Byung-Chul Han, Anomalisa, and the Myth of Sameness

Paul D. Wilke
Sep 23
11 min read

Updated: Sep 24

Introduction: Anomalisa and Byung-Chul Han

Philosopher Byung-Chul Han has become one of the most recognizable critics of modernity today. His short polemics on the evils of neo-liberalism have struck a chord with millions of readers in the English-speaking world, including me. In Han’s telling, modern life has turned us into identical puppets, manipulated by invisible strings into slavishly serving consumer capitalism. That interests me, which is why his comments on the film Anomalisa caught my attention.

He writes, “…Charlie Kaufman’s stop-motion film Anomalisa mercilessly depicts today’s hell of sameness; it could equally have been called Longing for the Other or In Praise of Love. In the hell of sameness, no desire for the Other is possible” (Han 8).

But after watching the film, I saw something different: not a society collapsing into sameness, but one man collapsing into himself. Anomalisa's 'hell of sameness,' which crushed the soul of its protagonist, Michael, was a distortion created by his depression. The people in his life weren't the unthinking puppets that he saw them as. In other words, the world wasn’t the problem; Michael was.

Maybe the same is true in our own lives. Is modernity really as dystopian as Han describes? Or does it only appear that way for those sensitive and creative types who spend most of their waking hours in mediated, online realities? I would know, I was one of them.

Yes, systemic forces are nudging us toward the kind of flattened and homogenized world Han describes. I agree with him on that. Yet they are not totalitarian. Not even close. It only seems that way if your world is mediated through pixels. But that’s a choice. We still have agency. What if people spent more time in the textured reality of lived experience, rather than in the numbing glow of screens?

Maybe the better question isn’t whether Han is right, but which reality we choose to live in.

These questions were on my mind as I rewatched Anomalisa, with Han’s provocative philosophy echoing in the back of my mind.

To see how this plays out, we first need to step into the bizarre world of Anomalisa.

The Creepy Puppet Planet of Anomalisa

Anomalisa centers on a middle-aged celebrity author named Michael Stone, who has flown to Cincinnati to give a speech about his new book on customer service, one of those dime-a-dozen, cliché-ridden self-help books you’ll find in any airport bookstore.

It’s clear from Michael’s body language in the opening scenes that he is having some sort of existential crisis. Han writes about Michael, “He seems lonely, lost, bored, disillusioned, and disoriented in a meaningless, monotonous, polished society of consumerism and performance.”

Despite his worldly success, he’s lonely and depressed. Everything looks the same; everyone sounds the same; every day, the same. Every interaction and experience has been flattened into a kind of repetition.

It soon becomes clear that all the puppet-people in this world have the same bland faces and the same bland male voice, done brilliantly by actor Tom Noonan. The name of the hotel where Michael stays, The Fregoli, offers a clue about what’s going on here. Fregoli Syndrome is a rare delusional disorder where the sufferer believes that many different people are the same person in disguise.

After checking into the Fregoli, he has an awkward reunion with Bella, a woman he ghosted eleven years earlier. She still carries the emotional scars from that breakup, though Michael is too self-absorbed to notice her pain. Their brief reunion goes sideways after Michael asks her up to his room, presumably for sex. Bella storms off.

Alone again in his hotel room, Michael hears a woman’s voice drifting down the hallway outside his room. He’s stunned. She doesn’t sound like all the other people in his world. The mystery voice turns out to be from Lisa Hesselman, a shy and awkward woman from Akron who has come to Cincinnati with her girlfriend Emily to hear his book lecture.

While Emily looks and sounds identical to all the other puppets in Michael’s world, Lisa is different. She has her own unique voice and appearance. Smitten, Michael invites her back to his room for drinks, where the two get to know each other.

Lisa is self-effacing, emotionally and physically scarred, yet is a sincere and kind person who jokingly describes herself as ugly and uninteresting. Since she hasn’t had a relationship in years, she just assumes she’s not attractive enough to deserve one. Lisa has settled into her role of plain-Jane sidekick next to her more attractive friend.

But to Michael, Lisa shines like an angel sent from heaven, a truly singular woman who breaks through the dull sameness of his world. For the first (and only) time in the movie, he’s happy. He nicknames her 'Anomalisa'— his little anomaly — since she’s so different from everyone else. The two end up making love, a remarkable scene so tender in its realism you almost forget you’re watching puppets. This is what Han meant when he wrote, “Anomalisa is the epitome of the Other who saves us from the hell of sameness. She is the Other as eros.”

Michael had found her, the One, the Other that would rescue him from his emptiness.

If only.

That night, he dreams that the hotel manager and his secretaries chase him through the halls, trying to rip him away from Lisa and claim him for themselves. He wakes in a cold sweat, comforted by the sight of the real Lisa lying beside him.

Over breakfast, he begins imagining a new life with her: leaving his wife, marrying Lisa, and escaping from the dead void his life has become. But then cracks in this fantasy begin to appear. He listens in horror as Lisa’s voice starts to sound like everyone else’s.

As this transformation takes place, he becomes irritable and controlling, criticizing small things about Lisa, like the way she chews her food. None of this bodes well for their future together.

The transcendent love that had enthralled him the night before begins dissolving. Panic creeps in, and his depressed alienation returns with brutal force. Lisa perceives this jarring change but doesn’t understand what’s going on. She apologizes repeatedly, assuming she's at fault, and that in the light of day, he’s seeing her plainness and is revolted by it.

It’s the most heartbreaking scene in the film.

By the time he delivers his keynote speech later that day, Michael’s world is unraveling. He rants incoherently, revealing his despair to a bewildered audience of identical puppets, including Lisa, who sits in the crowd watching in shock. She now looks just like everyone else.

At one point, he blurts out, “I’ve lost my love! She’s an unmoored ship drifting out to sea, and I have one to talk to…I have no one to talk to…I have no one to talk to.”

But he did have someone to talk to…someone to talk to…someone to talk to, and he walked away.

Returning home that night, he finds his wife has invited all their friends to throw him a surprise party welcoming him back. He finds no solace. We see that even his wife and son bear the same generic face and voice. It’s sad because we can tell they do love him.

The film ends in bleak ambiguity: Michael sits slumped in his own home, surrounded by friends and family he no longer recognizes. Whatever love he felt has been smothered by his narcissistic depression. He remains imprisoned in a world perceived without difference, where everyone is identical, and he can love none of them like that.

Just after this, a curious epilogue shows Lisa writing a letter to Michael as she rides back to Akron with Emily. She has her own face again, the one that Michael fell in love with. She’s hurt and confused at how it ended, but still feels transformed by the experience.

Who knows, she writes, maybe they’ll meet again someday under better circumstances. Probably not. But we get the impression that Lisa’s going to be fine. She sees the world clearly, which is sometimes cruel and indifferent, but also full of love and beauty and possibility.

As the scene fades out, Emily, who has been driving and is blurred out for the entire scene, turns to look at Lisa. We see for the first time that Emily also has a unique face. She had it all along. We’re not stuck in Michael’s bizarro world anymore. That only ever existed in his head.

Seen this way, the film isn’t about society at large at all, as Han argues; it’s about Michael’s own incapacity for love. In fact, Michael can’t love because he’s too self-absorbed and critical of others’ imperfections. He is the unmoored ship, drifting further and further from humanity. No one can save him, not even Lisa.

This film wasn’t a critique of the soul-crushing experience of modern life that Han seemed to think it was, so much as a disturbing portrayal of one man’s deep and isolating depression:

“For the depressive performance subject, the self is a heavy burden. It is tired of itself. Entirely incapable of stepping outside itself, it becomes absorbed in itself, which paradoxically results in an emptying and erosion of the self. Isolated in its mental enclosure, trapped in itself, it loses any connection to the Other.”

That's a good description of Michael's mental state, even if Han takes Michael’s perception of the world at face value. But we know by the end of the film that Michael’s world is not reality but a manifestation of mental illness.

Is Michael’s profound alienation a metaphor for how thinkers like Han (and sympathetic readers like me) tend to view ourselves in relation to everyone else? Why bother when the world is populated by puppet people or non-player characters (NPCs) or sheeple, or whatever, none of whom can think for themselves? Not like we do, anyway, right? I took something a little different away from Anomalisa, which is the obvious reminder that how we frame reality dictates our experience of it.

The genius of the filmmaking is that, though we’re viewing the world through Michael’s eyes, we’re hearing the actual words of the characters he interacts with, and those words are not delusions. If you observe closely, many of the characters in Anomalisa reveal they are anything but soulless puppets, even if they all look that way to Michael. Bella’s lingering hurt, his wife’s devotion and frustration, and Lisa’s endearing vulnerability and decency all reveal layered emotional lives that existed independently of Michael’s solipsistic universe.

Maybe there’s a lesson here for us today. Viewing the world in this distorted way can happen to people who spend all their time online. Is it surprising that people start to lose touch with reality if they spend many hours a day online rather than engaging with real people? I don't think it is.

Then, a variation of the psychosis that Michael experienced might appear, where everyone looks and sounds the same, both online and off. Those who dwell entirely in digital space risk sealing themselves off from the wonderful serendipities that come from the offline world, including love and the breathtaking beauty of the natural world, something else we’ve become alienated from.

Otherwise, you’ll get intellectuals like Han who see nothing but darkness and dystopia everywhere. They marinate in online life even as they condemn it, and confuse its shadows for the world itself. The danger is letting their screen-sick vision replace our own.

There's another way.

Personal Photo - The view from a hammock

Final Thoughts

Earlier this year, I bought an app that locks me out of most websites for most of the day. I give myself a short window in the morning and another in the evening to check my paltry social media accounts and read the news before reactivating the blocker for another twelve hours. I also deleted most of the apps on my iPhone, leaving nothing more tempting than a weather app.

The purpose was not to completely divorce myself from technology. That’s not feasible anymore. In any case, there is much about it that I still find amazing and useful. I have no intention of becoming a digital monk. But I don’t want to be a digital junkie either. I've come to believe that staring at a screen all the time is a form of emotional and intellectual addiction that is toxic to human flourishing.

It was hard at first, especially in the frozen gray depths of an Illinois winter. What to do with all that free time I now had? Still, I went ahead and made some dramatic shifts in how I orient my time. Over the following months, I began noticing changes, subtle at first, but soon coming like an avalanche.

It was like going from a crowded, windowless hall, where everyone’s talking over each other and nobody’s listening, to a quiet meadow where the only sounds are the birds and the bugs and the wind blowing through the trees.

I got back into the habit of taking long walks without a set of headphones always pouring a podcast into my ears. I also planted my first vegetable garden this summer, started taking Portuguese lessons, and bought a digital piano to teach myself how to play music, something I had always wanted to do. I also began deep reading with a joy I haven't felt in years.

As I write these words near the end of September, I look out my window and see that the little wildflower garden I planted around a tree stump almost as an afterthought back in May is now a blooming thicket of flowers, filled with green buzzing hummingbirds and monarch butterflies gorging themselves before heading south for the winter.

I also began engaging with people in person, rather than just online. I started volunteering. Best of all, I’ve spent many delightful hours this summer lying in a hammock under two ancient sugar maples in my backyard, not doing one goddamn thing at all but staring up at the lush green canopy above, and the deep blue sky beyond, and watching the squirrels and bluejays go about their days.

I like this very much.

I am more convinced than ever that there is no unified reality around which we all more or less agree. Now there are two. The first is the embodied one of our five senses, tactile and textured, rooted in the immediacy of three-dimensional experience. Here, we enjoy the most agency, though our reach is limited. That vivid reality is what I described above.

This is also where the deepest relationships are to be found, romantic and otherwise, if they are to be found at all. Sure, embodied reality has a slower pace that often feels dull compared to the attention-arresting distractions one finds online. But once you get used to it, there’s no going back.

Then there is the mediated reality of the screen. It now stretches across the globe, yet flattens everything into an impoverished, two-dimensional world of sight and sound. You are in this world as you read these words, just as I was as I wrote them. So, in some sense, there is no pure escape.

When you close your screen, this reality vanishes. But it’s real nonetheless. Our collective gaze makes it real. Alas, to live in the twenty-first century means making some accommodations for mediated reality. There's no going back.

After all, it does expand our reach. It makes our lives easier and reduces friction. Han calls this a tyranny of positivity because it flattens and homogenizes our lives, annihilating serendipity and hollowing out depth and meaning. I agree. It's a shabby substitute for the real thing.

Mediated reality makes for precarious relationships. There’s no touch, no smell, no taste, no eye contact, no body language, no smiles or laughter or the intangible chemistry that binds two people together. Easy come, easy go is this reality's motto.

Han himself diagnoses the condition this way: “A new form of alienation is coming into existence today. It is no longer an alienation from the world or from work, but rather a destructive self-alienation: alienation from oneself. This self-alienation takes place precisely in the course of self-optimization and self-realization.”

Online, every experience is mediated and manipulated by unseen curators. The tech lords of mediated reality are vampires feeding on our hypnotized attention. We should treasure that attention as a finite currency that determines how we experience the world around us and the quality of those experiences.

Han is right in this case to criticize the neoliberalism that drives us into endless cycles of optimization and self-improvement. A year ago, when I was caught in that loop, his words hit harder than they do now.

You see, there is another way. It’s all a matter of how you look at it. We aren’t living in

Michael’s world, and don’t have to live in Han’s mediated nightmare world either. Han is not wrong; that world is real. But it doesn’t have to be this way. To view the world as filled by dimwitted, chattering puppets who all look and sound the same is to creep into the same pathology that Michael suffered from.

I’d rather give my attention to the butterflies and the hummingbirds than to dipshit techbro billionaires.

What about you?