The “tedious yammering of selves”: The End of Intimacy in Spike Jonze’s Her

Spike Jonze’s unusual career trajectory, from the outer edges of popular culture to the center of indiewood, has resulted in a distinctive body of work that spans several genres and forms. This chapter traces Jonze’s career to ground a stylistic reading of his fourth feature film, Her (2013). Presented in three parts—Jonze’s short works, Gilles Deleuze’s “implied dream” and the “sound-image,” the lonely social world of Her—the chapter argues that Jonze’s cinematic style is an elaboration of a very simple image of a body in motion. As his style develops the relation of body and world becomes more central and more uncertain. In Her, the world is replaced by media affect and the body experiences itself as an aesthetic form. Smith explores a terrain of loneliness that sits at the center of much of Jonze’s work.

Machinic Empathy and Mental Health: The Relational Ethics of Machine Empathy and Artificial Intelligence in Her

This paper situates a discussion of Her within contemporary developments in empathic machine learning for mental health treatment and therapy. Her simultaneously hooks into and critiques a particular imaginary about what artificial intelligence can do when combined with big data. Shaw threads the representation of empathy and artificial intelligence in the film into discussions of contemporary mental health research, in particular possibilities for the automation of treatment, whether through machine learning or guided interventions. Her provides some useful ways to think through utopian, dystopian, and ambivalent readings of such applications of technology in a broader sense, raising questions about sincerity and loss of human connectivity, relational ethics and automated empathy.

“You can be John Malkovich”: Celebrity, Absurdity, and Convention in Being John Malkovich

Throughout Being John Malkovich, reflexive narrational strategies, diegetic absurdities, and fantastical plot points seek to disrupt the expectations and viewing practices associated with the conventions of mainstream narrative cinema—yet Jonze and Kaufman’s film does not abandon these conventions. Being John Malkovich (like all of Jonze’s films to date) is not comfortably categorized as “arthouse” or “experimental.” Rather, Jonze’s work employs the conventions of the dominant Hollywood norm in concert with eccentric plot devices and irony at various moments in order to subvert audience expectation, which results in an “offbeat” tone or aesthetic. Wilkins argues that the most absurd, or eccentric, narrative elements of Being John Malkovich—its ironic focus on celebrity and the ludicrous Malkovich portal—are precisely the mechanisms that enable an essentially unresolvable existential conundrum to be shaped into the conventionally linear narrative structure. Yet these utterly bizarre narrative inclusions also function as diversions; they aim to distract from or make humorous the very existential concerns they narrativize.

“Are these feelings even real?” Intimacy and Authenticity in Spike Jonze’s Her

While essentially heteronormative, the world of Her’s male protagonist, Theodore Twombly, is complicated by the operating systems, sexual surrogates, blind dates, images, and phone sex aficionados he attempts to be intimate with, to which can be added his estranged wife and the romcom ideal in plain sight, Amy. This chapter explores Theodore’s interactions with seven of the film’s women: his wife, Catherine; ‘Samantha’; ‘SexyKitten’; Amy; his blind date; Samantha’s surrogate, Isabella; and a sexy pregnant TV star he glimpses briefly on a screen, and then incorporates into a phone sex session that turns from fantasy to horror. It investigates the complicated relationship between intimacy and authenticity in a future we are already beginning to inhabit.

Adaptation in Adaptation in Adaptation in Adaptation

This chapter offers a close analysis of Adaptation and its treatment of Darwinian themes. It uses the film to think through some issues in literary and cinematic Darwinism, prompting questions regarding evolution’s use in the humanities: what is the explanatory power of evolutionary biology, and how can we transform evolutionary thinking into meaningfully new information, information that might affect subsequent storytelling or behaviour in the world? Like the film, this chapter is concerned with identifying original thinking—how do we know when we have created something hermeneutically new?

Spike Jonze, Propaganda/Satellite Films, and Music Video Work: Talent Management and the Construction of an Indie-Auteur

This chapter critically evaluates the status Jonze has earned as indie-auteur, a label placing him alongside filmmakers such as Jim Jarmusch, the Coen Brothers and Steven Soderbergh. Jonze’s filmmaking career began in part thanks to his music video work, particularly for Propaganda Films; Stubbs analyses Propaganda Films’ talent management practices and their role in helping to develop Jonze’s brand and industry profile. The chapter investigates the economic and industrial strategies underpinning Jonze’s cultural and commercial profile, synthesizing textual analyses of Jonze’s music videos with marketing and critical discourse analysis. Stubbs aims to reconfigure Jonze’s authorial profile while considering the cultural implications of the indie-auteur label in general.

“I’ll eat you up I love you so”: Adaptation, Authorship, and Intermediality in Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are

Falvey contrasts critical work on Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are with its role at the epicentre of a series of intermedial adaptations, including Jonze and Dave Eggers’ screenplay, Eggers’ novel The Wild Things and, chiefly, Jonze’s 2009 film. The chapter observes how critical frameworks used to explore the novel’s conceptualization of child psychology can be mapped onto Jonze’s story and his aesthetics; Falvey details Jonze’s exploration of the shifting spaces of identity, existence and nature using filmic means.

Spike Jonze’s Screenwriting: The Screenplay

This original screenplay presents a fictional dialogue with Spike Jonze, drawing much of its content from interviews, speeches made by Jonze, and other writings concerning the nature of screenwriting. The dialogue traverses a consideration of the writing process and themes of Jonze’s two original screenplays: Her and Where the Wild Things Are.

Introduction: Jonze Between the Lines

Wilkins and Moss-Wellington describe Spike Jonze’s emergence as a unique voice in American filmmaking at the turn of the millennium, analysing the way his work crosses boundaries between philosophy and genre entertainment, commercial and subversive imperatives, independent and Hollywood modes of production, short work and features. After broadly surveying Jonze’s career and articulating its importance within film studies, the ensuing chapters are introduced.

Spike Jonze’s Abbreviated Art of the Suburbs

The Suburbs project with Arcade Fire brings together many aspects of Jonze’s oeuvre: the poetry of motion he developed in his early work as a skateboarding videographer, the naturalistic work with non-actors that he developed in his documentary work, and the close integration of lyrics and visuals that he developed in his work as a music video director. This essay considers the elliptical audiovisual storytelling that Jonze has mastered in a career spanning disparate filmmaking modes. Westrup proposes that Jonze’s work with Arcade Fire envisions a more holistic melding of music, imagery, and narrative that is fluid and polysemic.