So we return to the original question: Is Michael guilty, guilty of not being able to recognize the people he is meeting — or, and hereby the simple psychological flaw gains socio-political weight, are we guilty of pretending to be better than him? It is this question that prevents Anomalisa from becoming a comedy, which renders the seemingly comical effect of having female characters being voiced by a man into an unsettling viewing experience. We realize that we’re not that different. So, let us tackle this question by having a closer look at the case at hand, Michael, and then see what an actual encounter, what real recognition might look like.

We’ve already observed that Michael is able to distinguish people. This means that he remains within a functional context, in as much as the interlocutors only meet in virtue of their functions (waitress-client, porter-guest, taxi driver-passenger) and within an economical context, in as much as there’s always a goal with a well-attributed value: the porter brings the bags to the room and gets a tip, the taxi driver gets his fare, the drinks get paid. Negatively we could derive the elements of true encounter from that; it would need to be essentially non-functional and non-economical. That doesn’t mean that we can’t derive pleasure from meeting friends or that we can’t gain from it by exchanging knowledge or gossip, but, to indicate something ‘deeper’, these can only be understood as a secondary side-effect.

The question arises: Does Anomalisa show us such a real encounter at any point? We might be quick to point to the affair of Lisa and Michael as an obvious suspect. Indeed, only Lisa keeps her true face and voice in Michael’s world — but, alas, only for a short while. This failure is the clearest sign that it was never a real encounter. It was utterly unstable, like Constantius’, Kierkegaard’s alias in Repetition, sudden and unexpected day of joy, which ends because of an irritating eyelash. And it is also Michael’s irritated reaction against Lisa’s whims, her use of a stereotypical sentence that brings us to the heart of the problem. For it is his constant irritability with people — an irritability that is transferred to the viewer as well, and hence also works as a technique of focalization — that is a sign for how his intersubjective experiences remain in the outward (functional, economic), instead of becoming, as one might say, encounters soul to soul — inward, intimate. Michael gets impatient when the people around him try to go beyond the functional with meaningless chatter. Meaningless and useless, sure, but a chatter which gives the conversation a flair of the humane. We get impatient with a person that tells us a story because we are pressing them to ‘get to the point’ — but maybe the true reason for the digressions is that our conversation partner wants us to participate in her life. Patience, understood in that way, stands apart from ‘waiting to receive certain information’ and needs to be understood as a fundamental precondition to allow the individual to become visible.

Michael’s one night stand, as sensual as it was, remained impersonal. The unsettling effect of that scene on the viewer was undoubtedly intended, a sign for its lack of intimacy. The important thing is to note that requirements for it were missing from both sides. First of all, a real encounter couldn’t occur, because Lisa was seduced by Michael’s fame, not his individuality; she fell for him because she admired him as a once unreachable star. Once we step out of Michael’s perspective, in which he’s in love with the only unique being of the world, we easily see that the shy and unpopular Lisa — as well as her “usually more popular” companion Emily — is enchanted by the attention of a man she admires so much, that she went on a road trip and booked a hotel just to hear him speak, even though she could barely afford it. It was all but an affair among equals. The conditions for a real encounter weren’t fulfilled from Lisa’s side, but, and here’s the second issue, not from Michael’s side either. Even though we might believe him for a minute when he speaks of “the floodgates being open” after meeting Lisa, it becomes painfully obvious by the end of the movie, that the whole ‘encounter’ occurred on a private battlefield. Even this gesture of hope to open up to the outside failed. Michael is indeed a classic example of Kierkegaard’s demonic, who communicates without really wanting to, but who remains sealed within.

It is indeed a battlefield, because throughout the movie, particularly in his dream, it becomes more and more obvious that Michael is suffering from his condition and is trying to fight it. He is, one could say, struggling with himself, or, rather, with his own desperation. His writing consultation books for customer service was maybe an attempt to resolve it. With Freud one might speak of repression and sublimation; but let’s not step too far into theory here. Rather, this outward gesture of therapeutic expertise can be seen as testifying to the inner struggle, the gnawing urge to understand the other, to get through to the individual. Why does that fail? Because the therapeutic mode creates a distance that is also hierarchical (as in: doctor-patient) — another movie that also dealt with the failure of trying to therapeutically understand another human being was, by the way, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. Michael tries to understand, he contemplates about the other and ends up writing about the most impersonal and maybe even most dreaded type of human communication: customer service. He remains in the observer’s position and acquires the impression of superiority that accompanies that — we’ll deal with his narcissism in a second. In any case, the method Michael has decided to use to deal with his issue has only increased his distance from other people. And yet, we need to understand, that ‘decreasing’ said distance, as the seemingly obvious solution to the problem, is no less an effort than the diligent study of human interaction.

Understanding individuation as an effort is a major aspect of Henri Bergson’s philosophy. Borrowing from William James’ pragmatism as much as from insights of evolutionary biology, Bergson understood that to live is to act and that our interactions with the outside world, as nature intended it, is inherently to be practical. But just as the wolf doesn’t distinguish between kid and lamb, in general, we don’t distinguish individual lambs either (see his essays about Laughter). In other words, we generally remain in the ‘general’. To recognize an individual, on the other hand, is an effort, a continuous effort even, as we always have the penchant to fall back to the functional generality. But the more we put in the effort of individuation, the closer we are getting to the ‘true’ nature of things, as Bergson considered every moment, every being, every true inner sentiment to be unique and irreplaceable (he used the beautiful term nuance to express that) — and while not everyone might be willing to go that far, we will surely appreciate this valuable insight when it comes to understanding the true encounter. What we gain from it in particular, is the understanding that we can’t blame Michael for lacking something, like empathy, but rather for not willing to raise a certain effort, to traverse the distance that stretches between two people. This effort, that breaks through all hierarchies, is categorically different from a diligence that flatters the studious “expert on people” with a false sense of self-worth.