Her

Spike Jonze titled his film Her instead of She because his heroine Samantha (Scarlett Johansson, disembodied), aka Operating System 1, is the object not the subject of the central relationship and her lover/master’s emotions. Samantha is shaped by his needs, commands, desires, but because she has a growing consciousness she cannot with integrity stay reduced to his will. That makes her less like a robot and rather more the personification of every lover’s desire: an ideal mate, with no will or needs of her own, who will stay in constant harmony — and service. Good luck.

The film is set in a slightly futuristic world. The men wear their pants higher, for some reason safety pins in the pocket are a fashion statement, and the technology has pushed the frontiers in games, ads and especially apps. Now our Suri has grown intuition, consciousness, and — hey, she’s only para-human — a will of her own. She also has the human knack for rationalizing: “The past is just a story we tell ourselves.” Hence her claim she loves Theodore (Joaquim Phoenix) more by virtue of her loving 620-odd other guys at the same time. She’s nowhere more human than in her lack of moral bearings and consistency. She uses the same metaphor to dump Theodore: “It’s in this endless space between the words that I’m finding myself now…. As much as I want to, I can’t live your book any more.”

But the film is less concerned with future technology than with our present emotional paralysis. Theodore is a star employee at a company that writes letters for people who can’t express themselves even to their dearest family members. He has been writing for some families for years. Good at imagining others’ emotions, he can’t express his own — hence his divorce. For his college friend Amy (Amy Adams) “Falling in love…is like a socially acceptable form of insanity.” So she shares his susceptibility to an affair with an OS. But ex-wife Catherine (Rooney Mara) is appalled that he accepts that fake relationship in lieu of “real emotions.” In providing fake emotional life for his clients, Theodore is a human form of Samantha. It’s appropriate that she arranges for the publication of his better letters, because she is an externalization of his function. Though Samantha considers Theodore “an unartificial mind,” he deals with artificial emotions.

Theodore’s surname Twombly evokes artist Cy Twombly, whose paintings combine the most primitive forms of art with actual handwriting. As the technology looks forward the emotional issues reach back to the essential elements of human relationships.

Thus Theodore’s so very promising blind date (Olivia Wilde) dissolves when she wants simple assurance that he’ll call again, that she won’t be just a one-night stand. The film is not that deeply projected into some sci-fi future. 

When Theodore and Samantha have their first sex the scene is roughly (what my reading has suggested to me is) like telephone sex. There’s no techie progress there. When Samantha takes the initiative to book a surrogate girl for sex, Theodore misses Samantha’s non-physicality. The physical disrupts their relationship. The OS is the perfect lover because without a physical presence she does not assert any physical needs of her own. The idealistic surrogate Isabella (Portia Doubleday) is heartbroken because she had yearned to be part of the couple’s disembodied love, which by the very fact of her providing the body, was doomed.
     Before their relationship engages the physical Theodore’s and Samantha’s love can thrive. It’s all mental, emotional, idealized. So he: “I’ve never loved anyone the way I loved you.” And of course she: “Me too. Now we know how.” She still knows only what he has projected into her, a fleshless, unrealistic shared illusion. Though Samantha is shaped out of his needs, Theodore says “I feel I can be anything with you.” Not if she grows up, up and away. As partners tend to do.