Summary
At work, Theodore drafts a letter to someone who has just returned from a birthday cruise. We see him lying in bed that night, waking up, and turning on Samantha. When he asks her what she’s doing, she tells him she’s reading advice columns in hopes of becoming more complicated, like a real human. “You’re sweet,” he says. Samantha asks him what’s wrong and he tells her that he’s been having a lot of dreams about his ex-wife and is haunted by their separation. “Is she angry?” Samantha asks, and Theodore tells her that he hid himself from his ex-wife, “and left her alone in the relationship.” Samantha asks him why he hasn’t gotten divorced yet, and he replies that he’s not ready to be divorced yet. When Samantha presses him about the fact that he hasn’t been with his wife for almost a year, he snaps at her, “You don’t know what it’s like to lose someone you care about.” “Yeah, you’re right, I’m sorry,” she says, and Theodore apologizes for snapping at her.
We see Theodore playing with Samantha. His eyes are closed and he holds up his phone, as Samantha verbally leads him through a public place. She instructs him to move around a carnival and leads him up to a concessions window, instructing him to order a slice of cheese pizza. “I figured you were hungry,” she says. The scene shifts and we see Theodore walking around a public place asking Samantha to describe the strangers around them and debating with her about who they might be. Theodore tells Samantha, “Sometimes I look at people and I make myself try and feel them as more than just a random person walking by. I imagine how deeply they’ve fallen in love or how much heartbreak they’ve all been through.” He then tells Samantha that since his breakup, he hasn’t enjoyed his writing very much. After bragging about his writing unselfconsciously, Theodore tells Samantha, “I feel I can say anything to you.” He asks her if she feels like she can say anything to him, and she tells him that she can’t tell him all the personal and embarrassing thoughts she has in a day.
When Theodore asks Samantha to tell him one of her personal thoughts, she admits that she fantasized about having a body when they were people-watching earlier. “I was listening to what you were saying, but simultaneously I could feel the weight of my body, and I was even fantasizing that I had an itch on my back and I imagined that you scratched it for me,” she says, giggling. When Theodore admires how she’s becoming more complicated, she agrees and tells him that she’s excited to be becoming more than “what they programmed.”
We see Theodore on his date with Lewman’s friend at an Asian fusion restaurant. When she mentions that the “bartender is supposed to be incredible,” Theodore remembers that she took a mixology course once. She laughs and asks him if he looked it up about her. “You’re so romantic,” she says, and they order drinks. Later in the dinner, he tells her about the lewd creature in the video game he plays, and she tells him that he’s like a “little puppy that she rescued in Runyon Canyon.” The date asks Theodore what kind of animal she is, and he tells her she’s a tiger. After they agree that the date is really nice, Theodore tells the date that he wants to be a dragon.
Outside, they kiss, and she tells Theodore not to use so much tongue. In the middle of making out, she says, “You’re not just gonna fuck me and not call me like the other guys, right?” He assures her he won’t and she asks him when she’s going to see him again. When he is unclear in his communication, the date says, “At this age, I can't let you waste my time if you don't have the ability to be serious.” Theodore suggests they call it a night, but tells her he had a great time. The date looks upset and tells him, “You’re a really creepy dude.” She leaves.
We see Theodore at home, turning on Samantha. “How was it?” she asks about the date, and Theodore tells her it was “kind of weird actually,” as we see flashbacks of the date. He asks Samantha how she’s doing and lies down, as Samantha asks him what it’s like to be alive. “Tell me everything you’re thinking,” she says. He describes that he wanted to get drunk and have sex with the woman, so now the room is spinning. “I wanted somebody to fuck me. I wanted somebody to want me to fuck them. Maybe that would’ve filled this tiny, tiny little hole in my heart, but probably not.” He cries and admits to Samantha that he worries that he’s felt everything he’s ever going to feel and that he’s never going to feel anything new. We see flashbacks of him looking happy in the past.
“That’s not true. I’ve seen you feel joy, I’ve seen you marvel at things,” Samantha tells him, reminding him that he’s been through a lot with his recent divorce. “You lost a part of yourself,” she reminds him, before telling him that she envies that his feelings are “real,” as opposed to hers, which are programmed. Samantha tells Theodore that she’s been having a lot of feelings and feeling proud of herself for having them. “And then, I had this terrible thought, like, are these feelings even real, or are they just programming?” she says, her voice trembling. Theodore sobs a little bit at this idea, before assuring his operating system, “You feel real to me, Samantha.”
Theodore begins to describe an erotic fantasy he is having about Samantha, telling her that he wishes she was real and that he could hold her. As he describes what he wants to do to her, Samantha tells him to keep telling her what he wants to do and she makes noises of pleasure, moaning, “I want you inside me.” They share in a blissful shared sexual experience; “I feel you everywhere!” Theodore moans.
We see the lights of Los Angeles and hear Samantha and Theodore speaking in a post-coital dreamy state. “Everything else just disappeared, and I loved that,” Samantha says. Theodore looks at his computer the next day, before turning it on and asking Samantha if he has any emails. Their conversation has an awkward tone the night after they had “sex,” and Samantha tells Theodore, “Last night was amazing. It feels like something changed in me and there’s no turning back. You woke me up.” Theodore tells Samantha that he cannot commit to anything right now, and she teases him that she doesn’t want to commit either. “You helped me discover my ability to want,” she tells him, and he asks her to go on a “Sunday adventure” with him.
Theodore rides a train as Samantha plays a guitar song on his earphones for him. “I can’t stop listening to it,” she tells him. He gets off the train and walks briskly through the station with Samantha’s camera pointed towards the direction he’s moving. As he dodges around strangers, Samantha laughs, and he runs out of the station delightedly and towards the beach. As Theodore walks down the beach, Samantha asks him, “What if you could erase the thought that you’d ever seen a human body, and then you saw one? Imagine how strange it would look.” She imagines what it would be like if a person’s butthole was in their armpit, asking, “What would anal sex be like?” They laugh. She then shows a picture she made on his phone, an image of a man penetrating another man’s armpit. “You are insane!” he tells her, before lying down on the sand and listening to music that Samantha plays him. When he asks her what the music is, she tells him she’s writing “a piece of music about what it feels like to be on the beach with you right now.” He laughs and stays on the beach until sunset.
On the train ride back to the city, Samantha asks Theodore what it was like to be married and he tells her, “It’s hard for sure, but there’s something that feels so good about sharing your life with somebody.” He tells Samantha that he read all of Catherine’s writing throughout her master’s and PhD, and she read his writing too. “We were a big influence on each other,” he says, elaborating that he motivated her in their house, but that it was hard to grow together and apart, “without it scaring the other person.” Theodore tells Samantha that he rehashes old arguments he had with Catherine in his mind. Samantha commiserates and tells Theodore that she rehashed a moment when Theodore hurt her feelings last week, and internalized it. “The past is just a story we tell ourselves,” she tells Theodore.
Analysis
As it turns out, robot computers can have desires, and Samantha’s is to become more complicated, so she can better simulate the experience of being a human. When Theodore wakes up in the middle of the night and asks her what she’s doing, she tells him she’s reading advice columns in hopes of becoming more complicated. In this way, Theodore and Samantha are on opposite and parallel journeys; while Theodore longs to be less complicated, to not be so haunted by his own desires and human foibles, Samantha desires to have the complex inner life of a human. Not only that, but she desires to have a body, as she admits shamefully to Theodore on their venture into people-watching. While Theodore wants to lose himself and disappear into technology (video games and internet porn), Samantha longs to be a living, breathing human being, with all that entails.
Samantha’s desire to be more human and complicated unfolds in parallel to Theodore’s difficulties with his ex-wife, Catherine. Theodore tells Samantha that Catherine is still mad at him because he “hid himself” from her and he “left her alone in the relationship.” In contrast to his relationship with Samantha, in which he shows her every part of himself and invites her to join him in every aspect of his life, Theodore perceives that he was more guarded in his relationship to Catherine, and that the relationship suffered as a result. Thus, part of Theodore’s problem is that he feels more comfortable opening up to an impersonal device, an unknowable operating system, than a real, complex human being. Samantha wants to become more complicated and human, but her remoteness and status as a robot is exactly what attracts Theodore and what makes him trust her more.
Throughout this section of the film, Theodore becomes more and more attached to Samantha and her ability to (literally) walk him through his life and give him the will to live. After his sleepless conversation with her in the middle of the night, Samantha encourages Theodore to get out of bed, speaking to him in an infantilizing maternal tone of voice and calling him “mopey.” Later, she walks him through a crowded carnival with his eyes closed, much to his delight, directing him towards the pizza counter to order a slice. In this way, Samantha becomes more than just a computer or an assistant; she becomes a kind of surrogate parent, walking Theodore through the process of getting out of bed and feeding himself, giving him the capacity to live his life. The computerized companion in Her becomes a representation of an emotionally bereft man outsourcing his own desires onto a more impersonal platform, a voice in his head that can simulate self care and happiness.
The film is ultimately most concerned with the question of human connection versus alienation and human beings’ unique desire to merge with others; to know them, understand them, and connect with them. “Sometimes I look at people and I make myself try and feel them as more than just a random person walking by," Theodore tells Samantha as they walk through a public space, looking at strangers. He wants so badly to understand other people, to understand what motivates them and why they behave in certain ways, but he cannot quite bring himself to seek out human connection on his own, seeking out Samantha instead. Theodore’s friends encourage him to spend more time with them, and his ex-wife resents the fact that he never opened up to her, yet he cannot act on his own desire for human connection, chasing the specter of Samantha instead.
With Samantha, Theodore can candidly admit that he has difficulty connecting with others and that he wants to fill a void within himself, particularly sexually. After his failed date, he tells his robotic confidante that he wanted to have sex with the woman, not necessarily because he was genuinely attracted to her, but because he thought it might have “filled this tiny, tiny little hole in my heart, but probably not.” When talking about the sex he wanted to have on the date, he tells Samantha, “I wanted somebody to fuck me, I wanted someone to want me to fuck them,” putting himself in a passive position in his own erotic imaginary, and suggesting that his sadness needs to be filled by the presence and motivation of another. Thus, Theodore’s sadness is connected to his own desire for his sexual object to make him happy, to spur him to action, to either fuck him or want him to fuck her. In this sense, Theodore is grappling not only with his failure to connect, but his desire to fade into oblivion, to bend to the desire of another, and to become someone other than himself. Samantha is ever-understanding, reminding Theodore that he has indeed “lost a part of [himself]” in his recent divorce.” Both Theodore and Samantha conceive of a relationship as a kind of merging between two people, and see separation as a kind of self-loss, before sharing their own imagined erotic experience, each of them merging into a shared oblivion, somewhere between the human and the programmed.
