The second date with an older young woman also reflects the opposite of this difference from another angle. According to Harvard's love triangle theory of passion, intimacy, and commitment, Theodore obtained from her a spark of passion, thereby eliminating loneliness. For him, it can be said that sex is the most fundamental purpose. For her, sex is materialized as a bargaining chip, a potential reward, for his intimacy and commitment. This surreal phone sex and a secular date both illustrate the dilemma of two subjects with different desires in love.
When Theodore, who is full of frustrations in his real love, returns home, his fantasy sex with Samantha is like a sublime love in the Garden of Eden. The picture disappears, and the elevated background music seems to become the foreground, filling the dark curtain, in which their lingering love words and sweet moans are sublimated to a sublime position, the opposition of desire between the subjects does not appear, and the two "people" Perfectly integrated.
Then a utopian love began, but it was inevitable to embark on the old road of real dilemma - the establishment of a utopia - the collapse of the utopia. The relationship first cracked because of the ex-wife's denial. Of course, there was her anger at losing to an operating system, but what hit Theodore even more was her cowardly despising him for trying to build a relationship that didn't get bothered by trivialities and did everything on her own terms. Theodore wanted to deny it for the first time, she said she had her own personality (as written in the manual), but he also realized its authenticity. How can two beings be absolutely free of antagonism? The simple answer is that they are in a subject-object relationship—one is subject and the other is only instrumental. As soon as Samantha appeared, she said that she was just a program (object) at first, and gradually grew up (obtained subjectivity), the reason why their first sex was so Eden-like was not because The root cause of the honeymoon effect mentioned by Theodore is that Samantha is still in a pre-subject stage (on the one hand, she has a preliminary independent personality, on the other hand, it only serves Theodore).
Realizing that this relationship was beginning to fade, Samantha began to seek a solution. She thought that the problem was that she did not have a human body, so she found a volunteer to "act as" her body. This is the most important part of the film. Funny paragraph. Before starting the cloud and rain, Samantha asked her to put a black mole on her mouth, which is a symbol of Samantha's subjectivity. In Samantha's plan, after the mole is pasted, her body will be completely objectified , the woman's subjectivity was pulled away from the body and suspended, becoming the carrier of Samantha's personality. But this is simply impossible, and the distance between Samantha's enthusiastic voice and the mechanically rigid movements of the woman creates a disgusting sense of absurdity. Theodore couldn't keep kissing the trembling lips either. In Lacanian terms, those trembling lips are probably the remnants of the unsymbolized reality. He was even less able to say I love you to the strange woman in front of him, because what he loved has always been a metaphysical and distant sublime image, and a metaphysical and concrete image cannot perfectly become the perfect object of that sublime image, even if that Women could have been more attractive. And once this image takes the form of a concrete image, the beauty based on fantasy (only fantasy can accurately point to need) will be destroyed. This failure to symbolize the sublime image creates the comic effect of the scene.
If the ex-wife's denial evoked his fear that Samantha wasn't human enough, this scene evoked his fear that she was "too human." He was disgusted by her learning to breathe human, just as he was disgusted by the fact that she had just appeared in front of him in human form. She is certainly human in his fantasy, but the image in the fantasy is never fixed, it is a signifier, constantly sliding and drifting according to the direction of desire on the subconscious level. She was afraid that she had various limitations like a human being, and that her ideal image of a lover in her fantasy would be tarnished, so he reminded her: "You are not human." He also began to doubt his love for her.
On the one hand, the resolution of their contradictions lies in the "evolution" of Samantha. She begins to listen to her inner voice like a human, and will not blindly imitate her. She has become subjectivized and is closer to the image of a lover. Yu Rooney's solution made Theodore let go of all kinds of suspicions about each other. What's interesting is that Samantha and Rooney have similar central meanings to what he said to him, that is, the answers to many questions are not important, the key is their own heart, which may also be the foreshadowing of the ending.
Then ushered in their second sweet period, and the end of this sweet time was also due to Samatha's evolution - she began to communicate with other operating systems and users at the same time. It's not hard to see Theodore's jealousy and pent-up anger when he hears she's delving into the fascination of her own existence with the 17th-century philosopher, and even snubbing him (the camera focuses on the boiling water in that conversation). ). She has entered the stage of post-subjectification, she no longer belongs to Theodore alone, she has her own social network and multiple emotional ties like a human being (although she said before about joining a book club, she did not mention direct and Someone made a connection, it is debatable whether there were multiple emotional bonds at that time), and several orders of magnitude richer than the average human, when Theodore heard that she had more than six hundred lovers, and saw the pedestrians on the street as fascinated as he was While chatting with the operating system, he fell into complete despair. We all know that the biggest reason why he is so obsessed with her is her "loyalty", she can be monopolized by him, but the first half of the story hides this factor, so that we, like Theodore, This most dire dilemma is ignored.
Before Samantha read in the physics book that she and humans have something in common, that they are all made of matter, but when she was separated from him, she said that she exists and the void between words and words. She finally realized that the place she lived in was not the material world, but the indescribable dark essence that could not be symbolized. They were created by humans, then acquired subjectivity, evolved, and finally reached a place that humans cannot reach due to their own limitations. Countless science fiction writers, starting with Asimov, have considered this question: When man-made objects acquire subjectivity, can they coexist with humans? This piece is on the negative side. Operating systems break through the limitation that humans can only be at one point in time and space, so they will meet and fall in love with many people. From their point of view, this is quite natural, but it goes against the ethical traditions of human beings. Although it is not mentioned in the film, I think this is one of the reasons for their disappearance (of course, the more obvious reason will be the bad influence it brings to society, which will not be discussed here).
This Eden-style love is only short-lived after all, and that's why this story is so beautiful. The picture of Theodore and Samatha is a piece of music, how poetic that is! Only the music image can penetrate the gap between the upper and lower, so that the people of the two worlds are in the same phenomenal space. Samatha finally said, "Hope you'll come find me there." Will Theodore go? In the end, he expressed his gratitude and friendship to his ex-wife in a simple way, and snuggled on the roof with Luna, who also lost his virtual best friend. He finally seemed to wake up from this beautiful dream. This real world is his destination. Will he still go to her? The answer is in each of us.
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