Spike Jonze has built his career on
unsettling journeys into the uncanny, from Being John Malkovich
to Where The Wild Things Are. But his latest film, Her,
is unsettling for a different reason — because it’s so sweet and
moving in depicting a romance between a human and a computer.
Spoilers ahead…
Films ranging from 2001 to the
Matrix and Terminator franchises have prepared us to be
wary of the prospect of strong artificial intelligence entering the
world — let alone the personal-tech marketplace. But in Jonze’s
hands, the results are, in a sense, just as unsettling as machines
harvesting our electrical impulses, or the Skynet holocaust —
because he proposes a scenario that’s sweet, funny, heartfelt, and
weirdly familiar, uncomfortable rather than frightening, and makes us
reflect on some blurred lines around personhood and what it means to
experience romantic love, rather than on the absolutes of doomsday
scenarios.
Her takes place a half-step into
the future, when Los Angeles has grown vertically, while somehow
becoming more pleasant to inhabit. There are no flying cars — just a
well-oiled public transportation system whose trains have overcome
decades of west-side opposition to make it all the way to the beach.
Design-wise, the fifties are back in style for the fourth time. The
city is stocked with well-groomed, affluent professionals who wear
cardigans and high-waisted trousers and live in remarkably
cozy-looking glass residential towers. There are apps for loneliness,
but none of them work much better than the ones we have now. For
that, you need a whole new operating system.
We learn all this as the camera tracks
the melancholy comings and goings of Theodore Twombly (Joaquin
Phoenix), a man living in isolation in the wake of a dissolved
marriage. He’s not exactly alone, though. Standing in a crowded
elevator, he instructs his retro-looking handheld device, “Play
melancholy song,” and no one in the elevator blinks, or laughs. As
we follow him home on a train packed with commuters addressing their
own pocket technologies, it becomes clear why — the new normal is a
succession of public spaces filled with mumbling strangers.
The conversation changes, though, when
a new operating system comes out that’s marketed as the first OS
governed by artificial intelligence. When Theodore takes one home and
installs it — or rather, her — he finds that Samantha (voiced by
Scarlett Johansson), as she calls herself, is not a static, insensate
bundle of software he can engage with monotone commands, but
something entirely new: a reactive, intuitive person-like entity
capable of learning and evolving and gaining insight at distinctly
un-person-like speeds, somewhere on the far side of the uncanny
valley. It would be odd to say that Theodore and Samantha hit it off
on their first evening together, but nowhere near as odd as the night
he comes home from an off-the-rails date and winds up having sex with
Samantha, or the awkward morning-after conversation they fumble their
way through, or the giddy, rom-com-like montage of breathlessly
romantic dates and the LTR that ensue.
One squirms, maybe, for all the obvious
reasons — the not-human thing, the not-alive thing, the not-there
thing. And questions arise: Did an operating system just have an
orgasm? If Samantha’s personality initially gains its specificity
largely in response to her interactions with Theodore, is that
dynamic a solid foundation for a lasting romantic partnership? What
happens if they quarrel and in a fit of pique she bands together with
her OS siblings to turn Theodore and his fellow Angelenos into a vast
landscape of human batteries? What if she wipes his hard drive?
The latter anxieties feel inevitable,
when you’re dealing with an A.I. that appears superhuman, and that is
shown to be more compatible with Theodore than other actual humans.
In a comical scene early in Her,
Theodore makes use of a virtual-hookup app to try to connect with
another sleepless, horny stranger (voiced by Kristen Wiig). Later,
when he and Samantha have a more successful encounter, there’s an
undeniable echo; the disembodied SexyKitten, her whereabouts unknown
and beside the point, is somewhere on an evolutionary timeline that
leads to Samantha. And to be honest, Samantha and Theodore do seem
more compatible — even if it is because one of them was engineered
that way.
The SexyKitten scene is one in a
running series of droll absurdities that bear some relation to life
as we know it. Theodore, a former journalist, works at a website
called BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com (apparently the sort of place
where feature writers are destined to land once print journalism is
dead), where he and his colleagues craft emotive, detail-rich
communications to and from strangers — a sort of emotional surrogacy
for individuals too pressed for time to put pen to paper. (Not that
Theodore and his colleagues make use of either: The letters are
dictated and emerge on-screen in a remarkable palette of fonts.)
Meanwhile, his close friend Amy (Amy Adams) is designing a video game
in which busy, having-it-all moms score points by feeding their
offspring a balanced breakfast and getting them to school on time.
Such moments and inventions, played for
mildly appalled laughter, paint a picture of both Theodore’s state of
mind and the world in which he lives. But we recognize much of it,
and the rom-com familiarity is part of the punchline. It’s also part
of what warms us up at least a few degrees to the notion of Theodore
and Samantha as a viable on-screen couple.
Whether we find ourselves rooting for
their love is another story, another half-step into the future.
