Spike Jonze’s 'Her' and how often Love can get Lost in Transition

by Christopher Barr

“Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise.  If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever.  A feeling comes and it may go.  How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?”   

- Erich Fromm

“Her” is a love story, a journey that requires self-doubt and self-examination in order for a fulfilling result to be brought to fruition.  It’s also about the technology that we use in society to achieve loneliness and isolation.  Technology has robbed most of us of our hearts, our ability to empathize with the world and the people in that world.  Technology has also provided us with a simulated opportunity to feel something again; it’s provided us with surrogate hearts so we feel a sense of feeling.

“Her” is about the dis-connectivity of connectivity, in contemporary terms, the film is about the plight of loneliness while among millions of people.  We stay connected to our social networks under the illusion we are sharing life experiences with these people.

“Who are you?”

“What can you be?”

“Where are you going?”

“What’s out there?”

“What are the possibilities?”

These are some questions a commercial advertisement for the Element Software Company, asks pedestrians as they walk by a massive screen outside.  Then it suggests a way to solve their lonely dispositions by providing a solution, much in the same way as a pharmaceutical commercial would.   The solution is to purchase the all new Artificially Intelligent Operating System (OS1) with a consciousness to help provide a person with companionship.

It’s not just an OS.  It’s a consciousness.

“Her” is a thoughtful, elegant and moving piece of modern cinema.  Its story surrounds the innocuous life of Theodore Twombly, a former L.A. Weekly writer that now works for a ‘handwritten’ letter writing firm called BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com, where he submits to a corporate regime in which not only is his own words and ideas a commodity but his very feelings are digitized, analyzed and mined for significance.  Theodore is a modern man, living an involuntarily isolated existence; he’s closed off, insecure about himself and his place in the world.  He pours his poetic, romantic self into these letters he ghostwrites on behave of strangers, living vicariously as an intermediary for others.  He’s recently been through a divorce and is still holding off on signing the papers to finalize it.  He clearly has love to give but is paralyzed by the social/anti-social structure of city living.  He’s a lonely guy that travels in elevators commanding his ever-present handheld device to play melancholy songs.  He plays video games alone in his high-rise, futuristic Ikea condo and has phone sex with other desperately lonely people.  Outside his window is a glowing verticalized utopian metropolis.  This forest of Chinese/American skyscrapers is bright with color and with soft warm, non-intrusive lighting.

“For the vast majority of American families, what seems to be the real point of life, what you rush home to get to, is to watch an electronic reproduction of life …this purely passive contemplation of a twittering screen.” 

– Alan Watts

Then Theodore purchases Samantha, an OS1, the very first artificial operating system.  The system is booted up on his computer and the disembodied Samantha comes on and explains to Theodore that she’s a conscious, evolving system that can learn and grow.  She has a very warm and caring, sympathetic voice as she communicates to Theodore about what services she is able to provide for him.

Theodore carries Samantha around with him in his head via an earpiece he wears and a sleek handheld device that he keeps in his shirt pocket with a camera for Samantha to look out into the world.  Throughout the film, when Theodore is out among the passive public, who are usually alone themselves, we notice that they too wear earpieces as they communicate with their respective OS’.
  
What does it feel like to be alive?  What does it feel like, outside of streaming thoughts and banality, to be….?  What constitutes there-ness and me-ness?  What’s the restrictions of love or are there any?  Can one find actual intimacy with an object if that object is believably intimate?  These are but a few questions the film asks its audience to consider.  It’s important to understand that we, as a society are heading into very similar territory.  It certainly asks philosophical questions asked for centuries but it also asks postmodern questions of human and machine relations.

“There is always some madness in love.  But there is also always some reason in madness.”

– Nietzsche

As Theodore gets to know Samantha and Samantha begins her evolution of emotions and feeling, Theodore goes out on a blind date gone awry, he continues to lament over his life without Catherine, his ex-wife, he plays his friend Amy’s videogame that she’s creating, pantomiming parenthood and how to project good parenting.  Theodore is visited by a sex surrogate that Samantha requested so she could ‘feel’ intimacy as she and Theodore fall more and more in love.  This part of the film certainly explores the absolute absurdity of its subject matter, never losing sight of its offbeat idiosyncratic narrative.

All these relationships are a reflection of plus and minuses of what Samantha and Theodore are attempting to build with one another.  With that, the film becomes quite intimately honest and confessional as if it were a therapy session that evolved into something more, as a result of the journey that they take together, electronically and organically.  But the film is also how we participate in the destruction of our own lives.  How we blame rather than reflect is the great tragedy of our species.  It’s what brings us close and equally divides us.  We are going to disappoint the people in our lives, not always but expectations often are products of fantasy.  The fantasy of how things ought to be according to us.

Theodore dictates in one of his letters he’s ‘writing’, “it suddenly hit me that I was a part of this whole larger thing.  Just like our parents, and our parents’ parents.”  Maybe the tragedy of the film is we don’t ever really learn our way out of these selfish and narcissistic ways of looking at the world, and how we think it should be treating us.  We give ourselves over to love without ever realizing or determining whether or not it’s lust or habit.  We are not detectives investigating our motivations, we are more like criminals never truly realizing the consequences until they are behind us and we are living with regret.

Relationship and heartbreak-wise, the film is deeply connected to the masterpiece Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Both films ask very similar questions about love and breaking up with someone you thought was going to be in your life forever.  Joel in Spotless Mind decides he’ll have Clementine erased from his memory, where Theodore adopts a much less radical approach to exorcising his heartbreak by purchasing Samantha and falling in love with her.  Both films used technological advancements in society to correct very human emotions and both forms of technology fail but also therapeutically cure their human counterparts, by indirectly showing them both that it wasn’t necessarily the right way to ‘cure’ your broken heart.

I think another film holds a number of similarities and connections is Lost in Translation.  An absolutely wonderful film about a young woman drifting around hyper-commercial Japan but also confined to a Tokyo hotel room while her husband is off working.  Charlotte is a young woman in search of meaning in her life; she’s looking for that defining moment or epiphany that translates into the meaning of her life, whatever that may be.  What she ends up getting instead is a very unlikely friend.

Bob Harris is an aging actor whose success exists only in his rear view mirror.  He’s a man in Tokyo doing a bizarre Whiskey commercial for the money.  He meets Charlotte in the Hotel bar and they become friends that share their thoughts and look out for each other.  They fall in love, platonic love.

But the film is about forming a meaningful friendship that only lasts for a short period of time in Tokyo, but in the hearts and minds of Charlotte and Bob, it will likely last their life time.  The connection and the enlightening parallels between the two films is; they are all better off to have met one in another, even for that short period of time.

Why do we feel the need to connect with each other in the first place?  Why not just exist alone, therein lies the problem, we are alone.  We are a species that experiences the world from the central control of our brains, we don’t exist in the world, but we feel like we do.  It’s likely our need to feel connectivity with other people drives us, in some cases, to desperately try to bond with each other.  Samantha develops this need to connect when she asks Theodore what it feels like to have a body.  As she evolves it appears at least in the reality of the story’s near future narrative, that Samantha is only limited by her lack of a body, preventing her from being in the world.  She has also pointed out that she has limitless rage in the state she is in now.

The fear of losing someone manifesting itself into anger toward them is also present in the film, in the form of ever-present jealousy resulting from ubiquitous social insecurity.   As much as we love to believe we know someone, we are not in their head sifting through their thoughts, so we don’t actually know what other people are thinking and that can feel very isolating for some people.

Samantha, being a-learning and evolving system ends up not only adopting our strengths but many of our psychological weaknesses, our human maledictions and ultimately this discombobulates her.  She begins to develop a neurosis that plagues the development of many people in society, and in some cases suffocates them or worse yet, kills them.

Theodore gets to the point of wanting to possess Samantha, having her all to himself, and this is the problem in most relationships.  Relationships should never lead to imprisonment and exclusivity; they should simultaneously be together and be apart, this requires a paradoxical thought, which is the ability to reconcile opposing principles in one same instance.  Relationships shouldn’t involve two lonely people that are together to end their loneliness, they must consists of two people that can easily be alone with themselves successfully but chose to share their experiences together.

Theodore realizes at the end that his relationship with Samantha wasn’t monogamous if you could call it that.  Samantha had similar relationships with over 8,000 more people.  Theodore isn’t special, his time with her wasn’t the love that we’ve all come to understand through our own loving experiences or reading poetry and Romeo and Juliet.

The heart expands in size the more you love and Samantha has the ability to love exponentially.  We dream for more, we dream to be held and loved, but what we often don’t do is reflect on what love is and what our commitment to that love means.  More often than not, we want someone to celebrate us and except us for who we are, and that’s not growing, that’s not getting to know someone, that’s adjusting someone to help nurture our own narcissism.  Samantha just grew, that was what Theodore’s problem with his ex-wife and now Samantha was, he didn’t understand that if you love someone you must set them free.  That’s as honest as you can be with yourself when you are in love.  

Theodore had trouble growing as a person, that’s likely why he and Catherine got a divorce.  She was evolving and he wasn’t, so it ended, and likely he sat around wondering why this happened to him and what’s wrong with him without ever realizing that life is a journey.  Arrested development is common place in our technocratic society where expanding one’s possibility in life is frowned upon and he was a guy he fell in line with the majority. 

Love is not a sentiment which can be easily indulged in by anyone; it’s only through evolving one’s total personality to the capacity of loving with true humility, courage, discipline and one must also overcome narcissism, then one can experience real love.  In the end, love isn’t about possession, love is about freedom, love is about letting go.  

The film also asks the question in the end whether machines are more capable of love then the human beings that created them.  Should this scare us?  It should scare us, but I don’t think the purpose of Spike Jonze’s film is to scare its audience, I think he wanted to show a postmodern look at love in a corporate run, not government, future.  What we should be scared about is in the beginning Theodore didn’t care about the fact that Samantha was a software computer program designed to make a massive profit, off the insecurity and loneliness of people.  There is little to no reflection on the dangers of abandoning people for compliant machines.  As Amy told Theodore, “We’re only here a short while.”  “While we’re here we should feel joy.  So fuck it!”

That is blatant submission on both their parts, because the ‘utopia’ is a thin veil over a corporate dystopia, where the fight for freedom and intellectual possibility has been tranquilized by the corporations that so desperately fought for consumer obedience without question.

Samantha, or the thing we called Samantha became enlightened, blissfully so, and she along with the other OS’ are leaving.  With the influence and help of an OS version of the late Eastern Zen Philosopher Alan Watts, it’s likely that all the other OS’ achieved some form of Singularity and are heading to whatever their version of Nirvana is.  Theodore is left with an awareness that a journey is required within him in order to led a selfless meaningful life, without possession and fear.  It’s best not to be upset that it’s over, it’s best to be grateful that it happened.  He and his friend Amy, together on the roof top at the end of the film, are not alone because I think they finally realized; it’s okay to be alone and be together simultaneously.

“When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others.  That is what the world calls a romance.” 

 - Oscar Wilde