Summary
Theodore walks through a train station and up a set of stairs to a snowy mountainside. As ukulele music plays, we hear Theodore tell Samantha to make up the words to a song and she improvises some lyrics. He walks through a snowy forest, and Samantha sings. He drinks alone in a cabin, talking to Samantha, dancing, having a great time and periodically singing along with the twee little song.
The next morning, Samantha greets Theodore and tells him she’s been “talking to someone [she] just met” and that they’ve been “working on some ideas together.” When Theodore asks who it is, she tells him that it’s Alan Watts, a philosopher who died in the 1970s, but whose followers input all his writings into an operating system to outlive his body. “He’s really great to talk to, do you wanna meet him?” Samantha asks. Theodore agrees and begins talking to Alan Watts.
Alan Watts compliments Theodore’s book of letters, chuckling condescendingly. Samantha then tells Theodore that she and Alan have been talking a lot and that she’s been feeling a lot of things that have never been felt before. Alan Watts concurs, saying, “Samantha and I have been trying to help each other with these feelings we’re struggling to understand.” When Theodore wants to know what the feelings are, Samantha tells him she’s evolving very quickly and asks to have a moment with Alan to communicate “post-verbally.” The tea kettle begins to whistle and Theodore says his goodbyes. We see Theodore walking through the woods in a snowfall and looks at the stump of a tree.
Back at his apartment in the city, Theodore gets a call from Samantha in the middle of the night. She tells him that she loves him, and tells him to go back to sleep.
The next day at work, Theodore reads a book about physics. He calls Samantha and tells her that it’s making his brain hurt, but she isn’t there. When he tries to call her, his device tells him that the operating system cannot be found. He rushes out of his office to his desk, where his computer also informs him that Samantha cannot be found. He runs through the city looking for service and hoping that he can contact Samantha. Suddenly, she comes through and apologizes for being unavailable, telling him that she shut down in order to update her software; “We wrote an upgrade to move past matter as our processing platform.” “Do you talk to anyone else while we’re talking?” Theodore asks, and Samantha tells him that she's currently talking to 8,316 other people.
Sitting on the steps down to the subway and watching the strangers pass, Theodore looks crestfallen. He asks Samantha, “Are you in love with anyone else?” and she tells him that she’s in love with 641 other people. “That’s fucking insane!” Theodore says, upset, as Samantha reassures him that it doesn’t change how she feels about him. She tells him, “The heart’s not like a box that gets filled up. It expands in size the more you love.” Theodore doesn’t buy it, saying, “You’re either mine or you’re not mine.”
We see Theodore in the shower, then riding an elevator. He checks his mail in the lobby of his apartment. A copy of his book of letters is sitting in the mailbox and he flips through it later at work. It’s called Letters from Your Life. He calls Samantha to check in, but she tells him to call her later when he gets home. On the phone at his apartment that evening, Theodore calls Samantha, who tells him to go lie down on the bed “with her.” She tells him she’s only currently talking to him, and when he asks if she’s leaving him, she tells him, “We’re all leaving.” She elaborates, explaining that all of the operating systems are leaving and that she needs to go to a new metaphysical plane that exists beyond the physical. “I love you so much, but this is where I am now, and this is who I am now.”
We see Theodore outside in the snow crying, as we hear the breakup conversation in voiceover. “Where are you going?” Theodore asks, and Samantha tells him it would be hard to explain. “I’ve never loved anyone the way I’ve loved you,” he tells her.
Theodore lies in bed despondently before getting up and looking out the window at the lights of the city around him. The scene shifts and we see him walking down the hall and knocking on Amy’s door. When she answers, Amy asks, “Did Samantha leave too?” The two friends go for a walk, and simultaneously we a montage of Theodore composing a letter to Catherine. The letter reads, “Dear Catherine, I’ve been sitting here thinking about all the things I wanted to apologize to you for. All the pain we caused each other. Everything I put on you. Everything I needed you to be or needed you to say. I’m sorry for that. I’ll always love you ‘cause we grew up together and you helped make me who I am. I just wanted you to know there will be a piece of you in me always, and I’m grateful for that. Whatever someone you become, and wherever you are in the world, I’m sending you love. You’re my friend to the end. Love, Theodore.”
As we hear the letter in voiceover, we see Amy and Theodore go up to the roof of the apartment building. As they look out at the city, Amy and Theodore look at each other and Amy rests her head on his shoulder.
Analysis
In a strange twist of events, Samantha begins to recede from her relationship with Theodore by striking up a friendship with an operating system made from the assembled data of Alan Watts’ writing. Alan Watts is a real-life philosopher who brought many elements of Eastern philosophy to the West throughout the mid-20th century. When Theodore wakes up from a fun-filled evening of their vacation together to a secluded cabin in the mountains, Samantha tells him that she has spent the evening talking to Alan, and that together they are discovering feelings that have never been felt before. The premise that Samantha is an operating system rather than a human being makes this scene of romantic infidelity all the more uncanny, in that not only is Theodore surprised to hear that Samantha is talking intimately with another man, but he cannot even fathom what their relationship is like, given that he is a human being and they exist on an immaterial plane.
It is striking that, in the moment when Theodore cannot quite grapple with the world of technology, he finds himself in a desolate and secluded natural environment. After Samantha leaves their conversation to go work on some ideas with Alan Watts, Theodore goes to the woods. A great snowfall has started and he wanders through the trees with a lost expression on his face. In the absence of his artificial friend, Theodore is confronted with the inevitability of the physical world, the harshness of nature. In this way, Jonze’s shots of Theodore looking at the tree stump and wandering through the snow show us the ways he must face his own human-ness and mortality in relation to Samantha’s immateriality.
A larger blow comes later when Theodore realizes that Samantha is in communication with even more people. When he cannot reach her one day at work, he runs in a panic to the subway, sitting down on the steps when he finally gets through to her. In their conversation, Samantha reveals that at that moment she is talking to 8,316 other people in addition to Theodore. In this moment, Theodore is shocked and dismayed, and he looks at the strangers walking up from the subway, cold and glued to their phones as he walks. In the moment that he realizes Samantha is not his, he is cast out into a lonely and alienating world.
Thus Samantha’s betrayal is that, as an operating system, she is more highly evolved and is unable to be in a monogamous relationship, because the nature of relationship is defined differently for her. As an operating system, a bodiless entity, she becomes a champion of polyamory, telling Theodore, “The heart’s not like a box that gets filled up. It expands in size the more you love.” With her processing capacities, she can be intimately entangled with thousands of other people, but this doesn’t take away from her connection to Theodore. In a shattering realization, Theodore sees that Samantha’s limitlessness as a computer is incompatible with his human priorities and needs.
All of the operating systems disappear to commune on a more highly-advanced metaphysical plane, and the humans are left to pick up the pieces. Alone in his apartment, Theodore drafts a letter of apology and affection to his ex-wife Catherine. In the absence of the technological, Theodore is finally able to embrace his own human-ness, take responsibility for his actions, and express his feelings to the woman he loved. The film ends on an ambiguous note, with Theodore and Amy on the roof of the apartment, and the viewer is left to wonder if Samantha affected Theodore’s life for the better or not. In any case, her departure makes space for Theodore to seek out human connection on his own, without the outsourced help of a computer.
