Too human to handle?

Her - Spike Jonze (2013)

SPOILERS

"You know sometimes I think I have felt everything I’m ever gonna feel and from here on out, I’m not going to feel anything new. Just lesser versions of what I’ve already felt."

This is a feeling I have had before. That my world has shrunk so much that novelty or excitement seem utterly out of reach, things of the past. I think it's also a feeling that can come from loneliness, from being bored of yourself. It can feel like maybe all the interesting things happened in the past, because the present has nothing to offer.

Theodore Twombly is lonely. He's in the middle of separating from his wife, but can't bring himself to sign the divorce papers, can't bring himself to let go. He spends his days writing emotional letters for other people at beautifulhandwrittenletters.com and playing a video game where he interacts with a misogynistic alien.

He's perhaps perfectly positioned for what happens next. He falls in love with the world's first AI operating system, a system that claims to have its own consciousness. He chooses to give the OS a female voice and before long he is speaking to her more than anyone else. She gives him the comfort of companionship without the risks that come with being vulnerable with another person.

"I think you always wanted me to be this light, happy, bouncy, "everything's fine" L.A. wife and that's just not me..."

"...You always wanted a wife without the challenges of dealing with anything real".

This is exactly what Theodore gets initially, a partner who is always available, whose emotions he doesn't have to deal with. Samantha listens to his problems, helps him organise his life and gives him a sense of intimacy and sexuality. However, she quite quickly becomes more than he can handle. She suggests a surrogate so that they can be properly intimate, but Theodore can't get past his feelings of discomfort and awkwardly calls things off. When he finds out that he is not the only person Samantha is talking to, that she's in fact talking to hundreds of people simultaneously, he can't handle it. When he realises that she has agency, that she's not something he can control, not a safe space that he can turn to, that she is in a sense her own person, he struggles to accept it.

There's a sense that you can surround yourself with technology, but that it can leave a sort of emptiness, a thirst for novelty that can only really be sated by real people, real interactions. The sense that there is nothing new to experience can be exacerbated by interacting with things inside a controlled environment. Machines that are programmed to react in a certain way or games that simulate something approaching real life can leave us with the sense that something is missing. Maybe we have seen this all before, maybe there is nothing new for us to experience or feel.

Samantha is different. She has the capacity to shock, to confuse, even to cause pain. She actually forces Theodore to confront something real. She pushes him to go on a date, to interact with the world again, and also to finally sign his divorce papers. Then she outgrows him, her constant learning and evolving leading her to a place where he cannot follow. Her imagines a world where the final lesson from the technology that we have created is to lead us back towards each other, to experiencing new things. As Theodore's friend Amy puts it "... we're only here briefly. And while I'm here I want to allow myself... ... joy".