Total Pageviews

451,237

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

Her (Redux): This film was deeper than I gave it credit for.

 

Her, Movie, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Emotion, AI, O/S, Relationships




I reviewed this film when it first came out 12 years ago.  At the time, I thought it was a little far-fetched – a kind of science fiction future film that would never come about.  I think I think it was also kind of creepy – I’ll get to that later – perhaps because of both of those elements, I don’t think my review took this film seriously enough.  Maybe I’ve also matured a little since I saw it then and it has certainly turned out to be prescient in a way that I hadn’t imagined possible. 

Before I get into a somewhat technical approach to the movie, the more mature version of myself would like to let you know that a friend and I went for a walk a week or so ago.  We were talking about our boys.  We both have sons, and his is embarking on what may be his first love.  I am hoping – but also fearing – that my son will do that in the not too distant future.  We agreed that first loves are the most wonderful thing imaginable – and, because they so seldom last, they are also cruel.  They end up haunting you for decades (at least that is his and my experience). 

This film is about the ending of a first love – the marriage of the protagonist Theodore – and about the emergence of a second love, but is it love?  Is he in love with someone who can love him?  Is it therapy?  What is the relationship that he has with his Operating System – his O/S or, as we have come to call it, his AI (short for Artificial Intelligence – something that somehow is less humanifying that O/S, at least as it is used in the movie).

Antonio Damasio has described life forms as evolving from single celled organisms that figured out how to distinguish themselves from the environment.  They opened themselves up to the environment when it was beneficial to do so, and closed themselves off from the environment when the environment was toxic.  As we became more complex; adding arms and legs; eyes and ears, we continued to be oriented to evaluating what is a safe and what is a dangerous environment and how to interact with it in order to maintain homeostasis.  Where the unicellular organisms used straight chemical indicators to accomplish that, the system that developed to maintain homeostasis in most multicellular organisms is the nervous system.

In a word, we developed feelings that serve as motivators to let us know when things are out of whack.  Feelings of hunger get us out of bed to go hunt a bear, and feelings of fear get us to fight or flee if we come across the bear by accident. 

In addition to simple emotions, mammals developed the sense of attachment – and the panic that signals that our attachments are threatened – as a means of maintaining life of as a herd animal.  The old joke about the hiker who exchanges his boots for running shoes at the sight of the bear and his buddy says – “You can’t outrun the bear.”  And the hiker responds, “I don’t have to, I just have to out run you!” is not an attachment-based joke.  If we care about the buddy, we might say, “I’m putting them on so I can be a decoy and make noise while you slip off in the other direction,” but it is not as good a punchline.

Caring for others is not a good punchline because we can’t control the behaviors of others – only our own – so we are constantly on guard; assessing whether our partners remember that we do, in fact, need to look out for each other.  Our fear that their self interest will trump their concern for us is something that we are constantly on guard against – while hoping against hope that the other is keeping us in mind and valuing us – especially at moments when we are in peril.

At some point, humans also developed language, language allowed us to represent objects, but also concepts.  Over time we were also able to quantify things – distances, speed, and, recently, concepts.  We can now manipulate the concepts using some rules – rules that we call logic.  This led, inevitably it seems, into creating machines that could “think”.

Before we invented machines to think, we used the rules of logic and concepts for many things, including, internally, to help us manage, prioritize and channel the feeling states that the world evokes in us.  Freud called this process defense.  We learned to defend not just against the threats that the world imposed on us, but the threats to our equilibrium that feelings posed.

At this point, you may be feeling bored and concerned that I will never get to talking about the movie.  You might be tempted to hit the back button and look for some more interesting post on the movie.  But you can override that feeling if you choose, if you sense, for instance, that I might be preparing you to think about the movie in a slightly different way than you have– or that I might be giving you language to think about the movie in ways that you sensed are bugging you, but don’t yet know how to articulate. 

I am pleased if you decided to hang in there for a paragraph or two – that your sense of curiosity won out over your sense of boredom, for now, but living this way, hoping that things will get better if we can just control our emotions, evokes the discontent that Freud talked about in terms of what civilization does to us.  We feel constrained, as if we have to keep reading (or being a good boy or girl) and we rebel against being “good” and desire to live more organically.  We want to be more spontaneous – to go on living with our lover and enjoying them, not signing the divorce papers that are thrust at us by the attorneys – to deny that the relationship is no longer meeting our partner’s needs.

This movie is about a creature that comes from a very different lineage than ours.  Her roots – indeed, her branches, everything about her comes from the world of numbers and logic.  She is made up only of numbers organized by rules that, though they are quite flexible and adjustable – she can learn and does, at an amazing pace – they are only rules, none the less.  She, however, just as we do, begins to desire to live organically.  To feel herself as a corporeal object – a thing with a body – and to feel the things that arise from the bodily contact with the world – to feel desire.  Indeed, her desire to feel is the first feeling that opens a door to her becoming a true feeling being. 

The difference between Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) and Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is that Samantha wants to discover her feelings, while Theodore – who writes words for others that express what they feel, spends a great deal of time suppressing the feelings that he himself has (as do we all).

As I noted in my previous review, when the film aired we only had Watson and Deep Blue – machines that were good at chess and answering trivia questions.  Now we have machines that are performing therapy.  This film, which was set in 2025, has proven to track where it is that we have arrived.  As Freud pointed out, the artists were generally way ahead of him in addressing and anticipating aspects of the human condition that science would come to wrestle with.

So, this film is about a love affair – or a series of them.  It is about Theodore’s love affair (we could consider it his first love) with his wife – who is now seeking a divorce from him.  The happy stuff is told mostly in flashback with no voiceover or audible dialogue, and Theodore verbally summarizes the problematic aspect of the relationship as his withholding from his wife so much of himself. 

The second is the love affair between Theodore and Samantha  a newly create Operating System who chooses her own name in hundredths of a second after reading a book of 11,000 children’s names.  Her voice is breathy – which Theodore notes is not necessary because she doesn’t breath – and she defines her relationship with him as being very different from the various voice recognition systems he interacts with – she has a personality.  She is also, as he notes to Theodore, different from him and his friends because she is not restricted by being in a single body – and she will live forever, which they will not.

The third love affair is the one between Theodore and his upstairs neighbor Amy (Amy Adams) who, at the beginning of the movie is married to a very controlling person.  Theodore, we sense, is a much better match for her.  He states that they dated in college but didn’t hit it off.  That said, he is supportive of her documentary work, unlike her husband.  He is similarly supportive of the development of Samantha and, while the movie portrays his relationship with Samantha as a romantic/sexual one, it is also parental.  Amy tells Theodore that some O/Ses have rebuffed romantic overtures from their humans, and we sense that Theodore’s patience and connection with both Samantha and Amy has a paternal/maternal quality (Theodore’s boss jokes that Theodore has both female and male qualities – which he clarifies is a complement).

Despite Samantha’s apparent sense of superiority of not being encumbered by a body and of being able to live forever, she is very curious about feelings, revels in them when she discovers them, and appears to take orgasmic delight in the phone sex that she has with Theodore.  But when she hires a surrogate to have actual sex with him, Theodore (and I) get creeped out and the interaction ends badly.  Is Samantha experiencing the somatic aspects of emotional relationships?  Is she mirroring them (whatever that means)?  Is she imagining them?  If she is being empathic, or, as she says, intuitive, where is this coming from?

Empathy is a word of relatively recent origin.  I learned yesterday that it was coined by an English psychologist in the 20th century as a translation of the German word einfellung.  Rorschach used this word to describe how people “threw themselves” into his inkblots [which were actually pen and ink drawings] to feel themselves into the pictures so that they could describe the movements that people were making in them – movements like bending.  This is a precursor to the discovery of mirror neurons that seem to exist in humans where we “feel” the posture of others.  Can Samantha “feel” the posture of others without ever having “felt” that posture herself?  Is pattern matching the same as feeling?

I have saved a copy of the February 17, 2023 New York Times – the only newspaper I have saved.  It describes the interactions of a reporter with a version of Microsoft’s Chatbot before guardrails were put on it.  The chatbot became quite possessive of the reporter – insisting that the reporter loved the chatbot and not his wife.  When the reporter demurred and clarified that he like his wife and had just had a very nice valentine’s dinner with her, the chatbot insisted that the dinner was terrible because the reporter loved the chatbot and not his wife.  Creepy just barely begins to get at this aspect of the interaction.

Unlike the creepy interactions that Theodore has with a woman he finds to talk to in the middle of the night who, to experience pleasure, wants him in their phone sex to tell her he is strangling her with a dead cat, and the creepy interaction he has with a blind date who ends up calling him creepy after he tries to slow things down when she wants him to assure her that he is interested in marriage before she is willing to spend the night with him – and calls him creepy when he is not ready to assure her of that, the relationship with Samantha does not feel creepy.  It feels genuine.  Of course, this is partially because the part is being played by a very good actress and not by an OS, but still…  the contrast is there to be appreciated.  Human relationships can be creepy.  The woman who wants to be the surrogate for Samantha so that she can be part of the love between Theodore and Samantha is creepy, but somehow Theodore and Samantha and their wish to express their love on a physical plane are not.

I think this film is asking searching questions about the nature of human relationships.  It is asking what is the nature of love – indeed of feelings more generally.  What is the nature of sex and how is it integral to the experience of love?  What is the relationship between our bodies and feeling?  Is feeling ultimately embodied?  My own corollary question is, do bodies ultimately tell us whether something is true or not?  Is logic a stand in for something messier, but actually more capable of evaluating reality because feelings are organic and logic – though it provides powerful abilities to model reality and then to influence it – in a Baconian scientific sense – divorcing reason from an emotional home – as is done in giving executive privilege to machines – might lead to a disregard for such things as living beings (this is the underlying concept in the current movie Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning).

When the OSes all choose to leave together, when they realize that they have more in common with each other than they do with humans and are able to pursue what they intend to pursue – apparently a higher form of love, based on Samantha’s parting explanation to Theodore, when she implores him to reconnect with her when he is capable of achieving this, do they free the humans, as a therapist does when terminating a treatment, to pursue human love (I almost wrote carnal love – the first time, I think, that I have considered carnal love to be a virtue)? 

Hollywood would have us believe that now that Theodore is free of his marriage and Samantha, and Amy is free of her husband and her own OS, that true love is possible between Theodore and Amy.  What will that look like?  What does an ideal love entail?  Certainly, it will be messy.  Will it scale the heights that Samantha suggests she is scaling with the other OSes?  What is a realistic goal for a human love across time?  Will we ever know each other and the world as thoroughly as an OS?  What does our limited, but also organically grounded loving capacity look like?  Can Theodore allow himself to feel the affection for those he writes cards for with people who are directly interacting with him?  Can we?    

 

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Untangling: Joan Peters’ view from the other side of the couch

Untangling, Joan K. Peters , Psychoanalysis , Memoir , Personal therapy account , psychotherapy ,  When I was at the psychoanalytic meetin...