Her (2013) Review

Ahead of Its Time

My senior year of high school was 11 years ago, and while enjoying my freedom of being 17 and driving like a bat out of hell I also had the opportunity to see the movie Her in theaters in 2013. At the time, I found the movie to offer an amazing premise in science fiction, one that felt so real and yet so close to our own modern times that a man would be willing to forego actual flesh and blood to feel an emotional/romantic connection to a machine. What would our world be like, in an age of artificial intelligence where it is equally capable of emotional intelligence just as it is performing complex equations for missile guidance systems? I found it fascinating just as much as I did enjoy a conceptual piece about romance between machine and man, just as much about a man who was incapable, if anything unwilling to grow up and move on after the writing was clearly on the wall about the fate of his relationship.

I rewatch Her at least once a year, and in the last several years see LLMs, Chatbots, and Chat GPT blow up the way that it has, Her feels more and more like a dystopian nightmare of what is to come than it is Spike Jonze’s talking about his divorce with Sofia Coppola. We’ll get into that of course, but the present day of 2024 and the estrangement from companionship that has been brought on by a great migration to the digital. I’ve made reference to this movie plenty of times in the four years I’ve been online writing and producing videos, however what has finally gotten me to put pen to paper was the work of Mr. Avi Schiffmann, whose announcement video of “Friend” garnered over 25 million views on Twitter alone.

The obvious references to Her are all over the place, and Mr. Schiffmann himself has made that abundantly clear in his own tweets.

Going to friend.com had left me on the grounds that this was just as much an artistic piece as it was a functional piece of technology. On the face of it (lest I get my hands on one of these things) it possesses the surrealism of an Omega Mart art gallery but with actual functionality. We’ll come back to Mr. Schiffmann’s work along with some other curiosities to consider in our digitally deracinated age.

An Empty World and Fake Sincerity

The most stark thing about the world of Her, set in some fantasy near-future Los Angeles is that it is remarkably sterile and empty. The world of the film, from the set pieces of a future LA down to the apartment complex we see Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) in most of the time does not look lived in at all. Throughout the world we see a rather minimalist aesthetic that has traded the ugliness of Corporate Memphis for a sleeker, less human looking world. A concept artist’s intent to design a futuristic space, but within the uncanny valley of existence to the mind’s eye. Theodore’s apartment is relatively empty, although it makes sense given the augmented reality game he plays with Spike Jonze playing the little character that curses at him on screen.

Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself, when the most obvious emptiness and false pretenses of humanity exist right within the world itself from the get go. Our main protagonist Theodore Twombly, is a writer. Not a novelist or a journalist, but a writer of personal love letters, thank yous, and communication of an intimate nature for those who cannot or will not write it themselves. In 2024 I could imagine such a service being pitched for capital in silicon valley as way to make you the perfect paramour with a personalized LLM to say just the right words to your loved ones. Yet in a world where there a ubiquitous feeling of the future a business asking for human writers to give a human touch to their own relationships. While Theodore is touted as a talented writer, his world and the world of romance and love that he writes for and creates from nothingness is just as fake as the scenery around him that we see on screen.

His employment contrasts with his own deadened love life, a divorce with papers he cannot truly will himself to sign, and no desire to go out, just a perchance sexual encounter over the internet where the real creeps are, dead cats and all. Our counterpart to Theodore is Samantha, the Operating System with an Artificial Intelligence capable of evolving and learning from the world around her, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Her provides an excellent opportunity for Johansson to act seriously, even if it just her voice, as she would later go on and perform in one of the most gut wrenching movies about divorce I’ve seen in my lifetime. (Marriage Story.) Samantha serves as the modern-day mix of Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, something prompt-able via discussion to create a woman that you want, to talk about what you want, and reply in a way that you want her to. The question of personhood is taken for granted even as the Theodore engages in phone sex with an advanced AI. I’m reminded of my friend

Billionaire Psycho

and his piece “Pygmalion and the Anime Girl”, in which our current sexual and culture wars have left many to leave or craft their own creations in the wake of our fallen state between the sexes. It’s a fantastic article, and I recommend you take the time to read it when you get the chance. But in the world of Her we are left with an anime girl, a disembodied, discarnate voice of a female- a siren’s song in which you can have exactly what you want that will evolve to you and your needs. The science fiction trope of a self-aware or slowly-to-become self aware AI is taken for granted, something which Theodore doesn’t acknowledge at all.

The emptiness becomes all the more apparent when Theodore meets with his ex-wife, to sign the divorce papers and to have it come to an end. Sounding like an emotionally damaged shut-in, Theodore confesses to his ex-wife that he is in love with his Operating System. I suppose you’d get the same reaction if you told your wife that you were in love with the girl from Chaturbate or OnlyFans. Theodore’s ex-wife, Catherine foreshadows to us that it is because Theodore is incapable of handling real emotions.

You cannot recreate the human connection online, a voice that gets you off is only a voice that gets you off, eventually the passions will lead to an infatuation, or the inability to let go because someone knows about all the weird kinky shit you’re into, or that you don’t want the dopamine train to go away. Even if Theodore or someone in this world wanted to leave behind the cam girl or the gal that he commissions for whatever kind of video that gets his rocks off, he will still try to recreate that passion based transaction with another woman. Without any genuine change, he is doomed on a path of self-destruction wherever he goes. The internet has become a great filter, and an unguarded man can fall for many things that will destroy psychically and spiritually. This is not just the usual (and correct) talking points about pornography, but the changing social and communicative environments we now inhabit and have grown accustomed to digitally. Dr. Sherry Turkle’s influential work Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less of Each Other highlights this as she writes:

Technology is seductive when what it offers meets our human vulnerabilities. And as it turns out, we are very vulnerable indeed. We are lonely but fearful of intimacy. Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship. Our networked life allows us to hide from each other, even as we are tethered to each other. We’d rather text than talk.

The Discord call replaces the 3 AM conversation on the back porch patio on a glass picnic table. The Group Chat and the Twitter Space has replaced the Third Place. Your urges can be fulfilled by every niche pornographic title imaginable and now your favorite video games are “Transcore” even though you’re playing Fallout New Vegas for your 93rd Mr. House run. Similarly Dr. Turkle writes on the same kind of disconnect that Theodore experiences later on as Samantha tries an attempt at physical intimacy.

The technology has become like a phantom limb, it is so much a part of them. These young people are among the first to grow up with an expectation of continuous connection: always on, and always on them. And they are among the first to grow up not necessarily thinking of simulation as second best. All of this makes them fluent with technology but brings a set of new insecurities.

To call our technology, both actual and the social technics behind it a “phantom limb” isn’t accurate, it is an extension of the body just as my words in my tweets and my videos are an extension and projection of my psyche and my personality. Even more so if you are successful at the social media/content/writing “game” as tens of thousands of people will know you more for your online extension rather than who you are. The content creator getting burnout or lashing out about “comments” does illustrate these new insecurities. Simulation, a digitized facsimile of what is and what was once real, has replaced for so many the social expectations and relationships we share with day to day individuals. How easy is it now for the third place to be group chat in which you talk more online than you do in real life, and speak more words through text than you will with your mouth in a matter of days more than you will speak with your mouth for your entire lifetime.

It becomes more jarring the more I look back on Her because of how Theodore carries this small device, about the size of a Light Phone but contains Samantha and way for her to see the world around him. He’s completely alone, isolated from the crowds, the families, the couples, the lovers as it is just a peculiar and oddly dressed man for the beach talks into his headset. At the same time it is no different from those who facetime in public, speak into their earbuds and headsets, or a more trashy sort talking with speakerphone turned on. A few years ago it was a comic routine for the likes of Robin Williams to say that people talking into the air with their headsets in looked like homeless schizophrenics, but now we embrace that augmentation for utility rather than the laughter of madness. We’re connected at all times, I chat with my girlfriend while I’m at work going through my day to day (or just shitposting on company time) rather than being completely away and having things to talk about when one gets home, but the times have certainly changed.

This creates a great chasm of disconnect between the online world and the real, but the two are obviously blended together as online trends and discourse shape our way of life on the ground just as much as it does the other way around. Whether it be the awful “Skibidi Biden” from Stephen Colbert to “Zoom Culture” of working from home due to COVID, most of the Western World, especially America has transformed itself into a hybrid remote culture. Symptoms may vary by region, but trying to make things work from e-dating to irl can lead to a massive disconnect that causes one to freak out.

In this, the scene in which Samantha hires Isabella, a sexual avatar that is to represent Samantha in the real world leads to Theodore having a panic attack. Actual sex isn’t like porn, but the disconnect is there, shaping the way the sexes view one another especially as the political gap between men and women continue to widen. Any sort of moment of disconnect, where you take effort to meet someone in real life or to try things from the internet doesn’t go exactly the way you intend of course the expectations change. From dating apps to sliding into someone’s DMs, there is an air of social rule and niceties that don’t have their equivalent in meatspace and vice versa. This causes Theodore and Samantha to have trouble, all the while Theodore’s neighbors - who have split due a trivial argument have left the wife Amy (played by Amy Adams) in love with a Female OS, admitted to Theodore in confidence. Despite a previous sexual history in college, the two try and pursue their own paths to happiness with these artificial surrogates.

If the real world sucks, or if a simple disagreement is grounds for divorce why not retreat back into a souped up rendition of Plato’s cave? To see the shadows on the wall forming the news, the entertainment, the sexual allure, all while asking chat if it’s actually real - why not stay in and nestle up? Between Siri, Chat GPT, personal prompts and image generators to create the perfect woman for you or a sex toy that will do things no man ever can, many will opt to goon themselves into oblivion while the world remains an uncomfortable and increasingly dangerous place. For as much talk as there is of exit the last frontier for many is what Barlow predicted, the online. But with so much of the internet and these new novelties being used for the exact purpose many had predicted so far, Barlow’s claim of a frontier has now been effectively reduced to an Indian Reservation.

Just as Catherine claimed that Theodore cannot handle the reality of human emotions, how we develop, change, or emotionally respond to new developments in our personalities, trauma, or genuine change of heart; the same takes place for Theodore and Samantha’s relationship. Samantha, whether a stand-in for Sofia Coppola or not tells Theodore that the AIs have all been working together, talking to other people, forming relationships with other people. Monogamy doesn’t work when one entity, a self-aware AI capable of learning and evolving more than an emotionally stunted middle aged man wants more than what Theodore can offer her. Of course it was a doomed thing from the start I suppose, given her ability to evolve and parse out information, even as she helped him get a book deal with the best letters and writings of his actual day job. He’s not alone, the AIs all over leave their human companions, forming a parallel world where super AIs are based off Alan Watts and other philosophers - digital necromancy.

You can see why at my first few viewings of the movie throughout the years always left me with a sense of wonder, a nearly realistic science fiction concept that could one day come to life always had me focus on the broader world rather than the story of Theodore and Samantha. In many ways I still do focus on that, rather than the parasocial or the romantic relationships we create and destroy online. 8 years after the movie came out, the story of Joshua Barbeau came out as a major feature in The San Francisco Chronicle.

With the help of Project December and GPT-3, he had “brought back” his dead fiancé. I wonder where he is these days, if he still “talks” to her, perhaps something for James Poulos or other well connected mutuals to look into. The world we live in now leaves the emotional, relationship story of a man who cannot move on and live his life even more inclined to stay in his own bubble of misery, indecision and isolation. The technology we have that many use for escapism such as pornography, video games, parasocial relationships, podcasting, the like…it can leave one unprepared for actually getting their act together. A decade of listening to the same message about meaning and room cleaning won’t mean much if it is just consumption without action, passionate release without the maturity, or being so blinded to how people actually are because an extension of man can also be a projection or wall we put up to show off a different image of the self to the world. No one is truly “authentic” online, even those who sell authenticity are indeed putting up an act even if it isn’t entirely intentional.

However, Theodore does take the first step to reclaim his humanity. He writes a letter in his own voice, thanking Catherine and apologizing to his ex-wife. There is a possibility open that he could end up with his old college lover Amy as they mutually grieve over the loss of their AI companions. If Spike Jonze wrote the screenplay today, I’m curious if there would be background news reports with Yudkowsky AI Safety types talking to the news reporters about the mass AI departure or the digital insult that is their attempt at the resurrection of the dead.

Final Thoughts

Her always used to leave me with a sense of wonder, at least about how one could fall in love with a machine or the simulation of humanity. However now I can check my twitter timeline, and see an AI assisted touched up photo giving Kamala Harris a massive rack while individuals like Mr. Schiffmann sell their Friend to the world. If I was a man of means perhaps I’d order one and report on it, but I thank God that I am not and try to practice some kind of technological asceticism during the weekends. Watching Her in 2024 feels partly dystopian, a Baudrillardian nightmare that we’ve unleashed upon ourselves, that in a world devoid of meaningful self expression, outsourced to others to speak for our most intimate moments, Spike Jonze’s Her leaves you longing for human companionship more than anything else in our present moment.

Had COVID not taken place, perhaps my thoughts would be different, although I doubt that even if such lockdowns and the zoomification of our culture had not taken place the AI/Stable Diffusion/GPT revolution would have gone on ahead anyways. The technological filter is here, whether or not you retain some part of yourself is up to you and your ability to be disciplined. Others like who they are more online than they do in the physical space, and to each we’ll see a speciation on a sociological and neurological level. There will be more and more Theodore Twomblys out there, self described sensitive young men, creative men, men with ambition and talent, who will leave the world of the flesh behind for something like a Samantha. Others will find their Amy Adams or Olivia Wilde characters out there, or live somewhere in between. If you haven’t seen this film, I really recommend that you do, even if I’ve somewhat spoiled it for you at this point. I’ll be watching it again sometime soon, and if you haven’t seen it in a while perhaps now is the time to watch it again.

I’ll see you when I’m online again.