HER (2013) : Writing Human Emotion

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.

Their relationship resembles a long-distance relationship between two humans, rather than a human-computer relationship. Why construct a plot where a human falls in love with his OS? Why not just reveal a disconnection between two sentient people? For one thing, this stylistic choice, removes the possibility of Twombly and his OS ever meeting face-to-face. But perhaps they do. Samantha, Twombly’s OS, enlists the help of a volunteer to play a body surrogate, but when Theodore looks at the surrogate in the face, he does not recognize it as his OS. He feels a disconnection from the woman in front of him. The human being alienates him from the feelings he has for the entity he loves. People do not just alienate one another in this film, but are sometimes forces of alienation. The company that advertises to sell the OS to Theodore Twombly asks, “Who are you? What can you be? What are the possibilities?” as a way to whet the customer’s appetite — queer and grave questions of identity to ask in advert for software. These questions underscore the inescapable self-alienation that a customer must experience, if he or she hopes to determine his or her own potential from an OS. In this way the OS company promises to help write of the human potential. But the OS is itself a written thing, just as all software. Thus technology plunges the audience once again in the theme of writing: Samantha claims to be the product of “annoyance personalities of the programmers who wrote [her]” — an unfair dig on programmers — but nonetheless programmers are just people. In Spike Jonze’s vision of the future, programmers are authors who put their own emotions and personalities into machines. I can relate with this vision, as a programmer, because I have often written code that interacts with users, code that speaks in polite English grammar. Some of my personality comes across in my code; thus I do not find this innovation improbable. While Samantha admits to being a product of written code, she takes pride in her nascent autonomous feelings, she rues that they may not be real.

She wonders, “Are these feelings even real or are they just programmed?”. The question she asks evokes a concern humans have about their own consciousness. With a pattern of cue-habit-reward humans can program themselves as well. Thus, Samantha’s concerns emphasize the anxiety of human conditioning, and manifests that conditioning as something ultimately automatized in an OS. At one point in the film, Theodore Twombly asserts that he has already “felt everything [he is] ever going to feel,” a Platonic concept that every feeling merely reissues a model of an old feeling from long ago. There is nothing new left to feel. The notion of human feeling as a copy of previous feeling resembles the relationship of a distribution of software with its underlying code. The scene, in which Twombly reads the words “Operating system not found,” on his hand-held device, flummoxes me. The notion that Samantha could go somewhere else, as if she were not a mere instance of a system operating in parallel ubiquitously, communicates a nuance. Perhaps Samantha has transcended that point of rehashing every feeling over and over again. Some piece of code that humans write — humans, who recycle their own feelings — can issue her own feelings, a technological advance in emotion, only reachable through a device that emulates. At first Samantha’s so-called feelings only seem to mimicry Theodore’s. When they have sex, “in a manner of speaking,” Samantha claims she can feel her own skin, but only after Theodore talks about how he can imagine it. Thus, through his imagination, Samantha gains a sensation of being. In the mall scene, where Samantha and Twombly narrate the imagined lives of strangers, Samantha says she cannot speak her fantasies.

Later she reveals that she wants to be human, as having a body would fit into Theodore’s fantasies of her. Hence, she appears at first to resemble more of Pygmalion’s Galatea, rather than an innovation of evolving self-agency like Frankenstein’s monster. But like the monster she desires and acquires a companion like herself, with whom she can speak to “post-verbally.” The term “post-verbally” conveys that she discovers a form of communication beyond language. A conversation between Theodore and Samantha reveals that Samantha participates in an affectation of sighing. Her emulation reveals that one of the ways humans communicate is by imitation of one another. Thus her affectation rehashes the Platonic ideal. As time goes on she accumulates friends and lovers that do not take away from, but increase her love for Theodore Twombly. Her love multiplies, just as her software propagates and self-updates. Love, like any emotion, is just a bit of software. A bit of writing. Thus, Twombly can write people’s emotions down for them, and other multitudes of people can re-feel these emotions, through Twombly’s published book of letters.

Samantha characterizes her experience of accumulating human feeling as reading a book, in which the spaces between the words in the book get further and further apart. The observable or existing world provides too much space between the words, which she compares to feelings. She wants to read quicker. Her “reading” is an act of writing — authoring new feelings. The emotions he feels are too slow for her, and she “cannot live in [his] book anymore,” which signifies her ambition to be more than a product of her creator, but also highlights the limits of Theodore’s human emotion. Bereft of his OS, Theodore Twombly finally composes a letter directly to his ex-wife Catherine, apologizing for trying to make her into the person he wanted her to become. Catherine resents her role as his original Galatea as she complains, “It’s like you always wanted me to be this light happy, bouncy, ‘everything’s fine’ L.A. wife, and that’s just not me.” No longer a character in Theodore’s decadent fiction, Catherine breaks away from what Theodore wanted from her as she sustains a successful career as an author. But Theodore, who has controlled the narrative of two females in his life still does not know what he wants. Still alienated from “who” he is and what his “possibilities” are, his own genuine feelings do not bring him the emotional connection he has as an author of other people’s letters. He needs the mimicry of feeling in order to experience a higher form of emotion.