On Virtual Love Interests: Vaporware and Her

In Spike Jonze’s new movie Her, a schlubby writer, played by Joaquin Phoenix, falls for his operating system. You can’t really blame him. For one thing, the OS is voiced by Scarlett Johansson. For another, she’s programmed to be compatible with him. To match his wants and his needs. To make his life easier and his interactions with her uncomplicated and undemanding. And this is particularly alluring because relationships with real people are messy. They have jagged edges and they require work and you don’t always get everything you want as soon as you want it. Even in the most loving, equal partnership, there are points of contention and hidden land mines, moments of disagreement that can render you frustrated or angry or irritated. Hollywood may package up romance as seamless and zipless, but the person you wake up next to in the morning is a person, with their own wants and needs and dislikes. Theirs will never align precisely with yours; just as importantly, yours will never align with theirs. And so if you’re raised by movies to expect that once you find the love of your life, or even the love of the next six hours, it’s all slo-mo montages and near-psychic agreement, you’re going to get a rude surprise the second you discover that your partner’s wants and needs are just as valid as your own, and that you’re going to have to put in honest effort to support and sustain what you have.

That, in large part, was what I was trying to get at in VAPORWARE. The protagonist, Ryan, has relationships with multiple people in his life, and they’re hard. They take effort, to give the person in the relationship what they require or expect. Whether that’s the love and attention he needs to give his partner or the professional and personal respect he needs to give his ex or the friendship he needs to show his best buddy, all of them demand that he make an effort on someone else’s behalf or give up something he wants. What it is he actually wants is unimportant; what matters is that in dealing with the people who are theoretically important to him, he can’t have everything and he can’t have it right away, or he’s going to lose them as parts of his life.

And that’s where Blue Lightning comes from. The game asks him to give up nothing that he wants. There are no compromises, no learning curves or missteps or forgotten anniversaries or moments when he needs to subjugate his desires to Blue Lightning’s. All he needs to surrender is time, and who could possibly begrudge time spent at work? That’s doing something important.It’s the easiest thing to keep doing that, especially if your relationships outside of work are more demanding than the ones on the inside.

Which means, ultimately, that Her and Vaporware are circling the same problem from two very different directions. Her is a marshmallow apocalypse, people sinking into effortless comfort and away from one another. Vaporware is about the cost of people falling into that sort of relationship, particularly the cost to people who are not themselves falling.

You may of course, be asking why I’m choosing now to write about Vaporware. After all, it’s been out for a while. I have new projects. Surely there’s something else to talk about. But sometimes things fall together a certain way. Her came out. Adam Shaftoe wrote a very sharp review of the book that nailed all the points I had been trying to make. And everything came together.

So. Is Vaporware like Her? No. But they’re different aspects of the same issue, different fictional takes on the latest iteration of that age-old question “How are we going to talk to each other?” Read the book, see the movie. Maybe you’ll figure it out. I certainly haven’t.