“You know it’s..hard for sure. But there’s something that feels so good about sharing your life with somebody.”
Her is a brilliant cinematic treatise on love in the age of technology and how human interaction has been affected as a result. The film is set in Los Angeles in the not too distant future and follows Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) after his purchase of an advanced, new, operating system/personal organizer for his phone called OS1 and named Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) that he subsequently falls in love with.
This love affair, and the film itself, serves as a metaphor for the increasingly technologically dominated lives of the citizens of the western world and a satirical warning against where this trend is headed. A commercial in the film for OS1 subtly hints at this, depicting people wandering aimlessly on a beach until a voice begins to tell them about “the first artificially intelligent operating system. An intuitive entity that listens to you, understands you, and knows you.” Upon release, the average reaction to Her’s premise was that it was ridiculous on its face, a human being in love with a computer? What is that? But in the years following the release of the film, we now see that perhaps its message was more prescient than many believed when first hearing of it. Many times, art is at the forefront of examine our society and holding a mirror up to us all, forcing us to analyze and consider how we think and behave. Her’s brilliance and resonance for me lies in how it delves into how we’ve changed as a society as a result of the technological advances we’ve made and whether the technology that we’ve accepted as having had an endless positive effect on our lives may also be hurting us as well.
The film’s opening, with Theodore at his job as a writer for hire for people who want to send love letters to their partners, jumps right into the film’s theme of how technological advances have disconnected human beings from one another; in this case the outsourcing to a faceless corporate employee of something as personal and intimate as a 50th anniversary note from a wife to a husband, an intimate retelling of all that they’ve been through and everything that he has meant to her.
After a long day at work, Theodore goes home alone, drifts off into memories about his time with ex-wife Catherine (Rooney Mara) and has an unfullfilling, chatroom phone sex tryst with a tele-escort (voiced hilariously by Kristen Wiig). The tele-escort’s weird kink only underscores the cold, impersonal, robotic nature of the encounter and leaves Theodore too aware of his loneliness. His retreat into technology to mask the pain from his impending divorce is unsuccessful but indicative of a society that values the perceived safety and control of impersonal technological connection over emotionally fraught and uncontrollable human connection.
Theodore’s behavior and how it mirrors real life human interaction in the age of technology is what made this film resonate with me instantly during my first viewing. The dissolution of his marriage has left Theodore scarred and hesitant to embark on another journey toward love and human connection since he’s all too aware of how disastrously and hurtfully it can end and afraid that he can never again reach the highs that he had with his ex.
The advent and increasing popularity of internet dating, dating apps, and advanced technology in general, have created a world where human interaction has been reduced to meat market of sorts where human beings are commodified and selected as products rather than people with whom a meaningful connection can be made. This major shift in how generations of people seek out and find partners seems to be having an increasingly deleterious effect on those same people. In some countries, the availability of technology to create a refuge away from real life emotion and connection has become almost a crisis.
Social media has given younger generations more of an audience than perhaps any generation before but, some studies have shown that nearly 60 percent of millennials report feeling lonely. As the oldest millennials head into their mid-30s, a Pew study found that among the recently married, 88 percent had met their partners without the help of the internet. Despite making people more connected than ever to more people than ever, the internet’s usefulness for creating intimate connections still has yet to be fully realize, if it ever can be at all. The phenomena of “ghosting” in the internet dating age, abruptly cutting off all communication with a potential mate as a way of indicating an end to your interest, speaks to the crutch that the anonymity of online interaction has provided people and what Her explores.
When Theodore’s friends attempt to set him up on a blind date, you can see his face flood with dread at the thought of trying to connect with another person. During the date itself, after the girl (Olivia Wilde) kisses Theodore and asks him if he looking for something serious, Theodore hesitates and again avoids even the possibility of forging any kind of connection with another person. The fact that upon returning home from the disastrous date, he becomes “intimate” with Samantha for the first time makes this even more clear. As we saw during his attempt on the phone sex hotline, anytime that Theodore is faced with the challenges and pains of love with another human being, he retreats to the comfort of technology.
While it does explore the implications of technology on humanity, Her does also make the statement that the issue of human interaction does still ultimately fall onto humanity itself and isn’t simply left to the whims of the machines that we have created. Theodore’s relationship with Samantha does evolve and play out similarly to any other relationship between humans. In a bit of black comedy, after Samantha disappears following some relationship strife and her sudden cozying up to the AI version of a long deceased author, she returns to a panicked Theodore and reveals that she also “sees” 8,316 other people in her duties as an OS and has fallen in love with 641 of them. The absurdity of that number, and Theodore’s realization that he is surrounded by countless other men completely immersed in their phones as he is, finally breaks down the illusion of an uncomplicated love that he has created for himself. In reality, the love he has with his phone is just as complicated and emotionally fraught as with a woman. No matter what it’s source, when you choose to fall in love romantically, the potential for heartache and unwieldiness will always be there. Learning how to navigate this is integral in learning how to love at all. The last words Theodore and Samantha say to each other illustrate this:
Theodore: I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you.
Samantha: Me too. Now we know how.
We end the film with Theodore turning to his neighbor Amy (Amy Adams) for comfort. Like Theodore, she retreated into a relationship with technology following the painful end of a tumultuous relationship. After her electronic companion goes offline as Samantha has, they go to the roof of their building and just sit together, shown amidst Theodore’s dictation of a letter of apology to his ex-wife for being unable to love her adequately during their marriage. The scene is subjective and open-ended, lacking any definitive statement on what it means; my interpretation is that both Amy and Theodore, now free from their avoidance of reality and the potential for hurt that comes with human connection, are able to realize what has been there in front of them the entire time, each other.
If Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the best, most honest portrayal of life that I’ve even seen put to screen, Her is its futuristic counterpart; an unflinching soothsayer, warning us all where love could take the populace as technology increasingly claims parts of our lives. The film is a fascinating look into how human interaction and connectivity has evolved in such a short time, the effect it has on us all, and how intrinsic these issues are to the human experience and psyche, regardless of the circumstances of the time. As society becomes more immersed in technological advances, it remains to be seen just how relevant Her and its premise will become to how we live our lives.
Image: Warner Bros.
