Watch: Spike Jonze: Of Humans and Machines

The love between Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore and Scarlet Johannson’s Samantha in Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’ was actually the culmination of a development that’s been in place since Jonze’s first film, ‘Being John Malkovich.’ Jonze suggests that the relationship between humans and robots can be a stage for the relationship between dreams and reality, i.e. between our best life and our real life. At least that’s what Chloé Galibert-Lainé indicates in this new video essay for Fandor. She makes a very strong case, too, tracing the progress from Craig Schwartz’s (John Cusack) follies with his puppets in the earlier film to the presence manifested by the later film’s living, breathing operating system.