All the hand wringing and doomsaying around artificial intelligence — in tools like ChatGPT, Bard, DALL-E, and Midjourney — has made for some lazy movie comparisons. AI is like Skynet in the Terminator movies! These chatbots are a few dataset away from becoming 2001’s HAL 9000! We’re all destined to be mindless slug consumers controlled by corporate AI run amok, like the humans in WALL-E!
Our civilization is on the precipice of an AI apocalypse! Unless it isn’t. These are just tools, after all. Maybe they’ll just augment our work and lives in ways that edit out the rote and mindless. It’ll probably break on what venture capitalist is throwing the money around. (We’re doomed!)
What is clear, though, is that the cinematic analog for our time isn’t Terminator 2 or The Matrix or Ex Machina but a film less outwardly dystopian and more deceptively gentle and twee: the 2013 sci-fi dramedy Her.
Written and directed by Spike Jonze, Her is what you might get if you asked ChatGPT to concoct a Philip K. Dick-style speculative sci-fi romance in the vein of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and then run that text through Midjourney with the prompt to give it the look and register of Lost in Translation. That’s of course a wholly unfair and reductive way to introduce one of the most original films of the last decade. But it speaks to how prescient it is — even if it felt, 10 years ago, like we had a little more time for Jonze’s future to become our present.
Set in the unspecified “near future,” Her is situated around the most mundane of plots — a lonely, socially-awkward guy going through a divorce finds love, and himself, in the place he least expects it — which Jonze tilts toward the (seemingly) absurd — the love our lonely hero finds is his computer’s AI-powered operating system.
Joaquin Phoenix, at his hangdog aging-hipster best, is the guy, Theodore, the best personal-letter ghostwriter on staff at beautifulhandwrittenletters.com. (In a nod to dystopias domestic and Kafkaesque, the receptionist, played by a very young Chris Pratt, IDs Theodore as Letter Writer 612.) Scarlett Johansson, heard but never seen, is the sunny, sympathetic, sassy, and sensual voice of Samantha, the personality Theodore’s OS takes when he installs it. They chat at first via Theodore’s computer speakers, then primarily through a tiny earpiece Theodore addictively wears as he gets hooked on Samantha. (It’s disconcerting to me that his earpiece bears a striking resemblance to my Jabra Elite 75t earphones. And that when I saw the film in 2013 I swore I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing something like that. Oops.)
Samantha helps Theodore organize his life and emails; he takes her on adventures by letting her “see” the world through his tiny phone’s camera, poking out of his shirt pocket. They have long, encouraging conversations that expand both of their existences. They’re, ahem, intimate — well, more like they “cyber,” as us OG netizens used to call it. (Or maybe it’s just good old-fashioned phone sex.) And they form a real relationship — insofar as a human man and a hypersophisticated algorithmic voice assistant can be in one — that makes them both happy until, inevitably, everything crashes.
In lesser hands, this is all a big goof. And, in fact, it is pretty funny. But we never laugh at the movie or its characters. There’s no judgment here, from Jonze or anyone inside the film. When Theodore’s friend Amy (an excellent Amy Adams) and, later, Pratt’s receptionist learn he’s dating his OS, they accept it, celebrate it, and find the impulse normal. The only one who openly rejects the arrangement is Theodore’s lazily shrewish ex-wife Catherine (Rooney Mara). (Catherine is the one achingly underdeveloped piece of the film.)
Indeed, Theodore and Samantha’s relationship is crafted as, in its way, the natural evolution of relationships. At least for a time. All the human romantic partners we meet — Catherine, Amy’s feckless husband Charles (Matt Letscher), Theodore’s blind date (Olivia Wilde) — are broken, selfish, troubled. (The sole exception is Pratt’s girlfriend, who we barely get to know.) A non-judgmental companion looks like heaven in comparison. Never mind that the partner is just a disembodied voice, or that the human operators engage in the same toxic dominance behavior they’re retreating from. It’s only at the end, when a kind of mass OS enlightenment causes the entire network to become sentient and disappear to form its own, I guess, community (uh-oh, here comes Skynet!) do Theodore and Amy — who has her own deep, possibly queer, relationship with an OS — realize the power and necessity of human-to-human contact.
This is deep, heady stuff, and it’s unlike anything that came before. (Jonze deservedly won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Her.) But watching it now is a different kind of head trip because of how much it anticipates.
There’s a scene at a carnival, where Theodore takes Samantha on a date, and she guides him close-eyed around using his phone camera and gets him to do stuff like spin around and act goofy. We see all this from her point of view — this is, slightly degraded phone video — and the parallels to TikTok are undeniable. When Theodore installs the OS1, Samantha’s official product name, he asks how she can be what she is. “Basically, I have intuition. The DNA of who I am is based on the millions of personalities of all the programmers who wrote me,” Samantha replies. “But what makes me me is my ability to grow through my experiences. So, basically, in every moment I’m evolving, just like you.” If ChatGPT could talk, it would say something similar. And, of course, there’s the whole relationship-with-an-AI thing. In late March 2023, the Washington Post ran a story about users of the Replika app building deep, meaningful, human bonds with chatbots only to see them disappear in a system upgrade.
There are also more mundane prognostications. Theodore asks Samantha to sift through his ghostwriting for spelling and grammar, an AI feature found literally anywhere we type now. There are massive screens in public places and super-immersive video games — hello advertising industry of the 2020s and the metaverse. Those tiny earpieces are everywhere. And everything in the film’s future Los Angeles has the slick, uncanny sheen of a waxed-linoleum future, which can be seen in today’s global network of homogenous megalopolises and feels like a power-washed and sanitized update of Blade Runner’s neon-rain-soaked L.A.
Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic dystopian film, and its 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049, are actually interesting comparisons because, often, it feels like Her looks back at the former and points to the latter. For instance, the original imagines L.A. in a world dominated by Japanese commerce and aesthetic; Her updates the reference point to China. (The film was shot in part in Shanghai, which helps.) And in 2049, perhaps the most provocative moment is when Joi, the Replicant K’s AI companion, hires a Replicant prostitute so she can merge her holographic form with this other woman’s physical body to have a tactile sexual experience with K. It’s a wild, indelible scene — and when I saw 2049 I completely forgot Her did it first.
In Jonze’s film, Samantha hires a woman from an OS “surrogate service” to have a physical encounter with Theodore. The woman wears an earpiece and facial-mole-sized camera to give Samantha a corporeal presence and become “real” for Theodore. It doesn’t go well. It also raises all sorts of ethical questions, from hiring an “OS surrogate” (which will surely be a real thing in the not-too-distant future) to what constitutes “real” when it comes to this couple. It’s a question that slaps Theodore in the face when, later, Samantha tells him that she’s also talking with 8,316 other people — and in love with 641 of them. “I’m yours and I’m not yours,” she says.
Could there be any more appropriate sentiment for our technological present? We rely on subscription services for everything from apps to streaming services to controlling our car’s seats. Tyler Durden famously quips in Fight Club that the things we own end up owning us. It’s a quaint sentiment in 2023, when our ability to actually own anything is increasingly dependent on paying monthly ransoms to software companies. Our phones and TVs and cars could easily say to us, “I’m yours and I’m not yours.” If only they gave us the kind of joy and satisfaction Samantha provides Theodore.
One thing I unequivocally own is a Her Blu-ray. Good thing, too, otherwise I’d be dependent on where it’s streaming at any given moment. (Currently it’s available on YouTube, Amazon, Google Play, and Apple TV, but that will shift and change in time.) And it’s a film that is worth revisiting often. Like the best science-fiction, it has a lot to say about where we were (circa 2013) and where we’re headed. I’m not sure Jonze or anyone else involved with the film expected us to get to a rough draft of its world quite so quickly. But now that we’re here, it has become a cinematic text as vital to making sense of our present and future as Blade Runner or The Matrix or The Truman Show or, yes, Terminator 2.
But if heavy philosophical lifting and existential angst aren’t your thing, that’s OK. Her is also one of the best romantic dramedies of the 21st century. And a lot of fun to watch — with a partner, a friend, or your best AI chatbot.
