In fact, nearly everyone surrounding Theodore is either close friends with an OS or dating one, too. The most novel thing about the movie is how Theodore’s new love life is not thought of as strange. She and Theodore quickly develop a deep bond, which quickly turns romantic. She’s funny, earnest, sweet, and capable of learning, which she does exponentially. Samantha is a hyper-intelligent, sultry-voiced OS designed to meet her user’s every computational and emotional need.
It is only when he installs a new operating system, a Siri doppleganger named Samantha, that Theodore awakens from his techno-coma. He is a technological somnambulist and a shadow of our current times. He sits at a desk writing poetic, intimate notes for people who can’t properly express themselves, then goes home to play immersive computer games and surf the web for porn and adult chatrooms. He is recently estranged from his wife and a little lost. Her sets out quickly to establish its main character, Theodore, as a well-meaning loner in a sea of well-meaning loners. Instead, I’m interested in the ways in which Her manages to objectify its female love interest using syntax alone It’s a warm and fuzzy film, with many moments of heartbreak and irreverence, and it raises some very interesting questions about the nature of cognition and what it means to have a personality, but I’m not interested in those right now.
The subway is filled with people talking to their phones and not to each other, sort of like today, and everyone wears oversized glasses and old-man pants, sort of like today. Its vision of an ultra-hipster Los Angeles in the not-too-distant future is something of a Jobsian utopia, where technology and fashion have become inseparable, minimalist aesthetic invades every corner and orifice of civic design, and computers are so ergonomic they are subsumed by the mundane. In a year of memorable and highly inventive films, Spike Jonze’s Her stands out as one of the most realized, topical, and vivacious of them all. Enjoy this guest post by Richard Herbert! – Ed.
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