![]() ![]() But there is a flaw so obvious and basic that I'm puzzled nobody seems to have brought it up yet, which is that the film ends three times. Less and less equal, Silicon Valley is one of the most unequal places inĪs Silicon Valley goes, so goes our imagined future in films like “Her.There is much to love in Her, and there is a little bit to be hugely frustrated by, though on the whole the concept and world-building is beguiling enough that getting through the rough patches en route to the terrific stuff is no real chore. After decades in which the country has become Have seen a twenty-per-cent rise in homelessness, largely because of the There are also record numbers of poor people, and the past two years Half a dozen more of the former and more than a thousand of the latter. Silicon Valley last year’s Facebook public stock offering alone created There areįifty or so billionaires and tens of thousands of millionaires in Stanford Shopping Center’s parking lot is a sea of Lexuses and Audis,Īnd their owners are shopping at Burberry and Louis Vuitton. The Valley was thoroughly middle class, egalitarian,Īverage house in Palo Alto sells for more than two million dollars. Public schools in the area were excellent and almost universallyĪttended the few kids I knew who went to private school had somehow Was virtually unknown in Palo Alto, as was the adjective “high-end.” The Woolworth’s, with one boutique store-a Victoria’s Secret had opened inġ977-and a parking lot full of Datsuns and Chevy Novas. Across ElĬamino Real, the Stanford Shopping Center was anchored by Macy’s and Google-were sports shops, discount variety stores, and several art-houseĬinemas, together with the shuttered, X-rated Paris Theatre. University Avenue-the future address of PayPal, Facebook, and (Steve Jobs grew up in an imitation Eichler,Ĭalled a Likeler.) The average house in Palo Alto cost about a hundredĪnd twenty-five thousand dollars. The neighborhoods of the Santa Clara Valley wereĭotted with cheap, modern, one-story houses-called Eichlers, after theīuilder Joseph Eichler-with glass walls, open floor plans, andįlat-roofed carports. Here is his comparison of the valley in 19: “Her” is a part of a larger cultural beast, recently documented in George Packer’s recent New Yorker piece on Silicon Valley’s new politics. Perhaps this would be fine if this was just one solitary cultural object. Phoenix is in the whole film and he is captivating.īut in the interest of simplifying the film’s story, the fat was cut, and the fat was Los Angeles as it truly is, a city with a minority white population and the same income inequality that plagues the rest of the country. It’s funny and sweet without being sentimental or overdetermined about a thesis on humans’ relationship to technology. That being said, “Her” is an astute observation of how many users interact and rely on information and communication technologies. Jonze is so invested in the same techno-Orientalism that inspired cyberpunk culture that Los Angeles’s own buildings do not embody its own future well enough one must go to the imagined epicenter of tech capital, East Asia, to shoot believable skylines. In this near future, poverty is invisible and Los Angeles’s nearly 50% Latino/Hispanic population has disappeared. Jonze also doesn’t really have a reputation for being attuned to the world’s diversity in his filmography otherwise.īut this is a film that creates a world here a hipster handwritten letter company is a viable business able to rent out a large office in a skyscraper. “Her” is a studio film, and Hollywood, to put it lightly, does not depict America as it can be seen on its streets. The main cast of characters is all white, except for a few East Asian-American women who serve as women for the core crew to date. This is surprising because the exteriors are shot in Shanghai, and there don’t seem to be any Latino people in the whole damn film. It is not until late in the film when Twombly decides to go to Catalina Island that one realizes that the film is set in a Los Angeles not too far in the future. I’d like to answer Diller’s question myself: Jonze has made a dystopia of gentrification. He didn’t divulge his answer to that question, but he did explain that the question helped him understand what he should do in creating the atmosphere for the film. In discussing his inspiration for the imagined future world for “Her,” Jonze said he spoke with Lincoln Center and Highline architect Liz Diller and she asked him if he wanted the film to be a utopian or dystopian story. READ MORE: Review: Why Spike Jonze’s Weird And Wonderful Technological Romance ‘Her’ Is One of the Best Studio Movies of the Year Bam Margera Sues Paramount, Johnny Knoxville Over ‘Jackass 4’ Firing and Alleges ‘Inhumane Treatment’ ![]()
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