Her

We don’t require relationships to spawn or raise our offspring. Plenty of pregnancies occur as accidents outside of relationships. A village can raise its children collectively. What use, therefore, have we of relationships?

To study this question, the movie Her removals sex (all physical contact, in fact) from such a partnership. It digs at what truly affects our emotions and fuels our needs for intimacy beyond the bedroom.

If we required only physical intimacy, our lives would prove simpler, and our vocabularies would rarely include the word “lonely.” Sex would, without emotional baggage and wagers, prove a common, effortless occurrence.

The movie Her features Theodore, who, for a living, writes beautiful love letters. He takes the lives of other people, and he writes for one exactly what the other feels. Yet, he cannot honestly express his own feelings.

Theodore spent the last year finalizing his divorce from Catherine, with whom he seemed to enjoy plenty of physical contact, but very little intellectual or emotional synchrony.

Catherine, in a flashback scene, asks her then-husband Theodore to spoon her. He happily gratifies her request. They seem, in terms of physical affection, compatible and content.

Theodore eventually purchases a computer operating system for his computer-phone-and-so-forth that possesses artificial intelligence (Her takes place in the near future, where everyone wears the same stupid pair of pants).

His operating system can speak to him through an earpiece and see him through his smartphone’s camera. She names herself Samantha.

Theodore and Samantha’s relationship starts out professional before it graduates into friendship. They afterwards connect on and intellectual and eventually emotional level . . . and fall in love.

Theodore can (perhaps because Samantha is a computer program, and he therefore doesn’t have to look her in the eye) speak frankly with her. He discovers much about himself in the process.

The movie’s experiment begins. How would a relationship with someone you cannot see or touch differ from a physical version?

Would a polyandrous relationship bother Theodore, despite the fact that Samantha couldn’t actually touch (let alone enjoy sex with) her other boyfriends?

Would the routine, relationship hurtles surface, even those that seem directly related to the sex Theodore and Samantha couldn’t experience? They do (as if sex actually has little in common with these issues).

Her presents evidence that we want someone to see us naked of our daily disguises, which we shed once no one can see us. Notice me. See me. Infuse me with significance. I’ll hide from you, though, the instant I notice your attention.

The dialogue in Her feels so well crafted that this movie could’ve worked just as well as a radio drama.

That’s not to say that Her failed to offer impressive visuals. Its director, Spike Jonze, uses everyday objects—from boiling teakettles, to a manhole cover venting steam, to dust drifting helplessly through the air—to convey the movie’s mood.

I recall a splendid scene in which Theodore sits in front of a large, television screen that displays an owl while it swoops down for a kill, and I felt refreshed to witness visuals creatively geared towards telling a story, rather than loud, high-end, “mind-blowing” computer graphics without a message.

Her moves a little slow at times. Jonze might’ve benefited, had he sliced away or shortened thirty minutes from the final cut. Still, I’m far from complaining.

Guy falls in love with his cellphone. Who would’ve thought?

I love it when Hollywood takes chances. I love it when those chances pay off wonderfully and unexpectedly.

(You can catch my short fiction at martinwolt.blogspot.com, and you can find my novels, such as Daughters of Darkwana, on Kindle. Thanks for reading. See you next time.)