Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0008
P. Marks
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.
{"title":"“Are these feelings even real?” Intimacy and Authenticity in Spike Jonze’s Her","authors":"P. Marks","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":304918,"journal":{"name":"ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129189871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0011
Cynthia Felando
Cynthia Felando demonstrates the relevance and significance of Jonze’s narrative shorts in his larger filmography. Felando argues that these short films both reflect and enrich our understanding of Jonze’s auteurist preoccupations. The short film is treated as its own genre with important specificities, including several related to storytelling, narrative, character, and genre conventions that differentiate it from the feature-length film. The chapter’s aim is to establish the viability of contextualizing Jonze’s narrative shorts as shorts, and to demonstrate the value of an analytical approach that addresses their continuities with and differences from his feature-length films. Felando considers his narrative shorts in relation to discourses in the emergent area of short form media studies. The primary analytical focus is on Jonze’s fiction shorts, although his other shorts-related titles are cited to demonstrate the persistence of several of his recurring storytelling, character, and thematic strategies.
{"title":"Spike Jonze Shorts Stories","authors":"Cynthia Felando","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Cynthia Felando demonstrates the relevance and significance of Jonze’s narrative shorts in his larger filmography. Felando argues that these short films both reflect and enrich our understanding of Jonze’s auteurist preoccupations. The short film is treated as its own genre with important specificities, including several related to storytelling, narrative, character, and genre conventions that differentiate it from the feature-length film. The chapter’s aim is to establish the viability of contextualizing Jonze’s narrative shorts as shorts, and to demonstrate the value of an analytical approach that addresses their continuities with and differences from his feature-length films. Felando considers his narrative shorts in relation to discourses in the emergent area of short form media studies. The primary analytical focus is on Jonze’s fiction shorts, although his other shorts-related titles are cited to demonstrate the persistence of several of his recurring storytelling, character, and thematic strategies.","PeriodicalId":304918,"journal":{"name":"ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129731620","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0009
Frances Shaw
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.
{"title":"Machinic Empathy and Mental Health: The Relational Ethics of Machine Empathy and Artificial Intelligence in Her","authors":"Frances Shaw","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":304918,"journal":{"name":"ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze","volume":"2 2-3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132454711","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0001
Kim Wilkins, Wyatt Moss-Wellington
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.
{"title":"Introduction: Jonze Between the Lines","authors":"Kim Wilkins, Wyatt Moss-Wellington","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":304918,"journal":{"name":"ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze","volume":"112 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131693588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0005
Kim Wilkins
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.
{"title":"“You can be John Malkovich”: Celebrity, Absurdity, and Convention in Being John Malkovich","authors":"Kim Wilkins","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"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\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":304918,"journal":{"name":"ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125301608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0013
L. Westrup
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.
{"title":"Spike Jonze’s Abbreviated Art of the Suburbs","authors":"L. Westrup","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":304918,"journal":{"name":"ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121399651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0010
Richard Smith
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.
{"title":"The “tedious yammering of selves”: The End of Intimacy in Spike Jonze’s Her","authors":"Richard Smith","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":304918,"journal":{"name":"ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze","volume":"88 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122764190","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0003
Eddie Falvey
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.
{"title":"“I’ll eat you up I love you so”: Adaptation, Authorship, and Intermediality in Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are","authors":"Eddie Falvey","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":304918,"journal":{"name":"ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128842985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0004
Yannis Tzioumakis
This chapter examines the production background of Jonze’s first feature film, Being John Malkovich. Jonze put Being John Malkovich together with the participation of both production companies and music labels (such as Michael Stipe’s Single Cell Pictures), and a new distribution company, USA Films. Although largely unrecognized at the time, USA Films also released Traffic and The Man Who Wasn’t There, before merging with other companies to become Focus Features. As Being John Malkovich went on to become a quintessential ‘indiewood’ film, this chapter examines the film’s role, and indeed the role of Jonze more broadly, in the shift toward the incorporation of global finance and distribution structures within the independent film sector. The chapter posits that Jonze’s diverse media background and ability to traverse entertainment sectors can be seen as a key example of indiewood’s drive to push independent filmmaking into new arenas in the late ‘90s.
{"title":"Converging Indiewood: Spike Jonze, Propaganda Films, and the Emergence of Specialty Film Giant USA Films","authors":"Yannis Tzioumakis","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the production background of Jonze’s first feature film, Being John Malkovich. Jonze put Being John Malkovich together with the participation of both production companies and music labels (such as Michael Stipe’s Single Cell Pictures), and a new distribution company, USA Films. Although largely unrecognized at the time, USA Films also released Traffic and The Man Who Wasn’t There, before merging with other companies to become Focus Features. As Being John Malkovich went on to become a quintessential ‘indiewood’ film, this chapter examines the film’s role, and indeed the role of Jonze more broadly, in the shift toward the incorporation of global finance and distribution structures within the independent film sector. The chapter posits that Jonze’s diverse media background and ability to traverse entertainment sectors can be seen as a key example of indiewood’s drive to push independent filmmaking into new arenas in the late ‘90s.","PeriodicalId":304918,"journal":{"name":"ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133290060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-10-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0006
Julie Levinson
This chapter explores how Adaptation borrows, repurposes and subverts some of the concerns of the male melodrama. Nina Baym’s notion of “melodramas of beset manhood” is applied as a framework to describe Adaptation and its relation to a spate of comedies across the past twenty years that present beset manhood in comic form. Levinson works through the ways in which Adaptation’s particular perspective on midlife masculinity gets realized through – and, perhaps, finds an analogue in – its fractured narrative structure.
{"title":"“I can’t sleep. I’m losing my hair. I’m fat and repulsive”: Crises of Masculinity and Artistry in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation","authors":"Julie Levinson","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474447621.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores how Adaptation borrows, repurposes and subverts some of the concerns of the male melodrama. Nina Baym’s notion of “melodramas of beset manhood” is applied as a framework to describe Adaptation and its relation to a spate of comedies across the past twenty years that present beset manhood in comic form. Levinson works through the ways in which Adaptation’s particular perspective on midlife masculinity gets realized through – and, perhaps, finds an analogue in – its fractured narrative structure.","PeriodicalId":304918,"journal":{"name":"ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze","volume":"159 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133463230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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