My name is Claudia and I like movies.
I’m taking over this semester as MOVE’s new movie columnist. I don’t want to be strangers, so let me tell you a little bit about myself.
I like cats, caramel Frappuccinos, and Winnie the Pooh. Binge-watching Netflix and eating are usually the highlights of my day. Even as a poor college student, I tend to spend way too much money at the movie theater. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “(500) Days of Summer” and “The Princess Bride” are ranked highly on my Favorite Movies Of All Time Ever list, and I will never get tired of spending an afternoon watching them again and again.
As you may have guessed from my top three movies, I’m a sucker for love. But who isn’t? We all want to find someone who makes us happy, who we have things in common with, who we can spend hours talking to about anything and everything.
But what if that someone was a computer?
In Spike Jonze’s latest creation, “Her,” Joaquin Phoenix stars as Theodore Twombly, a painfully lonesome writer who enjoys listening to melancholic music, playing video games and anonymous sexual chat room encounters. He lives a life of solitude, heartbroken and depressed after the recent breakup with his wife Catherine (Rooney Mara).
When a new operating system is released to the public, Theodore purchases it to help sort through his emails, proofread his writings, and perform various day-to-day tasks one might expect from an operating system.
Enter Samantha. She is an OS1, the very first artificially intelligent operating system. OS1s are individualized to fulfill each person’s unique needs. All you need to do is answer a few questions such as “What is your relationship with your mother like?”, pick the gender of the voice, and voilà — you have your perfect system.
Samantha captivates Theodore right away. Voiced by Scarlett Johansson, Samantha is sweet, sensitive, funny and remarkably human. She thinks and feels and desires to learn everything she can about the world. Like a person, she is constantly evolving at every moment.
As the OS1 advertisement says, “It’s not an operating system, but a consciousness.” Her presence provides the light that has been missing from Theodore’s life, and it isn’t long before he finds himself falling in love with her.
“Her” is Jonze’s first original screenplay and managed to snag a Golden Globe award as well as several Oscar nominations. The script is miraculous and performed beautifully by Phoenix, whose performance earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor, and Johansson.
A depressed Theodore ruminates to Samantha one night, “Sometimes I think I have felt everything I’m ever gonna feel. And from here on out, I’m never going to feel anything new. Just lesser versions of what I’ve already felt.”
And later, Samantha remarks, “The heart’s not like a box that gets filled up, it expands in size the more you love.”
What’s a little troubling about “Her” is how believable Jonze’s love story of a man and his computer is.
Taking place in the near future in Los Angeles, the people in “Her” are perpetually plugged in. OS/human relationships become more common as the film progresses. Theodore’s longtime friend Amy (Amy Adams) becomes friends with her own system and gossips with Theodore about a coworker who romantically pursued another person’s OS.
In “Her,” smartphone-esque devices and ear pieces are always in hand, and people mumble commands to their programs, waving and gesturing as they’re talking with their technology. It isn’t really that different from the modern world. Walking around campus you’ll notice how almost everyone is buried in their iPhone, trying not to run into each other as they shuffle to and from class.
Through “Her,” Jonze meditates on relationships and intimacy — how it exists today and how it may be evolving in the future. Is this where our tech-savvy society is heading? A world where people are so dependent on technology that they’d rather become a recluse from human contact and shack up with Siri?
