Though some gender tropes are being played with - Theodore is obviously the more emotional person in the partnership, and his friend Amy (Amy Adams) is a rather frank sounding board - Jonze's future continues the confines of today.
Spike Jonze's exploration of this world is thoughtful but limited. We are missing the perspective that would give this recognizable theme a new facet: The greater female viewpoint. As a result, Samantha is shackled to supporting-player status. Unfortunately, Her doesn't fully embrace this truth because we never see or experience Samantha outside of Theodore's vantage point (and by extension, Spike Jonze's). But in the end, the agency of the one we love will always lead them to deviate from fantasy, because they aren't fantasy. Attraction begets expectation, and sometimes willful blindness. The beauty of Her is that it explores our universal desire to have love that (at least somewhat) reflects ourselves - where a handful of similarities make it seem like everything will gel rather than collide. In a must-read piece at NPR's Monkey See, Linda Holmes writes that Her is asking about the "nature of love." Samantha, she argues, "exists in a strange gray area between what is real and what blinkers the mind into believing it's real," and Theodore "is indeed falling in love with a reflection of himself." What she says next is key: "Maybe we all do that." She becomes the clueless partner trying to understand something foreign and failing desperately. In a clever flip of the group sex scheme from Chasing Amy, Samantha believes a stranger, standing in as her surrogate, can create the bodily intimacy missing in her relationship with Theodore. Likewise, Samantha can never truly understand how the body's limitations inform experience and being. The limitations that Theodore understands and lives by do not exist in her world.
Samantha can read an entire book in a fraction of a second, talk to thousands of people at the same time, and absorb lifetimes of knowledge and experience in moments. He struggles when she exhibits differences from what he can understand and love. "I want to discover myself," she says, and he answers: "I want to help."įrom Theodore, Samantha learns about the eccentricities of humanity, and what she reflects back at him makes Theodore imagine her as a human with human limitations. He's the strange paramour easily titillated by running through a crowd, and the man amused by a raunchy doodle. He is a quirky guy who plays videogames, wears high-waisted pants, and loves to cry. Club has said, "The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely.to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." But in Her, the situation is reversed. In fact, though we see no physical embodiment of Samantha - and glean just a bit of her existence outside Theodore - she is the one who instigates the relationship and uses it to evolve.
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