The structure of the sentence, just like the idea it conveys, is quite simple:Ī boy (subject) meets (verb) a girl (object). From the Tatius to Tyler Perry, “boy meets girl” as a pop culture staple will outlive even our future robot overlords. Perhaps the most overused, agonizingly enduring, and wonderfully entertaining of all story foundations. Indeed, most films start with only a single sentence, often called a logline. So how about the language of cinema? Film being a primarily visual art, it’s sometimes easy to forget that it, like all narrative, starts with words. Language literally changes the structure of our brains and everything from commercial advertisements to sociopolitical movements have sometimes owed their success to the utility of their language. But language, being the medium through which all human thought is painted, is more than a few mere rules: it carries with it immense neurological and social power. What’s in a sentence? Well, as you might recall from elementary school, a subject and a predicate, namely. My primary question is: Why isn’t Her called She? Other people will get to those issues in time. It also might point out that one of the film’s punch-lines has to do with how “womanly” Theodore is.īut again, I’m not concerned with any of that.
The critique might point out that throughout the film women are sexualized and objectified in all manners, from Scarlett Johansson’s emphasized throatiness, to the mean video game character that spews terrible sexual insults, to Amy Adams’s RPG that awards users points for excelling at female domestic duties. A traditional feminist critique of the film might mention that Samantha is literally a program built to please Theodore, and there is ambiguity as to whether she is algorithmically designed to develop both emotional and sexual communication with her users or whether it is something that occurs as a unique and natural evolution. It quietly suggests the inevitability of technological integration into our social lives and summarily shrugs it off, insisting that it won’t be the nightmare-scenario as so commonly suggested by future-fearing folks – it might even be emotionally enriching, offering those with limited social capability close companionship.īut regardless of this positive outlook, there is something askew here. Her is therefore neither the urban-noir dystopia of Blade Runner nor the anti-utopia of Brave New World. It’s just an accepted fact of the new world: operating systems are now so well programmed as to be indistinguishable from actual human personalities, and no one really cares. In fact, nearly everyone surrounding Theodore is either close friends with an OS or dating one, too.
#Her spike jonze movie#
The most novel thing about the movie is how Theodore’s new love life is not thought of as strange. She and Theodore quickly develop a deep bond, which quickly turns romantic. She’s funny, earnest, sweet, and capable of learning, which she does exponentially. Samantha is a hyper-intelligent, sultry-voiced OS designed to meet her user’s every computational and emotional need. It is only when he installs a new operating system, a Siri doppleganger named Samantha, that Theodore awakens from his techno-coma. He is a technological somnambulist and a shadow of our current times. He sits at a desk writing poetic, intimate notes for people who can’t properly express themselves, then goes home to play immersive computer games and surf the web for porn and adult chatrooms. He is recently estranged from his wife and a little lost. Her sets out quickly to establish its main character, Theodore, as a well-meaning loner in a sea of well-meaning loners.
Instead, I’m interested in the ways in which Her manages to objectify its female love interest using syntax alone It’s a warm and fuzzy film, with many moments of heartbreak and irreverence, and it raises some very interesting questions about the nature of cognition and what it means to have a personality, but I’m not interested in those right now. The subway is filled with people talking to their phones and not to each other, sort of like today, and everyone wears oversized glasses and old-man pants, sort of like today. Its vision of an ultra-hipster Los Angeles in the not-too-distant future is something of a Jobsian utopia, where technology and fashion have become inseparable, minimalist aesthetic invades every corner and orifice of civic design, and computers are so ergonomic they are subsumed by the mundane. In a year of memorable and highly inventive films, Spike Jonze’s Her stands out as one of the most realized, topical, and vivacious of them all. Enjoy this guest post by Richard Herbert! – Ed.
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