Imagine riding the subway every day to work as everyone around you is plugged in, face down, murmuring to his or her gadget, never actually interacting with one another. This is what one of the opening scenes of the movie Her looks like, and it is actually quite similar to how our society acts in 2014.
Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is a walking slash-mouth emoticon (:/) who writes heartfelt letters for strangers as a profession. The character of Theodore depicts how, as technology advances, relationships are prone to becoming more and more impersonal. Even today, we text instead of talk in person, we video chat instead of going on dates, and we live vicariously through emojis that we send to express our instantaneous emotions. In a few decades, receiving a letter from your loved one through “beautifulhandwrittenletters.com” could, not surprisingly, become the new normal.
When Theodore first activates his Operating System (OS), Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), he marvels at everything she is able to do and at how quickly she is able to do it. This reminded me of the day I got my iPhone 4s. I probably asked Siri 100 questions because I wanted to find out what she didn’t know the answer to, and that is exactly what Theodore does. He has in-depth conversations with his Samantha, a pastime many of us can embarrassingly relate to with Siri.
Theodore and Samantha form a friendship that quickly morphs into a romantic relationship. Because she is a piece of technology, Samantha implicitly guarantees companionship for Theodore, for she is his possession in the most literal sense and, therefore, will always be there for him. He isolates himself from the rest of the world, depending entirely on his Operating System. When he can’t connect to Samantha while she updates her software without telling him, it seems like his world is collapsing.
Many people of my generation can relate to that exact feeling when we can’t find our phones or when our Instagram feeds aren’t loading. I also know I am not alone when I say that I feel naked without my phone in my hand. We rely heavily on technology, so heavily, in fact, that the absence of it actually frightens us.
Adeline Dubov ’15 agrees, “Checking my Instagram feed has become a reflex. If I were to lose my phone, I would feel like I’m missing so much.”
Theodore is living in a world where every human necessity and desire is met entirely by manufactured technology, one of which includes sexual needs. In an awkward, hard-to-watch sex scene between Theodore and Samantha, he tells her incorporeal voice that he is “entering” her. This scene clearly shows how extreme and uncomfortable it is when we allow technology to interfere with even our most intimate moments.
In the film, OS-human romantic relationships are actually considered to be as socially unacceptable as online dating was when it first surfaced about 15 years ago: people did it, but it wasn’t yet a norm. At first, Theodore seems crazy to be in love with just an artificially programmed voice, but then his friend, Amy (Amy Adams), gossips to him about all the people she knows who have found themselves in serious relationships with their Operating Systems. The movie is telling us here that relationships are capable of evolving in this way in the future, even though now we may refuse to believe that technology will ever be so ubiquitous.