Last time I went to a theater, and it doesn’t happen really often these busy days, I saw this poster of Joaquin Phoenix for an upcoming Spike Jonze’s movie, ‘Her’, and I got intrigued, by the picture, Phoenix’s sad face, all blue eyes on red background. Today, I got another reason to be intrigued even more, when I read that Arcade Fire’s song ‘Supersymmetry’ was in fact originally written for the movie. Actually the song plays during the closing credits.
According to Indiewire, Jonze asked the indie (can we still say this?) band to score his movie 2 years ago, as he said during a Q&A after a Los Angeles screening of the movie:
‘The [band] was working on [their latest album Reflektor] as they were working on this, Win and I started talking about the score about two years ago, and then it kinda seemed like the record sort of informed the soundtrack and the soundtrack informed the record a little bit, and there’s like a song on Reflektor — the last one, ‘Supersymmetry’ — that he wrote for the movie, but then it sort of became something else. It’s actually the last song in the end credits.’
So it means there is even more Arcade Fire music for the soundtrack of the movie! He added:
‘What Win and I started talking about in the beginning was just that we wanted the soundtrack to have this electricity to it, a current to it, but not to be electronic and not to…use synthesizers at all. For it not to feel synthetic, but to feel like hand-made, but still have an electricity to it, and also just to sort of play this sort of romance and love story and longing of Theodore.’
So what’s this film about? IMDB just says ‘A lonely writer develops an unlikely relationship with his newly purchased operating system that’s designed to meet his every need’, and apparently Scarlett Johansson is the voice of Joaquin Phoenix (Theodore)’s operating system. She cleans up his inbox, organizes his hard drive, books his appointments and, the obvious happens, he falls in love with ‘the machine’.
But there’s nothing too futuristic about this story, the man-machine love affair does not seem to belong to the future anymore, since I have read that humanoid robot Kenji was successfully programmed to convincingly emulate certain human emotions by researchers at Toshiba’s Akimu Robotic Research Institute and became extremely attached to a young female intern, even refusing to let her out of his lab enclosure! They had to deactivate Kenji! I don’t know if Jonze read this story but this is not exactly what ‘Her’ is about, this is what he had to say to the New York Times about it:
‘There’s definitely ways that technology brings us closer and ways that it makes us further apart — and that’s not what this movie is about. It really was about the way we relate to each other and long to connect: our inabilities to connect, fears of intimacy, all the stuff you bring up with any other human being’
Spike Jonze has a long history with music as a video director, he already used Arcade Fire’s music for the trailer of ‘Where the Wild Things Are’, and he directed Arcade Fire’s last video for ‘Afterlife’ during the YouTube Music Awards.
‘Her’ will have a limited release on December 18th in New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto before a wide release on January 10th. It sounds interesting, I personally loved his movie ‘Adaptation’ and Phoenix is always brilliant, plus the soundtrack also has the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s ‘The Moon Song’ on it.