Love in Unexpected Places: Her/City of Angels/ Tangled Wires

Love in Unexpected Places: Her/ City of Angels/Twisted Wires

We're all connected now every hour day and night, but also disconnected in so many ways. It’s the silver lining… *and the storm cloud.

So when I feel a bit of kindness, love or compassion from an unexpected place, online or off, I hold that close to my heart. 

I saw the movie Her years ago and couldn't remember many scenes but never forgot the wild, deep emotions I felt watching it. 

It’s the story about a human played by Joaquin Phoenix dev a friendship then falling in love with an AI-created-being played by Scarlett Johansson.

A big reason I love this movie is because of JP’s performance. I have loved—that verb should probably be adored— Joaquin Phoenix for a long time. If you’ve listen to this podcast before, you know about my undying love for Keanu Reeves, and Joaquin Phoenix is right next him on the pedestal—there’s a soulful vulnerability in their performances that just gets me.

that soft open vulnerability in JP performance in this movie stabs me in the heart the entire time.

I think this is a movie about the transformative power of open hearts, of Love and relationship, where ever those relationships are found. 

In Her, Joaquin Phoenix is Theodore, a man who makes his living as a professional letter writer– Okay people you know about me meeting my ex as a penpal. So right off the bat I loved this story.

[Clip letter aloud]

Theodore is full of eloquence and emotion at work, but depressed and grieving outside of it because of a painful drawn-out divorce. 

He distracts himself from lonlinesss and grief by gaming and surfing online. Most of his real life relationships are kept at the surface.

He lives in a smoggy gray distopian urban landscape that is supposed to be LA but is barely recognizable.

 one day while commuting to work he sees a advertisement for new interactive AI op system. 

Theodore mostly wears beige throughout the movie but always paired a  orange top, which matches this operating System logo color.

It’s close to monks robe color. In Buddhism saffron orange symbolizes illumination, the highest state of perfection. Spike Jonze is such a cool director.

[Who are you clip]

[Clip Intro to Sam]

As Samantha starts to fill more and and more of his emotional and even logistical needs perfectly, Theodore’s feelings of loss and grief and isolation from the world start to fade.

 then the organic messy emotions that he’s locked away start to seep into this virtual, synthetic world.

[Clip morning convo]

Omg heartbreaking. a conversation with someone who shows such compassion when you’re feeling down and vulnerable? The interpersonal dream.

His personal growth and her programming start to blend the organic and synthetic, and when Theodore takes Sam out with an earbud and his smart phone camera, like an actual date, she plays an adorable game with him, to get him out of his Head and interact more spontaneously with other humans.

[Clip public game]

As they get to know each other, their emotional States start to blend like they sometimes do in human relationships. who's to say who's emotions are actually programmed? The human or… The machine?.

[clip after blind date]

After they have virtual sex, their relationship brings up fears and desires for human and machine that they try to navigate together. 

to me this whole story is a metaphysical exploration of the nature of love. what’s true intimacy? You can fall in love with someone neveer touch them, from reading their thoughts and emotions in a letter, you can fall in love with someone's breath and emotions in their voice on the phone, you can love a virtual friend ouve never met,,,… How is Love created? is it ever lost even when the person isn't physically with us?

Oh my gosh cried so much with the poignancy of it.  

This isn't  a happy ever after but it's a beautiful look at Love and romance like a shirt turned inside out. What’s in the margins? 

As Samantha says the more we love, the more our heart expands. I'm yours and I'm not yours.

These kinds of stories tend to be a little emotionally cooler, more Intellectual,  yearning, and that's what makes them even more exquisite to me.

Another movie like this is City of Angels. It’s loosely based on Wings of Desire starring Bruno Ganz as an angel who becomes mortal so he can romance a lonely trapeze artist. It’s set in Berlin, and it's such beautiful story — so worth tracking down.

City of Angels stars Nicholas Cage as an angel, Seth who falls in love with maggie, a highly respected but all too mortal surgeon played by Meg Ryan.

At the start of the movie she has a bit of an cocky attitude, God complex. Then one day she does everything right in surgery but one of her patients dies, 

 Seth hears her anguished thoughts about what she could've done differently, and tries to comfort her and begins to follow her.

 they each save lives in different ways and he gradually makes himself known to her in conversations of compassion and understanding.

He starts to fall in love with her, and she starts to fall in love with him, but The only way Seth can offer the love she deserves—with touch and kisses etc.—is by literally falling to earth. making the choice to become mortal using his free will but Then exposing himself to all of the pain and struggles of ordinary beings.   

Seth has otherworldly powers to change lives, but all he wants is an imperfect, messy, authentic human relationship with Maggie.

[he Love you clip]

There's something non- heavenly about not being able to truly love someone freely and fully. There's something less than heavenly about love when it’s messy and imperfect. 

this is another not-happy ever after story that’s still manages to be a beautiful Romance. 

He desires, she desires and for one beautiful moment they meet and overlap — and maybe that's the best of what we can hope for on this earth. 

[Fin speech]

And now a happy synthetic/organic love story. The romance novel Tangled Wires could be summed up like this: what if a smart, good scientist working at her Family’s biomedical firm fell in love with an Android so perfect, Smart and handsome, he was created just to achieve the greedy aims of her scientist-inventor father.

Matthew, this mechanical Pygmalion, detests his invention, because he believes it was for the wrong reasons. but he admires and desires his creator’s daughter, Charlotte the goood scientist, who wants to use the android’s schematics to create new synthetic organs. He thinks it could create a black market. She believes that synthetic organs could save lives.

Now that is a true enemies to lovers story. Who decides what's good, rspnsible progress? The humans or the machines?.

This whole book turns Alpha Trope on head: as you read this story  Matthew seems to have organic sexual responses to Charlotte and you wonder if he's been programmed have these, to control through emotion? Or was he programmed to be responsive to just the right human like Charlotte?

She’s so attracted to him but alwas wonders — is her lust for him mostly about his external perfection? (By the way he's got warm synthetic skin and working parts if you know what I mean)

Charlotte loves how Matthew's "put together" on the surface, but she's constantly questioning whether or not his reactions are programming— doesnt this sound familiar?

When we read people, their emotions, how accurate is that anyway? We make assumptions about people’s "programming" all the time, how they're "put together" physically or emotionally, 

I don't always understand the World building in most science fiction but stories like this, one step removed from daily reality, look at big emotional issues with a little bit of distance and turns out, I love it.

All of these stories made me think: am i open to love from an unexpected place? Love with someone put together in a less usual way? Love with someone very different to myself? Do I recognize the gift of love wherever it comes from, however long it stays? Well, Now I say: Bring on that messy unexpected beauty.

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You can find me on Twitter and Instagram at poppy_ confesses

(Any Sound effects you hear are courtesy of the good people at freesound.org under a creative commons license.)

 Find Show notes with links to what I've been babbling about at  confessions of a closet romantic.com 

Special shout out to my listeners in…

So nice to have your company…until next time, wishing you plenty of shame-free ROMance…!

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