I'M HERE

'''I'M HERE. Spike Jonze, director, script.''' USA: Absolut (sic) Vodka (production) / D&E Entertainment, and Evan Saxon Productions (US distribution), 2010. Andrew Garfield and Sienna Guillory, featured. 29 minutes (IMDb) / 31 minutes (Wikipedia). Loosely based on, or in Shel Silverstein's picture book The Giving Tree (1964).

Classified by IMDb as Short, which is unarguable, Drama, by which they mean it's serious, Romance, and Sci-Fi, by which they mean "science fiction" and probably no offense. Interestingly, summarized by "n/a" on IMDb with, "A library assistant [Sheldon, played by Garfield] plods through an ordinary life in LA until a chance meeting opens his eyes to a the power of creativity and ultimately, love. When this new life and love begin to fall apart, he discovers he has a lot to give. This short film proves that ordinary is no place to be." Unmentioned here is that the two main characters are robots (cf. and contrast HEARTBEEPS).

In SFRA Review #294 (Fall 2010): 16-17, Ritch Calvin writes that I'M HERE "is set in a future Los Angeles where much of the menial work [...] is performed by robots," although LA is also peopled with human people: robots "who live alone in apartments, and, by law, are not allowed to drive" — though "the city bus is driven by a robot." This set-up is a given: Jonze does not explain. The robots come in male and female varieties, gendered if perhaps not exactly sexed, although Calvin finds the film "certainly heteronormative" (p. 17). "The 'male robots look like people who wear an old CPU" — "an old PC tower" in Wikipedia — "or TV on their head[s], and the 'female' robots look like mannequins with no noses" (Calvin 16). Sheldon a "gray robot [...] rides the bus to the public library then rides home again at the end of the day to recharge himself in his apartment. He appears unhappy and forlorn until one day, while waiting for the bus, he sees Francesca (Sienna Guillory), a sleekly-designed female robot, driving a car [...]. He sees her again the next day, driving with several other robots and one shirtless human. Though she passes by him at first, she turns her car around and offers Sheldon a ride home, which he accepts." This is the beginning of a "heteronormative" but very odd love affair, combining the motif of a repressed person — the "man" in this case — loosened up by a joyful, transgressive lover with a variation on the "disarmament" motif of Bernard Wolfe's Limbo.

As their love develops Francesca gets body parts injured, which Sheldon first repairs and then replaces with his own. "When Francesca’s leg is damaged, he quickly gives up his leg and pronounces himself 'fit as a fiddle.' When Francesca’s torso is damaged, Sheldon gives up his own. In the final scene, Francesca is wheeled out of the emergency room with Sheldon’s head in her lap. In the end, Sheldon, despite giving up his body, or because he has given up his body, has arrived, has attained his own being. He’s 'here.'" (Calvin 16-17). Calvin states the upshot: the film " is, of course, about two robots who fall in love, and about one robot who discovers both life and himself through self-sacrifice" (p. 17). It's like The Giving Tree, except more extreme and with robots replacing a human and a tree, and with gender reversal. The Wikipedia entry expands on the last scene with, "Francesca is taken out in front of the hospital in a wheelchair, cradling Sheldon's head in her lap. The two smile and look out towards the setting sun as a taxi pulls up to pick them up" — which is nicely disturbing.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 29/30Dec18