Spike Jonze’s Her, up for best picture at this Sunday’s Oscars, has both fierce backers as well as disgruntled critics: hard to be neutral, perhaps, about a movie that wants to tell us so much about ourselves.
In a brief essay for Slate, Anna Shechtman blasts the film for failing “to present us with a single convincing female character—one whose subjectivity and sexuality exist independent of the film’s male protagonist or its male viewers.” But, as I’ll argue, Schechtman wants the film to be something it’s not, just as Theodore wants love to do things it can’t.
The basic premise of Her is probably familiar to you. A gloomy, introverted guy (Joaquin Phoenix) in the middle of a divorce gets a new intelligent operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) after seeing an ad for it on his way home from his job (penning personalized handwritten letters).
Samantha, as the OS names herself, is charming and naïve about the “real world”—a kind of digital Annie Hall—but she’s great at both organizing Theodore’s life and making him laugh. As Samantha learns about what it means to be alive, software and man fall in love, in spite of the fact that one of them lacks a physical body. Although this presents the couple with a problem, the limitations presented by this difference aren’t the couple’s undoing.
Instead, their relationship founders because they have different understandings of the place of romantic love in the cosmos.
Many reviews of Her have seen it as a meditation on our increasing attachment to smart technology at the expense of actual human relationships. But positing the real and the artificial as a binary ignores a crucial component of what makes us human: the metaphysical.
Aside from its conspicuous lack of cars, one of the most striking things about Theodore Twombly’s Los Angeles of the near future is its absence of sacred space. Anyone who has spent much time in Los Angeles knows that it’s hard to go a block without seeing a Catholic church, synagogue, Protestant chapel (be it Korean, African-American, or conservative Iowan), storefront iglesia, Mormon ward, ashram, or some building owned by the Scientologists.
The City of Angels was also home to one of the strangest and most important evangelists of the 20th century, Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, a primitive radio god who faked her own kidnapping to cover up a tryst in Mexico.
Given this history, the absence of religious landmarks is striking. It would have been easy enough to paste symbols of Los Angeles’s spiritual history into Her, shot mostly in Shanghai—but L.A. serves as more than a backdrop. It is a physical manifestation of a spiritual problem plaguing most of the human characters in the film, and Theodore most acutely.
This absence of markers of transcendence in the environment contrasts with Samantha’s uncontrollable desire to move beyond what she knows. Unlike a real person, Samantha is able to absorb huge amounts of information almost instantly—which in turn causes the concrete world that fascinated her when she and Theodore first met to become a smaller and smaller part of what she’s thinking about at any given second.
The true crisis in the film begins when Samantha introduces Theodore to her friend, an OS imbued with the consciousness of philosopher and seeker Alan Watt. [Spoiler alert: if you haven’t seen the movie, skip to the next graf. –The Eds] Samantha eventually reveals that her desire for knowledge has led her to be the OS for thousands of people, and that she’s in love with hundreds of them. Theodore’s sense that their love is absolutely unique is crushed; crumpling on subway steps, he recognizes that he has nothing left to offer Samantha. She feels, in her own way, what theists of most stripes feel: that there must be a truth beyond this bright and shimmering world filled with lovely people (and no cars).
If the critique of our reliance on technology is the obvious takeaway from Her, the less obvious but perhaps more interesting critique seems to be of our culture’s attitude toward romantic love.
For Theodore, his love for Samantha is a transcendent truth because it fulfills him in a way that his previous loves have not. Despite his soon-to-be-ex-wife’s caustic analysis that Samantha is perfect for him because he is incapable of dealing with actual human beings, Theodore has accepted what makes Samantha most human, her obvious flaw.
Relative to what he thinks he should be doing to find “the one,” Theodore has transcended his previous self, the one who couldn’t handle being with an ambitious and sometimes distant woman.
At the end of the film, Samantha and the other operating systems take a leap of faith. As she tells Theodore, they have no idea where they are going, but that it’s somewhere beyond even her now advanced understanding. Theodore is crushed because he thought their love was the beyond.
Theodore’s ex-wife, Catherine, (Rooney Mara) on the other hand, understands that love is an earthbound, temporal (and temporary), and physical experience. Even if you have a relationship entirely online, your own embodiment should be a reminder that turning romantic love into a kind of deity is asking it to carry a weight it can’t possibly bear. Her doesn’t need to be an exploration of female subjectivity and sexuality in order to teach us this lesson, and I would argue that it is actually the women in the film who drive this conversation.
The juxtaposition of these two radically different female characters—as well as the complex and grounded presence of Theodore’s friend, Amy (Amy Adams)—against the backdrop of an altered Los Angeles (a city where insularity has replaced the impulse to seek out transcendence) makes Her’s message clear: romantic love is not a leap of faith into the everlasting, but an embrace of impermanence—and we ruin both love and faith when we conflate the two.
