ABSTRACT
It is perhaps a truism to say that representations of the future are preoccupied with the past. Films that chart a future world, even at their most utopian, linger on that which has been given up, reminding us that “progress” always entails the dissolution (or at least weakening) of once-valued and familiar forms. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Spike Jonze’s Her (United States, 2013), a film about a man’s romance with an artificially intelligent operating system. This chapter explores the “bibliographic trace” in Jonze’s film, arguing that while preoccupied with artificial intelligence and digital media, the film is awash with references to older communication systems—cursive handwriting, manuscript pages, printed matter. These bibliographic traces work to counter the sleekness and near invisibility of digital platforms, promising tactile intimacy amid anxieties about the relentless turn to the new. In this way, Her gestures not towards a nostalgic vision of the past but rather towards a twenty-first-century intermedial landscape, in which the trace of the book exists alongside emergent new media, helping us to articulate our subjectivities and to navigate our relations with one another.
