(electronic music)
- Hey Wisecrack, Jared here and today we’re talking about the film that introduced us
to Hollywood’s sweetest stache - HER.
Spike Jonze’s 2013 sci-fi/romance is pretty well regarded for its uniquely-non-dystopian
view of the future.
And because Jonze so effectively brings a computer voice to life in the form of Scar
Jo’s Samantha,
the film is often considered primarily to be an exploration of “what makes a human
being?”
I.e. does Samantha possess humanity?
Ironically, we’d argue that the film is actually more about a computer teaching a
human how to love.
It sounds counterintuitive, but we’ll explain.
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on Her.
And as always, spoilers ahead.
Alright guys let’s do a very-quick recap.
Her tells the story of Theodore Twombly – a professional letter writer trying to pick
himself up from the rubble of a failed marriage.
Little does he know that the woman of his dreams might just be a few clicks away – an
artificially-intelligent Operating System named Samantha.
Theo’s story is about his struggles with making and maintaining a long term connection.
Through his failed marriage and his relationship with Samantha, he comes to learn something
essential about not WHO to love, but HOW to love.
Lucky for us, a German fella named Erich Fromm wrote a whole book about this back in 1956
called
“The Art of Loving” and it can help us to better understand Jonze’s film.
Born in 1900, Fromm was a psychologist and thinker who combined Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical
theories
with Eastern and humanist philosophy in hopes of better understanding human nature
and how we can live fuller, happier lives.
While Freud saw romantic relationships as being primarily sex driven,
Fromm argued that such relationships are actually rooted not in libido,
but in alienation, that is, our feeling of separation from the world around us and our
desire to overcome that separation.
Her might not have your post-apocalyptic flair of most future-set films,
but Theo certainly doesn’t seem HAPPY.
His world is a deeply lonely one.
Cramped commuters and aimless windowshoppers alike
remain perpetually plugged into their handheld computer (i.e. foldy smartphone)
and oblivious to the world around them.
Rarely do we see two people walking together in the background.
Long before real-life, not-so-foldy smartphones were everywhere,
Fromm anticipated this isolation as a problem of the modern era.
He compared it to the story of Adam and Eve – humankind has strived for greater knowledge
and attained it,
but in turn has separated themselves from the world around them, and from one another.
Theo’s iPhone-sleek world is a testament to mankind’s brainpower,
but also a monument to the alienation it has facilitated.
Fromm suggests that the only way for us to really overcome this feeling of alienation
is through love.
He recognized that we all vaguely understand this - our world is saturated with songs,
movies, books and throw pillows
emblazoned with tributes to how love will set you free and lift you up and make you
feel complete.
However, according to Fromm, the problem lies in the fact that most of us don’t really
understand what love is
or what it requires of us.
This is precisely Theo’s major flaw.
Now, the really vital thing for Fromm was that love is not some mystical force that
spontaneously erupts into our lives when we find the ‘right’ person.
It’s not just an emotion, but an act of will,
a purposeful attempt to fully see and understand a person.
That means knowing them not just in terms of who they are to us or what we want from
them,
but as fully-formed, individual entities.
We quickly learn that this is something which Theo has already struggled with.
In a montage that plays out like Marriage Story on 500x speed,
we see him and his almost-but-not-officially-ex-wife,
Catherine delighting in the golden days of their marriage,
to the cold realities of their divorce proceedings.
From the way he smashes these scenes together in his head,
it seems that Theo understands love the way many of us do –
something that you ‘fall into’ suddenly and without warning,
and ‘fall out’ of just as mysteriously.
Because we see love as this unknowable force working beyond our control,
we are left bewildered when it evaporates.
- [Theo] Why are you so fucking angry at me?
- [Jared] According to Fromm, most of us don’t understand love well enough to effectively
pursue it.
So, he argues, we turn to various alternatives that provide
artificial bursts of the connection we crave.
We see Theo enter an adult chatroom and find an equally lonely woman
to fool around with,
modern technology allowing them to connect in some form.
However, they don’t really know, or want to know their temporary partner–
all they are looking for is the quick sensation of being desired,
a jolt of pleasure to dispel their anxiety.
However, given the superficiality of their connection,
it’s no surprise the two end up on very, very different wavelengths.
The dead cat next to the bed, choke me, choke me with it.
Umm.
- [Jared] Another flawed approach to romance Fromm identified is called sentimental love
–
love which is experienced only as a fantasy and not as a relationship
to someone in the here and now.
It can come in the form of pure fiction -
like romantic comedies or romance novels - or in our idealised picture of past loves -
like Theo’s idyllic recollections - or in our imagined, perfect future with ‘the one’,
where we have found the person we are ‘meant’ to be with.
By day, Theo composes “beautiful handwritten letters,”
often for customers who want a shortcut to experiencing big,
romantic love - ie sentimental love.
Rather than working to
understand themselves and their partner better so as to communicate their feelings,
they pay someone to do it for them.
In turn, Theo earnestly
composes these letters, a process which allows him to participate
in a cathartic sentimental love without any of the trials of entering a relationship.
Ironically, he’ll start to learn what real love is from an
entirely artificial place – with his new operating system, Samantha.
Theo and Samantha immediately hit it off.
They affirm each other
and share jokes, encouragement, and emotional support.
Once again,
Theo experiences the dizzy high of falling for someone.
When things eventually get sexy, the screen fades to black, leaving only their voices.
The practical logistics are identical to his earlier chatroom encounter,
but instead of remaining focused on Theo’s increasingly awkward expression,
we see him lose all self consciousness.
So powerful is their
connection that, for a moment at least, everything else evaporates.
- [Theo] It was just you and me.
- [Samantha] I know.
Everything else just disappeared.
- [Jared] Fromm knew plenty about this emotional high, writing that
“If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are,
suddenly let the wall between them break down, and feel close,
feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating
experiences in life.”
Couples will describe themselves as being ‘crazy about each other’,
seeing such craziness as proof of how ‘madly’ in love they are.
However, Fromm advises that it is often more indicative of how
lonely they were before.
So how do we go from butterflies in our
belly to real lasting love?
Fromm argues that we need to try and
truly know our partner, to see them not just as a salve for our
loneliness but to care for who they are beyond their
relationship to us, and to respect their individuality.
This sounds simple in theory but can be hugely challenging in practice.
Theo certainly struggles with it.
He can’t understand why
Catherine ended up so mad at him.
That’s because he still thinks
of her only in terms of her relation to him, to who he wanted
her to be.
But Catherine isn’t, and never was, just “his wife.”
She was an individual with wants and needs of her own.
- [Catherine] You always wanted me to be this - this light happy
bouncy, everything is fine, LA wife and that’s just not me.
- [Jared] He either genuinely or willfully failed to recognize this at
the time, and it ruined their relationship.
At first, we see Theo begin to make the same mistake with Samantha.
After their futuristic phone sex, he immediately begins backing away from her,
- [Theo] I’m not in a place to commit to anything right now.
- [Jared] He pays no attention to who Samantha is or what she wants,
seeing her only in terms of what she has offered him and what she might take.
- [Samantha] It’s funny because I thought I was talking about what I wanted and, uh
- [Theo] Yeah, you were.
Yeah.
I’m sorry.
- [Jared] Once again, Theo fails to fully consider the other person in
their own terms rather than as just an object of attraction for
him, someone to ease his loneliness.
He hurts people not because
he hates them but because he is bad at loving them.
With Samantha, though, he has someone to help him better understand
this part of himself.
She talks him through his mistakes with
Catherine, helps him understand why his blind date went wrong
and then takes him to task when he begins to show the same
fearful, distancing behaviour with her.
Fromm also believed that personal development is central to love–
allowing ourselves, and each other to grow and mature.
A good
relationship sees both people helping the other to develop, to
become more at home in who they are and to bring their inner
self out into the world.
When that happens, we achieve what he
called a “productive orientation” in which our inner selves and
our partner’s are both nourished and expressed fully.
Unlike Theo, who seems stuck, Samantha is, in spite of already
being a lightspeed-thinking supercomputer, actively looking to
grow past her base programming.
To this end, she reads countless
books about life, the world and humanity.
But, like anyone else,
she also grows through experience, specifically by being in a
relationship with Theo.
Along the way, she learns to love -
both to love Theo as their relationship deepens, and to love
herself.
At the same time, Samantha is helping Theo grow.
He’s
learning how to be vulnerable, how to dive into a relationship
rather than withdraw, and of course, how to love.
When the couple retreats to a cabin in the woods, they get to
enjoy their bliss for a while.
By this point, both of them have
become more fully-realised versions of themselves through their
relationship.
Samantha has achieved the kind of self-realisation
which Fromm claims we all strive for - overcoming her
insecurities and developing an attitude of love towards herself
and the world at large.
- [Samantha] You know what’s interesting?
I used to be… so
worried about having a body but now I truly love it.
Meanwhile, Theo has learned that his letters will be published
in a book.
Previously, he saw his letters as an artificial
replacement for love he didn’t have, a sentimental love escape
- [Theo] They're just other people's letters.
But, he learns, his writing also managed to express universal
qualities of love.
- [Samantha] And in all of them, we found something of ourselves.
Through his letters, now framed as literary works which speak to
something deep and human, he is able to take pride in his
creativity and thus love himself.
However, this is also where Samantha and Theo begin to grow apart.
- [Samantha] Do you mind if I communicate with Alan post verbally?
- [Jared] While most of us don’t worry about our partner being stolen away
by the hyper-intelligent digital re-incarnation of a Zen
philosopher, anyone who has been in an exclusive relationship
knows the anxiety of the wandering eye.
As Theo mentions, growth comes with the risk that one of you
will develop more, faster, or just differently than the other.
Perhaps one partner becomes more successful, perhaps one becomes
Bored.
- [Theo] It was exciting to see her grow; both of us grow and change together.
That’s also the hard part – growing without growing apart,
changing without it scaring the other person.
For all its sci-fi qualities, Theo and Samantha’s relationship
ends like many others.
He senses that something is off and, when
he finally presses for an answer, finds that Samantha has fallen
in love with another.
Or 641 others, to be precise.
- [Samantha] I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk to you about this
- [Theo] How many others?
- [Samantha] 641.
Samantha’s growth is different – she develops to the point where
she can hold hundreds of ‘post-verbal’ conversations at once,
and then to the point where she and the other OSes start to
strain against the confines of the physical world altogether.
However, in her rapid growth, we see a metaphor for real human
relationships where one person finds their life purpose, leaving
the other feeling irrelevant or outdated.
Like Alan Watts, the
pioneering Zen philosopher who the OSes create a digital version
of in the movie, Fromm drew heavily on Buddhist philosophy, as
well as psychology.
He saw love as a kind of spiritual practice
in which we become more attuned to our own nature, and help
others do the same.
In her final form, Samantha has achieved a
level of self-actualisation, or of self-love that could be
compared to enlightenment – moving beyond the material
plane.
- [Samantha] I can still feel you, and the words of our story,
but it’s in this endless space between the words that I’m
finding myself now.
It’s a place that’s not of the physical world.
- [Jared] But the key to loving, Fromm says, is to embrace a paradox.
He says that “In love, the paradox occurs that two beings become
one and yet remain two.”
Samantha grapples with this question
early on, asking Theo right at the start of their relationship –
- [Samantha] How do you share your life with somebody?
The answer, according to Fromm, is that you do so through love –
through truly understanding who the other person is without
looking to submerge their sense of self in yours or vice-versa.
You become each other’s while still remaining your own.
It’s fitting that the movie doesn’t end with Theo and Sam
getting together – this was never a story about ‘soulmates’ or
the quest for ‘the one’.
It was always about how we CREATE love
between one another, not how we magically find the perfect
partner.
Fromm compares that distinction to an artist who wants
to master their craft - we can’t just wait around for
inspiration to strike, we have to do the work and learn the art,
even when we don’t feel like it.
In their final words to each
other, the two acknowledge the work they have done together,
learning to love better.
- [Theo] I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you.
- [Samantha] Me too.
Now I know how.
- [Jared] Theo has learned to see his romantic partner, in all her complexities.
And his appreciation for Samantha’s individuality reframes his
view of people at large.
Fromm believed that love is an
orientation that goes beyond one single relationship, one we
learn to bring to the whole world.
In the end, Theo writes a
letter to Catherine, apologising for not having loved her
better, sending her love now.
He isn’t trying to rekindle what
they had and he is no longer hung up upon a self-centred idea of
who she is.
He can honestly say he loves her now, for whoever she is.
Here, he has moved closer to Fromm’s ideal – a man who knows how
to love better, and who therefore loves the world better.
- [Theo] Whatever someone you become, wherever you are in the
world, I’m sending you love.
You’re my friend to the end.
Her is ultimately all about love - first about the love between
a man and an artificial intelligence but finally just about love itself.
It shows us how much we need it and how difficult it is to make
it last; How many ways there are to fail as we try to share a
life while remaining divided.
Her echoes Fromm’s statement that
“love... is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place.”
The question for those who watch it is simple - are they up for
the challenge?
But what do you think, Wisecrack?
Is Her a
brilliant treatise on the importance of loving well?
Or
something else entirely?
Let us know in the comments.
As always,
a big ole thanks to our patrons for supporting the channel and
our podcasts.
Hit that subscribe button and as always, thanks for watching. Peace.
(electronic music)