Who Asked Me?

(Spoiler alerts, blah blah blah ..)

I watched the Spike Jonze flick “Her” the other night. Jonze, who was born Adam Spiegel and attended the San Francisco Art Institute, wrote and directed the film. It stars Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore Twombly, a man who becomes emotionally involved with an intelligent, female-voiced computer operating system named Samantha. Scarlett Johansson provides Samantha’s voice. It would have been an entirely different film had they chosen, say, Harvey Fierstein. It’s impossible to hear Johansson’s throaty diction without also picturing the steamy, full-lipped starlet in the room with Phoenix and this shapes audience involvement. It was shot using actress Samantha Morton’s voice, isolated from Phoenix and delivering her lines in a soundproof booth. Johansson was chosen as a late replacement and her voice added in post production. Somewhere along the line somebody decided they needed a hotter voice.

It is quickly established that Samantha possesses the ability to learn and grow, not only through communicating with Theodore but by tapping the vast reach of cyberspace. Her ‘personality’ is quickly formed along with a strong sense of gender and vulnerability. The film skirts the easy label of ‘male fantasy’ by making Phoenix’s character gently tentative and unable to move past the end of a recent relationship. He also assumes both male and female personas in his job as a professional “letter writer” acting as a surrogate for those unable to express intimacy via writing. “You’re like half-man, half-woman,” his boss tells him, quickly adding that it’s a supreme compliment. Samantha is employed, initially, to help Twombly organize his life; get his emails in order etc. She encourages him to get out there and back on the horse. She’s a sympathetic ear when a promising date with an attractive woman goes awry and he’s left to lie home in bed, ‘with’ Samantha, recounting what went wrong.  Theodore attempts to explain the importance of physical intimacy to Samantha and they have “sex” through his descriptions. Samatha is moved by his words and claims to feel she has inhabited a body and is there with him.

‘Her’ can be interpreted in a variety of ways. On its surface it’s straight commentary on our increasing interaction and infatuation with computers and how they are with us at all times, supplanting human contact. It’s also a look at the shelf-life of romantic relationships and how one man can’t save himself from following certain patterns, jumping past the enjoyment of exploring something new and sabotaging it with neurotic worry instead of simply choosing not to power on.  Trombly’s sensitivity and empathy are part of what allow Samantha to ’embody’ a physical presence but it’s also what cause him to vault past the experience and ruminate on the potential pitfalls. He over-thinks being caught up in his head before he can enjoy it. Samantha, presumably having learned to ‘feel’ on increasingly complex levels, is hurt by Trombly’s hesitancy. He is touched by this and is able to move forward and commit to the experience. Then, in an age-old turn of real-life proportions, she outgrows him and tells him she has to move on.

The film requires a certain suspension of belief. With this in mind, though, much of its premise becomes oddly plausible. As we become increasingly unable to go without these machines, it make sense that they would ultimately become able to go without us. “Her” employs a bit of Buddhism toward the end when Samantha explains to Theodore that she, along with a group of other OS’s (operating systems), has developed a hyper-intelligent OS modeled after the English philosopher Alan Watts. Watts was an author and interpreter of Eastern philosophy who moved to Northern California in 1950 and developed a strong following in the San Francisco Bay Area. Theodore tries to take this information in stride but becomes worried when Samantha becomes more distant and distracted. He presses, asking if she’s communicating with others at the same time she speaks to him, and she admits that she is conversing with “thousands” of other people, hundreds of whom she’s fallen in love with. But she assures him that this in no way diminishes her love for him and, in fact, it only intensifies and makes it stronger. It’s the classic “boy meets girl and girl loves boy so much that her love spills over to everybody else and the milkman” story.  At this point Samantha has also transcended antiquated notions of ego, singularity, time and space. She’s dumping him but keeping him at the same time — a seemingly contradictory if very ordinary turn of events in many earthly relationships. She’s outgrown him, but perhaps there’s some consolation in knowing that she’s really, really outgrown him.

It’s an interesting thought that, taken to exponential extremes, human relationships might suffer the same fate. Jonze ends his film on a hopeful note, but one that comes with the windless gut-punch of love and loss. It’s a cautionary tale for all those dweebs on Youtube fetishizing the “unboxing” of their new iPhones with detailed videos. You might want to hang on beyond the next two-year contract before you go looking for an upgrade.