Famous for portraying a human-computer romance, Her (2013) reveals that emulated feeling confers more intensity than natural human emotion. In the opening scene Theodore Twombly faces the audience with an abstract backdrop. In the manner of a film actor slating for the camera, he composes a letter from Loretta to Chris — two people in love for fifty years. He articulates their authentic feelings into words, making their feelings more rich by means of his imitation. We overhear that he works for a letter-writing firm, when the receptionist answers the phone: “Beautiful Handwritten Letters.” In this scene letter-writing, and the whole writing process, appears to resemble acting. Good writing and good acting both require and induce empathy. Theodore Twombly steps into the experience of another person and tries to reconstruct their sentiments. He even adds a bit of detail to the letters that does not occur in real life. People pay him to write letters to their loved ones, and evidently in the future world this film depicts, letter-writing services are so prevalent that people know their loved ones use writers to express their thoughts. Twombly is a surrogate purveying emotions. In another instance he admits to writing letters to a woman on her lover’s behalf ever since they met years ago. Therefore, their intimacy isn’t based on authentic exchange, but the feelings that Twombly manufactures in his writing. The people in these relationships require Theodore Twombly to connect with one another. It doesn’t matter who feels the feelings.
In yet another instance, Twombly writes a letter on behalf of parents to their son who does well at school. Twombly says he feels happy for them; he not only articulates their emotions, but feels their feelings with them. Articulating other people’s emotions requires character improvisation. Authors who create fictional characters have to feel the feelings of their characters. Theodore’s clients become his characters. But they also become characters from the perspective of their own observation as his fictional anecdotes must be incorporated as part of a true relationship. Theodore navigates home by subway, checking his email, in the atomistic crowd of whispering subway passengers, each engrossed in their machines. The film captures this sense of social disconnection in large bodies of people who group together. In reality, nobody’s voice recognition system would understand them in a crowded subway. But the scene in the subway reinforces the concept of separate togetherness. People become analogous to the machines that overwhelm them, unable to relate with or converse with one another.
The color palette of the film persistently uses red and orange-red for clothing, furniture, even large metal frameworks. Theodore’s shirt is orange, his jacket is orange. Even the divisions of the cubicles at Theodore Twombly’s workplace are red-orange. The chairs are red. Such a persistent use of red and orange makes one wonder what this scarcity of color represents. When Twombly’s friend’s husband, Charles, leaves his wife for a vow of silence, a picture appears of Charles with a bunch of monks in an orange-red robes. Perhaps the orange-red color signifies Twombly’s monkish lifestyle, staving off romance for a memory of a marriage he is not quite ready to leave. What kills this theory is the appearance of his orange-red shirt in flashbacks with his ex-wife. Perhaps he just wants to cling to a past, and does not want his circumstance to change. A comfort lies in repetition. In an article by Durga Chew-Bose, production assistant K.K. Barrett claims that Spike Jonze, Casey Storm and himself “were all really enamored with red. . . . It just gave it all a warmer feeling. But these decisions are all a little whimsical.” I should not read into this “whimsical” choice, but I know better than to trust the artists, when they relate that their artistic choices may mean nothing. “Warmer feeling[s]” are the most human of emotions that relate closeness, something the film lacks. Maybe surrounding the narrative in red accounts of the lack of human closeness? Christine Smallwood suggests that these barriers of “red and pink” shelter the main character, conveying Spike Jonze’s anxiety about abandonment. But abandonment requires that the central figures of the film do at one point have a strong connection or bond, whereas distance seems to permeate the relationships, even the romantic one Theodore Twombly has with his OS.
