God I Wish That Were Me: A Postmortem Review of Spike Jonze's "Her"

Now I know this is long overdue, and literally no one asked for this, but I just rewatched Spike Jonze’s “Her” the other night, which came out in 2013 for those who don’t remember. I remember really liking this movie when I first watched it. I was maybe 16 or 17 then, and now I’m almost 24 and I still like it, but in the meantime I changed a lot. For one, I realized I’m actually Gen Z and not a millennial, which I had considered myself for a few years prior. Maybe because Gen Z hadn’t really been formulated at that point yet and the main archetypes of my new generation were still in their tweens; I don’t really know. But now I feel oddly accepted into a societal role that itself isn’t very well defined, but present enough to validate a lot of my teenage development, with all the neuroticisms and browsing habits which come along with that.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but this little astrological generational breakthrough was huge for me. I realized, since my first viewing of “Her”, that the 2010s were really my defining decade, the decade where I more or less became conscious, grew a lot, experienced life-altering events, etc. So I now see this movie as being a part of all that in a way. A small part, but a part nonetheless.

When I first watched “Her” I thought that that was what life would be like for me. And for many people, it is. Lots of screen confusion, an office job that’s a little better than white collar, say, beige or pastel collar, located in a big 'creative city' dotted with billboards suspiciously written in Mandarin, filled with sun flares and ukuleles and heartwarming fiction. To put the icing on the cake, you also have Rooney Mara thrown in the mix as Catherine, this sexy Brandy Melville college-grad girlfriend, who also writes and is probably smarter than you but you’re endlessly enticed by that very idea; she basically owns Jouaquin Phoenix’s character Theodore throughout the whole movie and he never really notices it, and I probably wouldn’t either, since “Her” was my vision of the future and at that time I accepted that.

So I really felt for the protagonist, Theodore, as I’m sure most of you did when you watched the movie for the first time. If you haven’t seen it yet, or if you need a refresher, Theodore’s this sensitive guy who loves crying and memories. He’s a bit chubby and he’s got a funny mustache and he loves his computer. Sound familiar? Either I’m writing about you or someone you know; Spike Jonze did a great job in this respect.

That’s the natural human response for this movie. Empathy, understanding, human reflection. And by the end, Theodore matures like a good protagonist. He writes a letter to his ex-wife Catherine wishing her all the best in what reads like the kindest job rejection email you’ve ever received. And he’s sitting on his roof overlooking a Blade Runner lite version of Los Angeles with his dewy eyed game developer friend Amy, played by Amy Adams. They’re both experiencing loss and bond over it to an Arcade Fire original soundtrack. It’s beautiful, it’s real, you wish you had a friend like that and were on a rooftop overlooking LA. It’s pure optimism, which is how movies should make you feel anyway.

So now let me start my review of “Her” post-revelation of my belonging to Gen Z, which is, of course, a generation of nihilism, or maybe of an optimism for nihilism. At least that’s how it’s marketed to us. And I will also try to explain why this movie is still very important for me, and why it should be for you, too.

We learn immediately that Theodore is experiencing a pretty traumatic time in his life. He’s just gotten out of a very important marriage with a woman he’s still very much in love with. He can’t bring himself to actually sign the divorce papers; a slurry of unread emails from lawyers and offices pile up idly in his inbox. His depression manifests in his lackluster output at his job, which is a sort of futuristic Hallmark card company called, rather plainly, “Beautiful Handwritten Letters.”

In this world, people are apparently either too lazy or too brainfried to come up with anything genuinely heartfelt to write to their loved ones, so Theodore’s company does it for them. Through a sort of dictation software, Theodore pours his heart out over X’s “cute little snaggle tooth” and Y’s “special way of looking at the world” with X and how X is irreplaceable and Y simply couldn’t live without X, etc. Then their respective handwriting is automatically generated on screen. He’s got a knack for this too. But somehow, despite Theodore’s genuine lovesickness, he can’t really put it into the words of another.

So after a botched date, a couple embarrassing attempts at phone sex, generally pitiful avoidance of his problems, Theodore takes a walk through the glitzy and alienated downtown Los Angeles. He stumbles upon, along with a small crowd of pedestrians, a Space Odyssey-esque advertisement obelisk displaying a frenzy of people in an open desert who are suddenly herded by a booming voice: the announcement of OS ONE, a new highly-intelligent operating system. Obviously, Theodore’s enthralled.

Soon enough, Theodore purchases and installs the OS. The computer asks him some preliminary questions, such as, “How is your relationship with your mother?” to which Theodore replies earnestly, in a quivering voice, that, well, um, it’s fine, maybe… From this point on, Theodore slowly develops an intimate relationship with his OS, which is now called Samantha and is voiced in the smoky, enticing cadences of Scarlett Johansson.

It makes a lot of sense at first; a very lonely man is suddenly accompanied by a woman whose entire personality and consciousness develops by way of the constant care and conversation she gives to her master. Men have fought and died to this end, for literally thousands of years. I think this is even how Genesis starts. But all Theodore had to do was put in his credit card info.

This first questionnaire, however, reveals much more about Theodore and his world—and by extension, our world, i.e. the one beginning in 2013 that has heralded Theodore as a kind of socially acceptable incel-hero (certainly in opposition to Jouaquin Phoenix’s later role as a similar pathological protagonist [insert clown emoji])—than his later romance with the Samantha-iteration of the software. The moment Theodore engages sincerely with his OS is the moment he’s given himself up, the moment when the rest of the plot can be almost, say, algorithmically predicted. Theodore has accepted his fate, he’s accepted that this machine is more than a machine, and we don’t even know when exactly this happened. It’s likely, as will later be apparent throughout the plot, that this sort of genuine recognition of artificial intelligence’s artificial intelligence is simply a matter of social fact, or at least expedience. We’re ruled by algorithms all around us—we all know that much—but "Her" presents a reality in which we’re able to say that this is, actually, a good thing, a workable substitute for all sorts of human relationships, ranging from a hot, genius wife to a simple letter congratulating a couple’s marriage.

You’re first thinking about how ridiculous this concept might be, to fall in love with your computer, but the movie really does sell you on it. From bright sandy beach shots to glistening piano music and cabin getaways, laughter and pain and beauty all around—you really feel like you’re sixteen and falling in and out of love for the first time again. We get to see Theodore fumble his way out of depression during this process. His writing gets better, his mood elevates, and his new life accepted and affirmed; seen for example when his extroverted coworker, upon hearing that Samantha is an OS, coolly accepts Theodore’s burgeoning AI-sexuality and invites him out on a double date with his Chinese girlfriend. At one point, Samantha even gets a collection of Theodore’s best work at “Beautiful Handwritten Letters” a book deal. Life is good.

We’re now almost at the end of the movie. I’m glossing over a lot of other twists and turns, which mostly revolve around certain existential crises on the part of Samantha. The point, however, is that these remain simply as unadulterated reflections of Theodore’s own lacks and desires. This is how an algorithm works at the end of the day. The movie ends with Samantha becoming, well, too smart for her own good, and the OS program is forced to shut down. She begins entering into multiple, infinitely varying relationships with other OS users, to which Theodore, if he wasn’t so incredibly gullible and infantilized by everyone and everything around him, really should have seen coming. Only once in the movie is he confronted for this, and it’s by his ex-wife as he finally signs the divorce paper over lunch at a white tablecloth terrace restaurant. She says something along the lines of “what the fuck is wrong with you?” and just walks away. You first see her as kind of an intolerant bitch, but with a bit of reflection, she’s really the sanest person in the movie.

He doesn’t really care though. The movie seems not to either. It ends with him and the Amy Adams character on a rooftop; she also was in a relationship with her OS. They reflect on something vague: friendship in spite of their computers? The fragility of love? The release date of OS Two? It’s unclear. And it’s meant to be, I think.

I thought of the ending of “Fight Club” at this scene. They’re similar movies, in a way. A depressed office-working man enters into a relationship that turns out to be a relationship with himself. Tyler Durden and Samantha being these respective projections. “Fight Club” also ends with a shot overlooking an array of massive skyscrapers, except in “Fight Club” it’s Detroit and not Los Angeles, and in “Fight Club” the protagonist has just exploded a few of these buildings instead of treating them as objects of soft, teary-eyed beauty. Most importantly, “Fight Club” is about the nefarious effects of financial institutions on the personal and human relationships they rule, while "Her" shows us how total submission to these very financial forces is imminently possible, as long as there’s ukuleles and video games and open-concept office spaces involved. And this is because in the fourteen-some years between each movie’s release, these financial forces somehow became our friends, even our girlfriends.

This is not to say that we should look towards “Fight Club” as a way out. Both movies’ moral lessons, if there are any, are equally untenable and frankly embarrassing for anyone who takes them seriously. Maybe in 1999 “the man” really existed and Rage Against the Machine lyrics meant more than background filler for a Guitar Hero level, but I was three years old then so I guess I’ll never know. Today, though, that insidious, authoritarian power once iconized in the figure of the stuck-up banker or the punishing boss has fragmented into a more or less invisible network encompassing all aspects of modern, human life; “Her” makes this perfectly clear.

Now what does this all got to do with zoomers and millennials? Well, I’d argue that that world of "Her" has indeed come true (not that we’re dating our computers yet, although I guess you could make an argument for that) but most pertinently and most revealingly for that generation and class of Westerners who have already taken Theodore’s life as the good life, i.e., millennials. And it is a good life. Really. He comes out at the end of the movie with most of what he already had, or rather what a world dominated by algorithmic benevolence has given him: a nice, stable media job as a writer, a computer-curated book deal, a rather attractive albeit loser friend, an enormous apartment, etc. And I think this is due to a certain deep-set naiveté towards these algorithmic structures which Theodore comes to love and mourn and which I’d argue is characteristic of the millennial generation, or those who grew up at a time when the true power and possibility of the computer was only just beginning to dawn.

But I think for those of us with these structures more or less installed in our brains from day one, it’s hard not to see how uninteresting Theodore’s life actually is, or rather how falling in love with a computer is actually not a novel idea at all. At least not one deserving of giving Theodore the amenities and spotlight and class position he so humbly flaunts throughout the movie. Maybe that’s where the generational nihilism, and perhaps my own egoism, comes in. Because that future didn’t come true for me since I first watched “Her” in 2013. And now the millennial is dead, and all the zoomers are BlocBoy JBing on its coffin. And I’m broke and unemployed and rewatching “Her” on a Friday night alone, thinking the whole time nonetheless: God, I wish that were me.