The best way to explain how good this short film is is to tell the story of how I watched it. My wife is no sci-fi buff; on the contrary, she is someone who has not even seen Star Wars (the sacrilege). So settling down one night to watch a film together, I recommended we watch this short by Spike Jonze, all with the promise that we would watch a lighter rom-com afterwards. Not only did I not hear a word of complaint during the approximately thirty-minute running time, I witnessed the quiet appearance of wife-movie-tears at the film’s close.
The protagonist, Sheldon, is a robot with a head made of what looks like a CPU cabinet, from which he pulls a cable that he plugs into a power socket every night to charge. Not the stuff of exciting, light romance. From this starting point, the film manages to extract an extraordinary amount of sympathy through his minimalistic facial expressions. Jonze manages to show the humanity in very simple things: the day-to-day boredom of commuting, working, waiting. For viewers, these emotions are far more common than the passionate overexpression that film can often slip into. Seeing Sheldon do something day-to-day that we must suffer through as well, with the same melancholy that we saunter on with, has a lot more pathos than the obvious ‘do robots have emotion?’ gestures thrown around in other films.
The emotion conundrum has been couched in multiple ways by filmmakers for decades, but always with the ominous sub-text that robots may pose an existential threat because of it. Jonze is no ordinary filmmaker; he is one of the minds behind such mind-benders as Being John Malkovich, and Adaptation. His achievement in I’m Here is perhaps more impressive because he avoids his usual post-modern tricks completely. The simple sense of sacrifice that Sheldon possesses in the name of love is enviable. It is uncomplicated by human problems of selfishness, anger or frustration. When Francesca (with whom he has developed quite a tender relationship) comes to him first without an arm, he unscrews his as a gift; when she comes without a leg he does the same. In the end he is left as but a head: now picture that as the trade-off between love and self-interest. Sheldon possesses a purity of emotion superior to humanity. Why should our complex functioning minds be the ideal version of how emotion manifests?
The world of the film, independently of the powerful story at its core, has insights of its own. Sub-text is used to the level that Hemingway would’ve been proud of; there are histories told in the dialogue left unsaid, and the visuals simply mentioned and not explored. Francesca’s head is more anthropomorphised than Sheldon’s; it is closer to a face than his. Nothing is said of this. It simply reflects that there has been a generational development of robotics, and the corresponding treatment of robots has developed. When Francesca roars away in a car, an old lady at a bus stop yells (in typical ‘old lady on bus’ style – there’s always one), “You can’t drive”. This and the shots of worker robots earlier in the piece tacitly speak about a history of prejudice and subservience, referencing the roles we assume robots will fill as pieces of functional technology. But to get too bogged down in this would be to ignore the pleasantly simple emotional story of Sheldon and Francesca.
Andrew Garfield manages to capture a sense of vulnerability as Sheldon. The film is soft-spoken, subtle, and ultimately compelling. At no point in the thirty minutes are you bored, or annoyed by pretentiousness (a common flaw for a short). Jonze’s cinematic decisions are smart, and extremely touching. It is available on YouTube and I recommend you watch it – all of you.
