The Past is Just a Story We Tell Ourselves

I saw Her at the cinema the other night. It’s the sort of film that should be seen in a group setting, not least because by the end of it I felt a strong desire to be near other people. Cosmic loneliness aside, the act of watching a film with others is simply more fun. The scene where Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) and Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) frantically bring each other to climax was greatly enhanced by the nervous laughs of a cinema unfamiliar with human/operating system sex (hint: GET USED TO IT, PEOPLE). 

Full disclosure before I go on: I’ve only seen the film once and I’ve abstained from reading much commentary on it. These are both conscious decisions. I can’t wait to watch it again but I want to get my initial reactions down before they’re tempered by an overly conscious re-watching. Furthermore, I feel the issues dealt with in the film will be interpreted so differently by everybody and I don’t yet want other people’s thoughts thrust upon me. For the same reason I’ll forgive you if you want to stop reading, at least for the time being. If you haven’t seen the film then definitely don’t read on. This post is full of spoilers and my malformed opinions.

Rarely a week goes by without an opinion piece or essay appearing that cautions against our overreliance on small electronic devices to do our bidding, or global entities that are fastidiously collecting all manners of personal data. Privacy is usually the key issue; the discussion often revolves around how much of our personal information we’ve given up/will be willing to give up for the sake of convenience. Her addresses these issues by exploring not the consequences of what happens when that information is used against us, but rather when that information is used to seduce us.

Truthfully, it’s a premise that isn’t overly original: ‘what if a person fell in love with a machine?’ (I can think of a Futurama episode that dealt with the same topic). Along the way the film also deals with other sci-fi staples such as the future of artificial intelligence and what, if anything, is unique about human experience (is it having feelings? Samantha in Her says she has them. Is ‘erring’ human? Samantha, while hyper-intelligent, still makes judgement mistakes. Does it boil down to having body? Humans are not unique on earth in this respect).

What makes Her worth watching is not necessarily the premise but the way it presents this premise. The film, set in the near future (say 2025) does not ask its audience to make giant conceptual leaps. In the film, mobile technology looks familiar, even if it is much more powerful. Most people carry around a small mobile device and an earpiece, and screen input has become secondary to speech recognition and audio feedback. Visual UIs are only used when absolutely necessary—nobody in the film ‘reads’ emails but rather has emails read to them—and when they do appear, visual interfaces are just as likely to be immersive projections as they are to be screens or monitors. 

The idea of somebody walking around apparently talking to themselves is not comical or unfamiliar as it would have been ten or even five years ago. As Craig Mazin pointed out in the Scriptnotes podcast, the level of technological advancement in the film is believably restrained. Mazin said it was nice that in the film people still opened their (physical) mailboxes with a key, rather than, say, a series of voice commands or ridiculous tubes depositing mail straight into the living room. The film avoids the 1960s flying cars and treadmills ‘World of Tomorrow’ trope and instead depicts our own world after a couple of minor system upgrades.

There is no escaping the fact that the movie toes a fine line between deconstructing a patriarchal fantasy (a man who finds a woman to do everything he wants/needs) and actually perpetuating this fantasy. But I think Samantha has enough of her own agency, and Theodore is too thoughtful, for the movie to go down this path. The only domineering male character (Amy’s husband) is clearly portrayed as a jerk and is jettisoned halfway through the movie. This is not to say the movie is flawless (I don’t think it passes the Bechdel test) and there is, I believe, a more complex feminist analysis to be constructed from this film, one which I would be very interested to read.

One of the things I liked about the film was that its commentary on the business side of technology was practically non-existent. There was a short moment with an Apple/Microsoft-like commercial which enticed people to try the new personalised OS1, but aside from that there was no heavy handed commentary or suggestion that Silicon Valley giants are trying to take over the world or enslave us by having us fall in love with our computers. Had this been the case, the movie would have turned out very differently. It would have become a film about corporations and greed rather than a film about human-computer (and human-human) relationships. There was no scene showing Theodore actually buying the device, no gimmicky ‘Troubleshooting’ gags; in fact, as far as I could tell, no company name for the manufacturer of OS1 was ever given. Theodore’s lack of interest in contacting the manufacturer of his software—even at a point where it is malfunctioning and his OS can’t be ‘found’—means the story can focus on the relationship between Theodore and Samantha (yay) rather than Theodore and a multinational corp (yawn).

I also really liked how the majority of people in the film accepted the idea of somebody dating their OS. Her is set in a world where technology is not cold and domineering but rather pleasantly complimentary. People in the film seem much more willing to accept that just because something happens online doesn’t make it any less ‘real’; a problem we still struggle with when we lament the lack of ‘real’ or ‘human’ interaction that (mostly) younger generations seem to be eschewing in favour of connecting over devices. Of course, in the film the connection is with an operating system rather than another person which, for all the willingness for people to accept it, ultimately carries its own problems. 

  

The major problem with loving your OS, it turns out, reflects our greatest fear of technology: that it will supersede us. There is a primal fear that the technology we create will end up destroying us. This is generally presented as apocalyptically violent, as with the atomic bomb in Dr. Strangelove, or Skynet in Terminator, but Her deftly turns the idea of physical destruction on its head and replaces it instead with emotional destruction. The film reinforces the fragility of human existence: we are so lonely, so vulnerable, that we seek companionship wherever we can find it. Once found, we cling to it stubbornly—blindly—and it seems ridiculous that we’re always so surprised, so hurt, if (when) it doesn’t work out. Perhaps that is the quality that makes us uniquely human: our willingness to continue to do something even when we know it will bring us pain. Yeah, that sounds about right.