The Oscars are tonight and the internet has been flooded with
predictions about who will win and what the nominees will be wearing. And although I am
excited to see who will take home Best Picture or Best Actress, the film that
has struck me the most this season probably will not win either award. Spike
Jones' Her has been
echoing through my head since I first saw it in January as it raises important questions
about the future of technology, the fickleness of love, and, most
interestingly to me, what it means to have a sexual orientation.
Okay, I am going to try to not spoil
anything about the movie, so the the basic plot is that Theodore (Joaquin
Phoenix) lives in the not-so-distant future (2025) in a world where operating
systems have become artificially intelligent and even have the capability to adapt and evolve. If you couldn't tell from the trailer, Theodore falls in love with
Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), his OS.
The movie makes interesting points about
gender performativity; Samantha is female, although she
has no body (Theodore decides he wants a "female" voice when he has to choose between two genders). Her name is spelled in pretty cursive when she "calls"
Theodore, she giggles softly at his jokes, and she “plays” the role of the
female when they have phone sex (which gets pretty steamy), but is Samantha really a female? This question ties in with our discussion of how one chooses to separate sex and gender and particularly when they don't (butch lesbians vs. FTM trans folks). Samantha does not even have to consider "matching" her sex with her gender because she has no biological sex, yet she still performs one gender clearly. Even as she continues to "evolve," she never seems to take on a more complicated approach to gender that does not fit within the binary. But is Samantha, as an OS, taking on the position of a third sex? Also, what are the implications of Theodore's sexual orientation? It is never implied that he is anything but heterosexual and, as previously mentioned, he never thinks of Samantha as anything but female, but is being heterosexual even applicable when there is no body?
All I can think about is Catfish. In today's world, people fall in love online without ever having seen each other in person and the people they fall for can later turn out not to be the sex and/or gender they originally told their "partner" they were. Then, of course, the people who have been catfished are distraught and cry and make for great television. But why does it even matter? If you're in love with someone, does it not transcend gender? Is our heteronormative culture so ingrained within each of us that we sacrifice true love for the sexual orientation we have always thought we had? None of these questions can be answered easily, but I am glad there is at least one mainstream movie this Oscar season that is getting us thinking and talking about more complicated views on gender and sexuality. 
I think that this is a really interesting point. The movie gives the operating system a sex even though she clearly does not have one. But simply because Phoenix chose to have a female voice on the operating system it took on the gender role of a female. And yes i do think that this transcends into a third gender because she can't have a specific sex. Though she may take on female roles and be similar to what females do, she obviously does not have a female body so it can't be that. So I don't think that this would be considered a heterosexual relationship, it would have to be something in between. But I don't know how to classify that because they never actually have sex, they just talk. That is a very confusing thing to think about.
ReplyDeleteI think that society has affected us so much that people would sacrifice true love for what they think is their sexual orientation. It is so engrained in most people that they are straight that if they would be catfished like that they would completely reject the idea of homosexual relationship.