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Fuller’s Windrider Film Forum in Northern California recently screened the delightful Hank and Asha—a film about two people who meet but never actually meet.
Asha, an expatriate living in Prague, attends a local film festival and views a film directed by Hank, who lives in New York City. Asha decides to send Hank a video message, thanking him for his film and asking what he’s working on next. So begins a transatlantic back and forth of short films, visual pen-pal moments, and falling in and out of love without ever having entering the same room.
Some years ago, this wouldn’t have been a movie. If you’ve watched a Jimmy Stewart movie of late, or a Hitchcock thriller, or Casablanca even, it’s all about people in rooms talking to each other (and occasionally kissing or fighting). This is part of what makes vintage film so appealing—the cadence of dialect, the unique beat of colloquialisms from the past, and the weirdness of American actors speaking like British people. Special effects consisted of makeup and hair gel. All we had was “each other.”
It’s easy to forget that twenty years ago it was not normal for everyone to walk around with a cell phone and that a thing called the iPod was still years away. In large part we still took meetings, walked into offices where other people worked, and barked into landlines. Hank and Asha reminds us of the world we now occupy, where entire relationships can take place on separate continents via digital transference, and the rules of human contact change week to week. The proximity problem is this: as it becomes easier and easier to not be physically together as a human species, of what value is actual proximity with other people?
Nora Ephron’s 1998 film You’ve Got Mail cleverly presented our new electronic landscape and capitalized on the then-new buzz of having new messages in your inbox, back when those messages were from colleagues, lovers, and friends, not from a thousand e-mail marketing algorithms. It was a novelty, this idea of instant communication, back when instant commination meant a walkie-talkie or a Nextel phone, and not much else.
In Swingers, which emerged before the Internet and e-mail were inseparable appendages of modern life, we watched Jon Favreau’s character get a phone number from a girl, leave her a few hopeful messages, then ‘break up’ with her, all on an answering machine.
Perhaps most fittingly, Spike Jonze’s Her shows us what happens when the technology itself becomes the love interest, and we fall in love with avatars and renderings, instead of actual people. Technology is indeed one of our true partners now, and has become an end unto itself. If we wonder whether or not this will hold our dramatic attention in film, recall one of the most moving films in recent memory, Wall•E, where two machines find purpose, fulfillment, and dare we say love, in each others’ shimmering digital displays. Furthering the proximity question, the recent film Locke, featured just one actor (Tom Hardy), in one car, on the phone, for eighty-five minutes, to rave reviews.
And yet, there is an old idea, deep within us, and surely within the DNA of the Christ follower, that there is something good about human beings together. When we see the almost brutally cooperative model of community in the book of Acts, we can scarcely comprehend it. Selling our possessions and putting our money into one pile so that whoever needs a thing can have it? It’s downright un-American, almost. We have an economic recovery to attend to after all. But, Paul says it right there in Hebrews; “Do not forsake meeting together.”
When new technologies wrap around our lives faster than we can discern what the long term effects on us will be, we tend to ricochet back to some Amish-agrarian fantasy where our children play with sticks and wooden toys while the adults work the land in calfskin garments, deeply in touch with ourselves, the earth, etc. Evangelicals and the church in general are the worst offenders when it comes to fearing all things related to the future. Case in point; I grew up in a church that resisted the presence of the saxophone in worship, fearing probably that sax would lead to sex, or worse as the old joke goes—to dancing.
We have to be honest about what our world has become, and where it’s going. Again, the church is terrible at embracing the future, even as Jesus himself modeled for us a ministry that was completely immersed in his actual culture, not harkening back to some Old Testament glory day. It’s easy for us to fixate on technology—to fear it, to question its benefits and its integration with our lives, and yearn for a simpler time of rotary dials and soda fountains, but we have moved on. As much as I worry about my young sons descending into an isolationist existence of Minecraft and Frozen, theirs is a new generation, apart from mine. For all its lurking menace, the iPad is still the most interesting thing in the house, like it or not.
Film reminds us that story survives and relationships find a way to flourish, no matter where the characters are placed in the physical mise-en-scène. If films like Hank and Asha, Locke, and even Her capture us though their characters are geographically estranged, how does that inform how our real-life stories intersect via technology, and to what degree our physical proximity equals actual human exchange? The early church met together because it was the only way to be together. Even so, as the movement expanded and Paul began to define what the church would become in the coming ages, he had to do so remotely, through his epistles and occasional visits. Even then, he was continually reminding the churches he wrote to that he longed to actually be with them. These were the tweets of the ancient world.
We all know the ease of sending a text—the blasting of raw information, instead of taking the time for what’s now known, oddly enough, as a ‘voice call.’ There are new rules for how we meet, when we meet, and how often we do so, and these rules are different for lovers, friends, family members, and perhaps even pets. It may be that, in our postmodern era, ‘togetherness’ doesn’t mean proximity, just presence. Whether that’s an electronic presence, or a skin-and-bones appearance, seems to vary by degrees and necessities. This is the world we live in now, and we shouldn’t shy away from building strong, authentic, challenging, digital relationships. This used to be called evangelism.
How do we build such relationships? At the starting place of all things—truth. Are we telling the truth about ourselves and our relationships, regardless of the conveyances our messages travel upon? In Hank and Asha, we have a wonderful example of friends who become lovers (sort of), but remain true to themselves. They don’t hide behind profiles and digital figurines, but use technology to enhance their perceptions of themselves, and of their budding relationship. Theirs is a technology of learning and exposure, not of cloaking and artifice. Asha films herself trying Czech beer for the first time in a park overlooking the city, and Hank films himself playing guitar in his underwear in his cramped New York apartment. These are true, vulnerable relationship moments for the characters, and for us, and as most great films do, they transmit the truth about their characters and challenge us to force the truth about ourselves.
I write this on a crowded restaurant patio on a sunny Saturday afternoon. People of all different shapes, colors, and sizes meet and eat together, drink, laugh, and share life and tortilla chips. Not surprisingly, almost all of them are checking their phones, and a few of them audibly report the location of various friends who couldn’t be there, or aren’t there but should have been. As our technologies make it ever easier for us to separate, we still need to seek the truth about each other. If we live with eyes open and—like Hank and Asha—use our digital landscape to explore the true depth of human relationships, then the future is a wonderful, global place where the good news might flourish, not a frightening frontier to be feared.
Let us not forsake “meeting” together indeed.
