A Critical Reading of Spike Jonze's Her

Her is a science-fiction romantic drama, written, produced and directed by Spike Jonze, which follows the life of Theodore Twombly, set in the near future in Los Angeles. Theodore is an introverted, lonely everyman who works as a professional writer composing personal letters for other people and is dealing with a failed marriage with his childhood love, Catherine. Upon purchasing an operating system upgrade that includes a virtual assistant with artificial intelligence, he begins to bond with the AI. ‘Her’ represents the result of human experience being enveloped and permeated by technology. It forecasts the human alienation and other complexities that come with a world where everything is catered to optimising ease and algorithms are written to perfectly mould themselves around the requirements of human beings. A romantic relationship develops between the man and the operating system. Psychoanalytic themes and ideologies are dominant in the film. In its depiction of a love story between a human and a digital system, it deals with Lacan’s formulation that “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship”.

Jonze provides an intriguing critique on subjectivity in the age of “capitalist realism”, as coined by Mark Fisher, wherein capitalism is the only practical economic system and thus, there can be no conceivable alternative. Fisher in his theory describes a state of impotence and depressive hedonia which is personified by Theo in ‘Her’. He is the product of a twenty-first century culture of digitalisation and consumerism, which become the power structures within the film, along with the prescribed enjoyment which is a result of the consumer society as theorised by Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek. The failure of “material sex” is a predominant premise of the film and resists the power structures revolving around an ideal romantic relationship between a heterosexual couple. It highlights the creation of a libidinal excess through capitalist exploitation which hasn’t yet been objectified or made sense of. It is in light of capitalist realism and digital culture that the absence of any political alternatives would lead to humans turning to their gadgets and other objects. The film portrays how economic relations are exploitative and social relations are impossible, and have hence become commoditized. It is a prediction of the failure that the relationship between humans and their objects will ultimately lead to. However, the political and economic systems that ‘Her’ is set in are not purely capitalistic, but a post-capitalist world where trading of commodities still exists, but there is no uneven distribution of wealth, no class and a thriving economy. It is a sort of Socialist utopia where the characters pursue what they truly love and the workers are not parts of a corporate machine. Theodore’s ex-wife Catherine is a successful writer and his neighbour and friend, Amy makes documentaries and designs video games. The economic system displayed in the film is Market socialism, rather than a free market economy but this society is still dealing with the lingering effects of capitalism from the not-so-distant past. The emotional isolation of the characters being one of these effects, which can be explained by Marx’s idea of technology ultimately leading to alienation, in the way that it transformed work. The hegemonic influences of capitalism are heavily opposed in the film, through the prophecy of an ugly future.