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Her
From the trailer of the movie Her, my interest had been piqued. The two minute clip was
enough to tell me the movie follows the life of the main character, Theodore Twombly, who falls
in love with his A.I. I expect Spike Jonze, the producer, director, and writer, to depict peoples’
inability to form and/or maintain physical connections. I believe Jonze tried to explore peoples’
neglect of reality when looking for happiness. I expect a weird movie where a man without a
social life falls in love with the only thing willing to give him attention. I expect to be told the
tale of a man who was shunned by society to the point where the only person willing to pay him
mind had to be programmed to do so.
As much as I hate to admit it, I was wrong. Jonze did a phenomenal job with this movie,
in my opinion. Theodore wasn’t a social outcast, he wasn’t desperately eager for love either. He
was just a man who needed to heal after going through a divorce. Jonze carefully depicted the
value of companionship. I still stick with my opinion that Theodore neglected reality in his
journey for happiness but I see now that it was completely necessary. I also realized that in the
world they lived in, Theodore wasn’t very much different from everyone else. The advancement
of technology allowed for a wider gap between society. At the beginning of the movie, when he
was on his way home, I remember thinking to myself as he was listening to his news feed
“Wouldn’t anyone find it weird that he is talking to himself?” but then I saw the lips of the
people around him moving and I realized that he wasn’t going to stand out because he was just
like everyone else.
While I acknowledge Theodore as the main character, I found my focus drifting to
Samantha from time to time. The fact that she was programmed to replicate an actual person’s
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consciousness was amazing. Anyone would expect an artificial intelligence to be flawless but she
wasn’t. She was gifted with the complexity of human emotions as well as the ability to express
herself from time to time. What amazed me the most was the way Jonze gives Samantha the
ability to self-doubt and show insecurity which was shown when she said “Last week, my
feelings were hurt by something you said before… I was simply remembering it as something
that was wrong with me. That was a story I was telling myself, that I was somehow inferior.”
(00:50:35-00:51:00). This made me think of how society gives its definition of perfection and, as
people, we constantly compare ourselves to the given definitions and begin to despise ourselves
when we somehow don’t compare. Samantha was brought into a world where people had mental
(mind) and physical (body) aspects to themselves and despite being perfect, she found a way to
convince herself that she was inferior for not having the physical aspect of life. Every part of the
