Many movies have left me feeling on top of the world after I watch them, and some have left me confused.
But there are the movies that make me hate that it is one to two hours of my life that I will never get back.
“Her” written and directed by Spike Jonze made me feel exactly that when I had to watch it for a class recently.
The movie takes place when technology is so advanced that people can buy Artificial Intelligence to fulfill their personal needs. It follows Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), a sensitive man who makes a living by writing letters for other people, who just ended his marriage. As a result of the loneliness that comes with this, he signs up for a program that allows him to communicate with an operating system. This OS, Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), becomes an entity of its own and they begin to have a friendship.
Can you guess what happens next?
Spoiler alert, they end up developing a romantic relationship.
Now this movie won multiple awards. Academy Award, Golden Globe, Writers Guild of America, Critics Choice, ADG Excellence, and a Festival Film award. Which are well deserved by all means.
Don’t get me wrong, the writing, the casting, and the acting were all incredible.
It was all so good, it made me so genuinely uncomfortable.
I did not like it one bit.
Before I get into the relationship between Theodore and Samantha, let’s talk about why his initial marriage with a woman named Catherine (Rooney Mara) ended in the first place. The marriage between the two ended because she felt unsupported, misunderstood, and unappreciated by him. He knew this was because of his not being present and emotionally unavailable, which led him to believe he wasn’t the one for her.
This drove a wedge between the two and ultimately ended their relationship. In the movie, it never seemed like he made an effort to change his ways to repair this marriage. Instead, he just gave up when the relationship became rocky. No woman wants to be with someone who isn’t going to try and work their problems out making the split completely understandable.
Now, it is well known that getting back into the social atmosphere after a split is difficult. The dating atmosphere is even more difficult, yes, but people take steps to get there.
The start of this process is when my discomfort began.
Theodore joined these chat rooms where you can connect with strangers online. Nothing out of the ordinary, almost everyone does that now in this generation.
It got weird when he joined a dating app and he came across this girl when looking for anyone to talk to. It was normal until they started having phone sex and we learn that this woman has a diabolical kink. She tells him to drag a dead cat over to them and wants him to act as if he is choking her with his tail. What got me disgusted was when he clearly was weirded out by this woman’s dead cat kink yet he still forced himself to follow through with the sexual phone call.
Fast forward, to the middle of the movie, when I thought life would go back to normal.
Theodore signs up for the program where he signs up for the program he meets Samantha through. At first, he is just figuring out the system and speaking to it very neutrally and he starts to feel the part of his life full of loneliness start to go away. Samantha then starts to adapt to the personal things that he opens up about and she starts to have feelings towards him and the things he says like a human would.
Eventually, these conversations get deeper, and both develop real feelings for each other.
Can you guess what happens next?
He starts to have phone sex with Samantha too.
This already bothered me because it is the second time it happened.
But then it started to escalate. He was holding his phone out talking to it as if it was her, acting as if they were on real dates.
The whole talking to an Artificial Intelligence tool for fun is all cool, I’m here for it. But to start a whole relationship with it is where I personally draw the line. I feel like you just look and sound clinically insane. Is it bound to happen in reality? With the recent boost of AI interest, I’m sure it it is already happening.
The worst part is that his literal friends enabled him. They were so happy for him when he said he was dating someone even after finding out it was an OS. They even went on group dates with him.
Personally, I would have looked at him cockeyed, told him to get a grip, and called him delusional.
The best part of the movie for me, was when she left him with all the other operating systems and he had to snap back to reality and be alone once again.
When it finally ended, I had a major headache from the whiplash of shock this movie put me through. I couldn’t unsee how good the acting was because it felt so real.
I will say, if there is a movie I will never watch again it is this one. Not because it was a bad movie, but it was just too unsettling, and a sad reality to possibly the world’s newest fetish.
