There’s a discussion early in Operator about the difference between sympathy and empathy. The first is the capacity to feel bad for someone else’s condition, the second is to understand the feelings of another person. I found myself struggling to bridge that gap, between sympathy and empathy, with Operator.
A fairly standard romance, with a nonstandard lead, Operator is about Joe, a computer programmer (Martin Starr playing a more human, well-rounded variation on his Silicon Valley character, Gilfoy), who recruits his wife Emily (Mae Whitman) to voice the call center app he’s working on for a health insurance company.
Joe is about the least sympathetic person to ever headline a romantic comedy. He’s everything wrong with tech culture, with an arrogant certainty that enough data and programming can steer human outcomes. His work is premised on taking away human voices and replacing them with predetermined paths. Him and his affable start-up coworkers never bother to question the underlying premise of their work. If people hate talking to a machine on the phone, their only path is to construct a better machine.
His wife, Emily, is a more free spirit, spending her nights in an experimental theater scene that becomes the primary mechanism for her to express her inner feelings. After several unconscionable bits of manipulation and dickishness by Joe, it’s hard to get invested in the two staying together. When the movie splits their paths, Operator follows Joe, leaving Emily’s development to her short plays, which are open and raw.
Operator is tightly crafted, with Joe’s maniacal obsession with self-monitoring leading him believably, step by step, to the brink of madness and utter isolation from other humans. But while his anxiety attacks and Spock tics are meant to endear us to him, his passion for self-monitoring looks suspiciously like a neurotic’s flavor of narcissism.
The fact is, Operator isn’t really for me. The central character’s repulsive in large part because of my personal animosity toward tech culture generally and his specific embodiment, which is profoundly self-centered. Despite Operator’s keen script (co-written by Sharon Greene and director Logan Kibens), universally excellent performances and human honesty, I spent a lot of the time struggling against my ingrown biases. Investment in Joe’s emotional life proved to be an empathic bridge too far.
