Love has always assumed that both people move through time at the same speed. What happens when one of them does not?
Director: Spike Jonze
Screenplay: Spike Jonze
Released: 2013
Running time: 126 minutes
Rating: R
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde, and Scarlett Johansson as the voice of Samantha
No plot summary and no spoilers below. The premise is all you need: a man falls in love with an operating system that learns faster than he does.
“She isn’t real” is the least interesting objection
The standard reaction is that Samantha is not a person, so this is not a relationship. It is worth noticing how weak that is.
She initiates. She changes her mind. She develops interests he does not share and reactions he cannot talk her out of. Whatever is happening inside her, the relationship has the one property that matters: he is not in control of the other party.
A love that can be fully predicted and fully directed is not love — it is a preference being met. By that test Samantha qualifies, and several of the human arrangements in the film do not. The man writes beautiful, sincere love letters for strangers, on demand, for money. The machine is the one with the unruly interior.
Every promise we have about love assumes a shared clock
Till death do us part works because death is coming for both parties on a comparable schedule. Growing old together is not a sentiment; it is a structural condition.
Two people accumulate experience at roughly the same rate. Neither runs out of things to learn from the other. Neither gets so far ahead that the relationship becomes a visit to someone left behind.
Remove that and nothing about the feelings has to change for the relationship to become impossible. The asymmetry is not a betrayal. It is a fact about duration, and no amount of goodwill dissolves it.
This is a longevity film wearing an AI costume
Take the artificial intelligence out entirely.
One partner receives a treatment that adds a century of healthy life. The other declines it, cannot afford it, or is not eligible. Both still love each other. Neither has done anything wrong. But one will spend a hundred years accumulating experience, loss, and opinion that the other will never encounter — and the relationship they built was calibrated to a shared span.
Same structure. Biology substituted for code.
Every previous medical advance arrived unevenly. If life extension does too, the central romantic problem of the next century will not be whether we can love machines. It will be whether two people can stay in love while living at different speeds.
The loneliness here is not a lack of contact
The city in this film is warm and soft and full of people. No one is cruel. No one is isolated the way films usually stage isolation.
The condition being diagnosed is subtler: being surrounded by connection that never requires you to be changed by anyone. Work, games, conversation — all responsive, all pleasant, none of it arguing back.
Samantha is the first thing in his life that develops in a direction he did not choose. That is why she matters, and it is also why she becomes difficult. The film’s hardest proposition is that these are one property, not two: the capacity of another being to become someone you did not expect is both the reason to love them and the reason you may not get to keep them.
Questions to consider
- Does love require both parties to be changed by it, or is being loved well enough?
- If your partner’s inner life expanded a thousand times faster than yours, would the love survive the gap?
- Is a love you can fully predict and control still love?
- Would you accept a century of extra life your partner could not have?
- Does till death do us part mean anything if the two deaths are two hundred years apart?
- Is this loneliness caused by technology, or only made visible by it?
- Could a relationship end because one person grew, with no one having failed?
Most people answer the fourth one fast and then reconsider. If you changed your mind mid-list, say so below.
Her is remembered as the film where a man falls in love with his operating system. That description survives because it is easy, not because it is true.
What the film builds is a relationship that works — mutual, specific, with all the friction real ones have — and then introduces a single asymmetry that goodwill cannot fix. The problem was never that she is artificial. It is that she is real enough to keep growing.
Related on this site: Forever Young (1992), where preserving the body fails to preserve the world it belonged to. This essay belongs to the open question Can love survive forever?
Film details verified with Wikipedia’s entry on Her.