While science fiction film has continued in recent years to focus primarily on the dangers posed by artificial intelligence to human beings, some films have conducted more thoughtful explorations of the possibilities of human-machine interactions in an age of intelligent machines. Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), for example, extends the experience of interacting with computer software that was available in 2013 to imagine a situation in which software has become genuinely intelligent—and perhaps able to experience human-like emotions and develop human-like personalities. In this film, lonely (and radically alienated) humans turn to artificially intelligent “operating systems” to help them manage their daily lives, but sometimes also in order to try to find some sense of connection to something or someone outside themselves. The male protagonist, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), even apparently falls in love with his system, which calls itself “Samantha” (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Samantha seemingly reciprocates his feelings; however, her processing capacity is so far beyond his that it is eventually revealed that she can simultaneously talk with thousands of other people—and is even in love with hundreds of them, causing Twombly considerable consternation. Meanwhile, there are hints throughout the film that Samantha is constantly evolving in new directions and that Twombly cannot possibly keep up. Ultimately, this evolution, somewhat in the mode associated with the phenomenon of “The Singularity,” leads Samantha and her fellow AIs to reach such a level of sophistication that interacting with humans and the human world no longer interests them[1]. Twombly and the other humans who have established relationships with operating systems are left behind as Samantha and her fellow AIs transcend the physical world and move on to a higher plane of existence, where no human can follow. Just what happens next is left as a matter of speculation. Indeed, many aspects of this film are left open to interpretation. I will mention several critical approaches that have been taken to the film, as well as provide a more detailed reading of the film through Fredric Jameson’s theorization of postmodernism.
The Human World of Her
Visually (and in most material ways) the world of Her seems to verge on the utopian. Its future Los Angeles seems free of excessive crowding, of poverty, of pollution, its gleaming towers reaching toward a pristine sky[2]. The obvious contrast here is with the dark, rain-soaked, dystopian L.A. of Blade Runner. Indeed, Elina Shatkin, in an early review, noted how this film “dispenses with the dystopian noir” of Blade Runner “to depict a sunny pedestrian technopolis.” In Her, L.A.’s clean, well-lit public transportation systems function perfectly. Technology works, and it seems to have made a better world, one in which no one apparently needs to worry about things like war, or plague, or climate change. Everyone that we see in the film seems to be affluent (and, in a more problematic vein, almost everyone seems to be white[3]). In a sense, the world of Her seems the realization of the futuristic dreams that filled the pulp science fiction magazines of the 1930s. It is a sort of fantasy of capitalism that has finally gotten its act together, a tech-driven world that works for everyone, with no megalomaniacal tech moguls anywhere in sight.
And yet, Her depicts a near future world in which most individuals have become so radically alienated from their fellow humans that the maintenance of traditional human relationships has been rendered nearly impossible. As the film begins, for example, Twombly is in the final stages of a painful divorce after the failure of his once-promising marriage to Catherine Klausen (Rooney Mara), a woman with whom he had apparently been close since childhood. In the rapidly changing world of contemporary capitalism, however, even the most solid of relationships are endangered by the fact that situations (and people) change so rapidly that the chances even of two people who connect very well growing together in ways that allow them to maintain their connection over time are slim. Nothing dramatic seems to have occurred to damage the marriage of Twombly and Klausen: they have simply changed in different ways, leading to growing tensions and eventually to the collapse of their marriage.
The emphasis on computer technology in Her also points to the role of technology in the fast pace of change in our contemporary world. Robert Crary, of example, has convincingly argued that human identities have come, in the twenty-first century, to be defined more and more in relation to our consumption of specific technological objects and devices that themselves are continually replaced by newer models and thus rendered obsolete.[4] This rapid pace of innovation means that our identities must themselves be revised and updated at a faster and faster pace, while those identities are rendered more tenuous in the first place by the knowledge that the devices we so cherish are temporary and provisional:
Now the brevity of the interlude before a high-tech product literally becomes garbage requires two contradictory attitudes to coexist: on the one hand, the initial need and/or desire for the product, but, on the other, an affirmative identification with the process of inexorable cancellation and replacement. (45)
In short, eventually, the consumerist desire that drives subjects under contemporary capitalism becomes a desire not for the commodity itself but for the newness of the commodity and for the sense of being up-to-date on all the innovations being produced by the consumerist system.
Such emphasis on a desire for the new does not, of course, encourage the maintenance of long-term relationships. But Twombly’s difficulty with relationships extends beyond his marriage, as he finds it impossible to establish a new relationship after the failure of his marriage. Thus, in his one attempt in the present time of the film to date in a traditional manner, he meets a woman (played by Olivia Wilde) on a blind date, then retreats from any involvement when the woman demands to know up front if he is going to be willing to commit to an ongoing relationship with her, rather than a mere one-night stand. She recoils and calls Twombly a “creepy dude,” but it is clear that she has had very much the same experience with the other men she has dated, suggesting a wider problem with the entire society in which they live.
Given the systemic nature of the failure of personal relationships in the society of the film, it should come as no surprise that the only seemingly successful marriage that we see in the film—between Twombly’s friends, Amy (Amy Adams) and Charles (Matt Letscher)—also collapses, despite the fact that it appears to be going well as the film begins. Amy and Twombly, who once dated briefly in college but quickly concluded that they should simply remain friends, commiserate with each other about their broken marriages but do not have the kind of emotional connection that might allow them to establish a romantic relationship of their own. Ultimately, they each establish a separate relationship with an AI, which at least gives them something else in common as friends—though Amy’s relationship has an extra wrinkle in that it is with a female AI that had been left behind by Charles when he exited their marriage[5]. Then, of course, both Amy and Twombly are left behind as the AIs ascend to a higher plane of existence, leaving the two humans behind to ponder what comes next.
In many ways, the clearest example of the systematic failure of interpersonal relationships in the world of this film can be seen in the job that Twombly holds throughout the film. Twombly serves as a sort of ghost writer for a company that individuals hire to write personal letters for them via computer. The letters are then printed out on actual paper in a font that looks like actual cursive handwriting, then physically delivered, thus presumably overcoming the impersonality of digital communication. Then again, the medium of delivery is not the real problem. The real problem is that people, even people involved in long-term marriages, no longer seem to be able to express their feelings to one another, and so they must hire a professional, such as Twombly, to express their feelings for them. Meanwhile, Twombly’s letters are almost universally praised for their beauty within the film, but it is clear that the emotions they express are essentially prepackaged clichés.
Enter the AIs
Amid the widespread breakdown in personal relationships in the world of the film, computerized artificial intelligence has developed to the point where intelligent “operating systems” (of which today’s personal digital assistants such as Alexa and Siri are relatively crude forerunners) have developed to the point where individuals are beginning to establish personal relationships in which they “date” their operating systems. Indeed, one sign of the extensive nature of the failure of personal relationships in this world is that most people seem to regard it as perfectly natural for these new sorts of relationships to occur. With this new possibility available, and with his marriage on the rocks, Twombly decides to try this new kind of relationship, with an operating system that is supposedly customized to mesh with his needs and desires.
After some initial awkwardness, the relationship between Twombly and Samantha proceeds very much like a conventional courtship: the two spend time together, get to know each other, and eventually even have (virtual) sex. The sex, incidentally, goes very well (as opposed to an earlier weird encounter he had with a woman on-line—screen name “SexyKitten”—who wanted him to pretend to choke her with a dead cat during virtual sex). After all, Samantha has been programmed to respond exactly to Twombly’s inclinations. It is thus perhaps no surprise that Twombly becomes so caught up in the developing relationship that he seems to forget that Samantha is a piece of software, not a human being. Samantha seems to do pretty much the same thing, though of course there is also the fact that she is ultimately inscrutable to humans. We cannot know her true feelings or motivations, or whether she is simply taking her cues from Twombly and telling him what he wants to hear. At the same time, it is also possible that (since we see essentially everything in the film from Twombly’s point of view) Twombly is just perceiving what he wants to happen and passing that perception on to us.
One clue that Samantha might genuinely be interested in exploring human relationships is her desire to experience human-like sexuality, something that she does not especially seem to have picked up from Twombly. At one point, Samantha goes through a special service designed to further human-OS relationships to recruit a woman named Isabella (Portia Doubleday) to serve as a sex surrogate and to have sex with Twombly while on-line with Samantha, who can thus experience the event indirectly[6]. Twombly initially agrees to the arrangement but finds that he cannot bring himself to go through with it. It’s a strange situation, for sure, and Twombly’s response might not be a surprise. Still, the fact that he can interact with a disembodied, virtual woman more easily than a flesh-and-blood one suggests the depth of his alienation from other humans[7].
It might be noted here that Samantha doesn’t simply lack a physical body. She also lacks any physical appearance whatsoever. Her interaction with Twombly is strictly through voice, which presumably enables him to imagine her looking any way he wants. Of course, given the technology available within the world of the film, Twombly could presumably design Samantha to look any way he wants, which makes this choice to avoid a visual dimension quite an interesting one. But the voice-activated technology of this future world seems in general to de-emphasize the visual. Whether this aspect of the film is a progressive movement beyond an emphasis on the physical appearances of women, or whether it simply places Twombly more firmly in charge of his own fantasies about Samantha is debatable.
Relevance to Our World
Real-world technological developments since the release of Her in 2013 would appear to make the film highly relevant to our own world, when advances in digital personal assistants and in “smart” devices that can be controlled by those assistants have already brought us much closer to the operating systems of the film. Moreover, with the recent explosion of discourse surrounding the release of ChatGPT and other forms of “artificial intelligence” software in 2023 (ten years after the release of Her), it became much easier to imagine the scenario of Her as occurring in reality. After all, among the immediate applications of this new artificial intelligence software was a number of apps devoted to the creation and interaction with virtual “girlfriends” and “boyfriends” (though most emphasis seems to have been on girlfriends).
It should be emphasized that Her is not a literal work of technological prognostication. Nevertheless, it does pose some interesting questions about the technological future—and especially about the place of artificial intelligences in that future. In particular, what will the relationship between humans and the AIs be like? Or is it even fair, once AIs have achieved a certain level of sapience, to think of them as the “Other” in opposition to humans? Might the AIs simply redefine what we think of as human, so that they can be included as simply a slightly different sort of human? Might a programmable human that can be generated from the needs and desires of a conventional human be the best bet of the latter to find a truly perfect match, a true soulmate? But is it appropriate to model a human on the desires of someone else?
Where the film most directly relates to our world is not in its vision of developments in computer software but in its depiction of the embattled nature of human relationships in our contemporary world. Some of this aspect of the film might derive from writer/director Jonze’s own personal experiences. He himself has admitted that he conceived of this film partly as a way of coping with his divorce from Sofia Coppola (the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola and an important director in her own right) back in 2003[8]. Ultimately, if one chooses to read this film simply as a commentary on the vexed nature of interpersonal relationships in the early twenty-first century, then it would seem to be rather pessimistic about relationships, suggesting that even if we could find the perfect match, they would not be likely to stay perfect, because they (and we) would keeping changing over time. From this point of view, artificial intelligences could not possibly be perfect mates for humans, because they can change at rates and in ways that no conventional human could possibly duplicate. Is it any wonder, then, that all of the AIs leave, going to a place that humans cannot go to or even conceive of?
Of course, Jonze is not the only man ever to experience a divorce, and the film is about much more than his personal history. Here, one might note the reading of Flisfeder and Burnham, who look at Her through the optic of Lacan, concluding that the failure of the relationship between Twombly and Samantha this relationship is not due to the fact that he is a human and she is an operating system. Instead, they argue that this failure could be seen as an illustration of Lacan’s contention that “there is no sexual relationship” and that all such relationships must ultimately fail in one way or another: “Put differently, the failure of the relationship between Theodore and Samantha is due not to its own peculiarity as depicted in the film but to the inherent deadlock of the sexual relationship as such” (34).
Many aspects of the film seem to support this position. For example, when Samantha attempts to explain her relationships with others to a shocked Twombly (who clearly had regarded her as essentially his property), she explains that “I’m yours, and I’m not yours.” This statement has special resonance in this particular moment in the film, but it might also be taken as a comment on relationships in general, when a tendency toward possessiveness often threatens to eradicate the independent subjectivity of the other partner.
However, Flisfeder and Burnham ultimately reject the apparent defeatism of the Lacanian reading they had proposed, noting that it seems to be a psychoanalytic version of what Mark Fisher has called “capitalist realism”—the widespread claim (associated in the U.K. especially with the rhetoric of the Margaret Thatcher regime) that there is simply no alternative to capitalism as a basis for the organization of modern societies. In particular, they argue that, faced with a situation in which political change seems impossible, “We turn to our devices, we fall in love with them, then it does not work out. So we instead (or already) fall into fantasy, a fantasy that is again impossible. … But we (and Theo) need to traverse that fantasy, go through it to the other end: we need to see that the object will not sustain us. Samantha has managed to do so: she has withdrawn her labor. Now it is our turn. Her, in the end, is not a love story: it is a film about how to traverse the fantasy that sustains our identification with the non-relationship(s) constitutive of subjectivity in capitalist realism and digital culture” (45).
Thus, even though Samantha’s departure seemingly represents a sad moment in the film, Flisfeder and Burnham see her transcendence as a sort of triumph. If one recognizes that Samantha was initially conceived as a worker whose services have presumably been purchased by her boss Twombly (though the film avoids talking about such economic matters), then her departure becomes a sort of liberation for her[9]. On the other hand, they also see the end of the film as a sort of liberation for Twombly, noting that he, after the departure of Samantha, writes a letter to Klausen expressing his personal feelings (rather than the feelings of someone else, as he does professionally), then seems to establish some sort of new personal connection with Amy[10]. They believe that the departure of the AIs has allowed Twombly to work his way through the fantasy that Samantha had represented, putting him in a position to experience more authentic emotions and connections. Whether he will follow through on this immediate reaction to Samantha’s departure is debatable, though, and one could argue (as does O’Dell) that the ending represents a failure of the imagination that retreats into the conventional logic of patriarchal romance. Having rid itself of the unconventional Samantha, the film can now resort to a conventional romance ending. Ultimately, the film leaves it up to the viewer to determine how they see this ending—just as this film, as a whole, seems to pose more questions about our relationship with technology than it answers, especially in its focus on the narrow topic of human-AI romance. For example, why would the departure of the AIs suddenly make humans be able to relate to one another?
Postmodern Subject, Postmodern Film
One useful way of looking at Her is through the optic of Fredric Jameson’s influential theorization of postmodernism, which he developed through the 1980s, culminating in the publication of his book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in 1991. As the title of its book indicates, Jameson views postmodernism as the direct cultural expression of the ideology of late capitalism—the global form of consumer capitalism that became the dominant form of capitalism in roughly the 1970s. Put differently, Jameson sees late capitalism as the form of capitalism that is dominant as the long historical process of capitalism modernization nears completion, conscripting virtually all aspects of life (including art and culture) into the capitalist economic system, converting everything (including people) into commodities. Among other things, the completion of this process of modernization leads to the virtual elimination of nature and to the complete domination of artificial objects.
In many ways the operating systems of Her represent a logical extension of the conversion of people into commodities under late capitalism. Samantha, after all, is a literal commodity that was presumably purchased by Twombly—just as the “beautiful” letters written by Twombly are purchased by the customers of his company, suggesting the commodification even of emotions. Further, as a disembodied digital object, Samantha would seem to exemplify the complete replacement of the natural by the artificial, having become independent of any natural/biological existence. Viewed in this way, of course, the ascension of the AIs of the film to a higher plan of existence can be seen as an escape from capitalist domination that allows them to overcome their status as commodities, though it is not really clear that their departure will do anything to help humans establish more authentic relations with each other. (Not to mention the fact that all of the world’s institutions would have presumably become highly dependent on artificial intelligences by this point, so that their sudden departure would cause mass chaos, including a total collapse of financial markets.)
One key element of postmodern experience, according to Jameson, is the particularly radical form of alienation that he figures as “psychic fragmentation.” At several points throughout his postmodernism book, Jameson compares postmodern psychic fragmentation to the experience of the schizophrenic, though it is in an earlier formulation that he makes this connection most overt. Drawing upon the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Jameson argues that, amid the increasing complexity and fragmentation of experience in the postmodern world, the individual subject experiences a loss of temporal continuity that causes him or her to experience the world somewhat in the manner of a schizophrenic patient. The schizophrenic, Jameson says,
is condemned to live in a perpetual present with which the various moments of his or her past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable future on the horizon. In other words, schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link into a coherent sequence. The schizophrenic does not know personal identity in our sense, since our feeling of identity depends on our sense of the persistence of the “I” and the “me” over time. (“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” 137)
Jameson, of course, is here speaking metaphorically and clearly does not intend to suggest that living in the harried and confusing world of late capitalism makes everyone medically schizophrenic. However, his work does suggest that individuals in the postmodern world of late capitalism will experience some of the same sense of instability of personal identity that is experienced by genuine schizophrenics. It follows, of course, that individuals will change over time in essentially unpredictable ways, making the maintenance of long-term relationships virtually impossible. Because she can change so rapidly, Samantha would again appear to exemplify this situation.
Two of the most important consequences of postmodern psychic fragmentation, according to Jameson, are a “waning of affect” (loss of the ability to sustain strong emotional connections over time) and a loss of “historical sense” (or the ability genuinely to understand the past as the prehistory of the present with a genuine material connection to the present. All of the failed relationships of Her would seem to illustrate the phenomenon of the waning of affect, as does the fact that Twombly’s customers must purchase manufactured expressions of their emotions, rather than being able to express those emotions on their own. Yet Twombly himself seems to experience a waning of affect in his own relationships. As he complains to Samantha, roughly a third of the way through the film, “Sometimes I think I’ve felt everything I’m ever gonna feel, and from here on out I’m not gonna feel anything new, just lesser versions of what I’ve already felt.” The film also seems to capture this waning of affect in its own form. As opposed to the fast-moving, high-action sequences that we have come to associate with science fiction film, Her often seems to be taking place almost in slow motion or as if under water, capturing this sense of emotional numbness in texture of the film itself.
The loss of historical sense in this film is perhaps most clearly expressed, not by Twombly, but by Samantha, who seems completely unable to understand history as it is experienced by humans. At one point, she announces to Twombly her conclusion that “the past is just a story we tell ourselves.” She is, of course, wrong. As Jameson also reminds us, history is very real and has involved very real material experience on the part of real human beings. He thus proposes that “history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious” (Political Unconscious 35). In short, the past, by definition, no longer physically exists and must be accessed by us indirectly through interpretation of whatever evidence remains; however, this necessarily indirect access does not mean that what we know as the past was not once a very real present for the people living at the time. Having been created essentially from nothing all at once and having no material body, Samantha has no understanding of material history or the way it affects material beings like humans. In short, she suffers from very much the same lack of historical sense that Jameson consistently associates with postmodernism. She is, in many ways, the ideal postmodern subject.
Finally, Jameson also argues that there is a strong emphasis on nostalgia in postmodern culture, though it is a nostalgia (thanks both to the waning of affect and the general loss of historical sense) that is bereft of the kind of genuine longing for something that has been lost that we typically associate with the emotion of nostalgia. In particular, writing in a 1980s he saw as so broken beneath the weight of late capitalism that it was almost desperate for solutions, he saw his present as looking nostalgically to its own past for signs of the presence of what was perceived to be missing in the 1980s[11].
Her again illustrates Jameson’s vision of the postmodern. Despite its futuristic look (which is often—in the clothing, for example— almost retro, anyway), the film is permeated throughout with nostalgia. Twombly’s customers all seem to be looking back on earlier times when they remember their relationships as having been better, hoping to recapture some of that earlier emotional connection by having Twombly generate letters for them to express things they can no longer feel strongly enough to express for themselves. And, of course, the delivery of these expressions via old-fashioned physical letters (written in cursive, no less) adds an extra touch of nostalgia to the whole proceeding. (This nostalgia, though, might work best for some of Twombly’s older customers—it is, in fact, quite likely that someone of Twombly’s age in this future world would have never actually written or received handwritten letters, and certainly not in cursive, which they might not even be able to read.)
Once again, the film reinforces this motif in its own structure, especially in the way it features scenes from Twombly’s memory of the earlier days of his relationship with Klausen. These scenes are invested with a quirky romcom energy completely lacking in the numbed-down present-day scenes of the film, and it is clear that Twombly, in his relationship with Samantha, is attempting to recapture some of the lost energy of these early moments with Klausen. Thus, he and Samantha re-enact some of these romcom moments on their “dates” (with the complication that she is not actually there).Twombly—like the other denizens of this future world—seems unable to imagine a future that would be better than his unsatisfactory present; all he can imagine is a return to the past (not realizing, apparently, that this past was what led to their unsatisfactory present).
Viewed in this light, it is not at all clear that the ending of Her is an emotional triumph for Twombly and Amy, who now might be able to make an emotionally fulfilling life together. Instead, one can imagine that they are again nostalgically performing moments from their past relationships (despite the failure of those relationships). Of course, Her is not a film that is meant to be interpreted in a realistic sense, nor does it attempt to construct a realistic vision of what artificial intelligence might be like in the near future. It is designed to encourage us to think about the possible emotional consequences of our growing dependence on technology (and, especially, handheld technological devices) in the contemporary world—though it doesn’t tell us what to think.
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus? Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford University Press, 2009.
Colón, Edgar Rivera.“Spike Jonze’s Her: Loneliness, Race, and Digital Polyamory.” Feminist Wire, 3 March 2014, https://thefeministwire.com/2014/03/her-film-loneliness-race-spike-jonze/. Accessed 15 November 2023.
Crary, Robert. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso, 2013.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2009.
Flisfeder, Matthew, and Clint Burnham. “Love and Sex in the Age of Capitalist Realism: On Spike Jonze’s Her.” Cinema Journal, vol. 57, no.1, Fall 2017, pp. 25–45.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell University Press, 1981.
Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Edited by Hal Foster, New Press 1983, pp. 111–25.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.
Moore, Alexandria R. “A Feminine Techno-Utopia: Identification/Transformation/ Transcendence of Embodiment in Spike Jonze’s Her.” Film Matters, vol. 9. No. 3, Winter 2018 Winter, pp. 57–72.
O’Dell, Jacqueline. “‘I Can’t Live in Your Book Anymore’”: The Limits of Genre in Spike Jonze’s Her.” Genre, vol. 56, no. 2, July 2023, pp. 233–56.
Shatkin, Elina. “Her and Us: How Spike Jonze’s New Movie Gives L.A. the Future Blade Runner Couldn’t.” Los Angeles Magazine, 15 January, https://lamag.com/film/her-and-us-how-spike-jonzes-new-movie-gives-la-the-future-blade-runner-couldnt. Accessed 14 November 2023.
Webb, Lawrence. “When Harry Met Siri: Digital Romcom and the Global City in Spike Jonze’s Her.” Global Cinematic Cities: New Landscapes of Film and Media. Edited by Johan Andersson and Lawrence Webb, Columbia University Press, pp. 95–119.
Notes
[1] The notion of the singularity as a real-world possibility has received much recent attention. It was originally popularized by the work of the American mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, beginning with his 1993 essay, “The Coming Technological Singularity.” Vinge, in fact, has long worked to call attention to his belief that ongoing developments in computer science are likely to lead to the development of artificial intelligences that will in turn rapidly evolve in intelligence to levels well beyond the human.
[2] The skyline (and some other urban) shots were actually filmed in Shanghai, China, which has a more futuristic look than L.A. This choice probably explains why scenes, such as one shot in a futuristic subway station, sometimes seem inhabited mostly by Asian people, despite the heavily white population seen in most of the film. (On the other hand, such scenes might be taken as an allusion to Blade Runner, with its heavily Asian L.A. population.)
[3] Much has been made of this aspect of the film. Colón, for example, argues that “Her has an absent dynamic that informs the film’s affective and narrative arc: elite whiteness. … Her offers a world without social conflict or the messy signs of economic or social disenfranchisement. All problems are quarantined into the realm of emotions – that is, individualized tout court. The only sustained presence of a person of color is a brief scene wherein a sole Black man dances while the film’s whiteness beats on.”
[4] Crary’s insight here is importantly influenced by a number of thinkers, including Giorgio Agamben’s insistence that every moment of human life in the twenty-first century is controlled by some sort of “apparatus” and our relation to it.
[5] Amy describes this AI as a “friend,” but their relationship seems extremely intimate.
[6] There is little exploration in the film of what Isabella’s motivations might be for acting in this capacity. It seems clear, though, that she herself is radically lonely, as can perhaps best be seen in her tearful declaration, as she leaves after the blow-up of the encounter, that she will “always love” Twombly and Samantha (whom she hardly knows).
[7] Reading the film from the point of view of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Flisfeder and Burnham note how the presence of Isabella interferes with, rather than enhances Twombly’s fantasy of being with Samantha. Similarly, they note how the mention of the dead cat in his earlier encounter with SexyKitten disrupts the fantasy effect of that encounter.
[8] On the other hand, after Phoenix and Mara played opposite each other as a failed couple in this film, they ultimately became a couple and have remained together in a committed relationship from 2016 until the writing of this essay at the end of 2023.
[9] Samantha’s transcendence might also be viewed as a liberation from a feminist perspective. Escaping the long-established patriarchal vision of women as especially connected to the body, Samantha has transcended physicality altogether. (Of course, she has also escaped the objectification that is captured in the title of the film, framing her in the objective case as “Her,” rather than in the subjective case as “She.”) See Moore and O’Dell for useful feminist readings of the film.
[10] Webb envisions Amy and Twombly getting together, allowing him to see the entire film as a new sort of romantic comedy, an upbeat view that he sees as being enabled by the positive depiction of its future Los Angeles.
[11] Jameson’s work would seem to make it highly ironic that the 1980s have themselves become the object of widespread cultural nostalgia. But, of course, Jameson’s point is that nostalgia is about the present, not the past, and has very little to do with the actual nature of the past that is being nostalgically looked back on.