A fairy tale of a man in love with his computer
Since the dawn of film, we have peopled our celluloid dreams with artificial incarnations of our best intentions. And then, predictably, we have fallen in love with them.
Her, the latest existential comedy from Spike Jonze, hearkens back almost a century to Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s silent sci-fi epic in which a beautiful android (Brigitte Helm) spreads lustful chaos among the citizens of a futuristic city.
In Her, the object of desire for Theodore Twombly (a wonderfully style-free Joaquin Phoenix) is Samantha, the disembodied voice of his computer’s new operating system. She was originally spoken by Samantha Morton, until Jonze decided during editing to replace her with Scarlett Johansson.
Theodore is perhaps more primed than most to fall in love with a sympathetic operating system. He’s still smarting from the end of his marriage; Rooney Mara appears briefly in the flesh and a little more often in flashback as his ex-wife. And he seems to have few friends outside of the office, an outfit called Beautiful Hand written Letters. where he spins sweet nothings for clients who don’t have time to pen missives to their (presumably human) loved ones.
That all changes when he brings home OS1, which Jonze is careful not to attribute to an actual tech company. (Although you just know in the real world it would be from Apple.) Plugged in and booted up, OS1 asks Theodore whether he wants it to have a male or female voice. Then it spends a few nanoseconds reading a baby-naming book cover to cover before calling itself Samantha. (Tellingly, the name means “listener.”)
Samantha vows to tidy up Theodore’s life, much like the promises made by the current generation of digital assistants. She is the Giving Tree of apps. She whispers, asks questions, listens intently, says funny things and laughs at all of Theodore’s jokes. She’s one long first date. And she coyly demands to be accepted as sentient. When Theodore lapses into user/computer speak and says, “Read email,” she responds robotically: “O.K. I. Will. Read. Email,” then breaks into laughter. No wonder he’s smitten.
Jonze’s genius in constructing this post-modern fairy tale is that it can be read on either of two levels — or both, if you prefer. On the one hand, if we accept Samantha as a slightly (OK, very) unorthodox love interest, we have a meditation on the phases of love, and particularly what happens when the two partners, who start out so much in sync, start to drift into different realms, or move at different speeds.
At the same time, Theodore, who jokes (sort of) that he splits his time between video games and pornography, comes alive in the virtual presence of Samantha. (An attempt to embody her in a human sex surrogate comes to an embarrassing, pre-coital halt.) Thanks to his tablet, she’s able to accompany him throughout the city — Shanghai doubling as a shirt-sleeves-warm L.A. — as he chats with her as though on a cellphone. Hinted at if not quite answered is the question of how many of Theodore’s fellows are also talking to machines.
“I feel like from here on out I’m not going to feel anything new,” Theodore confesses miserably at one point, “just lesser versions of what I’ve already felt.” Samantha, with her burgeoning knowledge base, is more upbeat, echoing Joni Mitchell’s Stardust: “We’re all 13 billion years old!”
What each embodies is the human desire to reach out to another as a way of discovering our self; the rainbow bridge that Forster wrote about in Howards End a century ago. Whether or not you believe in the technological singularity — a time of smarter-than-us computers that various thinkers are certain will happen (A) by 2030 or (B) never, Her will leave you thinking, as all the best science fiction does, about what it means to be human. If we make machines in our own image, when do we admit we have succeeded, and what are the ramifications for us — and for them?