A conversation

As the EDGE interview has been doing once a year since 1998, it has given the world its annual question. The question of this 2015 states: "What do you think about the machines that think?". Or what it's just like it: "What do you think about artificial intelligence?". There is in its interesting web page a large army of scientists, writers and philosophers trying to figure out presence of future time, the one that will come, in our present and stuff like that.

It's been thanks to the EDGE's question that I've looked over the best movie I saw during the year 2014 again: the great Her, directed by Spike Jonze and starred by Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson's voice-over. In Her, the leading role, Theodore, a solitary guy who writes letters for others for a living falls in love with Samantha, an operating system programmed to satisfy all needs of the user and which the director and screenwriter's imagination supplies with conscience and female gender.

Hundreds of reviews have been written about Her. Most of them theorize about our relationship with machines that think and make projections about social changes that will come when artificial intelligence inundates our lives.

However, Her still delights me for the opposite, because it's a terrific vindication of the most fiercely human element: word. And specifically, of word as a basic pillar of sentimental relationships. Her asks for the central role that conversation must take up in loving relationships and that it has been sneaking away. Nothing older or more everlasting. Theodore, the solitary leading role, doesn't fall in love with Samantha's tranquil and warm voice. He falls in love with a dialog, with an interpretation, with someone who talks to him and helps him get over his emotional conflicts. Her is, first of all, a resounding memory of the power that affective bonds have on pure corporal attraction. Because the voice Theodore falls in love with lacks a body but he gets the feeling of being loved, listened to, and understood. We live among more and more intelligent machines, in more and more sophisticated cities, and in bodies mistreated until reaching the ebony level. But we inhabit a world destroyed by lack of communication, points out Spike Jonze, on account of the antihero Theodore. The Uruguayan writer Ida Vitale said so not long ago: "La información está sobrevalorada. La gente está dentro de sus casas pero fuera del mundo".

So if we want a sentimental relationship to be possible, word is the indispensable cement for it. This sacred commandment of affective life is certainly often reminded to me by my friend the writer José Lázaro with a Nietzsche's aphorism in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister: "Man soll sich beim Eingehen einer Ehe die Frage vorlegen: glaubst du, dich mit dieser Frau bis ins Alter hinein gut zu unterhalten? Alles andere in der Ehe ist transitorisch, aber die meiste Zeit des Verkehrs gehört dem Gespräche an". A conversation. It turns out that marriage is held up by a warm, unhurried, endless conversation... A conversation... Love is a long conversation. Like the one that Theodore and the Operating System Samantha have in Her. Like the one that the poet Pere Gimferrer and his wife María Rosa Caminals struck up for thirty-three years until she died and he buried her during a fall twilight which was painted with gouache by Arcadi Espada, the best journalist in Barcelona. A free, with no emotional baggage, and aroused conversation, like the one of doctor Bruno Sachs with his girlfriend, told by the doctor and writer Martin Winckler from the waitress's eyes from a cafeteria where the couple meets in the afternoons: "Ils viennent presque toujours ensembles. Et quand ils sont ensembles, ils parlent. Ils parlent beaucoup, parfois, pendant un bon moment... J'entends parfois des bouts de la conversation. Ça commence: " Est-ce que tu sais ce qui s'est passé ce matin ? ". Et elle: " Dis-moi... ". Ils sont amoureux, et ça dure. Ça se voit dans la manière qu'ils se parlent... Ils ne regardent jamais autour quand ils sont assis à la terrasse; en échange, des autres couples ont l'habitude d'être un celui qui parle et un autre celui qui regarde autour, pour voir s'il reconnaît quelqu'un ou pour voir s'il est reconnu. Il avait l'habitude d'être taciturne et maintenant il en est moins à mesure que les mois passent". It turns out that it's a conversation that stabilizes our loves and gives us calm. And it does even though our technical world claims it really fast. But love is merchandise that can't be bought made. We need to know each other, we need to talk to each other unhurriedly and for a long time to create mutual understanding with each other and feel embraced, understood and defended.

All of this life fire, this homage to word, to its ability to hold the biggest love stories (Jacques Lacan felt sexually aroused while just talking to his disciples) is what Her is about, a weird, brave and very exciting movie. Simply, a movie spoken.