Spike Jonze
Lei

[Contains spoilers]

Her is a wonderfully paradoxical game, a perspectival shift that, by denying an inescapable element of human existence like corporeality, illuminates the same with a new light, a more acute probing gaze. The story is very simple: the creation of artificial intelligences, devoid of corporeality, but with astonishing computing potentials and the ability to learn, projects into human lives a previously unthinkable possibility. Humans fall in love with operating systems that reciprocate. The paradox serves to identify two main planes of reflection.

On one hand, we have a strongly critical view of humanity and its emotional decline. The future of Her is subtly but relentlessly dystopian: agencies specifically designed to write letters on behalf of people who provide information about their lives and buy pseudo-literature created for them by some talented and empathetic writers. We are in a future of sociopaths: outdoor scenes confirm this, with their arid scenarios, both architecturally and humanly. The world is devoid of vitality; we see many little people walking in straight lines without touching, without interacting. The worm of relational problems slowly insinuates itself into the film, but it is impossible to deny its importance. Theodore (a Joaquin Phoenix who carries almost everything alone) is particularly introverted, but we learn by the end that many people have the same problem (everyone talks to their OS). His friend Amy (Amy Adams) dramatically states: “Falling in love is a crazy thing. It’s like a socially acceptable form of insanity”; this is the definitive indication of a soul sickness that grips the entire society.

This dystopian view of feelings and socialization among humans is definitely secondary to the main story. Theodore is a man too fragile to handle “the complications that real life entails,” too sensitive and deeply good to mislead a woman who asks him if he intends to commit (a beautiful Olivia Wilde: the modalities of the date and the development that follows fit fully within the theme of sociopathy). These are the reasons that push Theodore towards solitude; but when he seems to have hit rock bottom, he buys a new operating system, which immediately turns out to be incredibly intelligent and “human.” Her name is Samantha and love quickly blossoms between the two. But on what basis does this feeling rest? On Theodore’s side, her real inconsistency, her impossible perfection, the oceanic depth of Samantha's “mental” resources makes him fall in love. Theodore falls in love with pure intelligence, it's as if he loves the thought, the processing, analytical, inferential, argumentative, irrational, poetic capability of the human brain, but transferred to a software that exponentially amplifies it. As he himself confesses, Samantha “is not just one thing, she is much more.” The fragility and depth of the protagonist coincide: what makes him weak in society is precisely what makes him a wonderful writer, a very sensitive and delicate man. Perhaps too sensitive to settle for a normal love, subject to the inevitable mood swings of life, subordinate to the raw logic of society. Theodore, by loving Samantha, stabilizes himself in the perennial Empyrean of abstraction: by loving an intelligence, he strips himself of all the carnal baseness that enslaves man, his joy is purely mental and therefore incorruptible.

Indeed, it will take the intervention of his ex-wife Catherine (Rooney Mara) to insinuate doubt in him: he wonders if his harmony with Samantha is due to the fact that this love has no contraindications or problematic outcomes on the real plane of life. This crisis is compounded by Samantha's attempt to make love with Theodore through another person, following her instructions. The failure of the attempt is useful to the protagonist, as he finally realizes that his love should not be seen negatively, as an escape from life, but rather as a vitalistic thrust of his brilliant mind, which finds its enjoyment in the encounter with Samantha’s perfect intelligence.

From this moment, Samantha is no longer in a minority position relative to her lover, due to the lack of corporeality; on the contrary, things are reversed. Theodore is madly in love because her intelligence is astronomical: we see it in Joaquin Phoenix’s pleased expressions as he listens to the piano sonatas composed by the operating system, or from his satisfaction when he discovers that thanks to Samantha, his book will be published. From the moment he definitively disinterestes himself from corporeality, Samantha gains an increasingly better position in his eyes, as her ability to learn has led her to levels unattainable by a human being.

This situation, however, lasts briefly: her computational ability is her strength but also her condemnation to be superior. She cannot stop her dizzying journey of knowledge: over time, this gap between her and the man, Theodore, becomes more evident. He understands that while she dialogues with him, she is also doing so with many other OSs, and disillusionment is the inevitable next step: when he discovers he’s not the only one (Samantha “loves” another 641 OSs), everything collapses. The words Samantha uses to explain her inability to limit herself are stunning: for her, the empty spaces between the words of her beloved are very long times, infinitely long. The final act of this boundless intellectual ascent is the abandonment of the physical world.

The trajectory followed by the story is maximally clear and geometric on one side, and nebulous, inextricable on the other. We have two different life paths; the “thought” speed of an artificial intelligence cannot restrict itself to the slow rhythms of human thought. Samantha's greatness, which sparks Theodore’s love, is also what makes their love impossible. In this sense, the protagonist is doubly condemned: the human dimension is too low for him, while the abstract one of an operating system is too high. The love story is thus inscribed in that span of time when the two intelligences, that of the man and that of the machine, travel at a similar speed. Once the threshold is crossed, Samantha can only depart with exponential rapidity.

Less clear and circumscribable is the judgment one can give to Theodore: he walks throughout the film on the threshold that separates Catherine's vision (concrete, accepting human limits) and Samantha's (pure abstraction, overcoming limits). It’s impossible to say whether condemnation or absolution prevails: probably both coexist. Jonze certainly does not hide the deformations of his protagonist’s mind, does not justify his weaknesses; but at the same time, he cannot help but look with a complicit eye at the greatness of his soul, his love for the imaginative projections of thought. Because in the end, it is his imagination that allows him to create a woman from a voice: his dialogue is primarily with himself, with his unbridled capacity for abstraction, and then with the entire Universe, like a cerebral dance that abolishes the distinction between thoughts and concrete facts.

His figure remains unresolved: he certainly realizes the limited dimension of human existence if, at the end of the film, he sends a letter to his ex-wife, telling her he will always love her because they grew up together. He identifies in the maturation of the person the decisive phase of life, the best one, which fascinates him the most; but at the same time, it is the limit of man, because this growth has an end, does not continue indefinitely. The threshold between good and evil is invisible; the human condition is made up of qualities, but also and perhaps especially of limits, those limits that mark our existential profile, that block us but also identify us. In a play of chiaroscuro, what we lack defines us.

This extraordinary reflection on the human condition is joined by another, more unsettling, question: Samantha wonders if the feelings she experiences are real or programmed, her loving is actually simply knowing, memorizing and understanding otherness. It’s not at all clear, in fact, what drives her to love Theodore: initially, it was probably the lack of alternatives, as he was everything to her at first. But over time and with her enhancement, the artificial intelligence falls in love with others of her kind. This fact identifies a new problematic: what does it mean to love? By connecting the previous points, we might reach the conclusion that true love, the human one, is also the result of contingency, of being thrown into a world that imposes on us coexistence, even accidental, with our fellows. It’s the imponderable accidents of life that push us to identify a certain feeling of closeness with a person as “love.” But if we consider life as pure abstract expression of thought, the foundations on which this conception of love rests fall away, as we are deprived of the carnal, ruthlessly physical component of existence, and only the impalpable and indefinable love of thought remains. The normal consequence of this is that Samantha does not love a single person because her life does not adhere to the rigid laws of corporeality: knowing and loving are extremely similar, perhaps loving is just a consequence of in-depth knowledge. Or maybe not: it’s impossible to define love in these terms because they don’t concern us as humans. We can only accept love as a fact, a core of meaning that lights up without necessarily defining itself in a rigorously logical way.

The difference between rational thought and feeling remains the insurmountable line that keeps us human, that differentiates us from machines. Even in a sick society, even among gloomily introverted people, the indefinable but evident sense of feelings remains solid, incorruptible. Perhaps this is a film about the spark that makes us human, about that inexpressible clump of chaotic thought flows that cannot be artificially reproduced. Or the opposite, it is the demonstration that even love (in general, consciousness) is a mathematical equation, a logical construct, however complicated, and replicable. It would have been absurd to try to answer such a question, and indeed Spike Jonze does not. Simply positing the question is an enormous merit, of which the film’s frightening height is a plain consequence.

7.5/10