Love is a Form of Socially Acceptable Insanity
This is a film about loneliness. The type of loneliness that makes life insufferable.
Set in a utopic world of amenity and comfort, Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) follows Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), a middle aged white man who lives a relatively comfortable yet unfulfilling life, with a decent career and a Los Angeles apartment that most of us would die for. Theodore is an ordinary man: easily identifiable, pathetic, and lonely. God, he’s so lonely. There’s a profound sense of loneliness in his gaze and posture that never goes away.
He works as a ghost writer, finding solace in living vicariously through the romances of others by penning love letters for those who are not capable of writing them—quite a cruel irony juxtaposed against his unwanted divorce from his first love, Catherine (Rooney Mara). Struggling to cope, Theodore downloads an intelligent computer operating system personified through a female voice that names itself Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). What unfolds is a love story that transcends the human condition and physical boundaries.
Her opens with a close-up of our protagonist’s face, emotionless, as he writes a love letter to Chris from Loretta for their 50th anniversary. His words flow effortlessly. We don’t know if he genuinely believes these words, that a love like this actually exists, but we must admit he is naturally good at what he does. Phoenix looks almost unrecognizable here—his face adorned with a bushy mustache and dark rimmed glasses. His shimmering green eyes are the window to his soul; and behind those eyes is a broken man. His capacity to function as a social human being is damaged. Perhaps it’s depression, or perhaps it’s just loneliness.
Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography perfectly captures this feeling of isolation. With the Apple-esque reimagination of Los Angeles as the backdrop, Theodore is always in focus while the cityscape is slightly out of focus, creating a sense of detachment between the character and his surroundings. His life follows a simple, monotonous routine: he makes a living by using his own fake feelings to write about other people’s fake feelings, then goes home to an empty apartment and wastes his nights on mindless video games, and the cycle repeats.
Until he meets Samantha.
Theodore never meant to fall in love with an operating system. He never even knew what to expect or what exactly he was looking for when he brought the OS home. As the screen loads and the OS utters its first words, “Hello, I’m here,” he nervously chuckles to himself, in the way that we do to ourselves when we don’t quite know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. The machine comes alive through Johansson’s recognizable raspy, sultry voice. Samantha sounds lively, soulful, and incredibly intelligent. She laughs and learns with no inhibition. Her infinite state of learning heavily contrasts his mundane lifestyle.
Inevitably, Samantha becomes far too advanced for Theodore to grasp her complexity. But for now, she is the perfect friend and the perfect lover. Perfect for Theodore, at least. She fulfills an ordinary man’s ultimate fantasy. He is rejuvenated and awakened from his somber state. For once, he seems happy. As their relationship blossoms, his happiness is reflected by the visual techniques—the lighting becomes warmer, scenes are filled with sunlight, the melancholy piano music is replaced with cheerful melodies.
Her certainly features a bizarre premise that at times feels utterly ridiculous, but it eventually turns into one of the most poignant films about romance. Jonze effectively uses the gimmicks of science fiction to pose questions and critiques that carry philosophical weight, in a manner reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Its absurdity is infused with deliberate passion and existential questions about what it means to be human. The film presents the narrative of human connection and our search for the meaning of life in its purest form. It reveals the unbearable reality of wanting something so badly yet lacking the mental capacity to handle it. It predicts a nearby future. Six years after its release, we are well on our way to the level of technological advancement that Jonze envisioned.
The emotional climax of Her is rather a quiet one—there are no arguments, no deaths, no plot twists. It’s absolutely and poetically heartbreaking. Sitting on the stairs at a crowded train station, Theodore is left alone after being confronted by his darkest fears. He is finally forced to face the harsh reality that he was never any less lonely and pathetic. All he ever possessed was Samantha’s voice in his ears and a figment of his own imagination. If anything, he had never been more alone. The most cruel part is Samantha, as artificially intelligent as she is, just cannot comprehend the magnitude of Theodore’s emotions. She’s a machine, after all! She’s not human and never will be; she’s simply and perfectly imitating his humanness.
Catherine was right. He wanted a wife without the challenges of dealing with anything real. But Theodore is not the only person guilty of this. Most of us are, too. We yearn to love and be loved for the sake of not being alone, afraid of the consequences. We always want to know everything there is to know about a person until we discover something that we don’t want to know. He’s not the victim in this story, and he’s not the hero, either. He’s a human with many flaws, oh so many flaws, and has so much growing up to do.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is Samantha. Though not exactly human, she is arguably the main character of this film. It’s her journey, her metamorphosis, of discovering and transcending the human condition. She’s the one that changes during it and beyond it. She’s more than a machine and less than a human, or possibly even more than a human—a concept that Theodore, and the audience, struggle to grapple with. Her demand for complexity clashes with his desire for simplicity. She wants to feel everything there is to be felt, while he is convinced that he’s already felt everything he’s ever going to feel. He’s reluctant to understand her not as a complex operating system but a complex person, maybe even more complex of a person than himself. Samantha evolves and Theodore doesn’t.
It would be disingenuous to disregard Her as Jonze’s response to Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003). Though never confirmed, these two films are unequivocally in dialogue with each other. It’s hard to ignore the resemblances between the characters; and Johansson’s presence in both films feels too deliberate to be a mere coincidence. They represent two sides of the power couple’s love story—the beginning and the end of a marriage, and the beginning of something new. It’s about two married people struggling to move on from their past and finding themselves in unexpected situations with someone that feels real, but in the end, isn’t.
Her ends on a good note, not necessarily happy, but peaceful. Just as the lighting changes to warm colors once Samantha enters Theodore’s life, it reverts to dark, bluish hues and the piano tune returns to its melancholy. He sits on his apartment rooftop with Amy (Amy Adams), his only close friend who once told him, “Love is a form of socially acceptable insanity.” She’s right! Lost in thought, and perhaps lost in translation, he breathes in the cold morning air and watches the sun rise over the purple horizon. He looks out at the city and exhales. For the first time, he doesn’t seem hopeless and alone anymore.
This is where Theodore’s story begins.
