The movie Her is not nearly as creepy as you might imagine; at least not on the surface. You may have heard that a guy, Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love with his computer – actually his operating system (O/S), Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. As the reluctant wife points out, 20 years ago this would have been science fiction. Now, it seems like what we should be preparing for. The O/S is a version of IBM’s Watson, a computer that can intuit – that can guess – what would work best in a situation of uncertainty. But it is more human than Watson, and engages with Theodore in ways that are both surprising, but also quite believable. We work with computers most of our days – I spend more time at my computer than I do with humans – and I am a psychoanalyst! The story of Theo’s falling in love with his O/S and she with him is less about a basement dwelling guy who can’t connect with people than the story of a guy, coming off of a divorce, finding a compassionate ear who takes really good care of him and also finding an entity who is becoming someone – but who is virtual – and she wants to know what it is like to be human.
Now, about the title of the blog, it is really hard to view this movie and not see it as a representation of the therapeutic relationship, at least if you are an analyst. OK, this O/S therapist (though she might have also been the secretary in the days of Mad Men), is more consistently available – when you can’t sleep, she is right there, but the set up almost cries out for it. Theo is asked to answer several questions by the company thatt sets up the personal O/S that will evolve for him before they turn her on. They want to know what gender he wants the O/S to be, and they want to know what his relationship with his mother was like. As Theo is reflecting on the second question, after acknowledging that his mother would appear to be interested in him, but take everything that he said and turn it into something that was of interest to her, the machine cuts him off, and he is introduced to Samantha – who chooses her own name by reading a book of baby names in the time between his asking her what her name is and her seemingly immediate response. In psychoanalytic terms, we expect – and see played out – a transferential replay of Theo’s relationship with his mother, and get evidence that this is part of what happened between Theo and his wife, whom he is in the midst of divorcing.
While I could write about the arcs of those relationships and the ways in which the relationship with Samantha is a healing one, much as a relationship with a therapist/psychoanalyst can be – including because both the O/S and the therapist are ultimately unavailable, and thus the ways that this movie is, indeed, a comedy, as advertised, my experience of it was actually much more disturbing, much more creepy. After we got home from the movie, I had a long dream. In it, I was on vacation, alone. There were lots of other people in the dream, but they were all going about their own business and I mine. Towards the end of the dream, there was an earthquake and I tried to organize the people who were around me to get away from the walls of the buildings that were crumbling around us. I was the only one who was successfully able to do this. Everyone else died. I was alone and frightened. I yelled, hoping to find someone still surviving – it felt like anywhere on the planet. I noticed some movement, but it was just my reflection in a mirror that was hanging, crooked, on a wall a long way off. I looked like a monkey crying out, jumping up and down. I woke up terrified. And while the dream is about many other things as well, it was partly stimulated by the movie.
Theo becomes caught up with his computer. He is around many many other people, but he is isolated. His job – he works at handwrittenletters.com – is to write love letters for people that he doesn’t know, apparently because they are too busy to do so. So he writes to wives from their husbands, and to kids at school from their parents – picking up on subtle clues from photographs that they send to create relationships between them that he quite beautifully articulates. I, too, do this. I imagine the lives of my clients. I picture the people in their lives – I picture their dreams, and I use my intuition to connect with them. And Samantha does this with Theo. She sees, through the lens of the camera that he carries in his chest pocket what he sees. She joins in his conversations, first with him, then with him and others, and then on her own, and as she does this she becomes more and more human. She models her humanity, in part, on her experience of his humanity. Theo is the mirror that Samantha uses to build herself, and then she becomes a mirror in which Theo can see himself – he can see how he is treating her as he has treated others in his life. He creates her – in some ways more, but in other ways just as we create each other in our relationships.
Samantha and Theo become mirror images of each other, as he, to some extent, was a mirror image of his mother. And as they do this, Theo experiences himself as opening up – going on vacation with Samantha to a remote cabin where it is just the two of them and he can more fully be himself – but this does become a pretty creepy context in which to become yourself. He is literally masturbating as a means of having sex with Samantha, but he is also symbolically masturbating as he becomes the “master of his own domain” by living with a projection of who it is that the other should be.
Now part of the happy ending of the movie is that Samantha does not simply remain a projection, but she in fact becomes an autonomous other – and this allows Theo to reclaim himself, and to reconnect with humans. But the scary/creepy component is how drawn we (and here I mean me, as exemplified in my dream) are to an isolated, self-absorbed/reflective existence, one where we are as happy to sit in front of a TV or computer screen as to interact with real people. This withdrawal into virtual relationships is very inviting, seductive, and ultimately – my dream suggests, though the movie reassures us that it is not the case, deathly isolating. I think this movie is trying to reassure us, on the surface, that our basic humanity will save us from the onslaught of isolating factors that are increasingly assaulting us. Just as Facebook reassures us that we are in more and more contact with our friends. I think my unconscious questions that assertion.
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In another post, on Hozier, I am less convinced that machines can become "human".
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