I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written mostly for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here.
This is Beastly Reviews, where I write about films that made me feel something.
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Every so often, a film comes that captures our present cultural moment. In our time, that film is Her, directed by Spike Jonze.
In 2014, our world teeters on the edge of a technological future beyond our wildest dreams, and we are not all flying around in spaceships. Instead, we are relentlessly plugged in, connected to our phones and disconnected from each other, and analysed in a round-the-clock digital marketplace. So Her, set in a near-future Santa Monica, feels strangely poignant and relevant—and nicely devoid of catastrophe—in a way many current films speculating on the future of technology do not. So many of them feel heavy-handed and trudging, but in Spike Jonze’s hands, the future depicted in Her is both reasoned and realistic. In it, humans still suck at intimacy. We enjoy digital chat rooms and phone sex. We still have bad IRL dates. Some things never change.
In Her, everyone walks around talking to earpieces, clicking through emails, and living seamlessly with their devices. Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a nice, ordinary guy dealing with nice, ordinary breakup blues. His day job is to write letters for other people—from parents to sons, husbands to wives, and lovers to lovers. These letters demand intense empathy from a man who goes home and plays video games alone every night.
From the first scene, Theodore is positioned as a slightly old-fashioned, analogue middleman in the widening, tech-filled gap between humans of the future—someone who represents a fundamental schism in the fabric of society but appears unfazed by what his job entails. The letters are, unquestionably, fake, but the emotion, the tenderness, within them is real—not from the sender, but from him. Though slightly unnerving, his job is also reassuring—it’s sweet to imagine that people still write letters to each other in the future, even if they’re bogus.
Crucially, the world of Her is not a dystopia. People hang out after work. Coworkers go out for drinks. People go on picnics (picnics!). One day after work, Theodore purchases the world's first artificially intelligent computer operating system. The program clicks on and names itself "Samantha." Samantha is a disembodied robot with the sentience to name itself (herself?) and contemplate the limitations of its existence while organising Theodore’s files and deleting his junk emails.
Samantha becomes a sort of social experiment on both Theodore and the viewer, as we connect to her (or don't) without a body or face to look at. We assign her sentience with a human-sounding voice (albeit one that sounds strikingly like Scarlett Johansson), and as Theodore falls in love with her, so do we.
For the sake of debate, modern life sciences suggest that our brains are, in fact, complex, organic computers. Similar to digital programming, most of what we do is genetic coding (you might call it "data") passed down through generations along an organic circuitry system called "genes." Scientists are still debating how much agency we have, how much of what we do is just inherited instructions—algorithms responding to stimuli. The question is worth asking: are we so different from Samantha? Are our digitally mediated relationships (on hookup apps, chatrooms, and so on) very different from the relationship that forms between her and Theodore? In the real world, people meet each other via Facebook, and sometimes we fall in love with strangers over text. What makes the onscreen relationship that develops between a man and his computer so moving is that it’s believable.
Samantha operates at the lightning-fast speed of a computer, but she also gets hurt, confused, and scared. She wants to be human—until she does not, and that is when the real trouble starts.
The film invites a valuable discussion about what Samantha is and what the future of human relationships might look like. But Her refrains from giving us any clear answers. Instead, it suggests that the messiest and most difficult parts of future life will be the same things that make our lives messy and difficult now—love, communication, trust. In the end, its greatest offering is something like hope. Many films in recent years have depicted futures in which AI changes the world in terrible and destructive ways. Her is the first one that feels human.
The film broke my heart—and, as only a good movie can, felt meaningful, as if I needed to see it at that moment. I’ve been in a blue spell following a recent tragedy that I can’t talk about yet. My thanks to the screenwriters for this wisdom: there is a moment when Theodore is talking to a friend (Amy Adams) about his new, odd relationship and debating its legitimacy, and she says, "We're only here briefly, and while I'm here I want to allow myself joy. So fuck it!”
I have been saying that line in my head ever since. During our time, may we all allow ourselves joy—at least until the AI operating systems take over.
Love, Beastly