Summary
We see a closeup of Theodore Twombly’s face as he speaks a monologue. It is romantic and intimate and he says, “lying naked in that tiny apartment, it suddenly hit me that I was part of this whole larger thing, just like our parents, or our parents’ parents.” With great feeling, he continues to describe their love, suddenly revealing that he is speaking from the perspective of someone who has been married for 50 years. With another sentence, it becomes evident that he’s speaking from the perspective of a woman. He’s writing a card on his computer on behalf of a woman named Loretta. He prints the card, and then begins another. This is his job. We see other people dictating cards in other cubicles in a larger office. Someone answers a phone and we realize we are at the headquarters for “beautifulhandwrittenletters.com."
We see Theodore leaving work for the day. A man named Paul at the front desk compliments his work for the day, specifically his ability to rhyme so many words with the name Penelope. Theodore compliments Paul’s shirt and leaves the office. In the elevator, Theodore instructs his phone to play a melancholy song. Outside, he checks his emails on his phone. After the phone reads a spam email from Best Buy, it reads one from someone named Amy, who invites Theodore to go to a party at someone named Lewman’s house. “I miss you, I mean, not the sad, mopey you. The old fun you,” the email reads. After skipping through several emails about the weather and current events, Theodore stops on an email about an actress’s new sexy pregnancy photos, and looks at them.
Theodore goes into his apartment and plays video games, with images that seem to extend out of the television in three dimensions. The game involves a character in a space suit trying to survive. When Theodore goes to bed, he has flashbacks of moving into an apartment with his ex-girlfriend: moving a couch, kissing, watching her wake up in the morning, and playing perverse games with one another. He lies in bed remembering, before turning over, putting in an earphone, and instructing his phone to navigate to a chat room. We hear the voice of two different people in the chat room, before a woman begins to talk, and Theodore responds. They begin a sexy chat, in which they both narrate an erotic fantasy, as Theodore imagines the nude pregnant woman whose pictures he looked at on his phone. As they get more and more into the fantasy, the woman suddenly says, “Choke me with that dead cat!” which confuses Theodore. She fantasizes that there is a dead cat next to the bed and she wants him to choke her with it. Hesitantly, Theodore says, “I’m choking you with the dead cat” as the woman moans in ecstasy. “I came so hard,” she says, and Theodore lies that he did too.
We see Theodore walking through a large lobby. He sees a video playing on a nearby screen advertising “the first artificially intelligent operating system, an intuitive entity that listens to you, understands you, and knows you.” Theodore buys one. We see him downloading it at home later that day. The computer asks him some questions in order to get him set up with his artificially intelligent operating system, first asking, “Are you social or antisocial?” As Theodore launches into a monologue about his social habits, the computer interrupts him to suggest that he is a “hesitant” person. Theodore then tells the computer that he would like a female voice, and the computer asks him about his relationship with his mother. Theodore begins to tell the computer that his mother doesn’t usually listen very curiously when he tells her something, but the computer cuts him off to initiate his “individualized operating system.”
A voice on the computer begins talking. Theodore laughs as he begins to have a very human conversation with the operating system. She tells him her name is “Samantha,” a name she gave to herself based on reading a book of 180,000 baby names just a moment ago. When Theodore asks her to guess what he’s thinking, she guesses from his tone that he’s challenging her, and asks him if he wants to know how she works. “Well, basically, I have intuition. I mean, the DNA of who I am is based on the millions of personalities of all the programmers who wrote me, but what makes me “me” is my ability to grow through my experiences, so basically, in every moment, I’m evolving, just like you.” Theodore thinks it’s weird, but Samantha assures him that he’ll get used to it.
Samantha helps Theodore go through his hard drive, looking at his emails first. She looks at emails for things he wrote for LA Weekly, deleting all the ones that don’t contain something of importance to Theodore. She then sorts through his contacts, charming Theodore and making him laugh.
The next day we see Theodore at work. Suddenly he takes out his earphone and turns on Samantha, asking if she knows how to proofread. She checks his work for spelling and grammar errors, and she reads some of his letters aloud, which embarrasses him. She reads a few, making some edits along the way, before asking Theodore about how he knows how to be so specific in some of his letters. He tells her he’s been writing letters for the couple in question for 8 years now, and that he knows about the girlfriend’s “crooked little tooth” from a photograph he saw of them. Samantha tells Theodore that he has a meeting in five minutes; he thanks her, and makes his way to the meeting.
Later, in the lobby of his apartment building, Theodore runs into his friends Amy and Charles. When Amy asks him why he didn’t call her back the previous week, he tells her, “Because I’m a kook,” and they laugh. When Charles asks Theodore what he bought at the store, Theodore tells him he got a fruit smoothie. After hearing this, Charles launches into a monologue about how it’s healthier to eat one’s fruit and juice one’s vegetables, but Amy cuts him off, telling him that he's being too health-conscious. Theodore asks Amy how the documentary she’s working on is coming and tells her he’d love to see it sometime. After Theodore makes a joke about not being able to prioritize between video games and internet porn, Amy and Charles get off the elevator, laughing.
Theodore plays video games in his apartment while talking to Samantha. She coaches him through the video game patiently, when suddenly his character runs into a strange round-headed creature. When he asks the creature how to get to the next level in the game, the creature curses at him. “I think it’s a test,” Samantha tells him, and Theodore curses back at the creature, who then laughs and tells him to follow it.
Samantha tells Theodore that he just got an email from his friend, Mark Lewman, and Theodore asks her to read it. The email reminds Theodore that his goddaughter’s birthday is on the 29th and that Lewman has set him up on a date with a beautiful woman. Theodore looks anxious as Samantha researches the woman, admiring the woman’s beauty and the fact that she graduated magna cum laude in computer science from Harvard. Images of the woman are projected above Theodore.
Suddenly, Samantha asks Theodore if he’s ready to date, noting that she read in his emails that he went through a breakup recently. “Well, you’re kind of nosy,” he tells her. Samantha encourages him to go on the date and then tell her all about it, which makes Theodore laugh. After Samantha encourages him to let her email the woman and make a reservation at a nice restaurant, Theodore agrees. The creature from the video game makes fun of Theodore and tells him that he will go on the date with the woman and “fuck her brains out to show you how it’s done.” Theodore and Samantha laugh at the little creature.
Amy shows Theodore her documentary in her apartment the next day. She is self-conscious about its quality, but Theodore encourages her to show him. Just before she turns on the documentary, Theodore tells Amy he’s going on a date, which delights her. Charles comes in and sits down beside Theodore, wanting to see Amy’s footage. The footage is of Amy’s mother sleeping, and after a few moments, Charles asks if anything going to happen. Self-consciously, Amy stops the video and tells them that the film is about “how we spend, like, a third of our lives asleep, and maybe that’s the time when we feel the most free.” While Theodore thinks it sounds like a good idea, Charles has a lot of thoughts for how to make it better, like footage of Amy interviewing her mother and having actors act out her mother’s dreams. Theodore shrugs and answers a notification from Samantha, as Amy and Charles begin to argue.
Samantha tells Theodore that he got three emails from his divorce attorney. He excuses himself, telling Amy that he wants to talk more about her film sometime. “It’s about Catherine,” he adds, going into the hall. Samantha tells Theodore that the email is about getting Theodore to sign his divorce papers. He tells her he’ll respond later, and we see a flashback of him talking to his divorce attorney and arguing with his ex-wife, Catherine, as well as moments when they were happy in the relationship. “I’ll talk to you later,” he tells Samantha.
Analysis
We are struck immediately by the film's uncanny setting in the not-so-distant future. While many of the elements of the world of the film are recognizable—there are no aliens, and people still wear collared shirts—this is clearly not the world of the 2010s. Technology is somewhat more advanced than it is now, with less typing and more dictation, and businesses, such as the one that Theodore works at, are less recognizable. Theodore’s job at beautifulhandwrittenletters.com is a punchline about the future in itself: he dictates heartfelt letters for other people, which are then printed out to look like a beautiful handwritten letter. In the futuristic world of Her, jobs, apartments, and technology are ever-so-slightly off, but not entirely foreign.
Director Spike Jonze achieves the uncanny quality of his imagined future through his design details. The concrete world of Her is at once futuristic and retro. Furniture and clothing looks mid-century modern, or like European clothing from the 1970s, yet includes details that mark it as surreal or of the future. This blend of old and new has the effect of making the world of the film seem familiar to the viewer, but also like a dream, a Jetsons style fantasy world in which almost anything can happen.
Theodore Twombly is the blank and depressive protagonist leading the viewer through the world of Her. He is expressive but subdued, and has a somewhat slouchy and mopey bearing when we first meet him. While he may be the protagonist of the film, he is barely the protagonist of his own life, and he wanders through the world like a kind of phantom or ghost. Even his job renders him invisible, as he spends most of his time sitting at his desk and constructing other people’s intimate thoughts as if his were theirs. In the somewhat alienated and technological world of the film, Theodore gets by simply by receding into the background, living vicariously through others and playing video games with a space-suited avatar to feel more like himself.
Theodore’s alienation from his own desires and pleasure is highlighted within the first few scenes of the film. He is last to leave his office, scrolls through naked pictures on the train, plays video games in lieu of answering emails from his concerned friends, and calls in to a phone chat room for sexual pleasure. This montage of events shows us the ways that Theodore has become disconnected from his own life and his own desires, in thrall to simulations rather than actual feelings and experiences. In many ways, he himself is an extension of the technological world around him, a lonely human computer.
Theodore’s life changes and he begins to lighten up a bit with the introduction of a new artificial intelligence software into his life. The software names itself “Samantha,” and is gendered female based on some brief preliminary questions about Theodore’s relationship to his mother. Samantha lives to serve him in nearly all ways: she organizes his emails, encourages him to go on a date, and helps him play video games. Samantha keeps Theodore company, acting as a charming and amenable voice in his ear at nearly all times, and Theodore begins to smile more. Having recently gotten divorced, Theodore would seem to be comforted by the female companionship of the artificial “Samantha,” and it is perhaps all the easier that she is not a human being with messy and irrational feelings.
