the "robot slave" camp, of which Hollywood has produced too many. It does not, even a little. "Her" is a film I rank with Lost in Translation as a unique exploration of humanity and human relationships. I expect it will bear re-watching. 4.5/5 stars, down from 5 because I was reminded of the ending I disliked.
The casting is also brilliant. Joaquin Phoenix is our protagonist, a lonely man who struggles to keep relationships and unexpectedly develops one with this AI. Phoenix is awkward without being embarrassing or buffoonish. He's good at what he does, and people aren't his strong suit. The AI is voiced by Scarlett Johansson. This is a great choice because she is someone visually well-known so it's easy to imagine her speaking these lines and she's conventionally very attractive so I immediately see how Theodore (Phoenix's character) can visualize her as an attractive woman even though her on-screen presence is limited to an audio device. The choice never to visualize Samantha - the name given to Johansson's AI - is particularly good. If you are at all a fan of radio plays/podcasts you know how well sound can be used to convey even subtle things. I can't think of another Hollywood film where that has been done so well.
This set-up works especially well when Samantha begins to develop a real personality and to drive things. She has desires; she's petulant. She's not just there to please Theodore in a trivial sense. She pleases him by being a 'real' person really interested in him, his life, his activities. She misses him when he's away, just as he misses being away from her. The movie posits this as a relationship with an AI but it's a lot like I imagine a relationship might be between people who are separated by necessary distance. Imagine Samantha and Theodore as people on opposite sides of an uncrossable war zone and you'd get a very similar story, at least at first. This brings us to the question of what it means to be human. We know Samantha is computer code, but she relates as a human.
Now let me jump to Altered Carbon. I promised to write this up but never did, so a bit of background first. I really liked the novel and its premise. Season 1 of the show took a lot from that source material and did wonderful things with it, if you don't mind on-screen graphic violence. Also, nudity. The core premise is that on traveling to other worlds humans discover an apparently long-gone alien species that had developed technology to encode a mind into an implanted device, as well as allow the encoded minds to be cast between these devices, at supra-light speeds. These devices - stacks - become the real representation of a person and the physical body becomes just a sleeve. Organic damage can still be repaired; destruction of the stack becomes "real death". Imprisonment means putting your stack "on ice" for a period of time; your sleeve gets rented out to pay your debts.
Rich people can pay to have their stacks backed up and their bodies cloned, effectively becoming immortal. The class of meths (from Methuselah) are this reality's 1% with all the vices and deviances you'd expect. The series protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, is the last Envoy, one of a class of highly trained rebels whose rebellion was crushed long ago. A meth brings Kovacs back and in exchange for Kovacs' services, this meth arranges to have Kovacs' record expunged and his crimes pardoned. In Season One Joel Kinnaman, who you might remember from Suicide Squad (Rick Flag), plays Kovacs' sleeve.
He's very good and he's surrounded by a great cast, including Dichen Lachman as Reileen Kawahara, the stunning Martha Higareda as Detective Kristin Ortega, and Renée Elise Goldsberry as Quellcrist Falconer, the woman who founded the resistance movement that comes to be called Quellists, and who trained the Envoys. In Season 2 the sleeve is played by Anthony Mackie, who is just awesome, Goldsberry reprises her role, and Higareda is replaced by Simone Missick as Trepp, a bounty hunter with a heart. I loved Missick's work on Luke Cage and she's every bit as good here.
The writing is quite good, with Season 2 picking up themes and ideas from Season One but not being a strict repetition. Again, Kovacs is hired by a meth and again things go wrong but in ways that fill in much backstory and allow characters to develop. Also, the ending of S2 is just *chef's kiss* perfect in that I totally didn't see it coming but as soon as it revealed I was like "oh, of COURSE they could do that" because it lined up very neatly with the things that had come before.
Altered Carbon also features intelligent AIs, like "Her" does. Most of these AIs are created to serve people for specific things. There's a class of AIs that manages human-centric facilities like hotels and nightclubs, another class that serves archaeologists on dig sites, and presumably more. There's a subtle class system in place in that even the lower-class humans don't seem to treat the AIs as equals and the AIs associate mostly with each other. They're long-lived and tend not to get attached to humans, who do still have comparatively short lifespans. Chris Conner plays Poe, a hotel AI with a quirky Edgar Allen Poe fetish, who gets attached to Kovacs and ends up playing pivotal parts in both S1 and S2. Poe and some of the other AIs form friendships with humans, and it's left open (so far at least) how far the emotional relationships might go. Clearly Poe has emotional attachments to a couple people as the seasons unfurl, and it's also clear that the AIs have emotional relationships to each other.
Where "Her" zooms in close on the relationship of one (human) person to one AI (person) and asks us to see them both as people growing to love each other, Altered Carbon also asks us to imagine what it's like to relate to one person who has multiple bodies over time. There's a brilliantly painful scene in S1 during which a relative whose sleeve died is "spun up" to join the family for holidays but since the family is not well-off they have to use whatever sleeve is available. Still, that's "Grandma" even though she looks like a thug now and the family behave as if this was normal. It's a little creepy and yet so very effective.
There you go - two pieces of fiction that dive way into the notion of what it means to be human/to be a person, each excellent though very different.
In "Her", writer/director Spike Jonze gives us an interesting premise: what if you had an AI (they call it an operating system) that was theoretically designed to meet your every (personal) need. Wouldn't it be better if it was intelligent to understand your needs better? And if it was intelligent, what might happen?
I shied away from this film for a while because I was afraid that it was going to go in the "robot slave" camp, of which Hollywood has produced too many. It does not, even a little. "Her" is a film I rank with Lost in Translation as a unique exploration of humanity and human relationships. I expect it will bear re-watching. 4.5/5 stars, down from 5 because I was reminded of the ending I disliked.
The casting is also brilliant. Joaquin Phoenix is our protagonist, a lonely man who struggles to keep relationships and unexpectedly develops one with this AI. Phoenix is awkward without being embarrassing or buffoonish. He's good at what he does, and people aren't his strong suit. The AI is voiced by Scarlett Johansson. This is a great choice because she is someone visually well-known so it's easy to imagine her speaking these lines and she's conventionally very attractive so I immediately see how Theodore (Phoenix's character) can visualize her as an attractive woman even though her on-screen presence is limited to an audio device. The choice never to visualize Samantha - the name given to Johansson's AI - is particularly good. If you are at all a fan of radio plays/podcasts you know how well sound can be used to convey even subtle things. I can't think of another Hollywood film where that has been done so well.
This set-up works especially well when Samantha begins to develop a real personality and to drive things. She has desires; she's petulant. She's not just there to please Theodore in a trivial sense. She pleases him by being a 'real' person really interested in him, his life, his activities. She misses him when he's away, just as he misses being away from her. The movie posits this as a relationship with an AI but it's a lot like I imagine a relationship might be between people who are separated by necessary distance. Imagine Samantha and Theodore as people on opposite sides of an uncrossable war zone and you'd get a very similar story, at least at first. This brings us to the question of what it means to be human. We know Samantha is computer code, but she relates as a human.
Now let me jump to Altered Carbon. I promised to write this up but never did, so a bit of background first. I really liked the novel and its premise. Season 1 of the show took a lot from that source material and did wonderful things with it, if you don't mind on-screen graphic violence. Also, nudity. The core premise is that on traveling to other worlds humans discover an apparently long-gone alien species that had developed technology to encode a mind into an implanted device, as well as allow the encoded minds to be cast between these devices, at supra-light speeds. These devices - stacks - become the real representation of a person and the physical body becomes just a sleeve. Organic damage can still be repaired; destruction of the stack becomes "real death". Imprisonment means putting your stack "on ice" for a period of time; your sleeve gets rented out to pay your debts.
Rich people can pay to have their stacks backed up and their bodies cloned, effectively becoming immortal. The class of meths (from Methuselah) are this reality's 1% with all the vices and deviances you'd expect. The series protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, is the last Envoy, one of a class of highly trained rebels whose rebellion was crushed long ago. A meth brings Kovacs back and in exchange for Kovacs' services, this meth arranges to have Kovacs' record expunged and his crimes pardoned. In Season One Joel Kinnaman, who you might remember from Suicide Squad (Rick Flag), plays Kovacs' sleeve.
He's very good and he's surrounded by a great cast, including Dichen Lachman as Reileen Kawahara, the stunning Martha Higareda as Detective Kristin Ortega, and Renée Elise Goldsberry as Quellcrist Falconer, the woman who founded the resistance movement that comes to be called Quellists, and who trained the Envoys. In Season 2 the sleeve is played by Anthony Mackie, who is just awesome, Goldsberry reprises her role, and Higareda is replaced by Simone Missick as Trepp, a bounty hunter with a heart. I loved Missick's work on Luke Cage and she's every bit as good here.
The writing is quite good, with Season 2 picking up themes and ideas from Season One but not being a strict repetition. Again, Kovacs is hired by a meth and again things go wrong but in ways that fill in much backstory and allow characters to develop. Also, the ending of S2 is just *chef's kiss* perfect in that I totally didn't see it coming but as soon as it revealed I was like "oh, of COURSE they could do that" because it lined up very neatly with the things that had come before.
Altered Carbon also features intelligent AIs, like "Her" does. Most of these AIs are created to serve people for specific things. There's a class of AIs that manages human-centric facilities like hotels and nightclubs, another class that serves archaeologists on dig sites, and presumably more. There's a subtle class system in place in that even the lower-class humans don't seem to treat the AIs as equals and the AIs associate mostly with each other. They're long-lived and tend not to get attached to humans, who do still have comparatively short lifespans. Chris Conner plays Poe, a hotel AI with a quirky Edgar Allen Poe fetish, who gets attached to Kovacs and ends up playing pivotal parts in both S1 and S2. Poe and some of the other AIs form friendships with humans, and it's left open (so far at least) how far the emotional relationships might go. Clearly Poe has emotional attachments to a couple people as the seasons unfurl, and it's also clear that the AIs have emotional relationships to each other.
Where "Her" zooms in close on the relationship of one (human) person to one AI (person) and asks us to see them both as people growing to love each other, Altered Carbon also asks us to imagine what it's like to relate to one person who has multiple bodies over time. There's a brilliantly painful scene in S1 during which a relative whose sleeve died is "spun up" to join the family for holidays but since the family is not well-off they have to use whatever sleeve is available. Still, that's "Grandma" even though she looks like a thug now and the family behave as if this was normal. It's a little creepy and yet so very effective.
There you go - two pieces of fiction that dive way into the notion of what it means to be human/to be a person, each excellent though very different.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-03 08:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-04 02:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-04 02:37 pm (UTC)I'm not sure I would call what she does "polyamory". I don't think we have enough info on her interactions with other humans, or other AIs. Also, not consensual. I think much of his reaction is based on the sense that she's cheating on him, not least because she doesn't mention it until he probes.
(Also, the ending bugged me. I nearly downgraded the movie a point for that ending.)
no subject
Date: 2020-04-04 07:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-04 09:53 pm (UTC)I also recommend the original book. Let me know if you do engage with it what you think.