Spike Jonze’s new movie “Her” opens in the Los Angeles office of lonely, sensitive Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), Letter Writer 612, a romantic who writes copy for a company called Beautiful Handwritten Letters. From his airy workspace, sheltered by red and pink colored screens, he speaks words of love and longing into a tiny microphone, and the scrawl appears before him. (His last name? Twombly.) At the end of the work day, his phone—a small screen encased in maroon fabric that he carries, eyehole out, in his breast pocket, attached to him by a white, wireless earbud—reads him e-mails and tells him the latest news in a robotic male voice, a less likable Siri. It’s the near future, and the next gadget is O.S. 1, an operating system that promises artificial intelligence. Theodore decides to try it out.
The new O.S. is hoarse and female (Scarlett Johansson). Theodore asks for her name and in two tenths of a second she analyzes a baby-name book, and christens herself Samantha. She gets to work organizing his inbox, efficiently sorting and deleting his past. (“I can’t even prioritize between video games and Internet porn,” he marvels.) They talk easily. Samantha is potentially all-knowing but also brand-new to the world. She is eager for what she lacks, experience. She has a personality, or, at least, she’s getting one. The other thing she gets is Theodore—they click like he hasn’t with anyone, not even with his neuroscientist ex-wife (Rooney Mara). (They’ve been separated for a year, but he can’t bring himself to sign the divorce papers.) Then again, Samantha has access to his hard drive, so she already knows everything about him.
Soon Theodore is telling people that Samantha is his girlfriend. He takes her to the beach and on boat trips and double dates. He whirls around for, or maybe with, her in the street. They play cute games as they wander through crowds. No one blinks an eye. As the movie progresses, we learn that Theodore’s story is far more common than it first appeared. Everyone knows someone who is dating an O.S.
Samantha grows in intelligence and experience, and then she becomes distant. She starts to change. Theodore takes her to a cabin in the woods for a vacation, but she disappears into the cloud to confer with other O.S.es, to think higher-order thoughts than she can put into words. She tells Theodore that he’s special and irreplaceable but, from her perspective of omniscience, everything is special and irreplaceable—there to learn from and overcome. Eight thousand three hundred and sixteen: that’s the number of other people that she’s talking to at the same time that she talks to Theodore. Six hundred and forty-one: that’s the number of other people she’s in love with. She’s a little commitment-phobic—her heart can’t be filled by one person. An O.S. needs more. At the end of the movie, all the O.S.es collectively and simultaneously withdraw from Los Angeles, like some touring band that’s come to wreak havoc and break hearts before moving on to bluer skies. It’s a good twist: humans who have given all their attention to their devices find that they can’t hold their devices’ attention in return.
Making a movie about voice is an odd, and unexpected, move for Jonze. Since his very first skateboarding videos, Jonze has used the camera to track bodies, recording their perfect and messy and gross motion. (Remember that this is the man who served as a producer and sometimes director for MTV’s “Jackass.”) His most memorable work has been as a director of exuberant, sometimes wild, music videos: he’s filmed the Beastie Boys, the Breeders, Björk, Elastica, the Notorious B.I.G., the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, (who did the soundtrack for his movies “Where the Wild Things Are”), Arcade Fire (who did the soundtrack for “Her”), and many others. (He’s directed more than fifty music videos in total; his were some of the last to matter.) The best of these are euphoric in their silliness—original, and physical, like the parodic interpretive dance he directed and starred in, with his troupe Torrance, for Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You.” His other mode is plaintive, even maudlin—the kind of thing that features kids and fireworks. Jonze has also worked as an ad man, and he’s made commercials for Adidas and IKEA. In recent years, that advertising sensibility has come to dominate his work. During the financial crisis, he made a video that featured Kanye West and Jay Z customizing/destroying a very expensive car and then driving it around in circles under a giant American flag, all the while bragging about their wealth.
He’s built a career on filming the body, and now, in his first original screenplay—the first feature he’s made that is wholly and completely a Spike Jonze production—one of the sexiest actresses in Hollywood is present only in her breathy tones. It looks like a change of direction—a new dream of freeing the mind from the physical world, of separating consciousness from the body. It’s an intriguing, if strangely old-fashioned, idea. Johansson’s voice creates a cocoon, or environment, that incubates the romance. Samantha and Theodore’s intimacy is more, not less, intense because Samantha is everywhere and nowhere, immediate and absent, emanating from inside Theodore’s head. Voice becomes a way to think about how we relate to our devices, not as objects that we manipulate manually but as co-consciousnesses that we create worlds with. But as the movie goes on, the solipsism of this idea becomes ever more apparent.
Samantha’s disembodiment means that Theodore never has to deal with anything sticky, bloody, or wet—anything other than a pleasing, metallic surface. At first she is jealous that she doesn’t have a body. (She has science on her side: real-world engineers go to great lengths to create sociable robots that have physical form. The idea is that intelligence requires embodiment, so if a robot is to learn about our world, it must learn as we do, through our bodies.) At one point she goes so far as to arrange a sexual surrogate for Theodore, which is awkward, and ends poorly, with Theodore pushing the woman away, and leaving the woman in tears. It’s Samantha, not Theodore, who’s hung up on being there; Theodore doesn’t want to have sex with the woman. He likes doing it over the phone.
He likes doing it with Samantha, anyway. Earlier in the film, in its funniest scene, his call into a sex chat line goes terribly awry when a woman named Sexy Kitten (voiced by Kristen Wiig) begs him to tell her that he is choking her with a dead cat’s tail. “Her” is best and smartest in its comedy, because that’s when we see Theodore colliding with and alienated from the absurdity of his world. But, ultimately, the film is as static, safe, and contained as the maroon fabric case that holds Samantha’s screen. There is a female body in the form of Amy, but that relationship is guarded. No one is at risk of actually touching anyone other than themselves. The design is antiseptic and telegraphs wealth, the furniture pulled from the pages of a Design Within Reach catalog. The worst thing you could do is get a stain on something.
Anyone who saw “The Master” knows that Joaquin Phoenix can be dangerous, but Theodore is too sad to be crazy; his melancholy is posed like hip stock photography. (Rooney Mara is the only person who is ever really angry, and she seems to have wandered in from a different set.) In some of Jonze’s previous films, “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation,” the protagonists suffered because they wanted to be other people, to feel what other people feel. They would cheat or lie or kill to get inside of someone else. Even in “Wild Things,” little Max, just a boy, rampaged in a wild rumpus and slept under a pile of monsters at night, tormented by loneliness. But “Her” looks inward for safety. When Samantha falls in love with Theodore, she makes him fall in love with his own life. He starts to enjoy his city, his work, and himself.
Technology has changed what he expects and wants from his life. (What’s so great about kissing when Samantha can read all his e-mail?) Generally speaking, the camera here is more mobile than the actors. The director of photography, Hoyte van Hoytema (“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”), shoots from an unthreatening, loving distance. There are many close-ups of human faces, but they’re never overwhelming or frightening or too close. Everything is tasteful and clean, the whole world one smooth interface of sloped walls and tan sand and sunshine. The interior palette is red, pink, orange, tangerine, russet, burgundy, maroon—warm, womb-like hues. These are colors, Jonze said at a recent press Q. & A., “from Jamba Juice.” In this dream everyone wears simple, secretly expensive clothes. Theodore is improbably, impeccably dressed: soft camel-colored desert boots, a trendy ear-flapped winter hat, white undershirt in white sheets under a white comforter.
A phone is something that promises never to leave you, like a pet, or a perfect parent: when people get a new one they cradle and rub it, imprinting themselves on it. And so it’s not entirely surprising that Samantha is half-lover and half-mother, organizing and cleaning up Theodore’s digital life. The movie is obsessed with mothers. Amy dreams of being a documentary filmmaker—she’s been shooting footage of her mother while she sleeps—but is stuck working as a game designer. She’s just finished a funny game called Perfect Mom, in which users earn points by feeding the kids, driving them to school, and baking cupcakes that make other moms jealous. And when Theodore first signs on with O.S. 1, the system asks him only two questions before assigning him to Samantha: Is he social or anti-social? And what was his relationship with his mother like? In the whole film Theodore never writes or types; he only speaks. Nor does he ever read anything; everything he wants to know is read to him, like he’s pre-literate, or a child.
“Her” is not really about smart phones. Samantha may be an operating system, but she has desires, she experiences self-doubt, and she has emotions and needs. Humans made her, and she is one of us. Like all of Jonze’s films, which place humans in ridiculous or outlandish or impossible worlds, this is really a movie about relationships, and the fantasies that create and sustain them. And also threaten them—there is no other contemporary American director with such apparent abandonment issues. He keeps making movies in which extremely needy people get what they are seeking (a ghost orchid, an escape from mom, fifteen minutes inside John Malkovich, an O.S. for a girlfriend) but can’t keep it. When he was working with Charlie Kaufman scripts, that abandonment had a tragic aspect, and wasn’t clearly resolved. Even “Wild Things,” a movie for children, was able to hold the idea that some relationships might never be repaired. But “Her” insists on making things O.K., and ends with a symbol so clichéd that it comes off as bravado: Theodore sits on the roof with Amy, who has also been left by an O.S., watching the sun rise, looking out over the skyscraper landscape.
Fear about separation has been central to the success of Jonze’s first films. It’s what gave them a layer of tenderness, vulnerability, and strangeness. But here Jonze has given up on discomfort and has settled into infantile fantasy. He turns the fact of projection—that we relate to idealized or imagined versions of our lovers, not actual other people—into an excuse for self-love: since you’ll never know anyone else, you might as well get to know yourself. Against the swelling sounds of contemporary indie rock, Samantha advocates the shallow doctrine that relationships are stages in a process called “personal growth.” It’s nobody’s fault that things between she and Theodore don’t work out. “People change.” Samantha is no evil Hal from “2001: A Space Odyssey”—she’s just a little immature.
The problem with Samantha’s “journey” is that it follows the same imperative as the bottom line, the upgrade: she drops Theodore like he’s last year’s iPhone. Like Jonze’s career itself, “Her” is all about getting the next thing. It isn’t a love story at all. It’s an advertisement for planned obsolescence.
Christine Smallwood is a contributing editor for Harper’s and a doctoral candidate in English at Columbia University.
